Let’s start this off with a confession: I’m obsessed with vintage gaming, and am a strong proponent for keeping the classics alive. By and large, I don’t think that the industry has done a good enough job of acknowledging and promoting video game history. So many titles that were influential in getting us to where we are today are currently lost in the gaming void or unplayable on modern hardware, leaving expensive eBay auctions or seedy emulation as the only viable options for play.
Enter GoodOldGames.com, a 15 month old service that offers DRM-free old-school PC gaming at competitive prices. This site aims to deliver titles that you just can’t find anywhere else, and guarantees that they will work on modern day PCs. But with so many digital distribution sites out there, does GOG.com really offer enough to make it worthwhile? Does everything work as advertised? To find out, I spent a few days playing with the site and a handful of its games, and thought that you--the GPA readership--might appreciate a full breakdown of what I found.
The Site: GOG.com uses a clean, easy to manage interface with a highly sortable game list and a handy search function. Once a game is chosen and purchased, it’s added to your “My Games” list, which is a visual portal that looks like a virtual game shelf. From there, you can download your games quickly and effortlessly, and can also browse any extras that a game purchase might entitle you to.
The Selection: The roster of currently available titles includes a ton of fondly remembered AAA classics plucked from the past twenty years of gaming. Standouts include Fallouts 1 & 2, Beyond Good & Evil, Descent, Duke Nukem 3D, Freespace 2, Jagged Alliance, Oddworld, The Longest Journey, Unreal, Rainbow Six, and The Incredible Machine, with over 150 games being offered at this time. Each of these comes with all of the latest patches and fixes pre-installed, with many also including expansion packs and add-on content as part of the package.
Of course, the site’s name doesn’t ring true for its entire library, as interactive oil stains like Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death and Postal 2 are also available. Many titles lie somewhere in between classic and crap, with forgettable faire like Expendable and In Cold Blood sharing virtual shelf space with lesser-known gems like Giants: Citizen Kabuto and MDK2. This isn’t a necessarily a bad thing, of course, as I applaud the GOG staff for offering games without prejudice, but gamers with blind trust in the site’s branding should know that not everything on there is…well…good.
Far more problematic are the asteroid-sized omissions from the GOG library. Titles from developers and publishers like Lucasarts (Star Wars: Jedi Knight, Monkey Island), Blizzard (Starcraft, Warcraft), id (Doom, Quake), Maxis (The Sims, Simcity), Sierra (King’s Quest, Leisure Suit Larry), Monolith (No One Lives Forever, Alien vs. Predator 2), Irrational Games (System Shock II, Freedom Force) and Broderbund (Prince of Persia, Myst) are nowhere to be found, leaving many worthy good old games stranded without a home. To remedy this, the site includes a game request forum, where users can suggest and vote on titles that they would like to see appear on the service. I can only hope that the GOG staff is actively pursuing these developers/publishers, as many of the above games are extremely hard to find elsewhere and deserve to be available to the masses.
Pricing: GOG has two set pricing tiers: $5.99 and $9.99. Most of their roster falls in the former category, with some more advanced 3D offerings (Beyond Good & Evil, The Longest Journey) occupying the latter. While it’s tough to compare the pricing between digital sites (since GOG offers many games that the others don’t), I took a look at two other major online game portals to check the differences:
Painkiller: $9.99 on GOG and Steam, $19.99 on Direct2Drive
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Beyond Good & Evil: $9.99 each on GOG, Steam, and Direct2Drive
Fallout 1, 2, & Tactics: $5.99 each on GOG, $9.99 each on Steam, not available on Direct2Drive
Oddworld: Abe's Oddyssey & Exoddus: $9.99 each on GOG with no bundle available, $7.49 each or $9.99 for a two-pack on Steam, not available on Direct2Drive
Unreal Tournament: part of a $19.99 Unreal bundle on Direct2Drive that includes 4 games, $9.99 on GOG and Steam with no similar bundle available
Flatout: $5.99 on GOG, $9.99 on Direct2Drive and Steam
When compared with Direct2Drive, GOG seems to beat their prices in most cases, and also matches or beats Steam more often than not. The exceptions end up highlighting something that GOG needs to implement to keep up with its competitors: bundles. Since GOG offers a number of franchise titles, it would be great to see some discounted series packs available to users on a regular basis. I also checked prices on physical copies by snooping around eBay and Amazon, and GOG once again ended up being the cheapest solution when shipping and tax were factored in. Also worth mentioning are the GOG weekend sales, where additional discounts are offered on popular products (30% off of Tex Murphy adventures, 25% off strategy titles). Not too shabby.
Compatibly: Older games have traditionally had problems running on modern day PCs, so I was eager to see how GOG handled this. For testing purposes, I downloaded Beneath A Steel Sky, Under A Killing Moon, and The Longest Journey, spending several hours with each on a Windows Vista Desktop PC. Both Beneath a Steel Sky and The Longest Journey ran flawlessly during my tests, perfectly emulating the experience that one would have had when they originally came out. Journey is a particularly interesting example, as GOG fixed the crashing and video skipping that I had encountered in the disk-based, retail release several years back on the same PC. Under A Killing Moon, a FMV-heavy game, had a few sound hiccups, but they weren’t intrusive and didn’t happen often. While I (sadly) can’t test every game on GOG, my samples all ran better than expected, and they do offer free support in the forums in case problems arise.
Special Features and Services: One of the best things about GOG is the addition of bonus materials with each purchase, which includes site avatars, soundtracks, PDF instruction manuals, and wallpapers. The site also offers a meaty forum where you can connect with the GOG community, and allows users to rate and review each game on the service. The only noticeable omission from this area would be demos or videos, as I didn’t see any available on the site. While the games are super cheap to begin with, it would be helpful to actually see or sample that title before plunking down the change. Thankfully, some forum users have compiled a demo list for interested parties.
Overall: After playing around with the service extensively, GOG seems like a very worthy, rewarding games portal. The compatibility is stellar, the selection is solid, and the prices are hard to beat. While I would like to see the addition of demos, trailers, regular bundles, and more publishers/developers to the site, I can absolutely recommend GOG to any gamer with a hankering for something classic, timeless, and cheap, as they are sure to find an experience on Good Old Games that will make them smile. I know I did.
Pros: varied selection, solid prices, weekly sales, game compatibility seems excellent, downloads are fast and pre-patched, plenty of community features, bonus items for each title, no DRM, you can request games for GOG to add, pricing better than/equal to other options in most cases, its really fun to say GOG aloud
Cons: many key PC titles and publishers missing, rigid pricing structure means that some games are better deals than others, no demos offered, no bundles regularly available
The Info – PC, Prices range from $5.99-$9.99
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