Hi all, I’m happy to announce that after a long absence, today we have a new discussion review for you. This time, we’re off to a theatrically gloomy island housing a clearly unsuccessful psychiatric hospital, to trade punches with some costumed maniacs in Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Hello everyone.

The reviewing machine appears to be belatedly cranking back into life again in 2025.

Today’s review is of the Dragon Age: Origins expansion pack, Awakening.

Hello all.

I’ve not contributed much to this site lately, but today I have a new review for you! We’re looking at shareware scrolling shooter Raptor: Call of the Shadows.

Hopefully more to come in the future – maaaaaybe even a flight sim.

The thought may have occurred to some of our regular readers, as they plough through another 3/10 review of an absolutely ancient football game on this site, that trawling this particular section of the retro-gaming ocean is a largely pointless task, in service of a rather niche interest, the only source of enthusiasm for which is the author himself.

But, no, you fools! It seems I was right all along, as Bitmap Books recently brought out a heavy, glossy, heftily-priced hardback book on this exact topic. As you might expect, I immediately made sure I owned a copy of A Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games, 1982-2010. In some ways, it’s a book I would have loved to have written myself.

Picture: Bitmap Books

2010 makes perfect sense as an end date: it was probably the point at which the final boiling down of all competition left us with two giants that cornered the market: FIFA and Football Manager. My experience of both since 2010 has been limited but they are, by all accounts, very high-quality franchises.

It’s very easy to romanticise the past, and my memory of football games – or those that offered on-pitch action, anyway – in the 90s and early 00s was that the situation was vaguely akin to living in a town with no decent takeaways. There was plenty of choice, and some options might have occasionally satisfied, but something would always be a bit ‘off’ that meant you couldn’t really enjoy the whole thing as intended.

‘Fancy some computer football/curry tonight?’ you’d say. ‘How about World League Soccer ‘98/Kashmir Garden? It’s got great headers and volleys/Onion Bhajis.’ ‘Yeah, but the players look ridiculous/they put grated cheddar in the saag paneer that time.’

Or to put it another way – one that actually makes sense – if you’d told me, or indeed most gamers back in the day, as we cycled through a roster of unsatisfactory titles in search of fun, that one day the ultimate football game would exist, one that was not only great out on the pitch, but had all of the official licenses that money could buy, we would have said that was exactly what we wanted.

And yet. After FIFA established supremacy, even to a reluctant Pro Evo holdout like myself, I was somehow unable to warm to the experience, while still acknowledging the action as superior to Konami’s rival, which I also occasionally revisited as it continued to lose ground for the rest of the decade. The 00s, even as it devolved into a two-horse race, was the last ‘have a go’ generation: as long as FIFA, with all of its financial backing and official licences, still wasn’t the best game, there seemed room for others to enter the market.

A Tale of Two Halves goes back much further, though, to a time when anyone and everyone could make a football game, and when football itself was a much less glamorous and well-paid profession. It’s an impressive piece of work, covering over 400 games – and that’s a number that isn’t bulked out by multiple annual instalments of high-profile franchises, sensibly dealt with in batches here – including those released on computers and consoles, not only in the UK and Japan but in Germany, Spain and Poland, too.

And yes, it even covers the elusive Puma World Football 98, although it appears as Sean Dundee’s World Club Football here, and earns grudging praise as a ‘well-made, enjoyable final runout for the old side-on 2D perspective’.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s unlikely that the author, Richard Moss, has played anything close to all of the games featured, which makes it hard to know on what basis the appraisals are made. [NB: Richard has since contacted me on Twitter/X to clarify that he ‘played everything except the online titles, the Zeebo game, and a few of the arcade games’ as well as a number of others not covered in the book.]

Understandably, given the task at hand, he treats the bulky mass of extremely dry management games with some generosity, noting that while UK gamers may generally have preferred Championship/Football Manager, other games and approaches were also successful elsewhere.

(There’s an argument to be had about whether the non-playing/commercial side of things have any place in a game where you’re managing the team: my own feelings matched those of PC Zone, which would dish out high scores to Championship Manager and relegate the rest to brief reviews and low to middling scores. Indeed, FFG’s only foray into this territory is a review of FIFA Soccer Manager, a game during which it’s possible to be fired for personally authorising the building of a huge new stadium stand that the club could never afford.)

