After installing Freespace 2 yesterday afternoon, I spent the rest of yesterday just having a blast (or rather, several blasts)! I’ve never really played much shooters and space sims, but my experience with Freespace 2 has been generally good. The action is fun, the controls take some getting used to but are workable, but you really do feel like you’re in a spacefight with wingmates. I haven’t gotten very deep in the story yet, but it’s quite intriguing even if I haven’t played Freespace 1.
The astute reader would have noticed that this post was written on 2008, and Freespace 2 was released pre y2k (1999 actually). You’d be hard pressed to find this game around, and even harder pressed to figure out if it’d still work in this era of XP and Vista.
So how come I’m wasting my time on a game that’s almost a decade old? Basically ‘cozI’ve been hearing some space sim fans say it’s a “good old game”. Incidentally, that’s where I got it.
gog.com stands for “Good Old Games”, and that’s what they serve. The site aims to be the Steam or TotalGaming.net for the old stuff that a lot of geezers would still want to play, and what younglings of today should seriously take a look at. In those years, my rig was never up to snuff, so I missed a lot of those “good stuff”. Pretty much any average modern PC these days can play the games they offer, in fact, there’s a bigger probability that the game is so old it won’t work with the newer Windowz…
… but they worked on that too! The good people at gog.com reworked the games to make sure they work in our modern operating systems, and they’ll probably try to keep it working for future ones. You can pretty much rest assured that your old childhood companion Fallout will work. If in the off change it doesn’t, gog.com or it’s community should give you a hand.
Perhaps you’re leery of how much you’ll have to pay for a trip down memory lane. Fortunately, it’s not much, everything they offer is pretty much dirt cheap as far as video games go. I got Freespace 2 for US$6 (technically, it’s US$5.99, but c’mon, who are we kidding?). Fallout costs the same. The most expensive items are US$10 (US$9.99), around the cost of the cheapest games at Steam.
Currently, the site’s in beta, so you’ll still have to signup for a beta key before they open-up to the general public. After creating an account, you choose a game and select your payment methond among the supported credit cards or through PayPal. After purchase, the game will be avaliable for you to download, either as a typical download, or via the gog.com Downloader (which uses Adobe AIR, don’t know why they decided on that). Aside from the game itself, which is already patched to the last stable version, you’re also treated to a number of extras like wallpapers, soundtracks and manuals (depends on the game, I assume).
How about games that require a CD to play, or games that phone home to check your installation? What if I want the game on my laptop which isn’t always online? You won’t have to worry about that ‘coz all the games they offer are DRM free! Yep, you heard me… they be DRM free, folks! The gog.com guys talk about it here and here. Coming from a country with its share of problems regarding piracy, I believe that the gog.com approach is the way to go.
Give yourself a dose of nostalgia and head on over to gog.com! If you weren’t old enough to have enjoyed these games before, now is your chance! You might get pleasantly surprised that your old man was right when he yaps about the things he played in the good ol’ days.
As for me, I’ll enjoy Freespace 2 for a while. Afterwards, I’ll probably go find out for myself why people were raving about Fallout 2 back in college. 
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