This site is all about PC games from the past. We're of the opinion that, even if they're not powered by the latest advanced graphics engines, many of these older games can still be a lot of fun. So we started this site to try and make something constructive out of the large portions of our lives spent gaming. Part of our discussion looks at a game's place in history - what advances it made, how important it turned out to be, what influences it had on the development of that particular genre. However, this site isn't purely retrospective. Rather, we also like to discuss how enjoyable we find them, right now in the present day. Thus we can give an assessment see which ones we can still waste hours on, which ones had their strengths but have maybe faded with time, and which ones just weren't so great in the first place.

Your first question might be, what's our definition of "old" here? Currently, we're covering a fairly wide span. At the most recent end are games four or so years old, maybe just a generation or two behind in terms of technology and often still available on budget re-release at your local gaming shop. Meanwhile the oldest games date from around 1990, veterans of the days of MS-DOS, VGA (or earlier) graphics and Adlib sound. We're not currently looking at really ancient games - we've decided that they're beyond a line of how dated a game can be and still hold our interest, defined purely by our personal preference.

Second question might be, "are you honestly reviewing these in the same way you would new games?" Well, we should make this clear: we're writing from a certain mindset - we're a couple of guys who are quite aware of, and greatly enjoy, the likes of Oblivion and the latest Need for Speed - but we think the older titles can have their appeal too. We assume a similar perspective on the part of the reader - someone who can do without the latest ultra-realistic graphics if a game still has merits in other areas. Ultimately, you might just plain not see the appeal in the oldies; we're not going to try and argue that you're wrong, waving a copy of System Shock and ranting about THE GOOD OLD DAYS RAH RAH. This is all just our opinion.

Finally: is this all just a nostalgia trip? It's not worth trying to entirely deny that it plays a part - there are a lot of people now in their 20s and 30s with fond memories of Saturday afternoons spent hunched in front of a screen playing Monkey Island. Nostalgia in gaming is a rising force, to the extent that you can actually buy retro-gaming publications amidst the all the other gaming mags at your local WHSmiths. So, yes, it might influence us a little sometimes; we accept this on the assumption that the hypothetical like-minded gamer probably feels the same way anyway. However we try to make sure it's not the sole driving force behind our commentary.

Instead, we do our best to provide a rational analysis, as gamers in the modern day but within that context I've outlined. In our opinion a game can still have an attractive visual style, even if rendered with outdated graphics. An adventure or roleplaying game will still be atmospheric and immersive if work was put into the plot, environments and general ambience. A shooter will still provide entertaining blasting action if the mechanics of play are balanced just right. It's true that the older a game is, the better it will have to do in these other departments to make up for its dated technology. Also, another opinion of ours is that some genres age better than others - you'll find we're more willing to dedicate hours of playing time to an adventure from 1991, than a racing game of the same age.

Still, though, we believe that there are some top-notch oldies that are still very much worth the time of a discerning gamer. Even with newer, shinier games around, these ones still stand out, thanks to imaginative design and expert implementation. Few other games have provided the kind of experience they do, to the same level of competence. They're the ones you might catch yourself playing until midnight when you really should be in bed for work the next day.

Then there are those that have faded somewhat; and been outclassed by modern counterparts. They may well still be of some interest though, especially to fans interested in the historical angle and looking into the development of that particular genre. Or they might just supply that nostalgia buzz. So we're not going to tell you, for example, that the original Civilisation is the equal of its latest sequel, but we might claim that it was an important title and that strategy fans might still appreciate it enough to find a few hours' play.

Each review is accompanied by a score out of ten - this is just a general indicator of how much fun we think it is. At the end of the day there's not a whole lot of difference between seven or eight out of ten, and simple personal preference might count for more than that. I was tempted not to bother with scores at all - I'd much rather people read and think about the facts and arguments we put forward in the reviews, rather than relying on a number - but they do provide a convenenient summarising factor, and seem to be an essential part of media reviews.

Many reviews meanwhile have a couple of extra articles and screenshot galleries attached. These are mostly just a brief look at one particular aspect of that game we thought worth a separate mention - memorable characters, a typical sequence of events, an annoying bug, or just something random that happened to amuse us.

A few other details to cover: you might be wondering where to find some of these oldies. Or you might be having trouble running them on a modern windows PC. If you look the the mainmenu on the let you should see links to a couple of handy guides we've written - these should provide enough info to set you on the way to retro-gaming fun.

Finally in case you're wondering who "we" refers to, there's two of us. I'm mostly into roleplaying games, strategy and space sims, and also handle the coding of the site itself. My old comrade Rik meanwhile is a fan of sport, racing and adventures games. Action titles (like first-person shooters) we handle between us, and unfortunately neither of us are really into flight sims so there's a bit of a gap there. For the record we're both in our late 20s at the time of writing - so while we don't go right back to the start of gaming we are old enough to remember the days of Amigas, Spectrums and 286s.