A short account of what the material here is, what it is not, and what a reader may do with it. Written to be read once rather than accepted unread.
Reading these pages requires no account, no acceptance and no agreement. What follows describes the material and grants the permissions attached to it.Every duration published here was recorded by one person, with a stopwatch, on one desktop described on the timing page. The figures are reproducible on that class of hardware and they are not predictions about yours. Their purpose is comparison between the games in the file, not an estimate of what any individual machine will do.
Aggregate totals — an hour of lift rides, twenty-one minutes of scene transitions — depend on how we played, and the underlying counts are published beside them so a reader can substitute their own habits and arrive at a different total honestly.
A review score covers the entire game: design, writing, structure, options and craft. It is not calculated from the timings and is not intended to be reverse-engineered from them. Slow games score well here when they deserve to, and where that happens the review says so in its opening paragraph.
Measurements are more useful shared than hoarded. Any timing, table or count published here may be quoted, reproduced or built upon in any medium, provided this publication is named as the source and the timing page is linked so a reader can see how the figure was produced. No permission need be sought and none would be refused.
Republishing the written reviews in full is a different matter and is not permitted. Quote what you need, take the numbers freely, and do not lift an article whole.
The images on this site were produced for it and are not screen captures from the games discussed. They are thematic accompaniment, they depict no real product, and no timing or claim anywhere on this site rests on them in any way. Nothing in an illustration should be read as evidence for anything in the text beside it.
Titles and studio names appear for identification in the course of criticism. No endorsement, association, partnership or approval is implied in either direction, and no trademark belonging to anybody is claimed by this publication.
Every game timed here was bought at retail with this publication's own funds. No copy has been supplied by a developer, publisher or platform. Nothing has been funded, commissioned, embargoed or shown to anybody before publication. There is no advertising, no sponsored content, no affiliate arrangement and no storefront link on any page of this site.
Load behaviour changes under patching more readily than almost any other measurable property of a game, so a figure correct in one version may be wrong in the next. Timings are re-taken and corrected in place with a dated note showing both values, and where a patch fixes something criticised here the original criticism remains visible, because the shipped state was real.
Beyond that, this material is offered as one tester's careful work rather than as a warranty. Anybody making a purchase, a design decision or a hardware decision on the strength of a number here should verify it against their own machine.
These pages are static files served without a database or an application layer. They may still be unreachable during maintenance, hosting changes or failures outside this desk's control, and no undertaking is given about uptime, the permanence of any particular address, or how long a given article remains published.
Links here point only to other pages of this site. Where an article refers to a community patch, a tool or a discussion, it does so by description rather than by hyperlink, because we would rather not send readers to destinations whose content and privacy behaviour we cannot inspect or vouch for.
This site carries no address, no telephone number, no form and no submission mechanism, by design rather than oversight. Nothing can be pitched, submitted or embargoed here. Corrections arrive through readers repeating measurements in public, which has produced three amendments so far and remains the only route.
This page may be revised as the publication changes. Revisions take effect when they appear and are not applied retroactively to anybody's earlier reading, which, given that nothing here is agreed to in the first place, is a formality rather than a protection.
