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.