You know, I understand what you're saying, but except for the flash and/or ads to be blocked, I disagree on that. When a company is designing a site (sometimes it's a hard work with almost precision of 1 pixel, and I know what I'm saying, I'm a graphic designer), the visitor doesn't have to be able to mess it all (IE has already this task...).
When you go to theatre, would you like to have a remote that can control the colors, the lightings, etc, of a movie?

This is like saying "You should paint your house blue because I dont want to see it with the color its has."

I agree with your post, but now that you mention this... It would be awesome! :D

These "tricks" as you call them are standard web design, and are universally implemented to varying degrees on all but the most outdated websites. Pure HTML is far less customisable, and many HTML styling elements have been completely deprecated in favour of CSS in the upcoming HTML5. This self-inflicted "problem" of yours is contrary to universally-accepted web standards and is not going to go away.
Grab yourself a copy of Mozilla Firefox and the Stylish extension; this allows you to restyle pages, without any limitations, to suit your own personal preference. You can use along with it to do the same to JavaScript and other dynamic content. You can also download and share styles with other users on [url=http://userstyles.org]userstyles.org. If you only want to change pages on the most basic level you can use the Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus to selectively remove specific elements from sites and see your changes immediately. The limitation is that the Element Hiding Helper will only work as intended if the page's elements have been given unique classes, ids, or other distinguishing characteristics.

you do realize that we cannot alter content of the css, well I don't think so. It is up to whoever uploads the files to the web to decide how the page is coded.

Stop fussing. Put that id back where it came from.

good lord, i am so done with this thread. it's just one person whining and everyone else trying to figure out why they care so much.

Yeah, could be great ^^

Mm, you guys are making me feel like I'm completely insane.
I don't want something completely weird like a car that when you put third gear the windshield goes down.
Is it really so rare to not want to see google, slashdot, and most other sites the bright white they have because my eyes hurt? Nobody else does that? Anybody?
I just told firefox to change the background to black, and for some reason I can't see the images on this site. I say something and suddenly I want to paint mona lisa's hair blond!
Oh, and I explicitly stated in the title "rant", so if you don't enjoy arguing over the internet, well, you don't have to read this.
Edit: forgot to mention, a few people here seem to think I want them to change it for everybody so that nobody can see the design gog made. That's not it at all. I just want some pure text links added like "forums, catalogue, my wishlist..." and so on so that people like me, who change the background colors (which is more or less as crazy as re-painting the mona lisa blond) can still navigate.

I would like to see a mobile version of the site, one that allows for install of mobile games too.. :O

While using HTML for layout and presentation is universally frowned upon, and causes large amounts of problems with accessibility, etc.. it does seem to be true that without images/css you can't use the menu.
I haven't spent much time checking to see if there is an alternate system in place for such users, but in terms of accessibility this isn't perfect. They should probably put in some basic text links which they then replace with the images... that way everyone is happy.
Not sure of the number of visually impaired or blind people who'd want to play video games, but it'd be good practice to support them anyway. the site would look the same for most of us.
Generally though, GOG seems to have pretty good web design.

you do realize that we cannot alter content of the css, well I don't think so. It is up to whoever uploads the files to the web to decide how the page is coded.
Actually, you can indeed create a local style sheet that will override that of the site. There are plently of plugins for Firefox that make this easy to do, although in reality you don't need ANY plugins to do it. Just use Google to find all the information.

See, I can see why you might have issues with this (although it doesn't bother me), but why rant on GOG? It's got a dark grey background by default, and also provides a light skin (that almost nobody uses, according to an earlier thread), for those who prefer that. In other words, they give you the choice of having a light or a dark background. What more do you want?

I'll agree with you, that users should be able to customise the appearance at their end of any website. With the condition that it is completely up to the user on how to do this, don't just rely on the browser itself. (*and support may no longer be granted for website help)
Some fall-back to alt-text in the img tag would be nice, it's probably not that essential in a site like this, but the vision impaired, or those on vision-assistance browsers/plugins would experience issues.
Learning a bit of CSS (and browser specific quirks) can be quite fun, if occasionally frustrating.