Inside The Big Cardboard Box is where we delve into the history of the largely defunct world of boxed PC games, with a particular emphasis on all the ones I used to own, but later gave away or sold.

This series seems to have encapsulated a descent into middle age, in that where my preparation for a FFG piece would once have involved spending far too much time searching for downloads and second hand copies of games that I remembered, I’m now reduced to searching my own memory for details of those that I’ve forgotten.

As I’ve long since accepted, the full details of what used to be in my 90s and early 00s collection of boxed games are going to remain forever out of reach. But I think we’re at the point now where nearly every memory-jogging angle has been exhausted, so it’s probably time to type up a quick packing note before we seal up this big box for good.

First, though, a random mind dump of memories and games not shared thus far, many of which have come to me at moments where I really should have been thinking about, or doing, something else. (You’d think that the matter of which particular boxed version of an old DOS game someone once used to own would be something that helped them get to sleep, rather than keep them awake, but there you go).

Some games that we haven’t mentioned in this series have already been reviewed. Including: Quarantine and Quarantine II: Road Warrior (both original big box versions, one possibly acquired second hand, the other from a bargain bin), Iron Assault (sold, boxless, for cheap in either Dixons or Currys), NBA Jam: Tournament Edition (some budget label never seen before or since, and – possibly – bought in a newsagents?!) and the dreaded Zone Raiders (big box, bargain bin again, purchased either from the long-defunct Future Zone or its successor Electronics Boutique).

To which we can add, with no particular link between them, except that they were also original big box releases, rather than budget or compilation re-releases:

Tunnel B1, a PlayStation port that looked very nice on the box, but was pretty slow and dull.

FX Fighter, a 3D beat ’em up, which got good reviews, but I remember as being a bit crap.

Track Attack, an arcade racer which started life as something else (and I’m sure claimed some link – even if only as a ‘spiritual successor’ – to Geoff Crammond’s Stunt Car Racer) but ended up as a blocky neon-future spectacle undermined by a bad frame rate.

Terminator: Future Shock, which was quite good, but also pretty hard, as I recall. (My main memory is of watching Stoo start a campaign with the callsign ‘Antisocial’, which was then repeated endlessly throughout quite serious briefing sequences. And possibly was the inspiration for this childish but snigger-worthy feature).

For reasons of preserving my sanity, and that of the site’s 7 readers, I’m not going to attempt to recount or catalogue here the millions of football games that have passed through my hands over the years. From memory, like most others, I generally participated in the process of selling or part-exchanging older versions of FIFA to fund the purchase of the newest one. I certainly had, at some stage, every version of FIFA released on PC during the 90s. (And pretty much every cricket game that you could think of, too).

But, let’s throw in a few lesser-known ones here. Such as the non-FIFA EA game, The F.A. Premier League STARS, as well as World League Soccer ’98 from Eidos, and Microsoft International Soccer 2000. Oh, and Kick Off 3: European Challenge: another one that I’ve actually gone back to.

And so now to the recap of previous posts, which increasingly felt more like a look back at the different ways of getting cheap games in the 90s and 00s than helping me get a grip on what might have been in my own collection (although the former is probably of more interest to you, dear reader, so it was probably for the best).

Here we go!
Inside The Big Cardboard Box: Sealed and Sent continued »

Recently our good friend the J-Man posted something on twitter that echoed a very familiar sentiment for me:

I’m sure a fourth device is just what I need to get me into playing retro console games regularly 👍🏼

— Johnny Bomb Squad (@BurningStickMan) December 31, 2021

We retro gamers often find we’re not spending as much time as we’d like on our hobby. Myself, I have a toddler to care for which I suppose is a bit more important (hello dear wife, I mean MUCH more important of course and I will definitely read more books to her today). Even those without children, though, find themselves accumulating responsibilities and commitments as they get older. Saturdays are spent mowing the lawn and shopping for curtains; devoting most of the day gaming is a luxury for the under-30s.

I won’t pretend I have zero free time but when some does come along might be tempted away by (whisper the heresy) new games. Well not very new because I’m cheap and my main PC is a decade old, but still too recent to be considered retro (or relevant to this site). Also by about 10pm, I’m frequently just too worn out for gaming. Especially something complex like strategy or RPGs. Slumping in front of netflix seems like the easier option.

Furthermore there’s a sort of paralysis that can set in when confronted with too many choices. I have both a huge gog backlog, and massive lists of console ROMs. I pour through lists of games, wonder if I’ll be able to commit, think of reasons why each choice might be a bad use of time…. then end up not playing anything at all.

So what can bust people like me out of this rut? It’s easy to think what’s needed, to finally focus my mind and devote time to the classics, is another device to play them on. Something that’s more convenient to use, or enhances the experience somehow. Something specfically tailored for retro-gaming. After all, there are so many options now.

We could start with the various mini consoles, each devoted to emulation of a particular system such as the SNES or Amiga 500. They come pre-loaded with games so pretty much all you have to do is plug into your TV and switch them on. Downside is, it’s difficult to add more games unless you start hacking them.

Then there are more advanced options if you want a general-purpose device capable of emulating multiple systems, and are willing to do a bit of tinkering. The Rasberry Pi, the tiny and versatile little linux PC, is a popular choice. There’s also something I recently encountered called miSTer which uses FPGAs, eg it’s hardware emulation instead of software, so should be faster and more accurate.

