My mate Dave popped round last Tuesday with his laptop, looking like he'd discovered fire. "You've got to see this," he said, firing up what looked suspiciously like Mario 64 running in a window on his desktop. The catch? No N64 in sight, just some software called Project64 doing things that would've blown my teenage mind.Here's the thing about N64 emulation—it's brilliant when it works, absolutely maddening when it doesn't, and somehow both at the…
Right, let me tell you something about Warcraft II that people have totally got backwards. Everyone bangs on about how StarCraft revolutionised real-time strategy and made Blizzard famous. Rubbish. It was Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness that actually did the dirty work, and I will die on this hill because I spent hundreds of hours with both of them on the original hardware. Not nostalgia by the way. I still have the CDs, I’ve run…
There's a cardboard box in my attic that weighs more than it should. Inside, wrapped in old towels, sit the machines that taught me what "fun" could be. Sometimes I climb up there just to hold them—plastic cases that once hummed with electricity and possibility, now silent but somehow still warm to the touch.My journey started with that famous wooden rectangle. The Atari 2600 didn't just play games; it occupied our living room like a…
Tim here, and I am going to defend a game that may not be clear to anyone who only knows stealth through modern stealth titles such as Hitman or Metal Gear Solid. Thief: The Dark Project was not a friendly game. Thief did not label enemy locations on your mini-map. Thief would not save your game automatically after 30 seconds. As someone who missed this game when it first came out, I had to unlearn…
There's this moment burned into my brain from Christmas 1996. I'm sitting cross-legged on our living room carpet—you know, that rough brown stuff that left marks on your shins—holding an N64 controller for the first time. The thing looked like it was designed by aliens who'd heard about human hands but never actually seen them. Three prongs? What were they thinking?But then I pressed start on Super Mario 64, and everything changed.That plumber's face filled…
Look, I’m just going to be honest with you about Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun. It sundered our community when it was released on 27th August 1999 (Wikipedia), and, like, we’re still arguing about it to this day. Joe believes it’s the peak of the series’ ambition, Tim thinks it betrayed everything that made the first one special, and my feelings lie somewhere in the middle where I admire what Westwood were trying to do…
Man, October of 1997 was an amazing month to be a gamer. I had recently purchased a brand new Pentium 166 MHz PC (yeah, back then PCs were rated by clock speed, and “Pentium 166 MHz” was basically the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti of computers). And I was pretty damn proud of my 32 MB of RAM. Enough bragging. Point is, I thought I was ready for whatever games could throw at me. I strutted…
You know that argument that split playground friendships back in the day? The one that made kids choose sides like they were picking teams for PE? I'm talking about the great console divide that had us all convinced we had to pledge allegiance to either the chunky grey cartridge or the sleek black disc. But here's the thing—when it came to Mario, both the Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 delivered something special, just in completely…
There's something oddly magical about playing Super Mario 64 on a dual-screened handheld while sitting on a train that's gently swaying through the English countryside. I mean, you're holding what amounts to Nintendo's greatest 3D platformer ever made—arguably their most important game since the original Super Mario Bros.—and it's been squeezed into a device that fits in your jacket pocket. That's still mental to me, even though the DS version came out back in 2004.I…
“`html A few years ago I realised that the last twenty years of stealth gaming had seen some incredible developments and in my mind there was one title that stands above all others for its innovative design and overall excellence – Hitman 2: Silent Assassin. Released in 2002 (Wikipedia), this was not simply a stealth game with added stealth elements. It was a fully-fledged murder puzzle that required players to use their analytical skills and…