Interesting Game

I recently finished playing a PC game, The Whispered World. It's definitely a throwback, and I mean that as a compliment, being an old-school point-and-click adventure game, done all in hand-drawn cel animation. It's more LucasArts than Sierra - none of the Sierra-style punishing death scenes. The art style reminded me a bit of Discworld II, though the overall feel is closer to a fairy-tale storybook, rather than the humor of those two Rincewind games. Certainly worth playing, if you like those sort of games.

Personally, since adventure games have been one of my favorite genres since Zork, I consider it important to buy any (reasonably well-made) games that come along, in hopes of supporting their development and avoiding another long drought of decent adventure games, like the one that happened after Grim Fandango sales tanked (despite being the closest thing to Literature the medium has ever produced), until finally The Longest Journey came out after a couple of years.

Customer Service Above & Beyond

Because I feel like this sort of thing ought to be noticed & celebrated, here (in probably descending order of interest to anyone other than me) are some companies who have recently gone above and beyond my expectations for customer service:

Over the weekend, Gamers Gate had a game expansion at 50% off, and I submitted a question to make sure it was compatible with the physical-disk version of the full game (the same product at Steam, for example, only works with Steam's download edition). By the time they answered, the sale had ended, but they let me buy it at the sale price anyway, despite the fact that it was arguably my own fault for not submitting the question until Saturday.

A while back I tried to subscribe to Better Software Magazine, but apparently the online order never went through. It took several attempts to contact the subscription department to check on it (I think the subscription coordinator may have been on vacation at one point), and by way of apology, they gave me a free 2-year subscription.

And PhilC kindly emailed me an updated data file pack for his Poser clothing converter, which I had purchased through an old online store that has since switched to a different system, because of which I don't think I had any way to actually prove to him that I had actually purchased the pack (unless he keeps his own records). I was actually prepared to re-purchase direct from him, and had just asked if the updates were significant enough to justify that.

So bravo, guys. For showing an interest in actually making your customers happy, this one thought he owed it to you to highlight that fact publicly.