In his tweet the J-Man was here referring to one the plethora of emulation handhelds that have sprung up in the past decade or so. They tend to have fairly humble specs but are handy for 8 and 16 bit systems, maybe N64 an PS1 in some cases. Just like any other portable device, I could take one with me a train journey or play on them without even getting out of bed (lazy git).

Yet through years of experience, I’ve learned the hard way that new toys don’t help all that much. I had one of those handhelds, a JXD 8700. It gathered dust in a drawer for years. This was way before covid hit but even back then I had virtually no commute so didn’t actually spend any time on trains. Also if I try playing anything in bed i just fall asleep. Plus it was kind of big and clunky. So it went back from whence it came. (ebay).

Meanwhile I spent a week setting up RetroPie on my pi. Most of the installation is straightforward but I still had to tinker with settings, copy roms over and then deal with a reluctant usb speaker. Linux seems so modern and plug-and-play these days until something goes wrong, then you’re deep into the forbidden realms of esoteric technical secrets. After hours of pouring over forum posts and not understanding the mystic incantations to evoke sound drivers, I gave up and dug out some headphones. After all that I spent less than an hour playing anything. It’s sat on my desk right now, filling me with shame.

Well here’s proof I got it up and running, at least. (that’s the official touchscreen)

My mini NES and SNES have seen some genuine use at least, but a lot of that is fairly casual. Just goofing around for a few levels before dinner, or playing my wife at Mario Kart (yes dear, I mean losing to you at Mario Kart). I don’t see myself ever tackling something that requires lengthy time commitments such as Chrono Trigger; I rarely fire the minis up for more than 30 minutes at a time.

Ultimately all the hardware I need for retro gaming is the hardware I’ve always used: PCs running emulators. A big whirring old tower in the study and a Surface Go I can use from the comfort of the living room. If I’m not retro-gaming on those, I won’t do so on any other gadget. All the other duties, and time constraints apply. The fatigue and malaise is still there. The novelty of another device is only a temporary relief from these problems; it doesn’t fundamentally alter anything about my approach to gaming.

So then this is not a hardware problem, but one of time management and motivation. If I want to play old games more, I need to set aside blocks of time and carry out household chores more efficiently to maximise that time. I’ve also got to push myself little harder and say ultimately, this will be more rewarding than watching TV. Finally though, I need to make peace with the fact that I’ll never have as much time as I did in my youth, and make gaming decisions with some appropriate wisdom. For example, no more than one RPG on the go at a time.

So anyway with a new mindset I may end up gaming more, and writing here more. Or I may not. Either way I’ve told myself I don’t need another try at emulation handhelds, even if they look perfect for retro-platformers and old apogee games. Also I’m giving the build-your-own approach a rest for a while, miSTer doesn’t offer anything I need and I’m not going to go buy a fourth generation pi until I get more use out my pi3.  I’m resolved to resist any further temptation: there will be no more devices.

Happy New Year to you all.

I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m never quite sure whether to keep doing these annual round-ups or not. The first one coincided with an extremely productive year, which seemed to be the primary justification for its existence (although looking at it now, it’s an extremely half-hearted retrospective considering the number of games covered) and since then our reviewing capacity has settled to a level that doesn’t perhaps quite merit an end-of-year summary. Plus, we’ve spent quite a lot of time this year looking back at things already.

But, what the hell: here goes.

It was our birthday! (Yes, you’d have thought we’d have mentioned it, wouldn’t you?) And to celebrate, we dug out some of our oldest reviews, played the games in question again, and scrawled out some thoughts while setting them alongside all-new coverage of a related game. [You mean, ‘played one of the sequels’, right? – FFG reader].

To start, Stoo and I both took a look at Sin, which was tied to a review of the first instalment of its cancelled episodic sequel. And I finally got around to playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, while developing a slightly better understanding of the 1997 original.

Rocket blasting some foes in The Enlightened Adventures of John R. Blade.

In between, there were racing games new and old. And as a result, we now have the Need for Speed series pretty much covered all the way up to 2011. It’s a genre I continue to enjoy, although your standard track-based caper of the late 00s certainly requires a greater investment of time than might be ideal, to apparently no greater end than filling the middle of the game with #content that ultimately becomes rather hard to digest.

Anyway, the anniversary stuff isn’t quite over yet: there’s at least one and possibly two more pairs of reviews and retrospectives to come. (We decided to buy ourselves a bit of time by declaring the Sin discussion the start of our celebrations: hence, any further articles published before April 2022 are definitely still on time and relevant and not delayed at all).

In terms of other reviews from 2021, I guess a personal highlight was being able to finally get my teeth into the full Mass Effect trilogy. Like everyone has been saying for the past 10 years or so: it’s great! Although I was aided in this endeavour by the knowledge that I would have a chunk of time available to devote to three epic space RPGs, for once I actually used that time as intended rather than being distracted by four or five football games from the 90s.

Peroxide Man-Shep makes a run for it.

With Mass Effect, the Lost tie-in, Beijing 2008 and Burnout: Paradise joining the late-00s iterations of TOCA and Need for Speed, it’s been a slightly Xbox 360-era year, I guess. Call the retro police! Fortunately Stoo was on hand to review the Apogee platformer, Realms of Chaos.

