A short statement of what the material on this site is, what it is not, and what a reader may do with it. Written to be read once rather than agreed to unread.
Reading these pages requires no agreement, no account and no acceptance of anything. What follows describes the material and sets out the permissions attached to it.Every figure published here — action counts, menu depths, legibility thresholds, score components — is the result of one procedure carried out by one person on one desktop configuration, described in full on the method page. The counts are reproducible. The thresholds depend on eyesight and on a viewing distance we have standardised at roughly seventy centimetres, and a reader sitting closer to a larger display will legitimately reach different conclusions.
Scores describe an interface and nothing else. They are not statements about whether a game is worth playing, and several games with low figures here are recommended in the body text of their own reviews.
The measurements are more useful shared than hoarded. Any table, count or threshold published here may be quoted, reproduced or built upon, in any medium, provided the source is named and the method page is linked so that a reader can see how the number was produced. No permission needs to be requested and none will be refused.
Wholesale republication of the written articles is a different matter and is not permitted. Quote what you need, take the data freely, and do not lift a review entire.
The illustrations on this site are produced for it and are not screen captures from the games under discussion. They are decorative and thematic, they do not depict any real product, and no interface claim anywhere on this site rests on them. Treat them as accompaniment to the text rather than as evidence within it.
Titles and studio names appear here for identification in the course of criticism. No association, endorsement, partnership or approval is implied in either direction, and no trademark held by anybody is claimed by this publication.
Every game measured here was bought at retail with the publication's own money. No copy has been supplied by a developer, publisher or platform; nothing has been funded, commissioned or reviewed in advance by anybody outside this desk; there is no advertising, no affiliate arrangement, no sponsored placement and no storefront link on any page.
Interfaces change under patching, and a figure that was correct in one version may be wrong in the next. Counts are corrected in place with a dated note describing what changed, and where a patch improves something criticised here the original criticism stays visible, because the shipped state was real and the record should reflect it.
Beyond that, the material is offered as one tester's careful work rather than as a guarantee. Anybody making a purchasing decision, a design decision or a technical decision on the strength of a number here should verify it against their own hardware, their own eyes and their own version of the game.
These pages are static files served without a database or an application layer. They may nevertheless be unreachable during maintenance, hosting changes or failures beyond this desk's control, and no undertaking is given about uptime, permanence of any particular address, or how long an individual article will remain published.
Links here point only to other pages of this site. Where a piece refers to a modification, a tool or a community resource, it does so by description in the text rather than by hyperlink, because we do not wish to send readers to destinations whose content and privacy behaviour we cannot examine or vouch for.
This site carries no address, no telephone number, no form and no submission mechanism, by design. Nothing can be pitched, requested, submitted or embargoed here. Corrections reach the desk through the ordinary business of somebody noticing an error in public, which has proved sufficient.
This page may be revised as the publication changes. Revisions apply from the moment 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.
