Digital distribution platforms feature regular special offers to lure in new customers. These exceptional deals can be used to your advantage as a means to quickly assemble a vast collection of great PC games at very low cost. But that requires regularly checking in on each and every digital download service for their latest deals, which can be a tiresome affair.

That’s where this weekly Discount Drone feature comes in. Within I take a weekly look at everything that is on offer and extract the best deals for your perusal. These are formatted by genre and accompanied by short and accurate descriptions, so that you can decide whether a game might be worth having. This includes special offers on: Direct2Drive, GamersGate, Get Games, Good Old Games, Green Man Gaming, Impulse and Steam.

This week’s highlight is certainly the discount on the Unreal Pack over at Impulse. A combination of all Unreal Tournament games (except UT2003, which sucked) with all Unreal games is something you really can’t pass up on unless you already own the lot. Add to this an excellent half-off deal for Team Fortress 2 over on Steam and you’ve got a great weekend despite an unusually low amount of interesting discounts.

Read on for more exciting deals and subscribe to GameDrone for weekly coverage of the best digital download offers!

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A new Good Old Games version of Planescape: Torment may have been released only yesterday in a completely up-to-date format, but even that version isn’t quite complete without some vital community mods and fixes. These mods do anything from introducing high resolution graphics to introducing scrapped content and gameplay tweaks to make the game more familiar for modern RPG players.

In this guide I’ll cover the most important community mods for Planescape: Torment along with the appropriate installation order to get them to function properly and without conflicts. It’s also completely tailored for the GOG.com version and has been tested to work. This also means that owners of the CD or DVD versions should look to other guides for more specific installation processes as those versions require several additional steps.

Veteran PS:T players might also be served by this new GOG.com version as it includes numerous interesting goodies such as the soundtrack, the book of the game in .PDF format and 104 artworks. It’s also a full installation that comes patched to version 1.1 and its .ini file is already tweaked for performance. Most notably it doesn’t require a CD or DVD be inserted in order to play.

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Planescape: Torment is regarded by many as the best cRPG ever created, but has been notoriously difficult to find during the past decade or so. Now Good Old Games helps out us gaming fans by signing this classic game for their digital download service. Just $9.99 gets you the most famous RPG in gaming history and many dozens, if not hundreds, of hours of excellent RPG gameplay, right here.

It differs greatly from modern RPGs in that Planescape: Torment is extremely story-driven and allows for many different ways to progress through the game. It’s possible to complete the game with only a handful of actual battles, or to go through it hacking apart everything in sight. It’s supported by an excellent cast of characters and superb dialogue, which Black Isle Studios was known for back in the day. That and a 5000 page script involving The Nameless One, the immortal protagonist who suffers from amnesia after death and explores the crazy Planescape multiverse of AD&D.

Any RPG fan should already be out on the GOG.com site to get their hands on this game, along with the included soundtrack, manual, wallpapers, artwork, book and more. But before you get to playing it’s worth noting that there are mods that allow for proper widescreen support and even a few mods that reintroduce some incomplete portions of the game. A helpful widescreen mod can be found here, while a UI mod for widescreen resolutions can be downloaded here. The latter link also contains several bug fixing and restoration mods. Check back tomorrow for a proper install guide for these mods as they can be a bit finicky and I’m working to get them running properly myself.

Last week’s PR stunt may have garnered GOG.com some ill will, but this release, along with last week’s Baldur’s Gate, aught to restore faith in the service for all but the most jaded of gamers. Planescape:Torment, the game that everyone’s been clamoring for since the GOG.com beta started, has now finally been added to their catalogue!

In Games Worth Playing I take a look at noteworthy games released each month. This feature focuses on new games that are worth playing, but also contains an obligatory list of highly anticipated games that may not necessarily be worth playing.

I try to play a lot of the games I mention, but some will invariably escape my attention and be featured on the basis of reviews and player comments. These games will be accompanied by a no hands-on experience notice.

August saw few new releases, but most of what came out was quite interesting. Mafia 2 follows in StarCraft 2′s footsteps as a long-awaited sequel that truly managed to capture the spirit of its predecessor and present a great modern story-driven shooter. Elemental: War of Magic was the next most prominent release, but saw a messy launch and isn’t quite in a recommendable state just yet. Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse finally unleashed its season finale and combined with the Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars re-release that makes for a strong adventure game showing this month.

