The Naked Robber

If you’re anything like me, then you probably own more old, dusty PC games from the 90′s than there is things a cracked out hooker on meth will do for spare change and cigarettes. There was a time when I took pride in having all these wasted childhoods on a bookshelf in their original boxes, proud of the thousands of dollars I spent on women treating me like malignant cancer.

This was back when a PC game box was roughly the size of a small suitcase, and could easily house a family of Chinese people. What I’m trying to say is that I had some serious real estate invested in a collection of reasons my parents regret not drowning me in the toilet of the KFC I was born in. Sometimes I’m amazed that I’ve been getting regular sex for the last 12 years.

Finally someone has come along to address my needs, and I’m not referring to the lawyer I hired to deal with the hair dolls and pickle jar full of painted fingernails seized from my bedroom closet. I’m talking about Good Old Games (http://www.gog.com) which is an online service that provides a wide array of older games to download at a very reasonable price.

I’m sure many of you are thinking “wel i can just dload any gamez i want 4 free11!!!1 piratebay r0x0rz!!“. While this is certainly true, the fact is that most games from the 20th century are aging worse than Steven Seagal and seem to struggle like a hobo caught in a glue trap when running on Windows 7.

Good Old Games has addressed this and taken it a step further by reprogramming the installer for each game to run on modern operating systems. Not only that but they have also supplied a PDF for the instruction manuals, the soundtracks, hi-res wallpapers, and any other additional content that may have come with the games when they were originally released. Pretty damn cool if you are a retro gamer like myself.

When you create your gog.com account you are given an empty bookshelf and as you make purchases, the shelf fills up with the boxes of your games which can be downloaded as many times as you want, whenever you want. Every game has a tonne of reviews from other gog.com members and the community seems to be really friendly unlike most other gaming websites that seem attract that most hateful, preadolescent douche bags the planet has to offer.

As far as the pricing goes, a typical game costs $5.99 USD and some of the newer games or game bundles cost $9.99 USD. While there are quite a few available on the site, the only negative thing I can currently see with the service is that the catalog of games is slightly limited but it seems to be always evolving and worth checking out every week or two for new arrivals.

Good Old Games is the kind of service we need to help keep retro-gaming alive and I for one am more than happy to spend a few bucks on a quality website that delivers in spades. Using the only rating system we know, gog.com receives 4 1/2 hobo fingers out of 5. Impressive!

http://www.gog.com