Not an update as such, but I’ve spent a bit of time updating my brief histories. The racing one’s been done for a little while now, and the football and adventure histories have now been brought up to speed. There are new screenshots, games that we’ve covered are now linked to the review pages, and I’ve tried to remove any glib evaluations of games I haven’t actually played.

I’m leaving the cut-off date at 2004 for now rather than attempting to add entries for more recent years. That means they cover roughly the same time period as the games we review – detailed info on recent stuff is more readily available on ‘the internet’, after all.

If there’s a better way to spend a day off, I’d like to know what it is. Thanks to Jo for helping me out with some of the screenies.

Well, I finally got around to getting a new PC. As regular visitors to FFG may know, I’ve been making do with an old AMD Duron 900 for the past six years or so, and despite several makeshift upgrades, there comes a point when you have to accept that brand new technology is the only way forward. The final straw came when we moved house and my internet provider told me that it no longer supported Windows 98. I had been using their service and Win 98 at our old place pretty successfully since 2006, but after enduring snorts of derision from customer services (“I didn’t know anyone still used that operating system, sir“) and searching frantically for some kind of workaround, it soon became apparent that the game was up.

Admittedly, I could have just bought Win XP and put it on my old PC, but one look at the old girl told me she just wouldn’t be able to take another temporary fix. So despite unsteady economic times, I got out the credit card and splashed out on the best rig I could reasonably afford. It’s not a particularly powerful machine, but it does open up the possibility of experiencing about five years’ worth of gaming that were previously inaccessible to me.

Effectively, this means two things for FFG. Firstly, it puts a stop on me ranting about how things won’t work with Windows 98 (well, at least until the whole world’s using Vista, then I’ll repeat the same trick as I keep XP on my machine until 2020). Secondly, I think we can now entertain the prospect of covering one or two slightly more modern titles on FFG. We’ve never had any strict rules about this kind of thing, but in recent years we’ve certainly tried to keep to pre-2002 titles, partly because we’re supposed to be a retro games site, and partly because I would sulk a bit if anything too new to run on my machine was suggested for review.

When we first started we weren’t so worried about such things. FFG was more of a ‘here are games that we’ve played and liked’ tribute site than anything too specifically retro-focused. The first game I ever reviewed here was Blade Runner in 2001 (the date on the review refers to a later rewrite) – only three years after it had been released. So I guess there’s an argument for saying that if it was alright then, it should be alright now.

We’re not going to go too recent though. The focus of the site has changed, and with some logical reasoning behind that change, too. But don’t be surprised if you see the odd title from 2003 cropping up on FFG in the future.

—

As a footnote, it’s been a little quiet on the journal of late. Not that we’ve been too busy (or certainly I haven’t) but I seemed to have subconsciously imposed some kind of quality control on stuff that should or shouldn’t go up here. But blogs are generally fairly self-indulgent creations: and it’s not like I’m writing about what I bought from the supermarket or my Friday night down the pub. So there’ll be more of this kind of rubbish more regularly from now on. Bet you can’t wait.

Wow, it’s a double-whammy of updates. I guess if we’d have been better organised we could have rolled it into one, but hey, it’s sort of more exciting this way.

Anyway, we have one new review for you this evening, and the game in question is the cheerfully chaotic city-based racer Midtown Madness 2.

Budget games are mostly excellent, right? All kinds of classics from several years ago, that set you back only a modest amount and run decently even on outdated hardware. In fact, they’re as important a part of our archives as the older abandonware generations.

Still, I was reflecting lately on a point Rik once brought up (I think in the “general articles” section that’s been largely superseded by this blog). There’s a few kinds of game out there that I’m often tempted by, but probably shouldn’t spend money on. Like flight sims. Or the Total War series. Beacause I know I’m rubbish at them, won’t get anywhere, will give up in frustration and the game will end up sat on a shelf collecting dust for years.

Now, as long as the game commands £30 I’m safe; a sum that high acts as a shield against rash purchases. But once we’re down to say £10 then the temptation sets in. “Hey, maybe this time I’ll enjoy it and make some progress”. Except, I won’t. And thus £10 is wasted.

So that’s why I’m telling myself absolutely no Need For Speed games until I’ve at least played some demos and satisfied myself I can actually win a race.