More follows below.

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Blade Kitten is a side-scrolling platform game with quirky cell shaded 3D graphics and a catgirl as its protagonist. Not a combination that inspires a whole lot of confidence after the dismal failure of that other anime-inspired platform game, X-Blades, but I decided to give the demo (Steam) a whirl anyway. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

This demo includes the first level of the game in which Kit Ballard, bounty hunter / catgirl, sees her ship destroyed and missions details stolen by a mere human. Kit gives chase and a few cutscenes along the way try to expose some sort of story. It doesn’t appear to be a particularly compelling tale and the voice acting is mediocre, but all that falls away before gameplay that is surprisingly fun and varied.

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Digital distribution platforms feature regular special offers to lure in new customers. These exceptional deals can be used to your advantage as a means to quickly assemble a vast collection of great PC games at very low cost. But that requires regularly checking in on each and every digital download service for their latest deals, which can be a tiresome affair.

That’s where this weekly Discount Drone feature comes in. Within I take a weekly look at everything that is on offer and extract the best deals for your perusal. These are formatted by genre and accompanied by short and accurate descriptions, so that you can decide whether a game might be worth having. This includes special offers on: Direct2Drive, GamersGate, Get Games, Good Old Games, Green Man Gaming, Impulse and Steam.

Gratuitous Space Battles Complete is the highlight of this week’s deals as the space strategy game, along with three of its DLC packs, is available at a great low price on Impulse. It’s a great game that involves ship design, armada positioning and a lot of exploding ships, but no actual direct control during battles. Meanwhile the futuristic third person shooter Red Faction: Guerrilla and the four over-the-top first person shooters of the Serious Sam HD: Gold Edition add in some more straightforward action-packed fun.

Read on for more exciting deals and subscribe to GameDrone for weekly coverage of the best digital download offers!

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This past sunday it looked like Good Old Games was closing its doors for good, but a new promotional trailer on YouTube seems to confirm suspicions that this was merely a PR stunt. This video lists the numerous accomplishments over the past two years as the team signed 40 publishers and 300 good old games. But in the background several still shots of the old site can be seen and mixed into those is a single frame that depicts Baldur’s Gate on the GOG.com website.

A frame that depicts Baldur’s Gate in the GOG.com layout is significant, because that game was never part of the games library of the service. Several other frames also depict a Good Old Games website that’s slightly different from it’s previous form, with a new “Gogmixes” feature for games and slightly altered layouts. So it stands to reason that these frames depict a new version of the service that is to be launched after tomorrow’s conference at 6 PM CET.

New updates on GOG.com indicate that users will be able to download their games and associated content as usual this Thursday. It curiously specifies that these will be DRM free, which along with several suspicious Twitter messages seems to indicate that games on the service will no longer be DRM free when it returns on Thursday (A new video message details that GOG.com games will remain DRM free). This would also seem to be a good time to introduce numerous previously announced features such as Windows 7 support, multi-language support and new price points for games.

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Apparently the shutdown notice visible on the Good Old Games website is not a hoax. The GOG.com Facebook page was updated with a message that indicates the GOG.com team will divulge more details about the situation tomorrow.

It certainly looks like the GOG.com service will be closing down, but both official notices do indicate a possible return of Good Old Games in the future. Neoseeker got a hold of GOG.com’s PR man Tom Ohlen who backs up this notion by saying GOG.com is not gone, but merely the service in its current form. But it’s inconsistent with GOG.com’s and CDProjekt’s track record to do something like this with no advance warning.

As such it seems likely that this is but an ill-conceived publicity stunt for the service going from beta into live service, with some potential restructuring. This notion is supported by an authentic looking post on these Polish financial forums from CDProjekt’s CEO which indicates a conference regarding changes to the GOG.com service on the 22nd of September. That post was posted two days before this mess started.

So I’m hopeful that this will turn out to be nothing more than an ill-conceived publicity stunt. It may also be a prelude to some changes to GOG.com’s no-DRM policy as that has been the focal point of the official notices. Several publishers did not like this no-DRM policy so it appears that the first casualty in a potentially resurrected GOG.com would be exactly that.