And I belatedly caught up with, and enjoyed, Origin’s 90s blaster Crusader: No Remorse. Which I had to re-buy on GOG, seeing as I apparently got rid of my old CD copy some time ago (but bizarrely kept that of the sequel, No Regret).

Poking around in dim and dusty memories of games bought and sold is the theme of Inside The Big Cardboard Box, a series which continued throughout 2021 (and will hopefully conclude shortly). If you’ve missed it, and like the sound of a 40-year-old man reminiscing about various UK budget ranges and compilations while trying to remember what he did with some CDs he can’t find, then you’re in for a treat.

Causing havoc with the red tin man in Crusader: No Remorse.

And Jo and I continued our spoiler-tastic indie discussions, ticking off most of the major modern so-called ‘walking sims’ and deciding that putting the ones we’d covered into some kind of ranked order would be a worthwhile endeavour.

We’re planning to keep going with that series in 2022. While I joke about being a retro heretic, most of my gaming time is (by choice) focused on older games that fall within the usual scope of this site, and I figure that there’s a difference between not being able to keep up with modern gaming and deliberately shunning it. The short narrative adventures we’ve played thus far tick a lot of my boxes anyway, and have allowed me to at least feel partly in touch with what’s been going on in the relatively recent past. And I enjoy the discussions, too.

As for what else this year holds: who knows? I do make plans: CD wallets have been flipped through, boxes freed of their cellophane, digital libraries scanned, and solutions for awkward Windows 98 games considered and re-considered. For me, things don’t really get done without a plan. But, all the obstacles that life throws in the way notwithstanding, plans can also change, and there’s something to be said for being suddenly inspired to dive into a game you’d not thought about for a while rather than grinding through a list in a proscribed order.

So, I can end only by saying that we hope to bring you roughly the same amount of the kind of thing that we usually do in the year ahead, while offering you our thanks – as always – for giving us your time and attention, and wishing you all the best for 2022.

Hello there!

Hope you all had a good Christmas.

We’re sneaking in one final review for 2021: racing around the city of Paradise in Criterion’s racer, Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box.

(Hey, wasn’t there a late-80s rock song that was about some kind of ‘paradise city’? It was quite a big hit, I think).

Sending best wishes to all our readers for 2022!

Hello everyone.

As you may have noticed, the majority of games under consideration in our discussion series (with spoilers) have been so-called ‘walking simulators’, the arguably pejorative and dismissive term coined for first-person narrative adventures.

That wasn’t necessarily always the intention, although after a certain point the prospect of catching up with a selection of significant games within the genre all at once started to appeal, particularly as we were both enjoying the exercise, and it made sense to be able to compare and contrast as we went along.

But we’re probably now at the point where we might broaden things out a little more, and so thought it might be worth having a little re-cap of our thoughts on the games we’ve covered.

This piece comes without spoilers (unless you click on the links to the original discussions, of course). And in case you thought the absence of scores in this series was a sign of FFG embracing a more mature attitude with regard to the evaluation of computer and video game entertainment, let us now disappoint you with the revelation that this is a listicle.

Yes, we’re doing rankings! Because video games must always be ranked and/or scored, from now until the end of time. (Also, it’s good for a bit of fun).

This is likely to be the last post we’ll make before the 25th, although we might be back again before New Year. Anyway, I’ll take this opportunity to wish you all a Merry Christmas – hope you have a good one.

And now, since there’s no need to brace yourself for a spoiler warning, you can just go straight ahead and enjoy the discussion below.

Discussion: A Top 10 of Walking Sims (no spoilers!) continued »

As Rik wrote last week, this site turned 20 sometime this year. I’ve been meaning to write more to mark this anniversary, maybe contribute to the series of double-feature reviews, but nothing much materialised. 2021 has been a bit of a blur of work, parenting and to be quite frank, depression.

Sorry, that’s not very cheerful is it. I think finding time to write more would probably be some small help with that last problem. FFG is a source of stability, something that has existed pretty much my entire adult life. So let me see if I can at least come with a retrospective of my own.

Let’s cast our minds back to 2001. Windows XP was brand new and a lot of folks were still using win98. Your PC was probably still 90s beige, I know mine was. Monitors were still mostly CRTs. I think sometime around then I was upgrading from a Pentium III to an Athlon XP 1500 with a Geforce 3. (and it was still beige).

Some top games of that year were Max Payne, Age of Empires 2 and Black and White. If you wanted to talk about games to people on the internet you would sign up on a forum. If you wanted to broadcast your thoughts in a more formal manner then, well, you’d probably start a site like this one.

We launched with a mission to review old games, but we didn’t delve all the way back to the bleeping CGA 1980s. That’s an era we’ve always regarded as a bit primitive, where you’d be better off with a console or Amiga (and I say this as a guy gaming on PCs since 1986). Instead our initial area of interested was roughly 1990-1997. My first few forays into writing articles included Dark Forces and UFO Enemy Unknown. Rik started off with Wing Commander 4 and Puma World Football 98.

My early records are fragmentary but Lemmings 2 may have been the very first game I wrote about

I’m not sure we were exactly a “retro” gaming site. The word wasn’t bandied about as much as it is now anyway. Still, games up to the mid 90s certainly felt like a much older generation already, because the pace of technology was faster back then. I’m not sure what difference, for example, five years makes now. Slightly more realistic lighting on tree leaves? Back in those days it took us from the VGA mazes and blobby sprites of Doom to the cleverly scripted 3D world of Half Life.

