Reading this site means accepting the terms below. They cover what our pieces are, how setup notes should be treated, how the work may be reused, and where our responsibility ends.
Everything published here is criticism. A grade summarises a judgement formed by a specific person who finished a specific version of a game on specific hardware, and reasonable readers will disagree with some of those judgements. Nothing on this site is a warranty about how any piece of software will behave for you.
Where a piece records how we made an older game run, that is a description of what worked on our bench and not a set of instructions or a support document. Configuration outcomes vary with operating system version, drivers and the exact release of a game. Follow anything described here at your own discretion and risk, and take a backup before altering system settings.
We do not distribute software, host files, or advise on obtaining games from sources their rights holders would object to. Our notes assume a legitimately acquired copy, and requests for anything beyond that are not answered.
Setup times, playthrough hours and measurements such as load durations describe our sessions on our equipment at the time of testing. They depend on hardware, storage, operating system and the specific version tested, all of which vary, and a figure accurate on one configuration may be wrong on another.
Brief quotations in reviews, videos, articles and discussion are welcome provided Cold Boot Collective is credited and the quotation is not edited so as to reverse its meaning. Reproducing a full piece, translating one without permission, or using this site's text as training material for commercial machine learning systems is not permitted.
Grades may not be used in advertising, on storefront pages or in promotional material. A number taken out of a piece that also publishes a five-hour setup time misrepresents the review.
All illustrations, photographs and the site emblem used here were produced for this publication and remain ours. Names of games, studios, publishers and hardware belong to their respective owners and are used for identification and critical commentary only. No affiliation with or endorsement by any of them is claimed or implied.
The collective sells nothing. No shop exists here, no subscription, no membership, no tip jar and no advertising slot, so there is nothing to order, nothing to pay for, nothing to refund and nothing to be delivered. Treat any approach claiming otherwise in our name as fraudulent.
This site is provided as it stands. We do not undertake that it will always be reachable, that older pieces will remain online indefinitely, or that every internal link will survive a future reorganisation. Pieces may be revised, corrected, merged or withdrawn at editorial discretion.
So far as applicable law permits, we accept no liability for loss or damage arising from reliance on anything published here, including purchases you later regret and configuration changes made after reading our notes. A piece is an input to your judgement, not a substitute for it.
A few pieces send readers outward to archives and references we relied on. Those places are run by other people entirely; we cannot vouch for their accuracy or promise they will still be there next year, and their own rules govern your visit rather than ours.
We expect to rewrite parts of this page as the collective changes shape. The wording present when you read it is the wording that governs, and continuing to read afterwards signals that the current version is acceptable to you.
Consumer law in many places gives readers protections that cannot be contracted away. None of the wording above attempts to touch those, and where a clause here conflicts with such a protection, the protection wins and the remainder stands.
