Retro game reviews — the long-form pieces this archive holds
Most entries here are records. A handful are reviews, written at length when the site ran a two-page format, and they are worth separating out because a review says what somebody thought was arguable.
Why the reviews are kept separately
A listing tells you what a game contained. A review tells you what was worth arguing about.
In 2006 this site ran reviews across two pages, which at the time meant a genuine word count rather than a paragraph and a score. Five titles got that treatment, and the selection is informative in itself: nobody writes two pages about a game they are indifferent to.
They are kept apart from the index entries because they do a different job. An index entry records what a game was, which does not change. A review records a judgement made at a particular moment by somebody with a particular set of comparisons available — and that dates in a way a description does not. Presenting the two as the same kind of document would flatten the difference.
What survives is also uneven. Some reviews are complete across both pages, some only in part, and where a piece is incomplete this archive does not reconstruct the missing half. The gap is left visible.
The five pieces, and which two survive
The column ran five dated pieces. Two of them exist here as pages; three are titles and dates only.
The index this site kept lists the column in full, with a date against each piece: a review of Bonbon Quest dated 29 June 2006, a review of Crusaders of Space 2 dated 28 June 2006, a review of Charlie II dated 12 June 2006, a Retro Revisited piece on Chaotix dated 11 June 2006, and a review of Gibbage dated 28 May 2006. Five pieces in five weeks, and then nothing.
Two of them survive as pages and are reproduced here. Three do not: Crusaders of Space 2, Charlie II and the Chaotix piece exist as a title and a date and nothing else. That gap is stated rather than filled, because a title and a date are not enough to reconstruct what somebody thought, and writing the missing pieces would mean inventing three judgements and attributing them to a person who made none of them.
The dates are worth reading closely, because they correct something. Four of the five were published inside three weeks of June 2006 and the fifth in late May, which means the column was not an occasional feature that ran for a year — it was a concentrated burst that stopped. The Retro Revisited entry is the odd one out and the most suggestive: a piece about an older console game rather than a current shareware release, which is the column starting to look for a second format shortly before it ended.
How the column was introduced
The section did not open with a masthead or a statement of editorial policy. It opened with a comic account of failing to recruit a reviewer at all, followed by the arrival of an unnamed enthusiast who turned up unannounced and was hired on the spot. It is a joke, and it is also an accurate description of how a games site staffed by two or three people found somebody to write for it.
That framing is preserved here as a fact about the site rather than reproduced as copy, because the voice belonged to whoever wrote it. What it establishes is worth keeping: the column had exactly one writer, that writer was recruited informally, and no editorial process sat above the pieces. Read the two surviving reviews with that in mind and their confidence makes more sense — nobody was moderating them.
It also explains the shape of the run. A column that depends entirely on one unpaid enthusiast producing an evening's writing per piece has a predictable failure mode, and five pieces in five weeks followed by silence is exactly what that failure mode looks like.
What the reviews say about the period
Read together, the reviews share a preoccupation that is easy to miss now: they spend a great deal of effort establishing that a small game is worth paying for at all. The demo-then-register model meant every purchase was an act of faith in a stranger, and reviews of the period carry the weight of that.
They also compare almost entirely sideways. A 2006 shareware platform game is measured against other shareware platform games and against 8-bit games from twenty years earlier, and hardly ever against the commercial releases of its own year. That is a fair reflection of how the audience actually shopped.
Why so few games got the treatment
Writing two pages about a shareware game in 2006 took an evening, and an evening was a real cost for a site run by two or three people alongside their jobs. The economics of the format explain its scarcity better than any editorial policy would: listings could be produced in quantity from a press release and a screenshot strip, and reviews could not.
It also mattered that a review required the full game rather than the demo. A studio had to be willing to supply a registration code to somebody with no guarantee of coverage, which sounds like a small favour and was a genuine act of trust between strangers. Where that relationship existed the coverage got deeper; where it did not, a listing was the ceiling.
The consequence is that the review selection reflects which studios answered their email as much as which games were best. That is worth knowing before reading any of them as a verdict on the period.
Questions about the reviews
How many long-form reviews does this archive hold?
Five were published and two survive as complete pages. The two-page format ran for a few weeks in 2006 and was applied to a handful of titles rather than to the catalogue as a whole.
Are incomplete reviews reconstructed?
No. Where only part of a piece survives, the surviving part is presented and the gap is stated. Filling it in would mean inventing a judgement somebody else made.
Why are reviews separated from index entries?
Because a description of a game does not date and a judgement about it does. Keeping them apart makes clear which is which.
Which games were reviewed?
Five pieces are recorded: Bonbon Quest, Crusaders of Space 2, Charlie II, a Retro Revisited piece on Chaotix, and Gibbage. Two of them survive as pages here; the other three exist as a title and a date only.
How long did the review column run?
Five pieces between late May and late June 2006, and then nothing further. It was a concentrated burst rather than a standing feature, which the dates make clear.