We oldie reviewers possibly all like to think of ourselves as studious historians of gaming, charting a course through the past and observing key moments along the way. But these lofty ambitions often clash with the reality of the situation, which is that such an approach isn’t really consistent with why we play and enjoy games in the first place. Going through, for example, all of the King’s Quest games in order and in rapid succession sounds like the right thing for an adventure game fan to do, but there’s a reason that we’ve never come close to doing it.

For most of us, gaming history is, to reuse an old phrase, incomplete and subjective: What did you remember? What did you always want to try out but never did? What did you never want to touch with a bargepole? Even before FIFA/EAFC, there were always genre leaders: Match Day, Sensible Soccer, International Superstar Soccer, Pro Evolution Soccer, etc.

But people did play other games and found something to enjoy in them. When I think of old footy games, I don’t just think of marathon Pro Evo sessions or days lost to Championship Manager, but of being hunched over a friend’s Spectrum playing Footballer of the Year, or doing a summer job with some lads who didn’t like real life sport but for some reason were really into This Is Football, Sony’s third place player that briefly challenged in the early to mid 00s. And yes, I also think of being a nerdy teenager playing Puma World Football, the game that no one else had heard of.

By doing the hard yards to document absolutely everything – for all that this is an area of great personal interest, there are many titles of various generations featured here that completely escaped my attention at the time – A Tale of Two Halves ensures that everyone’s favoured game of any particular moment is likely to have been captured, however briefly. Anyone enraptured by an imperfect or idiosyncratic football game of the past will find something to enjoy here.

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A Tale of Two Halves: The History of Football Video Games, 1982-2010 is published by Bitmap Books and costs £34.99.

It’s February, which means it’s too late to wish you a Happy New Year, and also too late to make a comment about not knowing when it’s too late to wish someone a Happy New Year. So we’ll just call this a mid-Q1 check-in instead, shall we? [No, that sounds simply dreadful – a reader].

As you may have noticed, 2024 was the first year for quite some time in which we failed to hit our KPIs and SLAs, modest as they are. From my point of view, a steady trickle of content has somehow endured through numerous ups and downs over the years, including some fairly major life events, but in the second half of last year it almost dried up completely.

On the more self-inflicted end of the available excuses, I have to admit that my refusal to upgrade my old desktop PC crossed over from territory that could be described as cheerful eccentricity into an area clearly marked on the map as ‘full-on madness’.

As the amount of time between turning the machine on and actually being able to use it increased on a daily basis, I continued to use it to play through Dragon Age: Origins – a long process in itself, made longer by the extra hour or so required for an ancient HD to stop spinning before I dared to click on anything.

When I eventually replaced it, the new machine didn’t work at all and I had to send it back. Then, with replacement #2 in place, something Quite Bad happened in real life and I found myself abandoning all plans to do anything productive, electing to process events by purchasing and downloading a modern-ish tennis game, creating a female player with an approximation of my own name, and hammering through the early training modes and low-level tournaments with a vacant expression on my face.

As it turns out, guiding a female alter-ego through some clay court tournament in the arse-end of nowhere was just what I needed, but plans for #retro #content were kind of derailed slightly.

(I didn’t really make it far enough through the career grind to vouch for the qualities of Tennis World Tour: it had some fairly smelly reviews, and though I quite enjoyed the generic player and tournament names and mid-level production vibes of an earlier and more innocent age, on court the lower-tier AI opponents seemed rather prone to throwing matches away through an inexplicable number of unforced errors).

And so, with nothing in the pipeline for the end of the year and the usual dilemma about whether to accept our hosts’ latest pricing hike approaching, we took the decision to move and reserve our energies for getting the site back up and running again. Which it (hopefully) now is – thanks mainly, of course, to Stoo.

So, we go again for 2025, and hope for better. I just wanted to pop a note up to say hello, in case anyone thought that playing through Daikatana had sapped all my retro gaming enthusiasm and made me too depressed to continue.

