I think it'd be helpful to have, instead of "Did you find this review helpful, Y/N," something like buttons that describe the reviews as "entertaining" "helpful" and "nostalgic," and then you click the one that describes the review best...or don't click anything if the review was subpar. Then you could look up game reviews based on helpfulness, how fun they are to read, or how they remind you of playing on your dad's lap when you were five and your computer had four colors and no mouse. :P

All it needs is a good drop down box "sort by" system, like on Amazon, Ebay, etc. Sort by "user rating", "oldest first", "newest first" and so on.

I recommend searching the Games Finished in 2014 thread for reviews. (There are threads for previous years, but I'm too lazy to find them.)

It has never been a requirement, but many posters in that thread write reviews after completing a game for the first time, so there is little to no nostalgia factor.

Same here to be honest. While I understand Technojedi's point, I'd myself much rather read a review by a person who wrote about the game as if writing at the time of its release. I don't need to know that the game didn't age well because of its cumbersome controls for example, because if I'm buying an 80s game I already know that the controls will be difficult, graphics look dated and won't run properly in DOSBox without some tweaking (MM1 for example).

What *would* be useful though is having reviews based on the actual version of game GOG is selling (floppy, CD or recent port, with or without expansion). The most infamous example would be Z, which was flooded with positive reviews moments after it came out, only to be replaced with 1 star negative reviews, after it was discovered that it wasn't the original version but a remake.

That said, like many others here I don't base my decision on a single review. It's easy to spot whether the review is a review or personal impression, and after reading several I can tell if the game is for me.

The problem is not the nostalgic reviews as such, but the fact that with the lack of any sorting system these reviews are marked as most helpful and automatically flow to the top

Precisely. I'd really like to be able to read the 1 star ratings to see what is (or what others think is) wrong with a game, but finding them isn't that easy. Even going to the last page won't always take you there, since that's where the 1 line reviews (or spam) go.

This would be my opinion as well.

Then press the next page button, search for reviews outside of gog, ask on the forums or whatever. But gee, nobody cares about you marking a review as not helpful.

With the Star Wars games, it was more like "Twenty Tolkien-length reviews added 2½ seconds after the release" :-p

I don't mind nostalgic reviews - it has historic value to hear how someone remembers a vintage game. But please - PLEASE - state clearly that your review is based on a childhood memory.

"I haven't played it recently, but I remember it as ..."

Just copypaste that sentence and place it at the beginning of your review. It's super easy, and will make people love you!

All reviews start "getting old" from the moment they get posted.

What happens when those reviews that speak to Windows 7/8 get old and Windows 10 or above are current? What if the game runs fine on 7/8 and the review talks about that; but it doesn't run on later Windows and the review does not speak to that (because it was written previously)?

I'd rather have reviews that speak of those old memories as they give me a sense of the gameplay. Newer reviews can giv e a sense if they run on newer hardware decently.

As long as the reviews have dates on them so I know when they were posted, and the reviewer makes note that it is a "nostalgia" review, I am fine with old "pre-GOG" reviews.

I suppose it's one's own prerogative to m ark "nostalgia" reviews down - but over the timeline it doesn't seem sensible to me...

But, nostalgic reviews are almost never accurate even at the time they're posted. At least with modern reviews they're reflective of how the game plays in recent history rather than ones recollections of how it played a decade or more ago. There are games that I loved back in the day that absolutely do not stand up to the passage of time and if I gave them a positive review, I would be doing people a great disservice.

Without actually playing the game from here, it's hard to say whether the game is still such a gem or if there were things that you had forgotten about that make the game less good. Or possibly newer games do it better.

What's more, sometimes it does make a difference whether it's on old hardware or on new hardware. It's not as big of a deal now that GOG has a money back guarantee for games, but it's certainly more useful than the recollections people had during the Clinton administration of playing the game.
Well, at least they waited until the game was released. I seem to recall people writing reviews for games that hadn't even been released. Personally, I think that nobody ought to be allowed to write a review for at least a week after release.

The other part of the problem here is all the nimrods that +1 the nostalgic reviews at the expense of ones by people who have actually played the game recently.

Perhaps Mr. Gog could add a verified buyer tag to the reviews by people that have actually bought the game here. It would probably cut down a bit on the confusion. If you've played the game before and don't like it enough to buy it again, I'm sorry, but you clearly don't think it's a masterpiece sufficient to warrant a Tolkien epic of a review. Ditto if you can't be arsed to play it, but that's basically impossible to enforce.