Happy New Year to you all!

Back by overwhelming popular demand (ok maybe not), here’s the return of our once-regular feature in which we take a quick look back at what happened on FFG over the last 12 months.

My recollection is that I didn’t do one of these last year because our productivity in terms of reviews didn’t really seem to warrant a retrospective any more, and that I’d been hitting the old football games particularly hard so any summary wouldn’t have made for especially varied or engaging reading. But looking back, I don’t think either of those things particularly hold true…so perhaps I forgot, couldn’t be bothered or was too distressed at the thought of the Christmas break ending.

Anyway, these days, for better or worse, we have more in terms of other blog posts and features that supplement the traditional diet of reviews, and so content is still fairly regular at least, even if we can’t cover as many old games as we used to be able to.

Stoo led the way in the evolution of our old blog from insubstantial throwaway thoughts to more considered pieces, and in recent years we’ve managed to produce a few that possibly deserved greater prominence on the site. To that end, this year we added our Best of the Blog page, replacing our dusty old General Articles section, which had remained stagnant, with only a handful of extremely ancient features, since some point in 2006.

One thing I found out in 2018: someone is still selling Zone Raiders for money.

One of my colleague’s regular features, Moments in Gaming, began last year but continued well into 2018. I was inspired to contribute a few entries of my own before realising that he’s spent considerably more time playing good and memorable games than I have, instead of mucking about about with lowbrow street-racing fare and deservedly forgotten footy titles. Inspired by MIG (as we shall never again call it), we opened the much more Rik-appropriate Vault of Regret, which allowed me to at least indulge in some whingeing about poor choices made over the years. And for Stoo to finally vent his frustrations with regard to Operation Flashpoint…

The other big FFG news for 2018 was the introduction of our mobile site. It had been something we’d talked about for a long time, but we possibly put off doing anything on account of it possibly being too complicated to do properly without breaking the main site. I think it’s fair to say, although I didn’t do any of the technical stuff myself, that the whole process was easier and more straightforward than either of us anticipated.

As for the reviews, I personally made more of an effort to stick to the brief of the site as it first existed, in terms of covering games that made some sort of a positive impact on me. In some cases that meant stretching into the newer end of our permitted timespan, although I like to think that there was always at least a link to the old days, be it to a franchise that we’ve followed for some time, in the case of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, an echo of the overambitious interactive movies of the 90s as with L.A. Noire, or a reminder that adventure games with blocky graphics can be totally awesome and brilliant from Dave Gilbert’s Blackwell series.

NFS: Hot Pursuit 2010 – one of my favourite games from this year.

(I appreciate that might sound like a bit of a tenuous excuse for covering newer titles…but we’ve always tended to mix the proper oldies with coverage of ‘games from a few years ago’. In all honesty I think we might need to admit that we’ve reached the stage where we’re almost totally out of touch with the newest stuff in modern gaming and are increasingly likely to focus our interests on titles that at least have some connection to something we already know anyway, boring and middle-aged as that may sound. Perhaps revisiting the mission statement is something we should put on the to-do list for this year).

And there was older stuff, too. Stoo brought us some more authentic retro coverage, making good on our oft-repeated promise to ‘come back to one of the Sierra series at some point’ by ploughing through Space Quest III, and adding a review of possibly our first ever CGA-only title, Monuments of Mars.

Meanwhile, I enjoyed revisiting Apogee’s attempt at Super Mario Kart, Wacky Wheels, while playing Cricket 96 again took me back to a time where I wasted far too much time trying to extract maximum fun from a flawed cricket game instead of doing something more worthwhile (by recreating that exact same experience more than 20 years later).

Stoo was more kindly disposed towards Roger Wilco et al than I might have been.

Who knows what the future holds, but on reflection 2018 seemed like a relatively healthy one for FFG in terms of developing the site and, by our relatively modest standards, keeping up with regular content. As ever, thanks for reading, and we wish you all the best for the year ahead.