Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was my introduction to sports gaming. Growing up I played Sega Genesis games and Dreamcast games (Sonic, Streets of Rage, etc.). So naturally I wasn’t interested in sports games. To me they seemed stale and repetitive — kick ball, throw ball, try not to lose. What’s the fun in that? Don’t get me wrong, I think I just enjoyed how unpredictable and creative Sega games let you be. That is until…
The sound hit me first. That metallic crunch when Scorpion's spear connected, followed by the digitized grunt that my Mega Drive's YM2612 chip somehow made sound more menacing than it had any right to. I was hunched over our living room carpet—the brown one with those weird geometric patterns that looked like a computer had hiccups—frantically scribbling move commands on the back of a school exercise book. Down, forward, high punch. Got it. But what…
Day of the Tentacle Review: A Space Shooter That Made Pac-Man Look Easy My name is Marcus. Whilst the rest of the world is debating if modern adventure games can compete with the classics, I’m diving into the source code of Day of the Tentacle Remastered to find out exactly what made the original so innovative in terms of both creativity and engineering. The original Day of the Tentacle was released back in 1993 (according…
To this day, I remember hearing those sounds, in passing during the day, or sometimes even in my sleep. If you were lucky enough to grow up with them too, you know what I’m talking about. The glory of a wash of static as the local electronics store ran their loop of EWAV during the daytime. The coins clinking into slot machines. The frantic beeping of Frogger. The laser noises of Defender whizzing around the…
Myst Review: The Puzzle Game That Brought More PC Sales Than Any Marketing Campaign I’m reviewing Myst now because the rest of my crew spent three hours debating whether Myst is a “real” game or simply an interactive screensaver. Joe is adamant that Myst is merely nice pictures with obscure puzzles that don’t form coherent narratives. Samuel claims that the puzzle design is ingenious and revolutionary. John continues to drone on about how Amiga produced…
The other night I was cleaning out my game room—well, it's really just the spare bedroom with too many consoles stacked on IKEA furniture—when I stumbled across my old Dreamcast VMU. That little memory card with the screen still works, by the way. Thirty minutes of Chao Adventure before the CR2032 gives up, but still. There's something poetic about Sega's last proper console being remembered through a memory card that outlasted the system itself.I bought…
You know that feeling when you're rifling through an old cardboard box and find something you'd completely forgotten about? Last weekend I was digging through my gaming storage looking for a specific memory card, and I stumbled across this folded-up magazine clipping from 1999. Edge magazine, talking about the Dreamcast's "inevitable follow-up" and what Sega might do next in the console wars.Made me laugh, honestly. Here we are in 2025, and Sega's still making brilliant…
I’ll never forget where I was when I realised the entire social structure of Woodridge High School would change forever — it was during fourth period English class, Spring of ’98, when Scott Thompkins attempted to conceal his Game Boy beneath his desk. We were supposed to be reading Catcher in the Rye in Ms. Harrington’s class (if you can call dragging your eyes across the pages “reading” Catcher in the Rye), but I could…
# Forza Horizon 3 Timothy here, and I need to admit something upfront. I came to Forza Horizon 3 in 2026 with basically zero racing game history behind me. Carl keeps telling me I need to play Gran Turismo for “proper context” and Sam won’t stop mentioning frame data for rival AI cars like I’m supposed to understand what that means for a driving game. I don’t. What I do understand is whether a game…
Remember that kid on the school bus with the massive Game Gear who'd burn through six AAs before reaching the next stop? That was me, clutching Sega's nuclear-powered handheld like it was going to solve world hunger. The thing weighed more than my school bag and had the battery life of a mayfly, but bloody hell, it had a backlit color screen when everyone else was squinting at green-tinted Game Boy pixels.I've been chasing that…