GOG Eyes Disc Comeback

The digital store GOG, known for its catalog of classic games, is considering a possible return to selling discs. The idea is to let users order a physical copy of any game from their own digital library and have it delivered to their door.

Marcin Paczyński, a senior business development manager at the company, told GamesRadar+ that the idea has been discussed for many years, but putting it into practice is a complex task that requires warehouses, new logistics and separate permissions from game publishers. “Still, I really hope we’ll manage it someday,” he said.

PC games on disc all but vanished from stores decades ago. As a first step, GOG already offers scans of original boxes from old games, which people can print at full size and assemble themselves.

The Witcher 3 on a Mac

FX Steam Launcher, an app developed as an open-source project, installs the SteamOS system on Mac computers with M-series processors. It runs in a separate window without interfering with the main system and gives access to Steam’s gaming mode, just as on the Steam Deck console.

To make Windows games work on Apple processors, which have a different architecture, the program translates their instructions “on the fly” from the language of Intel chips into the language of Apple chips. Graphics commands also go through several stages of conversion to match Metal, the graphics technology Apple uses.

As the blogger ETA Prime reported in a review, The Witcher 3 ran at more than 70 frames per second at high graphics settings on a MacBook Pro with the M4 Max chip. In the shooter Left 4 Dead 2 the figure reached 200, while Fallout 4 and Skyrim ran steadily at 60 frames per second.

The technology has its limitations. Games with certain anti-cheat systems will not launch, nor will many new titles that require modern graphics technologies. Graphics glitches are possible in some games, and the first launch may take a while.

Portal Prequel Surfaces

A working version of the puzzle game has become available after a series of data leaks. Most of the game’s files surfaced back in August, in a leak totaling 12 terabytes, but the source code and the level maps needed to run the game were still missing. The missing pieces were posted this week in Valve Cut Content, a Discord community.

Although some of the dialogue and certain other elements of F-Stop later turned up in the game Portal 2, its core mechanic is entirely different. Instead of a portal gun, the player uses a camera. By photographing an object, the player gets a snapshot that makes it possible to place the object elsewhere, sometimes changing its size in order to solve puzzles. Playing through the whole game takes less than an hour.

F-Stop was in development back in 2007. According to the moderators of the community that assembled the game, the person who had the level maps at first asked $1,000 for them but in the end handed the data over for free.

Learn an Alien Language

A game released on November 2 challenges players to decipher from scratch the writing of aliens whose message reached Earth in 2058. Even the button used to quit the game is labeled in their symbols. The language consists of a thousand glyphs, and the player assigns each one its meaning. Little by little the player learns the aliens’ culture, and by the finale is translating their poems and jokes. The very first reviews from players have been almost entirely positive.