No, You’re Not Just Being Nostalgic
Some things actually were better.
What Happened to Game Manuals, Map Packs, and LAN Parties?
Before games were services, they were experiences you owned.
Steam Reviews Are Full of Shit and So Are You
Everyone’s got opinions. Almost none of them are useful.
“You’ve Played This Game Before”
Copy, paste, monetise, repeat.
Live Service Fatigue Is Real – And It’s Killing Games
Always online, always updating, rarely satisfying.
Al, Ian, and Tim dive into the $184 billion gaming industry versus Hollywood’s measly $42 billion box office, discovering that respect for source material apparently took 30 years to figure out. This episode covers why early 90s game adaptations were universally terrible, whether TV shows work better than movies for adaptations, and Tim’s inexplicable excitement for Battlefield 6 despite it being a obvious reskin. The discussion meanders through GoldenEye’s perfection, Spider-Man 2’s web-swinging physics, and...
Is it really nostalgia talking, or did older games actually do more with less? People like to say you’re only clinging to old games because you’re clinging to your youth. You remember them fondly because you had more free time, fewer responsibilities, and no internet to tell you a game was bad before you played it. That’s easy to say. But it ignores the actual differences in how games were made, how they played, and...
Do you actually miss the old days of gaming, or are you just romanticising plastic cases and dial-up? You didn’t need an internet connection to enjoy a game in the old days. You needed a disc, some patience, and maybe a patch off a magazine cover CD. The rest? You figured it out. Or you read the manual. And what a thing the manual was. Some were massive, with 40+ pages. They explained the factions,...
When was the last time a user review actually helped you decide what to play? Scroll through the reviews on any Steam page and you’ll see the same patterns. Wall of green thumbs. Some meme about potatoes. A few hundred people copy-pasting a joke. Someone playing for 2,000 hours before giving it a thumbs down...
If every game is different, why do they all feel identical the moment you pick up the controller? You boot up a new game. It looks slick. The intro is cinematic. Then it hands you control and asks you to climb a tower, unlock the map, and tick off objectives. Ten minutes later, you’re collecting...
At what point did “games as a service” stop meaning “ongoing support” and start meaning “eternal grind”? Live service games promised longevity. More content. Ongoing development. Support that didn’t stop at launch. But what we actually got was a cycle of shallow updates, disappearing content, and the kind of daily grind that feels more like...
Very excited to say that episode 01 is now live on all your favourite podcast services. In the inaugural episode of the Grumpy Old Gamer podcast, hosts Al, Ian, and Tim discuss the current state of the gaming industry. They discuss topics such as the monetisation of games, the over-reliance on DLCs, the shift towards...
There’s a moment before launch where you stop planning and start hoping. That’s where we are. The website’s live. The blog is full. The podcast has a name. The first episode is recorded, edited, uploaded, and set to publish. The second one’s nearly there. The third one is… being argued with by a man in...
Why did we stop hanging out and start performing? There was a time when you joined a forum, a clan, or a fan site just because you liked the same thing as someone else. No follower count. No algorithm. No pressure to monetise your opinion. You logged in, posted something dumb, argued with strangers, and...
So, you want to start a podcast?Great. Follow these exact steps and you too can launch your very first episode in a haze of confusion, sweat, and misplaced confidence. Step 1: Decide on a Topic We picked ours roughly four times. First version was too broad. Second was too niche. Third didn’t exist. Eventually we settled on something none of...
Before GTA was a household name and before Rockstar was making trailers like Hollywood studios, it was just a top-down car theft sim with bad controls and worse graphics. You drove around cities made of grey boxes and tried not to crash into corners every five seconds. It looked like nothing and felt like trouble. And then you’d hear it:...
What happened to try before you buy? There was a time when a demo meant something. It wasn’t a trailer. It wasn’t a pre-order bonus. It was a real slice of the game. You played it, judged it, and made a decision. That used to be the norm. You got them on magazine cover discs or from official websites. Sometimes...
When did “extra content” turn into “stuff we held back until you paid again”? Downloadable content used to be something worth getting. It wasn’t constant. It wasn’t planned months in advance. It showed up later, after you’d finished the main game and wanted more. It added something. A new faction. A proper expansion. A few hours of actual gameplay. It...
What did we lose when we stopped talking before the game even started? There was a time when joining a multiplayer match meant sitting in a lobby with actual people. No auto-matchmaking. No silent party queues. Just a room with a list of names, a chat window, and a countdown that didn’t start until the host said so. It wasn’t...
Why did this one game make us feel like war criminals and geniuses at the same time? Rome: Total War wasn’t about stacking armies and clicking attack. It was about control. Control of cities, people, and every bad decision you made five turns ago. You built empires, picked fights you shouldn’t have, and called it strategy. Released in 2004, it...
Can you work with sponsors without turning into an advert? Let’s be clear. We’re open to sponsors. We’ve got bills, gear, and caffeine habits to fund. But we’re not going to become one of those podcasts where half the runtime is “today’s episode is brought to you by…” followed by thirty seconds of forced enthusiasm about a VPN no one...
Wednesday, August 6th brings episode one of The Grumpy Old Gamer podcast. We open with the question that’s been brewing in living rooms, forums, and Discord servers for years: is gaming worse now, or are we just old and bitter? Probably both. Ian joins me for this first episode. He’s a fellow gamer, fellow grump, and the only person who...
What keeps us coming back to a platform that feels like it’s held together by duct tape and sunk cost? Steam is a disaster. We all know it. It looks like a dashboard from 2011. It acts like it was designed for CRTs. Half the features are buried in menus you forgot existed. It’s slow. It’s cluttered. It’s a landfill...
What do you do when the sequel finally lands and it’s a watered-down shadow of what you loved? You waited years. The announcement trailer dropped. The name was familiar. The logo made your eyebrow twitch. But still, you hoped. You wanted it to be the return. The comeback. The thing you didn’t know you still needed. And then it launched....
Why does it always feel like the PC version was handed off to the intern five minutes before launch? Remember when Arkham Knight came out on PC? Sixty quid for a PowerPoint presentation. It chugged like a Victorian steam engine and crashed harder than Batman’s emotional stability. They pulled it from sale for months. Months. Not because of one issue,...
When did we decide a three-page control list was an acceptable trade for actual instructions? There was a time when buying a game felt like getting something real. You opened the box. You pulled out the disc. Then you picked up the manual and started reading while the game installed. Game manuals weren’t just instructions. They were the first contact....
