On demand Good old Games

Getting your hands on retro (PC, obviously) games can be pretty tough nowadays. Remember those big cardboard boxes, containing 10 floppy disks and a huge poster printed on some cloth? If you buy a game today, you get a plastic DVD box with a tiny manual, sometimes even not colored. If you want more swag, you’ll need to buy the collector’s edition, which means things like on-line preordering to be sure you’ve got one of the limited printed boxes, and paying more than $10 extra. At this moment, ebay may offer a solution for you but most games are slightly damaged and more than overpriced.

Great, I can replay Jagged Alliance again!

CD Project offers a solution to the desperate retro gamer; a solution called “Good Old Games” (GOG). Essentially it’s a on-line webstore dedicated to retro and old PC games which are not that easy to find anymore, even in budget edition. You can subscribe to their service and for only $6 download the games. Of course you won’t have the goodies included either, but hey. The project is in open beta phase right now, so go to http://www.gog.com to try it! More information:

When it launches in September, CD Projekt’s Good Old Games will offer cheap, DRM-free digital downloads of long-lost old-school PC titles like Fallout, Fallout 2, Jagged Alliance 2, Sacrifice, Descent 1-3 and Kingpin: Life of Crime, among others.

Priced at either $5.99 or $9.99, these aren’t straight re-releases. CD Projekt has done work to ensure that each game is now compatible with Windows XP and Vista, going so far as to create a custom installer for each game. A closed public beta demonstrating this is set to go live on August 1, with the site currently accepting applications.

Read an interesting interview about piracy concerns and more at shacknews.