Old school TV reviews: science fiction

"Reveal very little at a tediously slow pace" – Me, 2007

77,000 words on some sci-fi shows I liked and some I didn't, giving you the lowdown on the latest VHS releases and DVD boxsets, sometimes covering the same eras more than once across different releases at varying degrees of obsolescence, and closing by recommending you import cheap Chinese pirate copies like I did. It was definitely worth picking these out of the trash.

Written for dooyoo.co.uk from 2000–2011 (aged 14–25).

Old school film reviews

"Frustratingly terrible and a chore to sit through" – Me, 2008

When I was finished being out of character, I wrote 44,000 more words of boringer movie reviews for dooyoo.co.uk from 2000–2008 (aged 17–22).

Here are my game-changing insights on films I owned on DVD or video, other films I'd seen and notorious turkeys I sought out for the sake of a "funny" review, because slagging something off is less intimidating than having to write about something good and risking enriching myself.

Alrightreads 2003–2007: boring student book reviews

"Far too long, for very little reward" – Me, 2007

There isn't much to be gleaned from my exhaustively long-winded high school and student book reviews, beyond helping me neurotically maintain a never-comprehensive record of everything I've read like an Art Garfunkel. That's reason enough to post it. Why do I bother posting anything?

Here are 99,000 words about books, written for dooyoo.co.uk for pocket money aged 17–22. I didn't write about absolutely everything I read during those years, especially since I was supposed to read two to three books a week for my literature course during term time (though didn't always), but some of those still made it in.

The switch between comedy travelogues read for pleasure and 17th-century plays where I'm trying to monetise revision is often very subtle, so I've highlighted the study books to make those easier to spot. I don't think I went so far as to copy-paste my essays, but you wouldn't call them "reviews" either.

Absolutely pointless nostalgia: unhelpfully reviewing retro games that are no longer commercially available

"The very premise of writing a review on a 1980s arcade game today may seem a little silly and unnecessary, however this is not the case: it is good." – Ms. Pac-Man review, 2003

I lost interest in computer games around the time people stopped calling them "computer games," but when writing "consumer reviews" became my £1-a-day job as a penniless teenager and then student, I got plenty of mileage out of digging up the classics (and less than classics). When those ran out, and I needed a steady stream of fresh topics to write about to keep up the momentum, I cracked open the 16-bit ROM library to see what treasures or otherwise lay therein.

Here are 79,000 words of inherently unhelpful game reviews written for dooyoo.co.uk between 2000 and 2010, mainly concentrated in the middle of that span.

Nearly all of them are much too long and go into more detail than would be strictly necessary even if the games weren't obsolete, because waffling on meant higher ratings and more chance of getting a coveted crown (£1.50!) from the majority of people who didn't actually bother to read what they clicked on and mistakenly equated quantity with quality.

I apologise for the occasional interruptions by "modern" (i.e. late 1990s to early 2000s) games. Most of these are early abberations before I set myself straight and clogged up the site with worthless product suggestions just for me.

Absolutely pointless nostalgia: obsolete consumer reviews for websites that don't exist any more

"I've also recently dabbled in comparing prices through Google, which is worth a try" – Me, 2004

Do you want to buy CDs or DVDs online in the UK, and it's still 2004?

These long-winded reviews of online shops written from the narrow perspective of a teenager on a seemingly endless mission to save a quid on RRP could help! If you cut through the sitcom quotes, heavy metal bias and digressive insights into his own pathetic life, and understand that this review site's misguided peer rating system favoured quantity over quality.

If you (somehow) enjoyed My Top 10 Websites of 2003 and 2004, here are overly detailed elaborations on some of those defunct shopping sites and other domains, chronicling a time when the retail behemoths were rising to power and crushing the mom and pop sites one by one.

Reviews exhumed from the wreckage of the also now defunct dooyoo.co.uk via the Internet Archive. With [self-critique] if I can be bothered to read through it all.

14-year-old me's appropriately juvenile film reviews

"With Cameron Diaz in it you know it's going to be good" – Me, 2000 (apparently)

Raised on an arguably unsavoury diet of perverted sitcoms when I was still in single digits, some of my permanent tastes formed early. But there was still a lot of developing left to do.

Less independent in his tastes and more beholden to what's on at the cinema, what his mum's rented on video or what gets put on the school TV when a teacher can't be arsed, 14-year-old Dave's choice of viewing material and falsely confident declarations thereon often couldn't be more different to my opinions today. Other times we're still the same, there's only so much growing up you can do.

Here's my earliest surviving online content from the year I was first connected to the world, a terrible decision in hindsight. Most contain at least one stand-out remark that made me laugh in spite of myselves. Hopefully 52-year-old Dave will come back and laugh at the clueless, out-of-character pap I post nowadays.