Sure, there's plenty of people out there writing retrospective reviews of classic games, but very few people offering an insight into what it meant to play those games when they were originally released. No one's writing first hand accounts of the sights and sounds that assailed them the first time they walked into a smoke-filled amusement arcade. No one's writing about those long summer holidays spent organizing tournaments of Summer Games I & II with your mates and the inevitable blisters, calluses and cramp you acquired while playing them. No one's writing about the joy of discovering a shrink-wrapped Infocom import hidden on a dusty shelf in your local independent software store.

Those are the stories I want to read about.

On a related note, one thing I feel is missing from contemporary gaming journalism is a general awareness of gaming history. That's not to say that every review and critique of a modern title needs to make reference to some obscure ZX Spectrum game, but over time you get a sense that, collectively, a web site's writers have very little gaming nous outside of this current decade. I'd wager that your average video game journalist is in their mid-20s and only started getting into the gaming at the dawn of the Xbox/PlayStation 2/GameCube era.

Critics of art, film and literature are steeped in the lore of their respective areas of expertise. When you see a film critic write up a piece on the latest Spielberg or Scorsese movie, you intrinsically know they've also seen The Searchers, Citizen Kane and Chinatown. When it comes to contemporary video game reviewers, you get a nagging sense that anything that happened before 1999 remains outside their experience.

Of course, I'm generalizing, but I think there's more than just a grain of truth to all of this.