There have been many great games over the years, Fallout, Freespace, MDK to name but just a few. Back in the heady days in the nineties when a lot of them were released, the internet was still getting going in terms of mass consumption, Google was a pipe dream, and porn was only available for those willing to wait 28 minutes for one decent image.

People were happy, the most we had to worry about (aside from the Gulf War)was Bill Clinton doing naughty and gay was still a word which meant happy and not the fact that you enjoy investigating other people’s bottoms, possibly sending a canary in first to see if it was safe.

Who wouldn’t want to relive some of those moments, albeit confined to the gaming cyberspace of your home computer?

The problem these days, most of the old games now will not play on our super-deluxe-cyber-squatting-eating-beasts-of-burden with that Frankenstein’s monster from Microsoft, Windows Vista all running in the background, instead those machines prefer burning villagers while asking “can’t we all just get along?”

So a great number of gaming’s finest hours are lost.

Well inject your arms with cocaine no longer, because a brand new service, Great Old Games, or GOG to its mates, located at www.gog.com now provides a limited number of people (myself included) with the ability to purchase all these old classics, which they have tweaked and massaged into running on modern day equipment, all for a reasonable price while they are at it.

Most games are priced at $5.99, which given the current state of economics means a game costs us British people about £3.50. Not bad in the grand scheme of things.

But the icing on the cake was that fact that for a limited time, there was a two for one offer on old Interplay titles during September from the service. Then they throw you the biggest bone to make you throw more money away, the filthy bastards.

Descent 1,2 and 3

Due to the offer, I had the complete set for £3.50, fully working on my modern day uber-beast and basically the feeling I had was when a fat man watches two ultra sexy ladies wrestling in beans, then they got out of the beans, and someone handed the fat man a spoon to clean up.

Descent has been mentioned a couple of times here in the past, but it’s so good, it’s in need of special attention here once more. Since the demise of Interplay, we’ve not really had a true 3D environment experience flying around endless mazes defeating hordes of bad robot things, blowing up a reactor which for some strange reason shoots at you, and then you try and get out of the mines before they explode.

To this day, some people even claim to suffer vertigo from playing the game, due to its full on disorientating nature, and there is still the lingering feeling that you wish you had a pyro spaceship, just to sort out all the traffic blues of today.

I look forward to the day that Descent 4 is brought back from the land of development dead, and that they provide the ultimate experience on modern day equipment. But in the meantime, you can have a go with the previous games, all for not much layout, and a lot of time, it walks all over a lot of the games being provided today.

Perhaps that’s the best part of all here, people who didn’t have the opportunity to play these games the first time they launched on the scene now do, and they don’t have to worry about not running them either.

GOG.com have pulled out all the stops with providing you with the ability to play the game with today’s tech using of all things; DOSbox which allows older apps to run without too much issue, but it’s been tweaked for each application.

Installation is straight forward, TCP networking (the network used today as opposed to banana skins and egg shells of yesteryear) has been sorted out for playing on normal servers, the full CD track is there for bounce to as you destroy another silly robot thinking it’s clever to pick on the guy with giant freaking lasers, and you even have optional extra downloadable stuff like the music and guides.

The games are even DRM free, and there’s no issue with installing on all your machines either. Ah, just like mamma used to make. If you have issues, they are forums where they respond very quickly and you can email support at any time with queries. Assuring is a word to use here.
Descent 2 took up a huge amount of time this weekend, and it cost about the same as a really expensive coffee drink with the foam from a rabid dog on top. Lasted longer too.

So to sum up this little diversion into the gaming past, you really just hope GOG finds its footing and becomes successful. Providing the games of the past to run on today’s equipment, for not much money and no restrictions, who could argue about that?