The screenshots and trailer make this look like Another World, which is one of my all-time favorite games. But while that game has some tough spots that can be frustrating to redo, I never feel like I'm being punished for failure or having my time wasted. It starts off with a compelling scenario and even makes failure entertaining with fun death scenes that don't overstay their welcome and get you back in the action quickly. This game... does not do that. I never made it to the alien planet in this game because I got so bored of walking back and forth through long corridors with instant fail stealth elements to do non-puzzle trial and error fetch quests, interspersed with clunky platforming stuff like jumping over security robots before they touch you. Most of it involved no thinking or fun combat, just fighting the stiff controls and the level design to do things like opening a filing cabinet on one end of a level and then sneaking to the other end to type the password you found into a computer. There's no joy in failing here, just more slow walking, climbing, and crawling back to where you muffed it. All of it felt like a ploy to pad the play time, and I'm honestly too old at this point to put up with that. It seems like it's getting interesting now that I'm on the space ship, but I've just lost all the trust I had in this game to not waste more of my limited time.
It's barely interactive cringe humor masquerading as satire.
I would absolutely pay for a copy of the C64 version made to work easily on Windows. This version (I'm assuming DOS) is just hideous. The game itself is an all-time classic. It's basically a board game, but one of the best ever made.
The 1987 edition of this game for the Commodore 64 ate up a lot of my childhood. Not only was it fantastically fun, it also taught me way more about the geography and history of the Spanish Main and 16th-17th century geopolitics in general than I ever learned in school. One of the things I most liked about this game was the variety of things you get to do. Ship combat, fencing, trading, assaulting towns by land or sea, searching for lost treasure, courting governors' daughters -- it all felt unique and yet organically coherent. Definitely give this a try.
I played the Ur-quan Masters and loved it for combining Star Control 1 and another of my favorite old games, Starflight. As a lot of people have pointed out, you can get Ur-quan Masters for free, and it's probably better than this release of SC2. But Star Control 1 was a good game in its own right. Yes, UQM has the melee mode that makes up half of SC1, but I really liked the strategy mode. It's great with another local player, especially if you've got joysticks. It's about as fun as a really good classic board game. That, and the hope that some of the money from this purchase will benefit the game's creators (either directly or indirectly by helping to persuade Activision to fund a sequel), makes this seem like a worthwhile purchase to me.
I hadn't really heard of this game before, but I bought it on a whim after reading some of the reviews here. I was profoundly unimpressed for the first hour or so, but once I stopped worrying about the skill trees and figuring out the "right" things to do first, I really started to fall in love with how big and well fleshed-out this world is. The environments in this game deserve special praise because they actually feel like a real country, with terrain and architecture shifting gradually into strikingly different regions. The main quest is interesting enough as RPGs go, but the side quests impressed me more with how inventive a lot of them are, especially in the cities. The dialogue is actually really well written (or translated), and the voice acting is decent on average. The writing has a very nice, often subtle sense of humor, and you'll especially enjoy it if you don't mind a little casual misogyny here and there. (There are multiple side-quests that revolve around dealing with wives or female relatives who are just too bitchy for the male NPCs to deal with themselves, and some of the dialogue might as well have been taken from a Henny Youngman routine.) You will probably enjoy this game most if you are like me and really like collecting shiny new equipment. There's a huge array of genuinely unique-looking armor and weapons to be had in this game. I honestly enjoyed this way more than I did Oblivion, largely because I rarely found new items in Oblivion that were better than what I was already carrying. I also disliked that enemies leveled up with you in Oblivion. I play games for the adolescent power fantasies they let me play out, and I really enjoy the heck out of just wading through a pack of enemies that would have destroyed me a few hours before. You get that in Two Worlds (along with a lot of new, stronger enemies to work up to), and I appreciate it. Overall, this is a quality game with a lot of depth to it. It takes some time to get your bearings, but it is definitely worth the effort.
I've had more fun with this free old game than with the last four or five new ones I've bought. It looks great, it's just complex enough to be engaging without requiring a lot of dedication, and the amount of little details that go into the story and the atmosphere are genuinely impressive. Thank you GOG for introducing me to this little gem!
