Many games with multiplayer features require Galaxy for those multiplayer features. You can consider this DRM-equivalent if you want. However, every singleplayer game on GOG will work without Galaxy installed, and that singleplayer gameplay will be completely DRM-free in every possible way. (That's at least 99.6% of the games on GOG, but eyeballing the 22 games which don't specify that they're singleplayer games, most of them simply have incomplete metadata, so it's really 99.9% of them.)

Depending on the launcher does not imply DRM. It could be a features-dependency to make the old games working or just allow certain features.

Really? What games are those? I've not encountered a single one :/

Off the top of my head Crime Cities on launch forced me to use Galaxy to play it. I vividly remember this because the game also ran like complete crap.

Galaxy can be required for multiplayer aspects in games, but if what you say is true for the singleplayer part of the game, GOG will consider it a bug, and will get it fixed.

There's nothing in the Crime Cities GOG forum about this, nor in the various tracking threads in the main forum, and generally GOG users are extremely sensitive about anything which even reeks of forcing Galaxy, so I'd strongly expect any issue to be known.

I've seen cases where the developer implemented a bad online check, so that if you blocked the program from accessing the internet while the OS reported being online, the game would hang or crash, but being fully offline would work. Could it be that something like that was at play here? Oh, or that you simply picked the wrong installer for the game, and thus ran the Galaxy-installer rather than the offline installer?

I think too it can be misleading since on Windows the default LNK shortcut that is created after the game installation launches Galaxy with arguments instead of being a path to the direct game EXE (which works entirely without Galaxy and how I run games).

They do this to push Galaxy for convenience I suppose as most are used to clients that handle updates but it can be confusing if some wonder why for instance their offline installer shortcut opened Galaxy instead.

If the wine experience is anything to go by, if you don't have Galaxy installed at all, the shortcuts will also just point to the .exe - but yeah, I suspect it must be something like this.

> on Windows the default LNK shortcut that is created after the game installation launches Galaxy with arguments instead of being a path to the direct game EXE

I think they've recently changed this.

I had Crime Cities lying around since it was a freebie on GOG many years ago, so I just went ahead and installed it using vanilla wine. There was absolutely no Galaxy requirement for installing or playing the single player part of the game.

There isn't now. It was there at launch. It was removed at least several months after launch.

Compared to rest of US? Maybe. Compared to Europe? Absolutely not.

I don't think so, the busiest lines of the London subway ("tube") don't even have AC.

I also rode the subway in Paris some years ago and it wasn't anything to write home about.

Tunic is probably my favorite game that has multiple "Aha!" moments when all the hints and puzzles so far suddenly click in a different way.

> Is it cheating, though?

Yes?

> I find it is more like bringing the games difficulty down to an acceptable level.

Yes, that's what cheating usually does? Apart from the extinct sub-genre of cheats like big head mode.

> Apart from the extinct sub-genre of cheats like big head mode.

Those are just easter eggs, which are not extinct.

> which I would argue has just become naked promotion to the same degree.

Everything you said is equally applicable to video game reviews and reviewers. Once again I am compelled to bring up Amiga Power the gaming magazine that dared, to much outrage among publishers, to give review scores lower than 7-8 on the regular. They were very pro-consumer even though in early 90's the press was already treated as ad space that pretends it's not.

Yeah that was my point.

Oh horses fart a lot too.

Horses poop a lot. A lot.

I had to search about and it's indeed a lot:

"it is quite normal for a horse to poo (defecate) 8-12 times a day and produce anywhere from 13 to 23 kilograms of poo a day."

Source: https://www.ranvet.com.au/horse-poo/

That's what you get when your primary source of nutrition is very calorie-poor and largely indigestible.

Yup. I’ve noticed that with my dog going to meat from kibble. Poop sizes reduced by 80%.

So Red Dead Redemption 2 was actually realistic? I always wondered why the horses were pooping all the time. It's because of AI.

More than pooping a lot, they literally cannot hold it. Humans don't poop that much, but imagine if everyone just did it on the floor at a moment's notice regardless of where they are

On top of the trash burning, there's also the fact that Krakow is in a valley so all that pollution just stays in (probably for the better /s)

There are many phrases that exist solely in fiction.

You are absolutely right!

That's a really wild, miserable reading of the strip. For one, Adams himself was a manager, not an engineer, so he had more in common with the PHB, or even dogbert/catbert than Dilbert. For another, he explicitly said Dilbert was based on a specific, undisclosed person he knew. For yet another, many strips were based on anecdotes/stories sent to Adams by his readers.