So, Impulse (haven't seen it on Steam, but it's probably only a matter of time) has a package deal consisting of Baldur's Gate I and II plus expansions, Icewind Dale I and II plus expansions, Planescape: Torment, and The Temple of Elemental Evil. Regular package price $19.99, currently on sale for $9.99. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

Not bad. Most of those have been on Good old Games for a while.

The ones I actually have the most interest in, though, are the old Gold Box SSI games. They're ancient, but I never got to play them much back in the day, so would love a chance to now.

I got it for Christmas, but have been distracted by Tropico 4 and Skyrim.

EDIT: And Genkibowl. The Yarngasm game is HILARIOUS!!!

Oh man, I remember those. I owned Gateway To The Savage Frontier. Navigation was always a doozy due to extreme low rez graphics, and the combat was unforgiving as hell. Wander into the wrong hex, or even into a poorly planned out encounter, and your guys were toast.

I remember one time I was just following the plot wagon, and I went into the evil building and there as a gargoyle. My party was level 1-3 characters and I think there was only 1 magic sword, and a quiver of +1 arrows for the whole group. TPK, due to lack of magic weapons, pretty much.

Makes you wonder how much they playtested.

EDIT: In my opinion, a lot of the combat strategy in those games rested on certain things you might not be able to do in the pen and paper game.

For example, I remember that you could coup de grace using ranged weapons on unconscious or helpless enemies, which I don't think is kosher. So that made a big difference since pretty much every magic user could carry darts and had a chance to instakill from the back lines without burning through spells.

Another distortion was that if you cast stinking cloud or sleep or some other area affect spell, you could have your guy be right on the grid square outside the area of affect, so that it incapacitated a whole bunch of enemies right next to him, but didn't affect him, whereas in the pen and paper game the DM would probably say that he would be affected to if he was engaged in hand to hand combat with the enemy last round. And then, in the case of stinking cloud, you could be outside of the area of affect, but coup de gracing into the area of affect, without needing to save vs. stinking could yourself, so long as you were on the grid square right outside of the area of affect. That's another element that tended to overpower stinking cloud that probably would fail the reasonableness test in a pen and paper game.

On the whole those games tended to be about plugging up the hallway with 3 fighters who could totally block off a space 3 grid squares wide (nobody was allowed to try and run through them, which lead to some odd bottlenecking situations) while the magic user cast Stinking Cloud and everyone else threw darts at the sleeping guys in order to coup de grace them.

Very large and ambitious games but maybe not the best planned out.

Coup de grace from range is not kosher. It's a full round melee action.

Careful placement of area spells, however, is totally kosher. Sleep is also not a lingering effect, it hits an area and is gone, like a fireball. If you're outside of the effect, you're not affected by it.

In fact, there's a good list our good friend Frank Trollman was part of putting together. There are tons of great spells that failing a save on basically screws you. None of them are damaging spells. Control will always win you fights.

I have all of those already

I would probably buy them on steam to get the benefits of the steam overlay though.

I was thinking of this as a common sense rules interpretation thing, though. If I'm in a ten foot grid square and the enemy is in an adjacent ten foot grid square, and we've not been in hand to hand combat, I can understand he might be hit by a sleep spell, and I'm just a few feet out of the area of effect. But if just executed a melee attack on him last round, it doesn't seem to make sense that I could be out of the area of affect of a spell that would also affect my enemy. I mean, I pretty much have to be right on top of him to attack him with my sword, right?

You're trying to apply common sense to magic. While in reality it's unreasonable to assume that you could aim your 10' radius sleep spell (or 20' radius fireball) and just clip an opponent while not also frying the person engaged in melee with them. I suppose that would certainly raise the reliance on lightning bolt and setting up those 100' line attacks more carefully... I'll also note that careful placement of spells works wonders in Temple of Elemental Evil where you aren't even on a grid system.

ToEE should have been a great, great game. If for nothing else but the turn-based implementation.

On a related note, you can pick up the Neverwinter Nights collection from Best Buy for $20-$30...

Buy Planescape Torment for 5 bucks from GoG and forget the rest.

Planescape is amazing and I love it, but it's hard to discount BG2 that easily.