That said, we were also quickly looking at stuff from the later end of the decade and even beyond. Deus Ex (2000), Wizardry 8 (2001) and Sin (1998) had all been covered by 2002. I maybe have been a slightly worse offender than Rik for looking at “only-just-old” games. Anyway I think the idea bouncing around my head was to look at just about anything you might want to play, between the standardisation of EGA and adlib sound up to just before the latest generation of games. Quite a wide remit already.

At that point we were also still clinging to the idea of objective reviews. We’d look at a game and see if it justified time spent on it versus its modern peers. In 2006 that was already a fairly pointless endeavour if looking at Wolfenstein 3D or a flight sim from 1992. From there it would become more pointless.

As the 2000s progressed there was sea change in our gaming habits brought about by digital distribution. It began with Steam, then gog followed. New games, but also old ones, could be beamed onto our computers with the wave of a credit card. It was fertile ground for finding more games to cover here.

Or at least it should have been. I was descending into a World of Warcraft addiction that gorged on my gaming time and severely limited my capacity to play (and write about) anything else. Well maybe not just that. I was also playing (and replaying) Bethesda timesinks. (note to self, just write about Fallout 3 and New Vegas, they’re old enough to fall within our scope now). Anyway though for whatever reasons, from this point on Rik was always the more prolific writer here.

The site went through a few technical iterations. Version 1 was static html. Version 2 was database driven and launched in 2005 after I bought myself a book on php and wrote my own cms. I was proud of it, but by the early 2010s it was already out of date. Readers couldn’t comment on reviews and the admin passwords were stored in a plain text file, for god’s sake.

At some point we began our blogging side, allowing for more free-roaming discussion outside of the review format. I facilitated that by bolting xanga onto my own code, and I guess that would be FFG v2.5. Then sometime I think in 2013 we decided we really needed to modernise the site fully, and shifted everything over to wordpress.

I’m not sure I deserve the “technical guy” hat anymore, I’ve not made time to properly learn how the guts of wordpress code work. I learned a few functions, made a few dreadful hacks, took a basic theme and turned it blue. A lot of it may as well still be witchcraft, or tiny ants carrying messages around tubes or something. On some level that bothers me. Still I suppose that’s a sign of how barriers to entry have lowered for making your own site. Knowledge of the witchcraft is no longer required, and simple tools mean anyone can have a go.

Anyway, back to games, which continued to evolve around us. First person shooters started to lean away from the reliance on scifi and fantasy, towards contemporary warfare. This lead to about three hundred Call of Duties for fans of cinematic action. I played the first one and…. that’s it so far. Meanwhile there was stuff like the bastard-hard Operation Flashpoint\Arma if you like tactical realism. Of if you’re me, you enjoy hiding behind a shrub and dying a lot.

Being a fanboy of Looking Glass Studios, System Shock was inevitably another early addition to my list.

Meanwhile the traditional point and click adventure, once a core part of PC gaming, was on its last legs when we started. Once we had enjoyed endless Quests from Sierra, and numerous entertaining and inventive titles from Lucasarts. Now we all we were getting was the odd lesser known example like Rik’s personal favourite, Mystery of the Druids. Around the end of the 00’s though it enjoyed a bit of a revival, thanks to the indie scene.

This blew up in the late 00s as digital distribution allowed small developers to release games without needing support from publishers. The wave of creativity unleashed has brought us all kinds of inexpensive games that I might turn my attention to one day, such as a new wave of platform games. Indie adventures in particular, though, have become a special topic of interest here. Rik and Jo have looked at both retro-styled point and clickers, and narrative-driven first person adventures.

Some of our other favourite kinds of game also declined in popularity over the years. Realtime strategy seemed to be doing okay through the first half of the 2000s, with classics from Warcraft 3 to Company of Heroes. Then I disappeared (as is my wont) into a dark cave to play RPGs for a while. I emerged blinking in the light several winters later, wondered if I should catch up on the RTS genre, and realised it was all looking a bit quiet (then went back to my cave).

What have we had in the past decade? The instalments of Starcraft 2 ran from 2010 to 2015. There was… a Homeworld but not in space, released a few years back. Oh and Dawn of War 3 (I’ve not played it, DoW2 really was more a tactical RPG but let’s just assume this one counts). So that’s three. Evidence of life, but not exactly thriving. If I’ve missed anything important, write in and let me know. (I guess the Total War series is still going strong and, er, it has strategy and realtime bits. But to me that never felt like a descendant of RTS progenitor Dune 2).

Space-sims meanwhile, once soaring through the void blasting TIE fighters, were in already in a decaying orbit when we started. I don’t think I noticed the warning signs at the time: X-Wing and Wing Commander, two of the most important series of the genre, had already come to an end. Freespace 2 was critically acclaimed but a commercial flop. There were a few more entries of in the early 2000s like Bridge Commander, but by the end of teh decade all we had was the X series. Which was more like a behemoth economics sim that you operated from the cockpit of a spaceship.

So in recent years it’s been heartening to see a couple of high-profile sims emerge: Elite Dangerous brings the return of a series that started when I was a preschooler. No-Man’s Sky with its promise of endless exploration looks tempting. Oh and there was another X, but the prospect of spending evenings looking for supplies of power cells for my factories is frankly intimidating.

