Est. 1998
Playing Out of Control Gaming

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

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Features · Opinion · Long Reads

Editorials.

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

Series 08 ← All Editorials
Top Loader
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.

Best-Of Lists Ranked Recommendations
Top Loader — All Entries 5 entries
05
Top Loader July 2026
The Ten Game Boy Games That Play Like Summer
The console you actually took outside. The Game Boy landed in America on July 31, 1989, and turned the backseat, the pool, and the campsite into a place to play. Top Loader ranks the handheld summer.
The Game Boy was the machine that WAS summer, the one you took to the pool and the backseat and the tent. Ten Game Boy games that owned those portable summers, ranked, on the anniversary of its US launch.
Entry #05
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04
Top Loader July 2026
The Ten N64 Games That Play Like Summer
The console turns 30 this week. It showed up in summer with summer in the box. Top Loader loads the Nintendo 64 and ranks the season.
The Nintendo 64 arrived as a summer machine: four controller ports, a jet-ski game, and a blue-sky Mario. Ten N64 cartridges that play like summer, ranked by the vibe and the four-player couch, not the release date.
Entry #04
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03
Top Loader July 2026
The Ten SNES Games That Play Like Summer
Not the ones that shipped in July. The ones that feel like it. Top Loader loads up the season and ranks it by vibe.
Ten Super Nintendo games that actually feel like summer: beaches, islands, backyards, and road trips, ranked by the vibe instead of the release date.
Entry #03
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02
Top Loader July 2026
The Most American Games Ever Made
For the Fourth. Not the most patriotic games, the most American ones. And half of them were built by people who only knew the place from the movies.
A Fourth of July Top Loader: the most gloriously, ridiculously American games ever made, ranked by the vibe, and a look at how many of them were dreamed up somewhere else entirely.
Entry #02
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01
Top Loader June 2026
Player Two: The Games to Play With Your Dad
Father's Day, the Top Loader way. Not games about dads, the games you can actually hand your father a controller for.
Father's Day, the Top Loader way: not games about dads, but the couch classics you can hand your dad a controller for, whether he is a lifelong gamer or has not played since Pong.
Entry #01
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The Series — Ongoing & Announced 32 total entries
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.

The Subsidy, Part Three: What They Kept Jul '26
The Man Who Called It Ancient Jul '26
The Subsidy, Part Two: The Bill Comes Due Jul '26
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.

Myst (1993) Jun '26
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.

The Box at My Mom’s House Jul '26
The First Run, and How I Lost It Jul '26
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.

A Name to Play By Jun '26
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.

The Ten Game Boy Games That Play Like Summer Jul '26
The Ten N64 Games That Play Like Summer Jul '26
The Ten SNES Games That Play Like Summer Jul '26
View all 5 entries →
One-Offs ARCHIVE
No series. Just opinions.

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

The Men Who Handed Me the Controller Jun '26
The Broken Games Report: Issue #1 Nov '14
Indie Spotlight: Safety: Life is a Maze Jun '14
View all 19 entries →