Last Sunday I was digging through a box of N64 cartridges in the loft—you know how it is, searching for one specific game and somehow ending up with dust in your hair and a sudden urge to replay everything you'd forgotten you owned. Anyway, buried beneath copies of Mario Kart that still smell faintly of childhood birthday parties, I found Glover. That weird little rubber ball game that nobody quite knew what to make of…
Samuel here – trying to get the kids off to school whilst wrestling with a colour drifted CRT television. I’ll be honest I was sceptical when Mark of the Ninja came out in 2012. A 2D stealth game from Klei Entertainment? Same people behind the wacky animated adventures? Seemed like a huge mismatch of genres to me. Stealth games were 3D games – cameras moved freely and the environment affected how you played. How were…
I went to a small game store in Denver — it’s probably gone now — to look for a copy of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. When I got back to my house and booted it up, I was greeted by the opening sequence. Wow! You’re playing as some Belmont dude fighting Dracula and the voice acting is…well, it’s a real thing. “What is a man? A pitiful little pile of secrets!” delivered with all…
The worst part about Donkey Kong 64 isn't the backtracking or the bloated collect-a-thon madness that every reviewer mentions. No, the worst part is how it absolutely ruined my summer of '99 because I couldn't put the bloody thing down.I'd just gotten the Expansion Pak—that chunky red brick that made your N64 feel properly next-gen—and DK64 was bundled with it. Free game, right? Except nothing's free when it costs you three months of daylight and…
My mate Dave knocked on the door last Saturday morning holding a battered cardboard box like it contained the Holy Grail. Inside? His dad's old 486 DX2/66 complete with a double-speed CD-ROM drive that made sounds like a cement mixer having an argument with itself. "Thought you might want this," he said, grinning. That's when it hit me—we're living through the archaeology of our own childhood, and the 90s PC gaming scene is buried treasure…
Heroes of Might and Magic III Review: The Best Turn Based Strategy Game Ever Created John’s writing about this one because the rest of the team spent an entire Zoom meeting arguing about whether turn based strategy peaked with Civilization or Total War and completely forgot that the best strategy games actually come from the world of computer gaming. Whilst they are all fighting about console strategy games that barely meet the minimum requirements for…
Going through those empty corridors – hearing Lara’s boots echoing off stone walls – not knowing what the next room will bring (treasure, an ancient death trap) feels a lot like being 16 years old and walking through my Uncle’s old abandoned silver mine, and only having a flashlight and a whole lot of curiosity to guide you through. The puzzle element also hooked me — although, I’ll admit, many of the puzzles in Tomb…
Right, so you've got yourself a Mega Drive—or Genesis if you're across the pond—and you're staring at those AV outputs wondering why your games look like they're being broadcast through a fishbowl. Trust me, I've been there. Back when I first plugged my Mega Drive into mum's Panasonic CRT using the RF switchbox that came in the box, I thought the fuzzy, slightly off-color picture was just how Sonic was supposed to look. Spoiler alert:…
One of the most vividly remembered events in my childhood was the very first time I ever played Pac-Man. I was 8 years old and completely amazed. That would have been around 1982. I had accompanied my dad to the working men’s club in Stockport where he played in their darts team – he’d drink with his pals, toss a few darts, and I would head off to explore the arcade machines scattered among the…
Standing in my mate's bedroom that summer of '89, watching him unwrap what looked like a sleek black spaceship, I had no idea I was witnessing the opening shot of a war that would define my teenage years. The Sega Genesis—or Mega Drive as we called it in the UK—sat there gleaming like something from a sci-fi film, all curves and air vents where my chunky NES was all right angles and beige plastic."Sixteen-bit," Dave…