Hi.

November’s proving to be quite a fruitful month for new content – well, by our standards anyway.

Here’s a review of Pool Paradise.

As we may have mentioned, it’s our birthday. And, boy, are we dragging it out. I’ve been meaning to write this piece for quite a while now, but if I procrastinate too much longer, the anniversary year will be over. (Apologies in advance if any of the following sounds po-faced, serious and self-important!)

I’d like to start by thanking my friend and colleague Stoo for letting me write here. I’ve always wanted to write about games, and I always have done, although my early efforts came in the form of crudely-daubed home-made magazines covering Amstrad games, written in green felt-tipped pen, progressing eventually to equally visually-unappealing AOL websites, written in MS Notepad. Such efforts were produced largely for my own amusement, which was a good job seeing as they were, justifiably, ignored by absolutely everyone.

To have some kind of audience, then, however small, is nice (thanks for reading, by the way). For this, I think we need to acknowledge the abandonware scene, which helped us establish some kind of following in the early days, and remains responsible for sending people our way. You may argue that abandonware isn’t what it once was, and you might be right, but before every man (or woman) and his (or her) dog had a gaming blog dedicated to retro-gaming, those sites were the ones recommending their favourites, preserving the memories, and showing a genuine interest in old games before it was necessarily fashionable.

In trying to think about what might have changed since we started, that’s the one thing that stands out to me. ‘Having a web-site’ was actually a reasonably novel (if nerdy) thing to do, perhaps because it required a modicum of technical expertise in hammering it together. The initial idea was basically ‘Let’s write about some games we really liked that would now be considered fairly old’ which, in today’s world, would seem like a rather pointless pursuit.

Back then, though, it seemed fair enough. Stoo would crank out some impressively-detailed coverage of a complex strategy game, while I would play Speedball 2 for a couple of days and submit a brief review padded out with waffle [No change there then – FFG reader]. My contribution in the early days was pretty limited, to be honest, despite being a university student with an abundance of free time between my two lectures per week. (I’d love to say I was too busy partying, but that would be a lie. In fact, I don’t know what I was doing. Studying? Sleeping?)

We didn’t actually have a lot of content online in the early days, but it didn’t really seem to matter. I think once we’d been going for a little while, we’d identified that while most abandonware sites were great at providing content and demonstrating genuine enthusiasm for the old games they featured, the reviews provided were usually (with some exceptions) both brief and gushingly positive. So in a way, we felt we filled a bit of a niche in the scene, and our more comprehensive reviews were an excuse for our lack of updates.

My main problem is, and has always been, getting through the games themselves rather than finding the motivation to write about them. I wouldn’t exactly say I had a short attention span, but I’ve certainly always acquired a lot of games that I haven’t necessarily devoted much time to before moving on. Staying focused on one game so I’ll be able to write about it in detail sufficient to be useful is always the challenge. In more recent years I’ve been able to contribute more.

There’s no formula for ensuring satisfaction with the end result, although if pressed, I’d say that a few things always help. Firstly, an interest in, and enthusiasm for, the genre of game you’re covering – dragging your way through something that you don’t enjoy and aren’t particularly qualified to talk about is a bit of a waste of everyone’s time. Secondly, finding enough – good or bad – to talk about, particularly little touches or flaws that not everyone might have noticed. And finally, having the feeling that you’re not saying the same thing that 10,000 other people on the internet haven’t said before already.

For that last reason, although we’ve never sought to restrict ourselves to more obscure games, I’ve always been more comfortable writing those reviews than, say, covering Half-Life. Reviewing a game because it’s ‘important’ or lots of other people have said it’s good, without having the motivation to play or write about it yourself, always seems to make for stilted and unimaginative content.

The temptation to delete or go back and fix things that you’re not happy with is ever-present and can certainly drive you to distraction. We’ve actually done both in the past, but in recent years I’ve tried to avoid going down that road, unless it’s to correct spelling or grammar. The old reviews are what they are, a product of when they were written. Looking back, there are plenty of bad jokes and misplaced cultural references, but my only real regret is trying to name-drop ‘current’ games, particularly on console, without actually having a clue what the hell I was talking about.

Perhaps because of our early nostalgia-busting attitude, our obsession with ‘but how does it play today?’ was too pronounced in the early days. So, yes, I did compare Stunts to Gran Turismo 3: [paraphrasing] “Of course, this VGA racer from 1990 isn’t on a par with the latest PS2 racing simulation.” Thanks for that! (The irony is, although I bought and own GT3, I actually find it incredibly boring, and probably had many more hours’ fun with Stunts anyway).

