jboy, Glad to hear, I love HOGs. Hope Whiterabbit's doing okay, haven't heard from him in so long.

Kestrel.,

I did not get a virus warning on my end. If you search that virus name you'll find this: "IDP.HEUR.26 is a generic detection name employed by Avast antivirus software to identify files or software behavior that may potentially be malicious." The "may potentially" indicates it may be a false positive you are getting.

You have to do what you feel comfortable with but all I can say is I have never gotten an infected file from this site in the many years I have been downloading from them.

Kestrel., heur means heuristic. It means it could be suspicious. That there could be something suspicious about the way it acts, or, in this case, it's design. Sometimes, however, that design is intentional and benevolent. More about that in a minute. It usually doesn't mean that they've identified a real virus. These detectors are a good idea to try and get ahead of viruses - catch them before they become widespread - but they are usually NOT positive identification of viruses, just a guess that there could be something wrong. They are useful if you take them with more than a grain - more like a cupful - of salt. They generate more than a few false positives. A couple of things that you can do: 1. see if your virus scanner keeps a database of viruses on it's homepage. If so, does it have a listing for that id.? If it doesn't, then it's just a guess based on the software design, not a confirmed virus.
2. Maybe even better is to take the file and upload it to one of the 2 online virus scanner sites, though that likely won't work today. I believe this file is probably too big. Yesterday's small file was perfect for that. I think they're both limited to 250 megs but can do zipped files if they're not above that while zipped. But keep a note of, or bookmark these sites: virustotal and the jotti malware site. Virustotal uses more than 60 of the well known scanners - like kaspersky or mcafee, bitdefender, etc. You may get a hit or 2, but, if 60+ sites say it's clean, it probably is. Jotti uses about a dozen virus or so engines.

Often heuristic software will hit on software that is actually for a benevolent purpose. This site is a prime example. People have found ways to hack the giveaways so they can install them at any time - without online activation which is just available on the day of the giveaway - but one day only is the only way the sites business model can work. So GGOTD uses a powerful "wrapper" software which prevents this type of hacking. The wapper often looks suspicious to heuristic detectors. But it's perfectly innocent. That's probably what's happening here.

For future reference, if you try a lot of software, there are things you can explore to help protect you. Look up: sandboxing or virtual environments. Those are 2 ways to try software but still isolate it from your computer critical areas until you're sure everything's safe. Also, in Windows there are 2 things you can do to be safer. Try software in a user account, rather than an administrator account. If you don't know the difference, you're probably running as an administrator and are more vulnerable, even on the net. The other thing you can try is to set a Windows restore point before you install new software, and, if you see anything wrong, you can wipe the software and any problems it caused by just restoring windows to the state before you installed the new software.

In any case, the game's are prescreened for viruses and the site is close to 20 years old. If it was giving away virus laden software, it would have been long gone. Same for the game developers. It's probably safe to turn off your anti-virus before you install the game and then turn it back on immediately before you try it.

In any case, hope you enjoy the site. Think you'll get a lot of interesting games.

Kestrel., not sure if this info might put your mind at ease? "IDP.HEUR.26 is a threat message that may appear in AVG antivirus when it detects a Discord application. The message may be a false positive, meaning that the application is not actually infected. To report a false positive, you can:

Click See details in the threat notification
Submit a false-positive report

AVG's team will analyze the website and whitelist it if it is found to be harmless. They will also update the status via email."