The first thing to understand about NCAA Football 98 is that it is not the game most people mean when they say NCAA Football 98. That honor usually goes to the PlayStation version, the one with the cleaner paper trail and the louder afterlife. This review is about the PC game, the 1997 Windows build, […]

Need for Speed II, at least the original 1997 Windows version, is what happens when a racing game falls in love with a showroom and forgets to make the driveway forgiving. It is a glossy, aggressively aspirational machine, a sequel that swaps out the first game’s rougher identity for something more decorative, more international, and,

NetStorm: Islands At War is what happens when an RTS refuses to behave like an RTS and, instead of apologizing, doubles down with floating islands, bridge-building, priest-snatching, and the sort of tactical cruelty that makes you wonder whether somebody at Titanic Entertainment had been quietly collecting grudges against ordinary real-time strategy conventions. This is the

NFL Blitz is the kind of football game that arrives wearing shoulder pads over a leather jacket, cracking its knuckles at simulation, and daring anyone to call the cops. The version I can responsibly talk about here is the PC release that followed the game’s 1997 arcade life, because that is what the available record

NHL 98 on PC is what happens when an annual sports series stops pretending that bigger numbers on the box are enough and actually tightens the screws. It is not a revolution, and thank heaven for that, because revolutions in late-90s PC sports games usually meant somebody had discovered a new way to make the