The 10 Greatest JRPGs Ever Made: A New Player Ready Crew Ranking Ranking the greatest JRPGs of all time was bound to destroy whatever harmony existed amongst the members of the New Player Ready crew. Joe immediately started saying that Final Fantasy VII needed to be at the top of the list due to the fact that it “altered everything regarding mainstream gaming”. Samuel then presented several passionate defences of 16-bit era design philosophies and…
Saturday morning, 2005. I'm staring at what looks like a chunky grey sandwich with screens, wondering if Nintendo's lost their minds. The DS had landed, and with it came something I'd never expected—a portable version of the game that basically taught me how to exist in three dimensions. Super Mario 64 DS wasn't just a port, though. This was Mario's plumber crew getting the full treatment, and honestly? It changed everything about handheld gaming for…
Grim Fandango Review: The Noir Adventure Game That Demonstrated Games Can Be Art Okay, I need to post this review before Carl starts telling me again how “games as cultural artifacts” and Tim starts telling me all about how modern adventure games have “progressed” beyond Grim Fandango. Let’s be honest – they’ve really gone nowhere. Tim’s as wrong as he usually is, and I’m going to demonstrate why this 1998 masterpiece is the pinnacle of…
I remember opening my Christmas presents in 1998. I was 21 years old, driving home from Arizona State University for winter break and wondering what games I’d be getting. Little did I know that my parents had bought me a PlayStation and Spyro the Dragon. “You’ve been talking about that purple dragon game,” my mom informed me. I don’t think I had outright said I wanted it to anyone, but I suppose my sighing in…
The smell hit me first—that particular mix of pizza grease and teenage determination that only a proper four-player split-screen session could produce. We're talking summer of '97, my mate Dave's living room, and the N64 controller cables snaking across the carpet like some sort of electronic pasta disaster. His mum had given us strict instructions about not spilling anything on the new beige carpet, which naturally made every sip of Tango feel like defusing a…
Tim here and I’ve got to say that I’ve had some concerns since I started my retro gaming journey. Everyone seems to rave about this game called Doom, how it changed everything, how it essentially birthed the first-person shooter as we know it today. Since I’ve come to this game completely cold, without experiencing the supposed revolution it brought, I was sceptical of how good a 30-year-old game could be. Well, I was wrong. Doom…
Timothy here — and I need to get something off my chest immediately. When I was first looking into retro gaming a few years ago, everybody would tell me I needed to play the original Mega Man games. “They’re classics,” they’d say. “You gotta play the Mega Man series.” Well, I did, and honestly, they were like doing homework. Stiff controls, crazy difficult spikes, and graphics that seemed ancient even to me. I was about…
Last night I found myself elbow-deep in a cardboard box that's been following me through three house moves, excavating Mega Drive carts like archaeological treasures. My wife rolled her eyes as I held up Shinobi III and made that satisfied "ahhhh" sound you make when you find a twenty in last winter's coat pocket. "You know you've got that on about four different compilations now," she said. True. But there's something about the weight of…
Sam has been arguing for months that the original Rayman should be taken seriously in platformer discussions. And I think he may be right after playing Ubisoft’s debut PlayStation exclusive, which took around two dozen hours to complete. It was released in the United States on 7 September 1995 via Wikipedia. Although originally intended as a quirky character design, Rayman turned out to be the first genuinely good platformer for PlayStation, showing the potential of…
The cartridge slot clicked with that familiar satisfying snap, and there I was again—standing in that cursed carnival town of Termina, watching the same three-day cycle begin anew. My mate Dave had warned me about Majora's Mask when he lent it to me back in 2001. "It's proper weird, this one," he'd said, tapping the gold cart like it might bite. "Not like normal Zelda."He wasn't wrong. Where Ocarina of Time felt like an epic…