reliving the games, tech and culture of the Win9X era

Every year around Christmas our lord and savior, VisionTek Products LLC, makes available mystery boxes of refurbished ATI graphics cards to lift our spirits - not to mention our framerates - while we huddle around our Athlon FX and Prescott Pentium 4 rigs for warmth. Or so various retrocomputing Y...

Our first episode of 2020 is also our first you can watch - complete with gameplay footage - on YouTube! Watch it here or on our YouTube channel and don't forget to comment, like and subscribe!

This month's PC Gamer disc serves up a heaping helping of ambitious games hampered by tank controls wi...

Our long-awaited seventh episode covering the PC Gamer demos from April of 1995 is finally here! This month, Full Throttle and Heretic shine like diamonds atop a heap of mediocre titles including Noctropolis, Creature Shock, 5th Fleet, Wrath of the Gods and Jungle Strike. As always, we encourage you...

In this week's episode we consider another landmark title in the evolution of 3D gaming, Parallax Software's Descent. Enjoy an in-depth discussion of what is almost certainly 1995's best game involving a robot insurrection in an extraterrestrial mining colony! Experience secondhand the unsettling re...

This month on Smug and Play, the tide of mediocre FMV games washes up some of the industry's least convincing South American drug lords. After a brief discussion of the advent of Yahoo! Search and quad-speed CD-ROM drives, we dive into PC Gamer's preview Cryo's disastrous, infringing take on the Ali...

It's February of 1995, the FBI is knocking on Kevin Mitnick's door, Sensible Software is turning soccer pitches into warzones and EA is desperately hoping that PC gamers are getting tired of Doom, which, of course, they aren't. We remark on PC Gamer's lamentations over the latest crop of FMV games b...