About

 “Bruce Sterling, the author, was a keynote speaker at a conference last year. He was comparing writing books to writing computer games. He said the problem is that any book that’s written is compared to every other book that’s ever been written, so the odds of writing the best book ever are very low. But when you do write a great book, it’s going to stand for a thousand years or more. Computer games have the other problem: technology is advancing so rapidly that with each new wave, games really are better than the ones that have come before, so you’re only competing with the people who are writing games right now. All the people who have written games before, their stuff is actually worse by definition- in fact you probably can’t find a computer to play them on any more. Bruce wrapped up by saying that even if you write a great game, it’s going to be forgotten very soon, much more quickly than, say, the works of Plato.

“My response to that problem is that though no individual Ultima will be playable 10 years from now, it’s my intention to leave a series through history, each one of which has been highly regarded. So a person playing Ultima 25 will feel the history, the value, they’ll look back and know these games have always been one of the highest achievements in the art form. So, basically, to leave a streak in history.”

-Richard Garriot
1993, PC Format Interview

Twenty years later, the Ultima games are still being played and sold. This means Bruce Sterling was wrong. Good games do not become obsolete due to new technology.

But there are so many PC games out there. Which ones are worth getting?  If you’re tired of buying a game based on excited reviews, sighing at how unfun the game is, and uninstalling it along with many others, this site was made for you.

PC once stood for Personal Computer. Now it stands for Post Console.

What is the Post Console? It is a gaming world without industry and without DRM.

Since there is no Industry in the Post Console world, there are no game reviewers. Only gamers can review the Post Console games. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem.

However, it is more common to see reviews of how a game influenced someone’s childhood instead of seeing a review of the actual game. Nostalgia holds a tyranny in the Post Console kingdom. Since these games are decades old with various complexities, the factor of having games run well on modern computers is not enough. The gamers must learn about how to excel in them, a given in the game’s time period, in order to prevent common frustrations that act as a wall between the new gamer and the old gamer.

This website seeks to untie the knot and obtain the true value of these games. These are not ‘review the game for a few minutes or few days’, these are fifty hour reviews. Considering the scope and depth of most PC games, this amount of review time is necessary. All this time will be spent in the present, 2013 onward. Special parts of the review will be dedicated to nostalgia checks and stamping it out wherever it exists. A large extension of the review is teaching about the game, how it works, and how to excel at its early areas. As old games come with more frustrations than they did when they were released, it is necessary to wipe out those frustrations as best as possible.

Most review sites lose value over time because they lack a ballast, an independent standard of value, in order to review the games. A review score has no meaning unless there is some standard it is based. This site’s standard of value can be found in the Scale page that measures today’s games against a snapshot of time in the 1980s.

However, even this will not be enough. What if the reviewer, myself, fails in my interpretation of the game’s value? This is where the reader comes in. The biggest check on the reviews will be you, the glorious reader. Comments are enabled for each review. Visitors are encouraged to say whether or not a review score should be altered.  The goal is to figure out the true value of these games. Normally, this wouldn’t be possible with the usual ‘score points’ that are tethered to nothing. With this site’s scale, there is a control group where we can weigh and measure the games.

These are living reviews. They are updated as time goes on. Recent games may prove to be not as great as we thought (or better than we thought) and the review score changes to reflect it. Older games may be re-evaluated.

Welcome to the Post Console world.