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.
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.
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.
Game mechanics? Controls? Challenge? All secondary, as long as the overall mood of a game is engrossing. One of the main drivers in this respect being its music.
Loom is interactive poetry. I'm not talking about the dialogue or text itself (which aren't bad), but the overall realization: the harmonic presentation and development of an idea using graphics, sound and timing, with emotion in mind. Scenes and situations are crafted in a delightful and very subtle manner, which make some very well-known story clichés take an completely new form and uniqueness. And that is the most positive aspect of Loom: it's something you've seen before, but in a way you have never thought of. The talent of Brian Moriarty brought us a game that is both simple an refined. That's its true beauty.
What's New?
2020-09-26
Beneath a Steel Sky actually received a late sequel not too long ago. Not the worst of reasons to re-visit the original. It's been many years and what I didn't remember at all anymore is that it's a rather short game by the standards of its time. A definite plus considering the changed player expectations of today which certainly I can't claim to have passed by me without effect.
Has it really already been 10 years since Dennis Hopper passed away? Then again, he did have a long, distinguished career. Well, part of it was distinguished. By the 1990s, he basically took any work which offered a solid paycheck and openly admitted it. This lead to a detour into the world of computer and video games. The downpoint of which must have been his appearance in Super Mario Bros.. He was also features in the "interactive movie" genre with almost alarming frequency, though in most cases, it was just a little cameo to later be able to print his name on the box. In case of Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller, it's mostly his distinctive voice; his facial features can really only be recognized by those with previous knowledge that he is in the game.
Photocopied manuals and manually reproduced floppy disks sent by post are not necessarily covered by the law of product piracy, but were a widespread form of software distribution from the 1980s to the early 1990s. Besides the colourful sales shelves in the shops the constantly growing supply of bedroom programmers found this unusual way to the customer. I will have a deeper look at what they sometimes found in their letterboxes by the example of a late work called Taam.
In my scouting for games deserving a fresh look, I stumbled upon Dark Seed once more. Since all those old screenshots were actually bad (downscaled so that all text was unreadable), I played through it again to replace those as well. The result of putting this fresh impression into words is now online.
Time for some meta news. We've been doing some internal restructuring deemed necessary due to the growth of the website. It is no longer this small thing it started out as. The amount of games we cover these days could be perceived as daunting by newcomers. So we have taken action and added some simple tools to help you manage.
First, you will undoubtedly have noticed the changes on our front page. Above all, this website is about human-created contents. So you may be interested to learn more about the heads behind it all. Those people who, apart from creating contents, also keep things running behind the scenes – our staff.
From now on, anywhere on the site, staff-created contents are marked like this. This is to distinguish them from user-generated contents.
Though, of course, we also thrive from user-generated contents. Hence, right on the front page, users who have provided specifically noteworthy contributions to the community will also find their profiles regularly highlighted. This is not just our "thank you", but from your visitor perspective, this is also to enable you to find contents which you may be interested in. Have a favourite reviewer? There he or she is, through the profile, you can easily jump to a list of his or her reviews.
Talking about discoverability, browsing the complete list of games is probably not the default mode of choice anymore. Takes much too long. So we're testing an additional approach which we call staff picks. Those are random games taken from a pool which our staff considers particularly noteworthy. This is not a quality seal for the games presented there, but those are games where we feel our coverage is pretty good and you could go out with it a little richer.
Last, but not least, those of you who are logged in to their accounts now have the ability to bookmark specific game pages (icon right next to the game's title). You can use this in various ways: remember some items for later reading, mark all your favourites for repeated consultation etc. You can access your personal bookmark list through the user icon on the top right.
As always, although we see the raw access numbers, additional feedback what helps, what you're maybe still missing, is always welcome in our forums.
Is there something like an overdiscussed game? Personally, these days, I tend towards answering this with a yes. At some point, simply everything has been said about a work of art and subsequent treatments can only reproduce the already known and agreed. Thinking of Civilization, do you really want to read again how due to the limited battle system, a phalanx can defeat a tank with a bit of luck or how the city micromanagement brings everything to a grinding halt towards the end? No, I didn't think so. So instead, I wrote down my personal experience with the game and what it meant to the computer gaming hobby overall.
It doesn't always have to be salmon and champagne that feeds the dreams of the discerning gaming consumer. Spurned by many as average, inconspicuous bread-and-butter games unfortunately remain trapped in anonymity from the start and fall into oblivion. Nevertheless, these preparations out of the fashion sparkle with their very own charm. I have played the taster for you and will tell you if the Shoot'Em-Up called Hypsys still passes for edible.
Time flies! It certainly feels like yesterday that this game was released to great attention of interested media. Hibernated 1: This Place is Death (hinting at a sequel already in its title) is one of those recent games which got a boxed release and was hyped quite a bit. Some time later, the bare game file, minus box, was released online for free. Does the game hold its promise?
Carriage rides instead of races in high-speed bolides, smoking a pipe instead of steaming Schischa, a corpse with an unknown murderer instead of 100 corpses that you just mowed down yourself with a shotgun: Such a thing is supposed to be entertaining? I unpacked my magnifying glass and took a closer look at this case. And found some very remarkable traces in Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments.
There is just no way around Wing Commander. It belongs to those with legendary status which changed the face of everyone's favourite hobby. First by showing that the days of the bedroom programmer were over, and the age of corporately produced games was upon us. Second, it established the IBM PC – previously regarded as a pure office computer – as the predominant games platform for the years to come. Therefore leaving a huge footprint and legacy on the whole industry.
P.S. For the true historians among you, we also have the versions for Amiga, CD32 and 3DO, called Super Wing Commander.
...that you have the same options of adding contents to the site as the core crew? Under "Share Memories", you will find links to all those forms which make adding new stuff as simple as it gets - no matter whether you just want to give a few games a rating or you want to cover all of your favourites which aren't listed so far. Here' a starting point...
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.