Thanks, as always, for reading!

Hi all. This humble site has now been transferred to the new host. There were of course more problems than I had expected, mostly relating to this janky customised theme I put together when we first moved to WordPress. Still, we should be 95% back to normal, there’s just a chance of broken images in old blog post.

Hi all, we’re currently in the process of moving to new hosting. The site is partially navigable, but not all the menu structures work and some of the formatting is kind of screwy. Hope to have everything back to normal in the next few days!

Some exciting news: the semi-regular discussion series, Discussion: [indie game] (spoilers!) has moved to a podcast format!

This does mean that future instalments won’t be appearing on FFG in written form. Thanks to everyone who read them, and to Stoo for extending the remit of the site to allow them to be hosted here. 

While Jo and I don’t plan to revisit any games covered in our previous discussions, we’ve started off in fairly familiar territory by choosing The Blackwell Legacy for our first episode: a game we’ve both played, but not discussed, previously. 

In addition to that discussion, we’ve also put up a couple of bonus episodes, in which we introduce the format and chat about various things from our gaming pasts.

Instead of the slightly ad-hoc nature of the written pieces, new podcasts will be released weekly, on a Friday, but with breaks in between each run of episodes.

Any and all support is welcome, whether it’s by listening to the podcast itself, which is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music (as well as a few other places), or by following us on Instagram.

(For anyone baffled by or indifferent to this news: this is my one and only plug for the podcast on FFG, and the next time you’ll hear from me, it’ll be back to the typical diet of oldies reviews, delivered at the usual rate).

Thank you!

Today in “news you’ve already read somewhere else”. The Warcraft series has reached its 30th Anniversary and as part of the celebrations, Blizzard have released remastered versions of the first two games.

You get the option of either original graphics, or ” lovingly updated hand-painted artwork”. You might recall the first game was pixelly VGA, the second moved to higher-res SVGA and established the series bold and colourful look. Now they share a similar style, more or less what I’d expect if you took the second game and re-drew it today.

So they look great… although it’s disappointing that the animation isn’t any smoother. This seems to be an occasional issue with remastering old-school 2D games. Just in my opinion, if you create hidef graphics but only have three frames for an “attack” motion, it gives the impression of a cheap mobile game.

Anyway we also get “UI and UX” improvements which I expect will, again, have more of an impact on the first game. For example, you can now move a unit by selecting and clicking instead of select, hotkey (or menu option), then clicking. Also you can select a larger number of units simultaneously. These details matter when you’re in a rush; I always found the clunky interface in WC1 to be a little offputting.

Oh and also, the remastered WC2 will still connect to Battle.net for multiplayer, as it has since 1999. Which is kind of astonishing.

I’d say both games are worth owning, being fine examples of early realtime strategy. Build up forces, fend off enemy attacks, try and co-ordinate your own successful strike on the enemy. Chaotic disaster when you get it wrong, immensely satisfying when you’re victorious. They’re also of interest to World of Warcraft fans, since they show events about 20 years before the point where WoW begins. If you’ve ever walked around the ruins of Alterac, here’s your chance to go and see the battle where it was destroyed.

The first game is going on Battle.net for £8.99 while Warcraft 2 will set you back £12.59. Alternatively you can get them both in the Battle Chest bundle with the remastered version of Warcraft 3 from a years back.

The changes haven’t (yet) reached GoG, who are still selling the versions of WC1 and 2 released about four years ago. (they don’t have WC3). These are more or less in their original state, with a few small tweaks to WC2 like widescreen support. They’re also a few quid cheaper, if you really don’t care about the upgrades or want a DRM-free version. Since I already own the gog versions I’m not in a hurry here, but will probably wait and see if the Battle Chest ever goes on sale. Then maybe one day I’ll finally give WC1 a proper try.

[update]  – sadly WC1 and 2 will be leaving the gog store on December the 13th. If you’ve already bought the games there, gog will at least keep them available and updated for modern windows according to their new Gog Preservation Program.

Hi there.

Nice to be back with you again. Sorry it’s been a while.

Today’s game is Mafia, a 1930s organised crime caper from Illusion Softworks.