It’s easy at our age to focus on what’s lost, and hope that old favourites will return. Yet we should also be aware of the new growth and innovation. For example, entire categories of online multiplayer-based games have been appearing. We got Mobas, spun off from Warcraft 3, then later shooters started becoming battle royales. Okay I don’t care about those personally, but I did spend a lot of time with my future wife on Minecraft. That one brought about a new age of online, open world crafting extravaganzas. Never mind fighting orcs and slaying dragons for treasure, here we were trying to build a vegetable patch and dig for coal!

Actually, open worlds is a concept of particular interest to me. I’ve always had a fascination with abandoning your immediate missions, picking some interesting hill or castle in the distance, and just mooching over there to see what you find. Once the preserve of beardy RPGs, they seem to have proliferated into other genres. I’ve played the first Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed, and both catching up a bit on both series is on my rather over-burdened gaming to-do list.

I’m not trying to recount a comprehensive history of PC Gaming from 2000 to 2020 here. Merely the trends that I happen to have noticed and honestly all of the above could be woefully inaccurate (let me guess, Mobas are dead already). For a while I was more or less keeping up with gaming, at least the genres of interest to me. Or at least I’d play teh games of five years ago thanks to steam sales. Now I’m becoming increasingly clueless. The last modern game I bought was Fallout 4 and that was (checks google) good grief six years ago.

Apparently the most modern game I’ve reviewed so far is the rather uninspiring Titan Quest.

Gaming is a blur to me now, a tide of Apex Legends and Titanfalls, and Call of Duty Modern Black Ops 5. What’s the latest Assassin’s Creed anyway? I think it’s either set in the court of Kublai Khan, the story of an aztec warrior or you’re a milkman in the 1970s. Do let me know. Then there’s all the indie games, countless as the stars in the sky. I’ve basically stopped reading about modern games on sites like RPS and apart from few series of particular interest, focus on games we consider FFG-relevant.

Which is, basically, 1990-2010. We stray beyond that upper limit sometimes for indie games and it may move gradually as years pass if we work to “about ten years before the present day”. Otherwise, there’s plenty to keep me occupied within that criteria. I still want to tackle the Total War series sometime, platy yet more 90s shooters and maybe one day actually finish a Bioware RPG.

We’re keenly aware that the nature of this site is itself somewhat dated. These days people want to be youtube stars, or streamers, and I guess who can blame them? Why stick to musty old text when you can be a star of effectively your own do-it-yourself TV show, or broadcast your gaming to thousands of adoring fans. Or at least start a podcast to chat about games with your friends.

We are… deeply unlikely to go in that direction. I’d love to excuse us by saying we’re too old for that sort of thing but there’s a bunch of forty year old men on youtube eager to tell you about ZX Spectrum games. I guess we’re just too busy with our real lives to be dicking around learning how to put videos together – writing is something I can work on in evening in front of the tv after my daughter goes to bed. Also no-one will ever, ever want to go to Twitch to watch me be shit at games.

Besides, we just plain prefer our thoughts to manifest in the form of the written word. This site was heavily inspired by the gaming magazines we read as teens, particularly PC Zone and I think we’ll always carry something of that in our mission. So we’ll happily remain a bit of a relic of the early 2000s, even if it limits our audience. While I sometimes wish I’d done more to draw in a few readers, drumming up a huge following was never a priority for us anyway. I’m happy to have a small readership of PC gaming aficionados.

When we started, the idea of doing this for twenty years might have seemed a bit far fetched. Now I find myself thinking another twenty is entirely possible. I mean, you might be reading via your Google Brain Implant or holo-smartphone or whatever, but I intend to keep going as long as the web exists. Hosting costs are minor, there will always be enough games to occupy our time, and this place will be where we assess and contemplate them.

I’ll keep contributing whenever I get my act together and make some time instead of flopping in front of Netflix in the evening (to be fair the new He-Man was really excellent). My short term goals are get back to early-90s flight sims and play another space quest. Then I have a few RPGs to finish. Rik I’m sure will continue to be more prolific, his work including (but not limited to) the most extensive record of 90s football games you will ever encounter.

So to finish I’d like to say thank you all for visiting this humble site. We’re the smallest of minnows amongst all the big name sites, and gaming youtubers, and yet you’ve chosen to come here. We appreciate that, and we hope our reviews and articles continue to be worth your time.

For some reason, November 2001 has been retained in my head as the significant month when it comes to the origins of this site: I figured while it probably was not when Stoo put the first incarnation of FFG online, it was at least roughly when my initial ramblings were published.

This is, it turns out, both definitively and verifiably wrong, with even a cursory check of publication dates on the site itself highlighting reviews from much earlier that year. (Goodness knows why I never bothered to check until now). And while I’m certain that Blade Runner was definitely the first game I ever reviewed here, exactly when that piece was first written remains a mystery, due to some early 00s tinkering with the write-up. (The Wayback Machine can retrieve the original, but we didn’t put dates on our reviews back then).

Ah well. Such things probably don’t really matter very much to anyone, except possibly me. And they don’t really matter very much to me, either. But there is a reason why I’m writing this piece now, other than the usual lack of time or organisation: it was part of a semi-deliberate plan, even if the underlying reasons for that plan happened to be completely invalid.

Anyway, whichever way you look at it, A Force for Good has now been online for at least 20 years, and despite our humble status in this quiet corner of the web, it still seems like a significant milestone, worthy of some kind of acknowledgement. We may not have been the most prolific site in terms of reviews over the years, but it’s fair to say that new content has been in fairly regular supply: there have been a few quiet moments, but rarely long periods of complete silence.

