Oldschool Gaming
Welcome to Oldschool Gaming – the first multi-format “retro” site dedicated 8- and 16-bit games from the present rather than the past. Our aim is to round up the newest games released on the various classic platforms and present them in an easy-to-read form on a single website as well as covering remakes of classic titles and independent games. We also carry lists of development resources for the formats covered and our intention is to provide support for anybody producing new software for our beloved “old” machines.
Oldschool Gaming isn’t a regular “retro” site and we won’t be reviewing the classic titles for the formats we cover because that’s been done by so many other places that we’d simply be adding to an already vast pool of material; there’s only a certain number of reviews of Uridium that one person can read!
At present, our format list doesn’t cover the entire range of machines still supported by developers; instead we’ve chosen the machines which have shown obvious signs of life online either in newsgroups or dedicated websites – but we’re not claiming it to be definitive by any means, so if you’d like to see a format that we’re not already covering added and can provide us with a list of releases and resources to get the section going, we’ll happily add it to the site – we don’t want to exclude any machine from the classic era of computing if there’s an active development community there.
Here’s an example of our review score boxes, these are positioned at the bottom of the information bar to the right on each review page. The first two categories are fairly self-explanatory, Graphics is a score for how the game looks and presents itself generally and sound is a mark for the music and effects. Playability is an evaluation of how well the game plays and will reflect comments made on the control system, difficulty level and so forth during the main review, whilst lastability gives a rough indication of how long they feel you’ll be playing the game after you start. Finally, the large digit is the overall score which does exactly what it says on the tin; gives an overview of the entire package in one pass with a handy graphical scale below it. When more than one reviewer has commented on a game, the scores are a rough average to reflect both opinions.
