Moments in Gaming is where we look back on gaming experiences that have left a particularly strong impression on us over the years: mainly for good reasons, but sometimes for bad ones.

I mentioned recently an unsuitability for playing ‘proper’ racing games, with modern simulation and sim-adjacent games being so effective at conveying a sense of danger that a nervous real-life driver might find themselves lacking the nerve to really hit the best lap times.

A couple of years ago I decided to fire up one of Codemasters’ Formula 1 titles that had accrued in my backlog without ever being touched, so that I may at least continue my long-running tradition of repeatedly practising the first race of a Grand Prix season before abandoning it forever.

But they’ve made these games better and more accessible to idiots like me, now, and so with some of the dummy-proof aids turned on, I made it through quite a few rounds with some success.

Note the helpful green arrows on the road.

Once the initial sense of pride and self-satisfaction subsided, however, it increasingly felt like a hollow experience. Without the aids turned on, I’d have no chance and give up, as I had before; but with them, I didn’t really feel as if I was participating in the ultimate racing competition. Or, to put it another way: I could never be a Formula 1 driver, so any game that makes me feel like I could is somehow fatally compromised.

As it turns out, F1 2018 eventually proved too difficult once I got to the street circuits like Singapore, where a slight misjudgement puts you into a wall, and I reverted to my habit of giving up as soon as it got tricky, while giving kudos to the game for still having that capacity, despite all its friendly assistance.

The feeling that you’re not in total control is, I think, what removes a sense of involvement. Strangely, arcade driving games have always been the ones that have made me feel like I’m racing closest to the edge, even if they’re so simple they can be played with the four cursor keys if needed.

4D Sports: Driving (or Stunts) was the first racer to ever make me care about timed challenges, and using the construction kit to build some kind of semi-impossible monstrosity before seeing who could complete it in the fastest possible time was a regular theme of a number of super-cool gaming get-togethers during the 90s.

The track…

But the greatest personal obsession was ‘Default’ – the track which would load at the start of each new game, unless you changed it [So the ‘default’ one, then? – FFG Reader]. A strangely narrow loop with multiple jumps on either side, it seemed like a strange layout for a developer to choose, although a friend later claimed to be the author, replacing the original with his own design on a copy of the game that was later widely circulated through unofficial means.

It should be possible, with some digging, to find out if this is true or not, but really, I don’t want to know. The copy of Stunts that I have on my HD is the same one I had back in the 90s, transferred over across multiple PCs, and complete with saved tracks, lap times and even replays that my teenage self thought were worth saving. This is my reality: I’m going to leave the actual facts out of this.

At one point, ‘Default’ acted as a kind of personal Top Gear test track to validate the performance of the various cars available (a roster which at the time seemed massive, but upon further inspection apparently totalled a mere 11), and seeing what times could be achieved with each. (It was the 90s, ok? You sort of had to make your own fun.)

There was no doubt regarding what the best car was, though, and soon these tests morphed into more straightforward ‘what is the fastest possible time that you can do with the Porsche March Indy’ territory.

The car…

At first, times under a minute seemed tricky to achieve, before seconds and fragments of seconds were shaved off through frenzied sessions of repeated attempts at the same track in the same car.

Sometimes things would go wrong and you weren’t quite sure why: little quirks on the first set of jumps would mean occasionally you’d fly through the middle of an open bridge and smash into the base below, or encounter that bug where the front of the car would hit a ramp and propel you hundreds of miles straight up in the air.

But eventually the process was honed down to a fine art, with little details becoming crucial: move to the centre of the track as soon as possible; make sure you bring the revs down in the air as you’re flying towards that first turn; attack the corners but don’t spin out; if you’re not under X time by this point, then quit and start again.

The time…

Revisiting that same experience all these years later and trying to beat my old times, I was left with the feeling that, despite the rudimentary graphics, controls and handling, I was thinking more like an F1 driver than in any actual F1 game.

With complete confidence in my ability to do the basics, the instincts associated with real racing – concentration, fearlessness, ruthlessness, perfectionism – could come to the fore. Even if it was only in a daft old racer with bumblebee engine notes and reality-defying jumps, on a track that may or may not have been designed by a 14-year-old in the mid-90s.

Hello everyone! For today’s review we’re adding another game to our archive of Sierra adventures with Space Quest V: The Next Mutation.

Good afternoon!

Today’s review is of the racing game SHIFT 2: Unleashed.

Almost certainly, after 18 games, this will be the last Need for Speed (yes, this is a Need for Speed game) to be covered on FFG.

As long-term readers (if any exist) will be aware, we already have a Brief History summarising all of our coverage, but perhaps the moment deserves a few extra words at some point, too.

I’ll see what I can come up with!

Hi there!

Today’s review is another modern(ish) indie adventure: Wadjet Eye’s post-apocalyptic point-and-clicker from 2016, Shardlight.

