Well, that’s another year of retro-gaming over and done with. 2007 has actually been fairly productive for us in terms of content, and any regular readers out there might have noted that updates have been more frequent in the last 12 months.

Although what we do here at FFG doesn’t really warrant any detailed analysis, I thought it might be kind of interesting to take a quick look back at the last year. If nothing else, it was certainly useful for me: having now reached the age where each year blurs into the next, I occasionally check back on a review that I thought I wrote a couple of months ago to find that it was actually two or three years. [Fascinating! – a reader]

Anyway, the FFG year was book-ended by reviews of 3-star games (I know, they’re more like blobs than stars, but I’m not going to use the expression ‘3-blob’). In January we kicked things off with Covert Action, that simple but addictive spy caper from the early 90s, and it all ended on the last day of the year with the addition to the racing section of the superficially-entertaining Sega Rally 2. This seemed to sum up the vast majority of games covered, with many of them falling into the ‘not bad’ category.

Still, there were a few gems: I gushed about Monkey Island 2 and Max Payne, and Stoo lavished praise on Outcast, with all three receiving the highest ratings of the year. Action and Adventure were the two sections added to most often, with all but one of the games receiving ratings of four stars or more this year being games of this type (the exception being the surprisingly-nifty Need for Speed: Porsche 2000).

There was also a significant minority of not-particularly-enjoyable titles, and an all-time low point was reached when a review of the excerable Viva Football was added to the Sport section. Aside from the significant achievement of finding a football game that we enjoyed less than Sensible World of Soccer, the previously undernourished Sport section grew to a more healthy size. Now, we need more RPGs – perhaps it’s time to dig out Fallout again…

And so, what does this half-arsed re-cap tell us? Well, er, nothing really. But, seeing as we’re here, it might be worth making some New Year’s resolutions, even if, as tradition dictates, we aren’t likely to keep to them. Still, as all my self-help books tell me, it’s worth setting achievable targets, so we may as well settle for the following: at least one (1) review of a Sierra adventure game (with the word Quest in the title), no more Need for Speed games appearing in the racing section (no matter how tempting it might be) and, er something else (details TBC).

Oh yes! 2008: It’s gonna rock.

[Edit – Ahem. Of course, if anyone has any sensible suggestions or comments, then we’d be happy to hear them…]