This is the story of how GoldenEye conquered my university experience and why everything that happened was absolutely fantastic. It all started back in October 1997, when I finally got myself an N64 (a ludicrously expensive bit of technology at the time – I had to save up roughly two and half months wages from my part time job). My purchase included the N64 bundle game GoldenEye 007. Honestly I wasn’t that bothered about it.…
Western RPGs have been around since the late 1980s, but there has never been an RPG that matches the scope and depth of Baldur’s Gate II. Released on 21 September 2000 via Wikipedia, Shadows of Amn took the foundations laid by the first game and turned them into a complete and comprehensive RPG experience. Rather than spend time explaining the engine and the basics of D&D, the second game assumes you understand those aspects and…
Saturday afternoons in 1991 had a particular rhythm. Mum would disappear into the kitchen with Radio 4 burbling about something appropriately serious, Dad would commandeer the garage for mysterious DIY projects that usually involved swearing at screws, and I'd have the living room to myself. The Mega Drive sat there like a black plastic altar, and more often than not, I'd find myself sliding that familiar blue cartridge into the slot. Michael Jackson's Moonwalker wasn't…
I’m Sam, and I want to get one thing settled after our team meeting. Tim said that action RPGs with cooperative gameplay are “basically button masher games with stat sheets.” Honestly, that’s a pretty big deal — and I think he’s never actually played Secret of Mana. I get that the genre can seem overwhelming to someone just getting into it, but to dismiss one of the most important cooperative experiences in video game history…
Shhh… don’t tell anyone but I still have my Gateway 2000 mouse pad at my workplace. I’m not sitting here at my desk trying to make some kind of retro gamer statement with it. I simply liked the mouse pad and it was the right dimensions to fit my mouse and well it must have been the right dimensions to withstand moving THREE times and every other mouse pad getting lost along the way. But…
The Curse of Monkey Island Review: Hand-Drawn Visual Style & Perfect Voice Acting Hello, Marcus here, and I want to talk about something that has bothered me in the way people discuss point-and-click adventure games for years. People say The Curse of Monkey Island is nothing more than “a lot of nice looking graphics,” and don’t understand what LucasArts did to advance the technology behind their games. The Curse of Monkey Island was released on…
The Only Reason We Have Modern RPGs: Baldur’s Gate II Was The First To Get It Right I’m Joe, and I have to say one thing before we look at BioWare’s work of art. Carl thinks the current crop of RPGs, like The Witcher 3, are the ultimate expression of the RPG genre, while Tim believes that JRPGs do a better job of telling stories. Both of them are wrong, and this is why: Baldur’s…
I was digging through my game collection the other night—you know, that annual ritual where you convince yourself you're "organizing" but really you're just reliving the good times—when my fingers found that familiar purple spine. Beyond Oasis. Even after all these years, that cartridge still makes me smile like an idiot.See, here's the thing about Sega's approach to RPGs in the mid-90s. While Square and Enix were crafting these massive, turn-based epics that demanded forty-hour…
John is writing this one, mostly because Carl keeps insisting Up Your Arsenal is the best Ratchet and Clank game and somebody needed to step in before he starts drafting a formal ranking document again. Tim just finished his first ever playthrough of A Crack in Time last month and won’t stop talking about Mr Zurkon, Sam has spent two weeks analysing the weapon upgrade paths like they’re fighting game frame data, and Joe keeps…
Escape from Monkey Island Review: The 3D Experiment That Divided Fans The first thing about Escape from Monkey Island is that LucasArts took a huge risk by moving Guybrush Threepwood into the third dimension. Half the fans of the adventure game community went wild with excitement and the other half were terrified. As someone who has been a fan of the series since the early 1990s and spent countless hours with this divisive title, I…