I like to think we’ve dropped that approach now. The main motivation to continue comes from a mixture of having a creative outlet (so that life isn’t just the day job and watching TV) and feeling that someone might be reading and enjoying the end product. I don’t know if we have a particular angle or niche any more (or if we ever did) but it seems to me that being a modern ‘gamer’ requires deep pockets, significant amounts of free time, and the ability to shrug-off disappointment with the latest over-hyped releases.

Before I sound like too much of an old duffer, I should say that there’s no doubting the appeal of that new-game smell (I must buy at least one football game per year), but I think it’s equally legitimate to take some time to have a look at what you might have missed over the years. When other people write about older games, I like to read about them, so perhaps it’s not so unusual for other people to do the same here.

Anyway, that’s enough waffle. Thanks for reading, if I haven’t said that already [You have – FFG reader]. Now, perhaps it’s time to actually go and do something more worthwhile. Like work on a new review, perhaps?

So I went and bought a Wii. Actually, I had to buy a TV to go with it too. First game purchased after such an extravagance:

See, I’m a Nintendo fan who’s never actually owned a Nintendo. Or a console of any sort.* Just played on emulators a lot, from NES through to N64. But now I can play the old favourites legally, and also enjoy what’s happening in more recent generations.

Really it’s the core Nintendo lines I’m interested in, ie stuff I can’t already enjoy on PC. Altho if people have any reccomendations, I’m all ears. For now I have Twilight Princess, and after that will be looking into Skyward Sword, and the Metroid Prime series.

The virtual console selection is smaller than I would have guessed – I mean there must have been far more than 60-70 games released for SNES. But that does actually cover plenty of the big names.

Also I got… Wii Fit Plus. No seriously. Stop laughing at the back. I’m actually exercising. (I otherwise jog once a week but that’s it). I don’t need to lose weight, just wish to be in slightly better shape in geneal.

*No home console anyway. I do have a DS, somewhat neglected.

Hello there.

Today, we bring you a review of Rally Trophy. No need to thank us, that’s what we’re here for.

More coming, as soon as we can bring it to you.

Hi there.

And we have yet another review for you. How about a bit of Project: Snowblind?

The shareholders are pressuring us to hit our year-end targets. We’ll do our best.

Hello all. It might look once again like I’ve left Rik to run the show, but I’m back. With Titan Quest. Which is… alright. I hadn’t even been planning on reviewing it until I realised that, at 2006, it’s narrowly within our range.

That’s not the most exciting return ever, is it? But at least the wheels are turning.

Hi there.

As you may know, it’s Halloween soon, and it’d be remiss of us to let that pass by without delivering some related content.

So, as a special treat, here’s a review of Rugby Challenge 2006. Oooooooh!

Kids – don’t have nightmares.

So Rockstar have announced GTAV. Here’s some speculation from PSM.

My first thought is, will this be the sort of change we saw from GTAIII to Vice City – same technology but more features? After all there was much we saw cut from VC and San Andreas, like buying property or SA’s RPG style skills system, that we might wish to see put back in (personally I care more about the former than the latter).

However incrementing the numeral suggests a whole new engine\graphics upgrade, I’m not sure they’d do that *and* add substantial gameplay features?

(sidenote, I’d be happy for them to ditch the one side-feature GTAIV did have, ie people calling you up demanding to go bowling).

Also I’m wondering if it’ll address the odd sort of dichotomy that came up GTAIV.

GTAIV the story – Nico Bellic, a former soldier haunted by his past, seeks a new start in America. But he remains tragically trapped in a world of crime and violence, culminating in the death of someone close to him.

GTAIV gameplay – hi tech murder simulator as you run over 40 people, find this terribly humorous, then shoot up the cops that come after you.

You could say this disconnect started earlier in the series, I just felt it more in GTAIV which tried for a more grim and gritty story than the slight cartoonishness of before.

Anyway, I appreciate no-one would come to this crappy blog for news on the latest games, I just kinda want to update more often and this seemed like a good opportunity for a post. From our retro-gaming perspective, we’ve shied away from GTA (after the early installments) pretty much for the same reason we’ve not looked at Doom or Diablo2 – pretty much everyone into PC gaming will have played it and have an opinion of their own already. But, eh, I picked up GTAIII for £2 on steam the other day so a review could still happen eventually.

So, we’ve managed ten years of this humble little site. We’ve never been quite as productive as the ideal I hold in my head, but we have in total churned out a lot of reviews of PC games from the past. I hope you’ve found our writing to be useful and interesting.

Anyway tho, Rik will have his own comments to mark the anniversary, but for now I’ll just remark on what the passage of a decade has meant for us as retro gamers. Some of this is our internal existential analysis, the rest a general comment on retro gaming.

