Last night I was digging through a dusty box in the spare room—you know, the one that's been sealed since we moved house three years ago—and I found my old Sega cartridge collection. Thirty-odd games stacked like plastic dominoes, each one carrying enough memories to power a Mega Drive for a week. It got me thinking about how Sega's library across all their systems was this brilliant, chaotic tapestry of creativity that never quite got…
Sam’s thoughts on Sonic 3 & Knuckles’ achievement in technology: The entire Sonic team brought everything they had learned from making the prior 3 Sonic games together with the addition of the lock-on technology to create the biggest and most ambitious platformer on Mega Drive at that time. This was not just the best Sonic game to date — It was the first true representation of how to combine both creativity and technological advancements to…
I have to say – when my daughter first started telling me about Chrono Trigger years ago (2011), I wasn’t that intrigued. Coming from a gaming background where 16-bit still looked “bad” to me because of Super Metroid (another game I picked up because of my daughter – I got it a year before Chrono Trigger), I thought it was just another old RPG that I would never play. She mentioned it to me over…
The Technical Evolution of Racing Games: From Vector Graphics to Polygons I get what it takes to send code out on constrained hardware. I know the impossible optimisations you need to develop a game that has some sort of responsiveness when you’re limited by kilobytes of memory and a CPU that’s clocked at single-digit megahertz. Racing games offer the ideal way to see the technical development of the 80s and 90s since each generation had…
“We knew it was going to get messy when we decided to rank the greatest PC games of the 1990s.” “It wasn’t until the argument spilled into the chat for a week straight that we realised it was going to take some effort to reach a consensus.” The disagreements raged on for three weeks; we established strict guidelines in order to resolve these debates. We agreed upon criteria that included: 1) The game must have…
Walking into my local indie game shop last weekend, I spotted something that made my heart skip a beat—a pristine copy of Moonwalker for the Mega Drive, complete with that distinctive silver spine and Michael Jackson's unmistakable silhouette. The asking price was steep enough to make my wallet whimper, but seeing that game again transported me straight back to 1990, when everything about it seemed impossibly cool and slightly mad in equal measure.You have to…