Welcome to The Good Old Days!

Editorial Staff

Herr M.

Longtime contributor and verbose commentator. Loves Roleplaying Games, Adventures and Puzzle Games. Gets strangely nostalgic when he enters a DOS prompt, hears a Gameboy *ding* or sees horrible colour palettes. Always good for a second opinion on everything.

LostInSpace

Played together with his little brother cute Nintendo games and gambled undercover Wolfenstein and Larry on the PC. But real nostalgic feelings only come up with the C64 and 8-bit consorts. Passion for everything that is cyberspaced, fun and fast.

Mr Creosote

Website founder. Likes adventure and strategy games. Enjoys perfection, but cannot help finding the fly in the ointment. Has a weak spot for the obscure and loves the beauty of imperfection.

Featured User

beranmuden

Born in the late '70s. I grew up with a great supply of console and home computer systems and games. I remember playing pong on the Atari, the trials and tribulations of the Spectrum ZX80, the simple yet fun Philips Videopac. Not to mention the Commodore 64, followed by an Amiga and on to the first DOS machines. For me the Adventure Game genre left the biggest impression on me. Even after 30 years and longer, I still enjoy playing Sierra and LucasArts games.

Review Highlight: Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards

The moment you start up this game, you know you're in for a treat. The cheesy music, accompanied with two-and-a-half colours active on screen and an intro featuring a dork in a white tuxedo, chasing what appears to be, a blow-up doll. Yes, welcome in the Land of the Lounge Lizards.

What's New?

2023-12-09

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Discovering foreign worlds or even distant planets has always been the kind of fascination that can be simulated especially by computer games in such an enjoyable way. On closer inspection, however, the programming of such worlds alone is worth exploring. The DOS game Joe Starman On Planet X is a short tour through some role-playing fantasy and – as it is open source – also allows a look at the QuickBasic code in the background.

LostInSpace

2023-12-02

It had to happen. Desperate for more material, Puffin Books started accepting outside book submissions into the Fighting Fantasy line, and here is their first definite misstep. Space Assassin used the very first book as a blueprint, not accounting for any developments since then. Worse, it is not even remotely a good imitation of the original. Don't worry, Andrew Chapman's books improved a lot later on.

Mr Creosote

2023-11-25

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Retro computers are particularly well suited to lightweight puzzle games such as Aztec Tomb on the C64, which do not drown the player at graphical fireworks and super-realistic ray tracing effects. Here you can still sit and relax with a cup of coffee in front of the computer and solve some puzzles, instead of being directly absorbed into it by the maelstrom of a psychologically sophisticated story and the accompanying moments of shock.

LostInSpace

2023-11-18

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Here is a game none of you have ever heard of, let alone played. In spite of 1497: Five Years After not even being such a bad name. The theme is instantly set without being overly generic. It triggers the "I get this" reflex without being elitist, too clever for its own sake. Between 1996 and 1998, it went through various revisions, starting at version 0.09 and finally reaching the treasured 1.0. Let's have a look at that one.

Mr Creosote

2023-11-11

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Time flies. A Golden Wake is almost ten years old by now. For me, it is a recent acquisition. Being totally decoupled from any pressure to get something new "urgently" has its advantages. It takes a lot of pressure out of life. And it enables to simply buy on a whim when prices are down. Of course, this also leads to the infamous "piles of shame" these days. And a number of games in one's collection which honestly aren't very good.

Mr Creosote

2023-11-04

Watch out, the ring wraiths are hot on your trail! Talisman of Death may not offer the most original sword & sorcery scenario ever, but then, this has never been the key selling point of the Fighting Fantasy line, has it? Nevertheless, there was always room for experimentation. Genre insiders will be delighted to see the origins of what later became its own line of gamebooks here.

Mr Creosote

2023-10-28

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Of Microprose's early output, there is the big question of what is their best non-airplane simulation. I'm in the Silent Service camp. The intensity of the sneaky operations simply grabs me every time. Dated graphics, almost no sound, who cares?

Mr Creosote

2023-10-21

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Since the now grown-up fans of the Amstrad CPC probably have more than a little pocket money at their disposal, the developers of Red Sunset are willing to take a rather handsome price for their work. Read here whether the money is well invested in this newly developed vertical shooter.

LostInSpace

2023-10-14

Welcome to the House of Hell! Towards the end of the 1980s, this one supplanted Caverns of the Snow Witch as my favourite gamebook. Why? I started to appreciate its real world setting over what I found to be rather tired sword & sorcery material found in most of the books. Indeed, it still has that going for it. But of course, upon recent replay, I did spot many other things which were not so clear to me back then…

Mr Creosote

2023-10-07

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Did Dynamix ever make a bad game? My feeling is their track record is pretty much spotless. Not only that, a large number of their works was great in their day and even holds up well today. Case in point, Project Firestart.

Mr Creosote

About

Did you know...

...that aside from the computer-related main part of the site, we've also scanned and collected many comics of the classic Masters of the Universe toy line? This section of our site is the most comprehensive index of those comics on the Internet - easily surpassing dedicated official and non-official fan-sites.
So what is this site? To put it in the most simple way imaginable: It's a site about digital games. Not about the latest gaming news, but about the games themselves, and - as you've already surmised from the site's name - specializing in what's usually considered 'classic' these days. Of course, definitions of 'classic' differ widely. However, if you browse around a little, you'll find us covering pretty much everything (with varying intensity) from the earliest home systems (late 1970s) to the end of the last millenium.

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