Ah, the good old days in gaming. When men were real men, when games could reference popular culture with impunity, when choosing between CGA and EGA was a big deal. Everyone had a game or three they used back in the Amiga and Commodore 64 days before the dark times of the console wars. Up until now, you're only luck was to find abandonware, or perhaps find an old crack of the game and pirate your eyes out.

But now there's a better option: Good Old Games, or gog.com, a site that sells properly licensed (and properly cracked, so no more TSR Code Wheels or Manual Image Matching Games) Good Old Games, for cheap!

First off, their web site makes the Steam store weep. It's simple to navigate and simple to use (even if their graphics have been hit one too many times with the shiny stick). Getting an account is a breeze, and with this account you can buy and store copies of all the games they sell.

First off, they have an online game shelf, so any time you buy a game, you can find it on your "shelf."

Secondly, you can download games infinitely many times, for when you reformat your computer. No more digging out diskettes, and no more searching for paper manuals. It's all there, to be downloaded whenever you need.

Thirdly, the games come with absolutely no DRM. Isn't that a hoot? Just download the game, and, bam! No SNAFUs with Steam Authentication Servers, no passing out your precious, precious Steam passwords to let your cousin play a game. It's just there, installed, like in the good old days (but without the rudimentary "What does Rogue Leader say on Page 112 of the manual?" questions.)

The prices for the games can't be beat: at $5.99 and $9.99, any nostalgia powered purchasing binge can be easily sated for the price of a very small pizza. Frozen. From WalMart.

OH! You remember, back in the Good Old Days, how you would buy a game, and when you opened the box you'd find your diskettes in paper sleeves next to the manual and the quick reference keyboard card? Similar to today... except that back then they always gave you goodies! Posters! Stickers! Maybe even an audiotape of the soundtrack!

Well, guess what? Buying a Good Old Game entitles you to infinite, un DRMed downloads of goodies that come with almost each and every game!

The site also has forums for each game, for discussion of tips, tricks, and strategies for the games.

They also have a cool Adobe AIR applet that checks your game shelf for new applications and downloads the installers instantly to your hard drive. Imagine this: after a hard day at work, you check out the GoG.com website, find a game you want to play, purchase it in about 30 seconds, and when you get home the game is downloaded and ready for installation! Shazam!

Finally, each and every game sold has been tweaked and set up to run flawlessly (or as flawlessly as possible on Windows) on modern Windows XP and Windows Vista boxen. Rock on! No more fiddling with config files or downloading patches. It just works!

My only complaint, really, is that most of the games run at really small resolutions. I have dual screens running on one card, and when a game decides to take over "the whole screen" (every single bloody one ever made for Windows), it plays havoc with my resolutions, and my card goes into spasms of death until I can coax the game to go into windowed mode OR AT LEAST go to native resolution.

I had my Windows Taskbar and all my windows disappear as the second monitor (where they were docked) suddenly spasmed to make room for the 320x240 "full screen" application attempting to take over my monitor.

So far, all the games I have tested have a configuration file where I can go in and force a windowed mode. But while I can accept that "full screen" should be a default for modern games, where it's expected you'll want to run it that way, for Good Old Games, perhaps a Windowed Mode Default would be nice. Or at least a choice in the installer to default to Windowed mode.

However, that one gripe set aside, Good Old Games is the service I've been personally waiting for. It's all the benefits of the Wii Virtual Console, but for real computers! Now I can show off all those good old games I've but been able to describe to my younger and unlearned friends.

Expect to see reviews of Good Old Games appearing on the front pages of Gamium. Why struggle with [i]Fallout 3[/i] bugs when I can play a perfectly functional [i]Fallout[/i]?

Go set up an account. It's free to browse, and you're able to download two free games off the bat, including [i]Beneath a Steel Sky[/i], which itself is quite worth the minutes required to set up your account. Go! Do it now!

[url]http://www.gog.com/en/frontpage/[/url]