Good Old Games pulled a fast one on players at the end of September in a PR stunt that felt as if they had sprung a trap on everyone and chuckled when pies hit the fan instead. Not a lot of people were amused, but at least the service wasn't going anywhere.
Online distribution services like Good Old Games, Direct2Drive, and Steam are quickly becoming the last outposts that are keeping some of the classics alive; titles PC players like myself had grown up with over the years. This is also a problem with console games and many of the niche titles that quickly disappeared from stores in the following years.
It's a hard truth for our hobby in that many games won't be around on shelves years later. Unlike Catcher in the Rye or The Terminator, Snatcher on the Sega CD isn't that easy or cheap to get a hold of. When you miss your opportunity to pick up a particular title and want to get back to it sometime down the road, you could be screwed. Add to this the dubious nature of ROMs and "abandonware" with their own unspoken role as the only means that some players can experience the classics - while at the same time offending potential copyright issues - and it can be confusing on just what options we have available to us to keep such games alive.
Things are getting better, though, for a new generation of players on PCs. Consoles, too, are reaping the benefits of a maturing broadband network with the Playstation Network, Xbox Live, and the Virtual Console on the Wii delivering favorites from the past. It's not a complete library in any of these cases, but it's far better than the alternative of letting the classics languish to the point where the only proof of their existence is left only as a blog entry, a 5.25 floppy moldering in someone's basement, or a cartridge left in your NES when you moved it into storage by accident.
But digging through all of the fun stuff is hard when you're not sure what you want or are looking for, especially for PC players that are curious about what they've missed out on - the kind of classics that introduced many of the things that we take for granted today. With that in mind and building on fellow community writer Daniel Sims' article on Console Retroists, I've scoured Steam, Good Old Games, and Direct2Drive for list of goodies to help out with a few friendly suggestions focusing on the classic CRPGs available from each service.
If you can:
...ignore the graphics...
...find the patience to immerse yourself in character creation...
...put up with random encounters...
...then you'll find hundreds of hours of adventure just waiting for you in the next few pages!
So in no particular order, here we go...