We’ve marked previous anniversaries with a combination of attempts at special features and blog posts. Looking back, the 10 year anniversary was the first obvious and significant one to be acknowledged: I wrote When I Played to mark 15 years because, while there was no active talk of winding things up, the thought of reaching 20 at that stage seemed a rather ludicrous and far-fetched notion. But here we are.

Hopefully you’ve noted our series of double-feature reviews: we’ve got a couple more planned, although they may well leak into next year now. So this is where I try and fail to say something interesting and/or profound about the site from a personal perspective (Stoo may well be along at some point to add some thoughts of his own). And, in a break with tradition, I’m going to try and avoid repeating things that have been said on previous occasions. (If it turns out that I have done so, anyway, apologies: I’m getting forgetful in my old age).

If it turns out Blade Runner wasn’t actually my first review then my head will explode. But we’ll never know.

One thing that I probably haven’t really expressed in the past is just how exciting it was in 2001 to write something that would be published online. In those days, coding even a fairly basic site required a certain level of expertise, and was definitely beyond me at the time. Even though Stoo put a fairly self-deprecating note on the front page that compared his skills to that of a primate, I was (and remain) impressed not only by his ability to put everything together in the first place, but also improve the site along the way, both in terms of looks and functionality.

(A proper site history is probably beyond us at this point, but from memory there was significant tinkering with the review and menu appearance and format in the early days, before search options, a content management system, video clips and the pre-Wordpress blog – the FFG journal – all followed later in the 00s).

At that stage, there were definite parallels with the world of physical publishing, in that I had to send my reviews off, plus screenshots, via e-mail, and wait for them to be formatted and published. Around this time, I was also working for the student newspaper at university, which had very similar requirements. And while nothing quite beats having your name in print (no matter how banal the subject matter or insignificant the circulation) I experienced a similar level of excitement from receiving an e-mail from Stoo saying FFG had been updated as I did in picking up a copy of the newly-published university rag.

FFG felt like it existed in a pre-blog world, before non-professional writing and publishing on the web was quite as accessible, mainstream or widespread. As this changed over the years, that special feeling of ‘having a website’ sort of wore off, before blogging itself became seen as outdated and irrelevant in the world of social and video content.

In that time, it would have been unusual for our thoughts and feelings about the site and its intended audience to remain completely constant, and from my point of view there were certainly times where the mind wandered to the possibilities that may exist for promoting FFG more widely, trying to attract a wider audience, and embracing new-fangled media channels.

Occasional dabblings aside, though, things here have rarely strayed too far from the original intent, i.e. writing down a few thoughts about old games in the hope that they may be of interest for like-minded gamers to hazard upon one day. Although FFG now has a blogging platform, a mobile site, and a (limited) social media presence, we remain, for better or worse, a fairly Web 1.0 outfit in most respects. Possibly we’ve circled back to the point where ‘having a website’ – at least in this form – is unusual again. And I quite like that! (Does this mean FFG is itself retro? We’re certainly old enough.)

Plenty has changed around us, of course, although I’m not sure there have been as many significant developments in the world of old PC gaming in the last 10 years of our history as there were in the first 10. As Stoo noted back then, the availability of oldies for purchase on the likes of GOG and the accessibility of tools like DOSBox and ScummVM were massive game-changers, and in my case meant that suspicion of new versions of Windows and hoarding of retired PC towers were less crucial when it came to playing and reviewing oldies.

Playing this on a 486 was certainly time consuming. And not in a good way.

DOSBox and ScummVM compatibility has only improved since, with the increase in processing power over the years also allowing more demanding games to be run with ease. (I never imagined I’d see the day when you could buy Wing Commander III for a couple of quid, download it in minutes, and have it installed and running in a window on your desktop).

Games designed for Windows 95 and 98 which don’t agree with the modern 64-bit iteration are possibly the next major hurdle to be overcome: although I know some have had success with virtual machines, my own tentative steps into that world have had mixed results. And there’s never quite been a title that I simply had to get working to motivate me in this regard (if you excuse the brief period of madness trying to get to the bottom of why this old football game kept crashing).

A part of me does miss the slightly nerdy hobbyist aspect of fiddling about with old machinery and CDs, although there was certainly an element of spending too much of my time on getting something up and running and not enough on actually playing and enjoying the games back then. A focus on the technical side of things is something that seems to have become increasingly prevalent in retro circles these days, although in fairness this is often in the context of discussing a re-release, retro collection or mini-console which is being sold for money, when in the past the titles in question might have been illicitly downloaded and emulated at no cost to the player.

While we’ve always tried to advocate buying old games when available, I must also admit to an element of wistfulness for the old days of excitedly browsing abandonware sites. Certainly, preserving old games and making them legally accessible is a worthy cause, although whether the motivations of the companies who belatedly cottoned onto the market for such things are quite so pure is open to question. (The recent trend for removing perfectly functional – and affordable – PC games from sale to be replaced with so-called ‘remastered’ versions would suggest not).

My own gaming habits have also changed over the years: from being a relentless tinkerer, playing the first couple of hours of lots of games, to now only really starting those that I intend to finish. For the sake of the site, the development of an ability to focus has been a blessing, and I certainly prefer experiencing, understanding, and (ideally) completing a game to endless fiddling, although I do sometimes wonder if it would really be so bad if I dipped into a few more titles from the backlog to see what they were all about from time to time.

