As most of you know I love to play old games. Anything relating to them and I will pretty much jump on them. This is true especially when I heard about a site called Good Old Gamers. For those of you who haven't been paying attention it is pretty much a site that sells old games at very low prices with no drm and the best part is it is legal. I signed up for the beta a month or so ago and got my beta key yesterday.
First I decided to buy Freespace 2 since i have heard nothing but good things about it, I downloaded the game once i bought it with no hassles. To my suprise the game booted right up (guranteed to thanks to installer tweaking) and worked great. One small problem though, this was my computer and not the game btw. My screen cut off part of the game and there are no options to change that thanks to it being a bit old. I then googled the problem and saw that you needed to choose an option in the installer for hi-res installation which would basically fix my problem but I couldn't do that since the installer was modified. I proceeded to contact customer support about my problem and got a quick response that would have fixed my problem if I didn't have crappy drivers for my video card, the other solution was to turn my resolution down which I did and the game works fine. Game itself plays great with minimal problems. Good customer service and good optimization.
Today I got a buy 1 get 1 free coupon in my email and decided to get another game, I bought a pack that had Descent 1 and 2 in it (I only wanted 2 but whatever right?). I then downloaded the game and they both ran on dos-box. For those of you who don't know Descent 1->2 is like Doom 1->2 in the way that the engine is very similar to both games and they were released within a year or two of each other. I was suprised when Descent 2 booted up no problem but I had problems with 1 when I couldn't see the screen on dos-box. I did a little research and found out again it was a hardware problem so I edited the config file to start at a higher resolution but as a result I got lag which is dos-box's problem (main reason I don't use it). I decided to uninstall them after I got a sourceport named DXX. Made both games work great except for with one I cannot save my control configurations. All of this is leading up to a point by the way lol, it being that the process of making these work on Vista with little problem is amazing considering how hard it was to get dos games running on Vista. I salute the efforts of Good Old Games.
As far as the actual site went it was very sleek and very polished for a beta. I am expecting the game bugs to be worked out since it is only a beta. I like the selection of Interplay games but would like to see some other games like System Shock 2 and Blood.
In closing I would recommend the service when it leaves beta. These people know what they are doing and seem to care about their customers. This could well be the next steam, I would be happy if it got more widespread support.
