Mildly good news, your highness. Good Old Games is having a buy two, get one free deal now. Buy two classic PC games for USD9.99 and get one USD5.99 game free. Even considering the shaky global economy (93yen to the US dollar … Holy Lucky Strike) the amount saved isn’t anything to get excited about. Six bucks is, what, a burger tasting of warm cardboard and a large paper cup of sugared water? No biggie, really.
But go get something from GOG anyway. It’s one of those rare services that seems geared towards the gamer rather than the publisher, which makes it worth supporting. The games are cheap, without the DRM publishers persist on inflicting upon honest buyers, guaranteed to be compatible with modern machines, include bonuses a gamer (and only a gamer) would appreciate and best of all, unlike Steam, each and every title on GOG is available to gamers worldwide for the same exact price.
But maybe you’re not the altruistic type. What’s in it for you, you ask. Fair enough. You selfish bastard. Here’s why you ought to support GOG: the games may be old but they really are good games. And good games stand the test of time.
The really good news is GOG now offers Jagged Alliance 2, one of those games that has stood the test of time extremely well.
I’m currently on Day 60 of my JA2 campaign, and I’m having an absolute blast tearing through Arulco with my 18 dysfunctional mercs. Even the fact I’m actually playing the Steam version — which crashes every single time I exit the game and has a nasty habit of creating savegames that crash me to desktop when I change the time decompression setting — hasn’t diminished the experience much.
I’m not sure how long it’s going to take me to complete my JA2 campaign but I may be playing nothing but retro games for the first half of 2009. GOG has Sacrifice, Fallout, Fallout 2, Freespace, Freespace 2 …
Ah, there are so many things from the past to look forward to in the future.