Perhaps some of that early restlessness came from the sense shared by our generation of gamers that it was actually possible to keep up with and across what was happening with all games of all genres at a particular time: a monthly magazine in the 90s/00s would pretty much review everything that was out there, while the playable demos on the cover-mounted CD would give you a taste of what was going on, outside of those titles that you actually bought and played.

UEFA Champions League 01/02: a virtual machine doesn’t solve your problems.

Magazines are sadly now a dying breed, but those that are still going these days have no chance of giving a modern gamer such a broad overview of what’s out there, and instead focus on a handful of interesting and/or noteworthy titles. The explosion of indie games, in particular, mean that even the most prolific and well-resourced websites can’t keep up. We’re a long way from the days when the Indie Zone pages of PC Zone would feature a handful of crap-looking arcade shooters.

(Incidentally, the indie scene’s revival of the point and click adventure, and its reimagining of the genre through the short-form first-person narrative format was the most significant development in ‘modern’ gaming that had an impact on me during the past 10 years, to the extent that I lobbied for the occasional step outside the roughly-defined parameters of what we usually cover here for a handful of reviews, as well as establishing a semi-regular discussion series. It’s another unforgiveable retro-crime to add to the list of those perpetrated by FFG over the years, for which I take full responsibility).

But the widely-held notion of 20 years ago that it was perfectly possible (and desirable) to know about all games was, looking back, utterly ridiculous. I was as guilty as anyone else in this regard, and will admit to thinking at various points during FFG’s lifespan that there was a big list of ‘significant’ games that could be ticked off once covered: a journey towards some logical endpoint that would one day be completed. In fact, I distinctly remember once glancing through a longlist of possible future titles for review, not particularly fancying any of them, and wondering if I’d actually written about everything that interested me already.

This thought, most likely the result of treating a fun hobby like a job, was soon dismissed as ludicrous, and ultimately started the train of thought that led to the Vault of Regret and The Big Cardboard Box: not only did I not play all of the games that I actually used to own, I couldn’t even remember what they were.

Clearly, trying to track down and review all these titles would also fall into the category of turning something light-hearted and enjoyable into a grim tick-list of tasks, the completion of which would not, in all likelihood, provide any sense of accomplishment or closure in any case. But the realisation that such a quest would remain a lengthy and time-consuming one despite the many years already spent playing and writing about old games does underline just how much more is still out there waiting to be rediscovered and enjoyed.

Not retro.

And, at the time of writing, my own motivation and capacity to do so remains. Who knows what life has in store, and what may cause that to change? But for the time being, I hereby renew my commitment to offer an ongoing contribution to this slow-moving review site, dedicated to the world of PC gaming between 1990 and 2010 (plus a few outliers).

Thanks very much, as always, for reading.

Hi there.

Today we have a review of an old PC game. I know, I know: stop it with all the crazy new ideas.

The title in question is Crusader: No Remorse.

Inside The Big Cardboard Box is where we delve into the history of the largely defunct world of boxed PC games, with a particular emphasis on all the ones I used to own, but later gave away or sold.

I don’t know why, but Empire’s Xplosiv range is the one that I most associate with 00s gaming landfill. Possibly it’s the slightly naff name or the flame-based !!awesome!! packaging. Or maybe it’s the fact that they did re-release quite a few stinkers, and also tried to bundle them together in a ‘we had a warehouse full of these already’ type move.

We mentioned their Top Ten compilation last time, a collection of Sega Saturn ports mixed with pinball, cricket and chess. Apparently, there was also a second Top Ten release in 2003, which again bundled PC versions of games from a defunct Sega console (this time the Dreamcast) – Crazy Taxi, Virtua Tennis, The House of the Dead 2 – with seemingly incongruous PC titles like Warrior Kings, Call to Power II and Comanche vs Hokum. Strangest of all, and entirely reinforcing my accusations of them endlessly repackaging the same stuff, there’s Sega Touring Car Championship again, which was already included in the first one. (And was pretty rubbish, if I remember).

As with the first Top Ten collection, all of the component games had an individual release on the label, and I still have my copy of Crazy Taxi, the purchase of which, as I mentioned already, meant that I unwittingly also ended up with a copy of the terrible Ford Racing 2001, surreptitiously hurled into the box with a hastily-applied sticker on the front informing you of this delightful free gift.

I think it probably is the prominence of the likes of Ford Racing and Empire’s other slightly uncool titles, like International Cricket Captain, that sullied its brand slightly. Although they also weren’t above re-issuing some absolute toss like London Racer/M25 Racer from Davilex (‘Real city, country and motorway tracks through London, Oxford and the M25!’)

Otherwise, it was largely similar to Sold Out: cheapo presentation and manuals in PDF on the CD, although I’m not sure the same 5 quid price tag was adhered to consistently: I think Xplosiv probably ended up there but I think they started out more at the £10-15 range. In terms of flooding the market with cheaper copies of a wide range of games, though, they had a similar impact.

