Est. 1998
Playing Out of Control Gaming

Retro reviews, vintage hardware, classic PC builds, and modern ways to keep old games alive.

Features · Opinion · Long Reads

Features.

Counterfactual history, industry profiles, retro PC culture, game preservation, and re-reviews of our own 1998–2002 verdicts. Long-form, researched, opinionated.

All Features — Newest First
Indie Spotlight: Fray Now Available on Steam
Indie Spotlight: Brain Candy's simultaneous turn-based strategy game Fray, set in a corporate-dystopian future, is out now on Steam for $19.99.
A Trip Into The Secret World. Part 1
A play-diary trip into The Secret World's beta: choosing the Templars, surviving the Crucible, and stepping through the Hollow Earth toward Kingsmouth.
Indie Corner: MiG Madness Out for Xbox Live
Indie Corner: MiG Madness, a Time Pilot-inspired jet-fighter arcade game with power-ups, four-player co-op and a day-night cycle, is out on Xbox LIVE Indie Games.
Indie Corner: Chompy Chomp Chomp Out on Xbox Live
Indie Corner: Chompy Chomp Chomp, a frantic local-and-online multiplayer eat-'em-up from Utopian World of Sandwiches, is out now on Xbox LIVE Indie Games.
Indie Corner: Compromised Now on Xbox Live Indie Marketplace
Indie Corner: Compromised, a 16-bit-flavoured top-down shooter with 10 levels and four boss stages, is out on the Xbox Live Indie Marketplace for 240 MS Points.
Are MMO Subscription Plans Changing Forever?
With Guild Wars 2 looming and free-to-play on the rise, is the subscription MMO finished? The numbers say the obituaries are premature.
The Next Generation Console Wars
Dreamcast launches, PS2 looms and Nintendo's Dolphin waits in the wings: an in-period call on who wins the coming 128-bit console war (spoiler: I'm backing Nintendo).
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The Series — Ongoing & Announced
Save State Series 01
Go back. Run it again.

One changed variable. Realistic outcomes only. No power fantasy timelines. Each entry takes a defining moment in gaming history and asks what happens if one thing goes differently.

Coming soon. No entries published yet.
First entry in the works
Makers & Breakers Series 02
The people who built it.

The people behind gaming's inflection points. One subject, one act, and the consequences that rippled forward. Industry history told through the decisions that actually changed things.

View all 4 entries →
The Beige Years Series 03
DOS to XP. No filter.

PC gaming from the late 1980s through the early 2000s. Hardware, software, big boxes, and the culture around all of it. Personal history and object history in equal measure.

View all 1 entry →
Last Save Series 04
The games that refused to die.

The games that died and the people who brought them back. Fan servers, reverse engineering, emulation, and preservation in all its legal grey-area forms.

Coming soon. No entries published yet.
First entry in the works
Replay Series 05
We scored it then. Again now.

A game POCG reviewed in the original 1998–2002 run, re-reviewed today. The in-period verdict and the modern one, side by side: what held up, what didn't, and what we got wrong the first time.

Coming soon. No entries published yet.
First entry in the works
From the Zip Disks Series 06
The restoration log.

Behind the scenes of recovering the original 1998–2002 POCG archive from a stack of Zip disks. What was on each disk, what survived, what's still missing, and the weird artifacts of hand-written 1999 HTML.

View all 2 entries →
Callsign Series 07
Who we are online.

Handles, gamertags, clan tags, and the identities we built before our real names followed us everywhere. Gamer identity from GeoCities guestbooks to the persistent profile.

View all 1 entry →
Top Loader Series 08
Top tens with a thesis.

Themed best-of lists with a point of view: the games worth loading up for a season, an occasion, or a system, ranked with a reason. No filler and no shopping lists, just the picks and the argument behind each one.

View all 5 entries →
One-Offs ARCHIVE
No series. Just opinions.

Standalone features that stand on their own: opinion, analysis, and longer-form writing that is not part of an ongoing series.

View all 19 entries →