Firstly, always hanging over us is the question, what are we classing as retro in the first place. Our criteria has generally (but not rigidly) become “1990 to 5-ish years ago”. As it stands today, that’s half the total span of PC gaming, and the fraction will always increase. It starts in the days where VGA graphics and sound-cards were only just coming into force, and ends in the kind of 3D graphics that are light years ahead of that, even if a bit dated compared to modern games.

That’s a very broad range. We’re now writing about “oldies” that would have looked astoundingly futuristic to our 2001 selves. Seriously, go remind yourself of the leaps from Wolfenstein 3D to Doom 3. Is a site based on anything not modern the same as a retro-gaming site? I do sometimes wonder if we need to narrow our focus. But to what, exactly? What would our cut-off year be? Tied to some particular development in technology, like the rise of 3D cards? Or just stick down an arbitrary year?

Also, even we nerds both only spend a certain amount of time a week gaming. And we don’t want to dedicate all of that to games over a decade old. We’ve never claimed to be solely interested in VGA games to the exclusion of more modern material. The way we do it now, we can write about a decent proportion of the games we play. Right now if we said, say “pre 2000 only”, the cut in output would be unacceptable.

There’s another, related matter: do retro- reviews themselves become dated? Is a 5-years-on retrospective on a game the same as 15-years-on? I think some of our reviews could stand more or less indefinitely. For example I don’t see our opinions on old point and click adventures being any different in 2020. However, what about say shooters or racing games? Although, re-visiting stuff we’ve already covered could get onerous, and would just further cut into new content. I might redo the likes of Descent one day, but I’m certainly not about to ask Rik to revisit anything.

All that aside, there are some other key changes in the retro gaming experience, that have occurred since I first bashed this site together. Which can be summarised as, “we’ve never had it so good”.

The first would be, for playing those genuinely old oldies, DOSBOX. When we first started, MS-DOS games were frequently a pain to run. You sometimes had to drop into DOS mode, then go fiddle with memory configurations. If you had already moved to windows 2000 or XP, you didn’t even have that option unless you got into dual booting. I recall with Lemmings 2 just giving up and playing the Atari ST version on an emulator.

What we needed really was an old-PC emulator. Which nowadays, is the service DOSBOX provides, making our lives so much easier. Even better, it’s an emulation of an idealised DOS PC – one that takes care of all the memory management and hardware divers. So unlike the bad old days, you don’t have to prat around with config.sys trying to free up 20k of conventional memory without losing the mouse.

The other key factor to arise is digital distribution, making many oldies easier to find. Where we used to have to tell you to go look on ebay, or rummage around the bargain bins or your local gaming store, we can frequently now give you just a link. We are of course huge fans of Good Old Games, which has an ever-growing range of 90s-to-early-00s material. Other services like Steam have some good choices, too.

Of course, this also means we’re less frequently pointing readers at Abandonware sites to find a download. Now, I don’t want to look like I’m shunning them too hard. (what’s left of them anyway – I get the impression there are less active sites than there used to be, and definitely less of a sense of community). We started off pretty much as a satellite to the Abandonware scene, providing reading material to inform peoples’ decisions as to what to download. We might not even exist if not inspired by it.

On the other, Abandonware is a concept that in an ideal world shouldn’t have to exist – these games would be available by legitimate means. Which is exactly what’s now gradually happening. I guess Abandonware sites have to move with the times – the better ones seem to be offering reviews of their own, supplementary materials like game music etc, and linking to GoG where possible. They’ll still have a role in providing games released as freeware, and also the really obscure titles that remain abandoned.

So. If I was launching a site based on writing about old PC games today, it could well be somewhat different. More of a focus on what you can get via GOG etc. But I don’t have any real radical changes in mind right now. Plenty of improvements we could make in the details, I guess. That can wait for another post.

So I went and got Operation Flashpoint from Good Old Games, which may have been incredibly foolish. I bought it once already, the first time around nine-ish years ago. And I sucked. My attempts usually worked out as:

1: lie prone in cover
2: carefully line up shot against target silhouetted against sky
3: miss
4: get killed by return fire

or when patience failed just

1: run around spraying bullets
2: this is not Commando so,
3: get killed

After failing on about the third mission, over and over, ragequitting and selling it on ebay soon followed. But I want to love this game, as the idea of huge open spaces, freedom of movement, lots of drivable vehicles, planning the best approach for a strike etc is hugely appealing. I’m just not so good with the realistic weapons and dead-in-2-hits (if you’re lucky). So… attempt 2 will happen sometime in the near future.

In non-retro news I also picked up one of the Codemasters sequels, which I’ve heard accusations of being dumbed down a bit, but frankly if that makes them easier to get to grips with, I can handle that.

[edit]Oops, no I didn’t buy it from GoG, but rather Steam under its new name of ARMA: Cold War Assault.