And, as with Sold Out, I can’t quite figure out whether I imagined them releasing way more games than they did, or it’s just that the list on MobyGames is incomplete. I think it’s probably a combination of the two, as Internet sources elsewhere confirm their release of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, which was also available in a double-pack with Matt Hoffman’s Pro BMX. And I had a copy of the former, which definitely went into the Big Cardboard Box of 2002: I think I’d just picked up the third game on PS2 and figured I’d be spending more time with that (I didn’t).

But, Sega ports and Ford Racing aside, Xplosiv also re-released some fairly respectable and high profile games, including Microsoft titles like Flight Simulator, Age of Empires and Midtown Madness 2. Plus the two post-Wing Commander efforts from Erin and Chris Roberts, published by Microsoft: Starlancer and Freelancer. Both of which remain in my collection, although sadly largely unexplored: despite my fondness for Wing Commander, I got stuck quite early on in Starlancer (I think due to my failure to intercept missiles heading towards a carrier I was meant to protect? Or is that just my excuse for giving up on all space combat sims?)

Their deal with Activision meant they could re-release various 00s Star Trek games of variable quality, including Hidden Evil, Armada and the once-discussed-on-FFG Away Team. Plus Voyager: Elite Force, which I still have in my collection. Although Elite Force II and Bridge Commander never made it, I don’t think, for some reason.

As with Sold Out, I think I tended to hold onto my Xplosiv discs as they were easy to store and didn’t have massive resale value. I even still have a copy of the notoriously tricky strategy title Hidden and Dangerous, my chances of ever playing which are slim to none. Having said that, I do seem to have relieved myself of the physical copy of Grand Theft Auto 2 that I once owned, which is odd, because I tend to keep copies of everything I review on the site, regardless of how little I care for the game itself. Possibly I interpreted the early GTA games’ availability for download via Rockstar’s website as being an indefinite arrangement, rather than something that can be taken away as freely as it was given (as it has now been).

After the early 00s boom of cheap budget titles, Xplosiv releases, like many others, petered out towards the end of the decade. There was a belated attempt to tone down the packaging to a slightly more muted red and black affair, but with the explosion-themed name remaining unchanged it made for a slightly incoherent combination.

Despite seemingly wanging on about old budget labels for several thousand words over the course of this series, a flip through the old CD wallet reveals it to have been a less than exhaustive round-up: Focus Multimedia were also fairly prolific in the 00s, re-releasing most of the CSI games, later under the Revival brand, while my copy of Trickstyle bears the markings of a short-lived Acclaim budget range which I think also included the late-90s Descent-a-like Forsaken.

The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind was from Ubisoft’s budget range, eXclusive, which also brought affordable copies of various Splinter Cell games (definitely since discarded via the metaphorical box). My copy of Deus Ex bears the markings of the Premier Collection, a late 90s/early 00s budget range from Eidos, which I think began life as a big box/manual/jewel case deal (games like Thief: The Dark Project and Tomb Raider were re-released in this format) before switching to DVD cases for the likes of DX, Hitman: Agent 47, Anachronox and later instalments of Tomb Raider. Oh! And Project: IGI, which I definitely owned – and played – at one stage, until I lost patience and got annoyed at the lack of a mid-mission save.

All this Eidos talk leads down a rabbit hole towards an earlier short-lived range of theirs which also bore the Kixx branding of publishers U.S. Gold. My copies of Olympic Soccer, Under a Killing Moon and a largely-forgotten F1 game called Power F1 came from this range. They also re-released Big Red Racing, too, although I think I bought the big box version of that one, for some reason (and came to regret it). I’m not sure what I did with my copy, although maybe it was donated to Stoo at one point, since he reviewed it here.

As an exercise in jogging the memory, this series has sort of worked, but has also left me feeling as old and forgetful as ever. I guess the main takeaway is: there were loads of budget labels in the UK in the 90s and 00s, and I must have owned at least one game from each of them at some point. Plus, despite bits and pieces of detail coming back, there’s absolutely no chance of me remembering what old games used to be in my collection with any degree of certainty.

So, unless I suddenly call to mind another load of compilations or budget labels [please, no! – a reader] it’s probably time to start winding this series down. Coming next time: a piece that tries to sum all of this up, somehow.

—

NB: All scans sourced from MobyGames.

Hello and welcome once again to our semi-regular discussion series on modern (or at least fairly recent) indie games.

As you know, Rik normally takes the lead on these discussions, but today he’s handed the editing baton to me, Jo – long-time FFG work experience kid. You never know, if it goes well, I might land myself a full-time position.

Anyway, for today’s review we’re taking a deep dive into the mysterious world of cults with Redact Games’ Sagebrush. It’s probably one of the lesser known titles we’ve reviewed in this series so far.

Set in the remote New Mexico desert, you find yourself exploring the abandoned Black Sage Ranch – site of the 1993 Perfect Heaven mass suicide. Wandering through the compound, you find out about the people who lived there, how they came to join the cult, and the events leading up to their tragic demise.

If you’ve read other reviews in this series, you’ll know that at this point we don’t like to say too much. Generally, with these games we feel you’re best going in knowing very little, and as these discussions tend to be an absolute spoiler-fest, we like to provide plenty of warning before we get stuck in.

So if this sounds like it might be your cup of tea, then we implore you to stop reading here, give Sagebrush a go, and then join us when you’re done.

And I think (without spoiling our own review) we would both thoroughly recommend giving this one a try.

Here’s your ***FINAL SPOILER WARNING***

Alright, let’s get into it.

Discussion: Sagebrush (spoilers!) continued »