Abandon all hope...ye who enter here.
I found a great web site called Home of the Underdogs . It's chaulk full of really old great games that you can actually download as abandonware. I've had a grand old time looking through the listings and remanising about the good times I had playing truly entertaining software. Ah it's wonderful.
And it made me stop and realize how many inventive, challenging and imaginative games came out in the 80's and early 90's and how few have come out in the last few years. The page has a manifesto on it about scratchware and it's very insightful as to what not only the gaming industry has become, but what our entire culture and social structure has become. I know it's cliche but those were the good ol' days, a golden age of computer gaming goodness, but to be honest I don't really miss all those sessions of tweaking my AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files to get things to work right. (Well I miss them a little).
And to put forth a little more honesty, I thought they were a little rough on the industry. Some good stuff has come out lately and not only is it fun to play, but it's absolutely beautiful to look at. It would be nice if you didn't have to upgrade something every six months in order to keep playing new games, but hardware makers gotta eat too.