Welcome to The Good Old Days!

Editorial Staff

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.

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.

Featured User

Seth

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.

Review Highlight: Loom

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?

2021-09-18

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In slightly more recent times of higher resolutions and smoother animations, Microsoft entered the game publishing arena. They were not met with missile launchers, but a rather welcomed by the market. Particularly as they carefully chose their products. Mech Commander came with a strong licence and it was overall well produced without going overboard on the videos which make many of the games of the time so cringeworthy in retrospect.

Mr Creosote

2021-09-07

An episode, a tale, a story taken out of the life of a pub waiter in a small harbour town can be replayed in this short text adventure. His adversary and pirate leader is the namesake of this freeware game: Captain Cutter's Treasure. Who will come on board?

LostInSpace

2021-09-04

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Queueing up for death… again. Cannon Fodder 2 takes the premise of the first part, but yanks up severity by various orders of magnitude. In spite of the new graphical sets, this is the impression which prevails after playing. A sequel designed solely to please the fans, not even trying to break into new audiences.

Mr Creosote

2021-08-28

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B.C. Kid – a home computer conversion of a popular Japanese console game. Technically highly competent, but was it still an appropriate design in the early 1990s? How about now, another 30 years later? Is anyone actually still playing jump 'n' run games these days? Let us know!

Mr Creosote

2021-08-21

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Going back to the days of black and white movies. Although this game does have a couple of small coloured spots. In fact, the game even delivers on what the title screen promises: a train, attacked by fighter planes, a bridge in the background… if they had squeezed in a station shootout, things would have been pretty much complete. The game is The Train. So is the movie it was inspired by.

Mr Creosote

2021-08-14

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Mad TV changed the landscape of business simulations fundamentally. People saw this genre didn't need to be all dry and niche-y. Though then, most imitators only copied the outer appearance, not so much the inner values. Does Der Planer manage?

Mr Creosote

2021-08-07

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…and now for something completely different. The larch. Sorry, wrong track. While not going back to the actual roots of its genre, XTrek defined the way "adult" text adventures would be for years to come. Why did this one, of all, gain such traction? How does it hold up today? What's the appeal of typing for virtual sex at all? Find out!

Mr Creosote

2021-07-31

Back into… the engine! The second Chaos Engine is not nearly as well known as the first, and as so often, there is a good reason for it. Released only on an already commercially dead platform, how could a broad audience have noticed? Let's take another plunge!

Mr Creosote

2021-07-24

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Although we review new text adventures with quite some regularity, there is also a wealth of new (free) point & click adventures released every year. The Telwynium may be a good one to introduce this world to our audience. Graphics and interface clearly recall Sierra's transitionary period, when they already used mouse interfaces, but before they moved on to fancy VGA visuals.

Mr Creosote

About

Did you know...

...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.

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