We don’t write a lot of articles about videos games here at Akihabara news, but being the inveterate gamer that I am, it was only a matter of time before I gave in to my geekest urge. Strangely enough, my first gaming article isn’t about the latest Xbox 360 or PC games. Today I wanted to write about retro-gaming.

Retro-what?

Retro-gaming is to gaming what puppy-love  is to bad poetry: it’s just essential. So many awesome games came out in the past two decades, you’d need a lifetime to play them all. Yes, their graphics are sometimes the tiniest bit outdated, but they were (and still are!) some of the best games ever made: Baldur’s Gate, Redneck Rampage, Serious Sam, Neverwinter Nights, Fallout, the Might and Magic series, the King’s Quest series, Duke Nukem 3D, Simon the Sorcerer, Planescape Torment, Icewind Dale, Total Annihilation, The Longest Journey… Need I go on?

Only problem was, most of those games either aren’t sold anymore, or they simply don’t work on the most recent machines (64 bits operating systems for instance). I say “was”, because thanks to a bunch of tech-savvy geeks, you can now have millions of hours of enjoyment for very little money or effort.

Good Old Games (GOG for short) is a team of gamers who just can’t get over the best games of the past, and they’ve dedicated themselves to offering the best oldies as cheap, DRM-free downloads that will run perfectly even on the latest operating systems.

I bought Heroes of Might and Magic 2 from them on Friday after I tried in vain to make my old version work on my gaming war-machine (well, trying to play a 16 bits game on a 64 bits OS is kinda like trying to shoot a mosquito with a bazooka — cruel, messy and totally useless). So I bit the bullet and turned to GOG for my oldies fix. Purchasing was a breeze (and with the yen so high against the dollar, ridiculously cheap), downloading went lightning fast, and after only a few seconds (click, click), the game was running beautifully. As a result I spent this very cold and rainy weekend blissfully playing Heroes 2 in my apartment and forsaking all social life. Thanks, GOG!

So, to recap:

* Awesome games (that will even run on a netbook!)
* 100% DRM free: you buy it, you own it
* Cheap: between $5.99 and $9.99
* Compatible with XP/Vista/7 (even 64 bits!)
* After-sales support for all purchased games
* Available worldwide, very simple purchasing, fast downloads
* Great additional content: game guides, walkthroughs, MP3 game soundtracks, wallpapers etc…