My mate Dave called me mental for keeping a working Mega Drive plugged into my old CRT, but honestly? He just doesn't get it. Last weekend I was digging through my collection—you know the drill, plastic cases stacked like wonky dominoes behind the telly—and I stumbled across something that made me proper nostalgic. Warriors of the Eternal Sun, still sitting there in its battered case, the manual pages yellowed like old tea bags.See, here's the…
Saturday afternoon, 1991. I'm hunched over our family's beige Amstrad PC, the monitor humming like a disgruntled refrigerator, when my mate James rocks up with a floppy disk that looks like it's been through a washing machine. "Trust me," he says, sliding it across the desk like contraband. "This'll blow your mind."The disk label, written in fading biro, simply read "Captain Comic." I'd never heard of it, but that was half the thrill with shareware…
John here and I’ve got to bring up some old business that’s been eating at my brain for nearly 30 years. Whilst everyone else was busy mucking about with their fancy video game consoles back in the early ’90s, PC gaming was providing experiences that would make any Mega Drive user green with envy. XCOM: UFO Defense (a.k.a., UFO: Enemy Unknown if you’re one of the lucky ones living outside of America) was more than…
You know what drove me absolutely mental last weekend? I was trying to show my mate Dave how clean my Knulli setup looked on my RG35XX, scrolling through what I thought was my perfectly organized Genesis collection. Instead, I'm clicking through a digital nightmare—ROMs scattered like confetti, duplicates everywhere, and games buried in folders that made no sense. Dave just stood there watching me frantically search for Streets of Rage 2 while I muttered increasingly…
Joe here, and yes, Carl asked me to review a PlayStation game. I know what you’re thinking – the Genesis fanboy reviewing Sony’s console? Well, I am a Genesis fanboy but I am not blind. The original PlayStation had some fine games and Syphon Filter is definitely one of them. And it illustrates exactly why Sony’s first party development strategy was so great whilst Sega was too busy killing itself with horrible business decisions. Again.…
Carl assigned me this one specifically because Sam wouldn’t shut up about frame data in fighting games during our last call and someone needed to write about a genre that isn’t about punching people in the face. Tim volunteered, obviously, because he “just got a PS3” (it’s 2024, mate) and wanted to write about how revolutionary GT5’s physics engine is. I told him to sit down. I’ve been racing games since Out Run in the…
There's something about that electric blue plastic that still makes me grin like an idiot. I'm talking about the Pikachu N64, obviously—that wonderful, ridiculous console that Nintendo dropped on us in 2000, complete with Pokémon Hey You, Pikachu! and a microphone that barely worked but somehow didn't matter.I remember the exact moment I saw one for the first time. My mate Dave had somehow convinced his mum to get him one for his birthday, and…
My mum used to say television was the devil's picture box, but even she couldn't resist the absolute chaos of Blankety Blank. Saturday teatime meant Terry Wogan winking at celebrities who'd clearly had a liquid lunch, and those felt-tip pens that squeaked against the answer boards like fingernails on a blackboard. I was probably seven, maybe eight, sitting cross-legged on the carpet with a plate of beans on toast, watching grown-ups make complete pillocks of…
Hi there, my name is Joe and prior to Carl delivering his standard commentary about how Command & Conquer “pretty much invented the RTS genre” (which simply isn’t the case; I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree about this one) I’m going to give you some insight regarding the game that really raised the bar for real time strategy whilst everybody else was still hanging back. Total Annihilation was released in 1997 and…
At seventeen, I considered myself to be too mature and intelligent for something as…childish looking as Earthbound. All my friends were talking about Chrono Trigger, and Final Fantasy III (which we later learned was actually Final Fantasy VI), and some other bizarre title with scratch and sniff cards and cartoon style marketing. The box cover art didn’t even look like any of the RPGs I was used to. I just thought it was a marketing…