Hi all.

We have a guest item today, so a great big thankyou goes to the J-Man of Just Games Retro. He’s donated us his review on the 2001 shooter, Red Faction. What’s more he’s done a quality in-depth asssessment where I’d probably just write “Kind of dull, you can blow walls up, 5/10”. So go have a read, then head on over to his own site.

No, you’re not dreaming, we have another update for you – the spy-shooter No One Lives Forever.

Once again, apologies for the lack of content recently. It’s a relief to finally knock that newspost which makes reference to ‘January blues’ off the bottom of the page. For shame!

Fingers crossed, we should be looking good for more regular updates for the forseeable future.

Hi all.

Two months without an update is pretty shameful! The good news is, our review machine lumbers back into action today. You probably remember DMA’s classic Lemmings – I’ve taken a look at a less well-known member of the family from a few years later: All New World of Lemmings.

More content soon, including an old favourite of ours: first person shooters of the 90s!

Proper content coming soon, honest, but for now everbody Ulukai Dance!

So no new content since the beginning of March. That’s pretty rubbish to be honest. In mitigation, we’ve both had (completely unrelated) housing issues to sort out. I was due to move house on 29th March but the new place wasn’t ready in time and we’d already packed up most of our stuff and blah blah blah etc. There’s nothing quite so tiresome as listening to someone whingeing on about boring real-life reasons why they’ve not updated their website in ages. Fact is, I probably could have come up with some new content in the past couple of weeks. But I didn’t.

Still, I’ve been doing a bit of tweaking behind the scenes. Most specifically, adding screenshots to reviews that had some missing or featured grabs nicked from ‘the internet’. To be honest, only a handful of games were affected, but it’s the kind of thing that should be rectified if at all possible. To guard against such things these days I stick to a couple of fairly simple commandments when it comes to my oldies, namely:

1) Thou shalt never, ever, sell thy old games on eBay, no matter how shiteth they be.
2) Fraps shalt be running whenever thou playest an old game, and the ‘Scroll Lock’ button hit whenever something mildly interesting happens, filling up thy hard drive with thousands of uncompressed screen grabs, ne’er to be deleted.

Ahem. Anyway, to cut a long story short, every review should now have a full complement of four screenshots all of our own making. I’m almost ashamed to admit how genuinely excited I was at finally being able to get some shots from the original Need for Speed, which had proved a real bastard in the past. On story/campaign based games, some of the shots are (out of necessity) from quite early on in the game – but I figured better that than nothing.

At least some of the older reviews don’t look quite so scruffy now, and although they don’t read quite as well as they might (I’m talking about my own work only here, of course) I’ve tried to resist the temptation to edit or re-write them. I might certainly approach some of them differently now, but in future I think I’d rather spend time on new content rather than obsessively tinkering with the old stuff.

I’ve also added some better screenshots to the Racing Games “Brief History” (again, removing any that might have been nicked off Mobygames), also updating the text to ensure my glib summaries of games there didn’t contradict anything in the full review. I’ll do this much with the others, too, although I did think about adding entries for the years 2005-present. One the one hand, we’re a retro site, and seeing as I own an extremely old PC and a clunking, whirring PS2, I’m not sure how well-qualified I am to comment on the latest releases, but if we don’t keep at least one eye on what’s going on in the gaming world, I guess that takes us one step closer to being closed-minded nostalgia bores. Plus there’s what I’ve (literally) just said about focusing on new content rather than buggering around too much with what’s already been written.

Any thoughts?

As a footnote, I was incensed today to find console kids, in-between discussing whether Grand Theft Auto IV would be better on 360 or PS3 and how many sick days they were planning to take off work in order to play it, describing GTA III as ‘retro’. Bah! I reckon that definitely qualifies me as a grumpy old backwards looking gamer. (Sigh) I feel old.

I’ve installed one of those “type the letters you see into this box” plugins to help fend off comment spam. Hopefully it won’t inconvenience anyone too much!

In other news, Epic have added all the Unreal games to Steam. I’m not going to shell out on the whole bundle this time, as I’m not into the Tournament games. But will almost certainly be giving Unreal 1 and 2 a try.