Four New Classic PC Rereleases Courtesy of Good Old Games: Personal Nightmare, The Pandora Directive, Crystals of Arborea and Ishar 3

For the last few years I considered Windows Vista's lack of compatibility with nearly all of my pre-Vista PC games (and just about everything else) to be my personal nightmare. Then Good Old Games, one of the best websites for snagging classic PC rarities that can run on both XP and Vista, reminded me that I have a better Personal Nightmare, one that I absolutely love!

Personal Nightmare is just one of four new retro PC rereleases that GOG.com has launched special for us old-school PC gamers. The others include the full-motion video sci-fi detective adventure, Pandora Directive: A Text Murphy Interactive Movie, and the remaining two titles in the Ishar series of first-person RPGs, Crystals of Arborea and Ishar 3.

• Personal Nightmare: The first game ever title from Horrorsoft, who went on to craft the classic Waxworks, unleashed this early PC horror thriller to DOS based systems in 1989. This first-person account of a man returning to his hometown to find everything is strangely off, leading him deeper into a horrific, not safe for the kiddies, mystery.

• Pandora Directive: A Text Murphy Interactive Movie: Remember that brief period of time where we all thought that live-action full-motion games would be the future? Well, they might not have lasted past the '90s, but the Tex Murphy series was certainly the most popular. This is the fourth game in the futuristic gumshoe detective series, but one of the very first adventure games to offer up multiple paths that dramatically change the game and story.

• Crystals of Arborea and Ishar 3: The prelude to the Ishar RPG series (Crystals) and the final game (Ishar 3) have just been added to GOG's slate, and bundled with Ishar 1 and 2 to make the Ishar Compilation, all for the same price of a single game. Now you can journey back to the land of first person fantasy and magic for about a $1.25 per game.