There's something almost mythical about the Sega Genesis Nomad that makes me smile every time I spot one at a retro gaming convention. Picture this: it's 1995, and while Nintendo's pushing the Virtual Boy (yeah, that happened), Sega drops this absolute unit of a handheld that can play full Genesis cartridges. Not cut-down versions. Not "special editions." The actual, honest-to-goodness 16-bit games that were melting faces on TV screens worldwide.I remember the first time I…
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…
Carl had to step in twice during our last Zoom call before this one got written, once when Tim said he’d “never really understood the fuss about Skyrim” and once when Sam started talking about combat frame data in a game that famously doesn’t really have any. John’s writing this one because he’s spent more hours in Tamriel than most people spend at university, and because he’s tired of people treating Skyrim’s jank as a…
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…
I’m Marcus and there is one thing that I think has been driving me crazy for decades. Each time someone says that XCOM: Enemy Unknown “brought back” turn based tactics (which it certainly did) I think they should be pointed towards a title that was effectively addressing the very same issues in 1999. Jagged Alliance 2 not only predicted the direction of tactical combat – it improved upon the systems that would eventually become common…
The first time I ever landed a punch in a video game that hit someone that looked like a person was at the age of 41. Sounds silly saying it that way, but that is the honest-to-God truth. By the time I caught up with all the gaming history that I needed to know, I was approximately 40 years old and I had been playing retro games for nearly a year. I had played the…