Next time I’m here, I’ll have something really exciting for you.

(Well, actually, not that exciting – don’t get your hopes up or anything.)

Hello! And Happy New Year to you all.

We’re kicking off 2026 with a discussion review of Supergiant’s indie battler Bastion.

Hello and season’s greetings to you all.

Today we have a review of the sci-fi indie adventure Whispers of a Machine.

Hi everyone.

Apologies for the recent period of silence. Here’s a review that was meant to follow close on the heels of my last one in… (checks dates) late May.

It’s from the area of the backlog marked ‘unplayed arcade racers from the last 25 years’: World Racing 2: Champion Edition.

Hi all

Hope you are well. We have a new review for you, looking at rather fascinating Doom-powered first-person shooter from 1996. So read on for my thoughts on Strife.

Sorry things have gone a bit quiet lately – real life continues to distract us from the vitally important work of playing old computer games.

We hope to have some more substantial content for you eventually. For now though let me show you all something cool I found on the Youtubes (there’s all sorts of marvellous stuff on there, apparently). It’s an old-timey English drinking song, and I think the earliest references to it date back to the 18th century. However, you will probably know it as something else.

Sound familiar?

What’s in that grog stuff, anyway?

Just got back from holiday and it turns out that while I was away, we fans of 90s first-person gaming received a double helping of exciting new re-releases!

Heretic and Hexen

Let’s start with these fantasy shooters from Raven, both using the doom engine. Heretic came first, swapping cacodemons and chainguns for gargoyles and magic wands, but otherwise hewing quite close to Doom’s simple run-and-gun format. Hexen was the sort-of-sequel that tried to be a bit clever with hub-based levels and puzzles, and also had three player characters.

Both are still highly enjoyable today, so it’s great to learn they’ve been re-released and remastered courtesy of those wonderful people at Night Dive. For a start you get high-rez graphics and widescreen support to rejuvenate these classics on your big fancy monitor. There’s also cross-platform multiplayer, some new episodes for each game and a unified launcher. Oh, and new remixed soundtracks. Even better, you get all of this for free if you have the originals on gog or steam.

(fun fact, these were some of the first games I ever bought on Steam, in a massive iD+Raven bundle).

So far this is similar treatment to what Doom 1 and 2 got from Night Dive last year. However it turns out there’s more: they’ve gone and tinkered with some of the weapons and levels, as well as adding entirely new features. For example in Hexen the Cleric now has a shield with his mace that can be used to block, parry and reflect fireballs. Time a parry correctly you can splat an Ettin (those troll-things you meet on the first level) in one strike of your mace.

They’ve also added markers on your map to tell you where to go next. I think players will be divided on this – some will be unhappy at introducing modern hand-holding, preferring the older days when you had to put in the hard work of searching for objectives yourself. I do think though that Hexen could get really obtuse at times – you’d flick a switch then spending an hour hunting around to find whatever the **** it actually did.

So yeah, as a time-poor dad gamer I don’t mind a little extra help. For what it’s worth you can turn off these new features. Also the DOS version is still included as an extra, which I strongly applaud. Even when the new features have a positive impact on the experience of playing the oldies, the original should always exist as an option.

You can find the remastered bundle on gog or Steam.

Azrael’s Tear

For a complete change of pace, how about this first-person adventure originally released in 1996, now again available on gog and Steam. Here you take on the role of a hi-tech thief in the near future, descending into a long-forgotten underground medieval complex in search of the fabled holy grail.

Turns out the place isn’t entirely empty. The knights originally charged with protecting the grail are still around, their lives unnaturally prolonged. They claim to be waiting for someone worthy to claim the sacred chalice but they may have their own agendas. Or may have just lost their minds entirely. There are further signs something deeply weird and disturbing is at work, and has been affecting both people and wildlife for a very long time. You’ll find not only ghosts and talking corpses, but actual dinosaurs. Maybe this grail thing isn’t so wonderful after all.

It’s a wonderfully atmospheric game – you get a real sense of descending into something ancient, haunted, and slowly decaying. It also a difficult one to categorise, since there are plenty of hazards, but not a whole lot of combat or anything requiring fast reflexes. There are only a few sections where something in a room is actively trying to kill you, and often it’s easier to just avoid them. In some ways it’s akin to something like Myst, but with a proper 3D engine instead of pre-rendered graphics. Then mix in a bit of System Shock, maybe.

This is definitely not a remaster of any sort, just the original game bundled with dosbox. I’m not complaining though – being a fairly obscure and commercially unsuccessful game, long consigned to the limbo of abandonware, I’m just glad it’s finally reached digital stores. Also in some ways that clunky 3D with its murky textures still perfectly suits the gloomy confines of Aeternis.

So it still comes with our highest recommendations – one of the true forgotten gems of 90s gaming.