Each piece states the release year, the setup time the game demanded on a current machine, and a grade that answers one question only: is it worth playing today?
Isometric RPG
9.1
Sixty-two hours, four endings, and a quest structure that assumes you are an adult with a memory. We went in expecting to explain why its reputation is inflated and came out having to explain why it is not.
Space trading
7.8
The economy is as good as everybody says. The loading is worse than anybody admits, and we timed four hundred transitions to establish exactly how much of a forty-hour run is spent watching a progress bar.
Adventure
6.4
Every painted room is a small masterpiece and two of the puzzles are indefensible. We reconstructed the intended logic for both and it does not hold together in either case.
Dungeon crawler
8.3
Ninety-one levels mapped by hand across five weeks. The absence of an automap turns out to be the design rather than an omission, and the game is considerably sharper than its reputation as an endurance test suggests.
Early RTS
7.2
A campaign of genuine tactical interest wrapped in an interface that predates every convention that made the genre bearable. Four of our twenty-nine hours went on unit selection alone.
Flight sim
8.6
It modelled the feeling of flying rather than the specification of an aircraft, and feeling does not date. The one thing that has aged is the manual, which assumed you owned a specific joystick nobody now has.
It is the honest cost of entry, and it is the number that decides whether a given evening will contain any actual playing.
