ok, making a top 10 list of the greatest SNES games almost destroyed friendships for multiple people. One of our guys, Carl, had to referee arguments that escalated to the point of people going fists. Another guy, Joe, would try to list things lower because he played for Sega. Tim wrote an essay about Chrono Trigger even though he only discovered it within the last 5 years. Sam argued for Street Fighter II like a…
The Top Ten Sports Games Ever Made This ranking will break all of your friendships. As soon as David proposed that we rank the greatest sports games of all time, Samuel was already muttering something about Amiga superiority, and Elena was preparing her usual defence of the Dreamcast. Then Joe jumped in and said that NBA Jam deserved to be ranked at the top due to the fact that “chaos beats simulation every time”, prompting…
Management Simulators That Were Fun To Play Bullfrog Productions built management games that really worked. And the best example of that is Theme Hospital. Released in 1997 for Windows, this was a true management simulator. The company took the boring world of health care and made it laugh-out-loud funny without laughing at anyone. When Bullfrog made management sims, they kept them fun to play. Not many games have done that before or since. Other business…
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…
The smell of Saturday morning cartoons still hits me when I boot up my old Mega Drive. There's something about the way those Power Rangers games captured that exact feeling of rushing downstairs in pyjamas, cereal bowl in hand, ready for an hour of pure televisual chaos. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers on the Genesis—or Mega Drive if you're from my neck of the woods—wasn't just a game. It was interactive Saturday morning telly, complete with…
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…