The other evening, while sorting through a box of old game magazines—you know the drill, sticky-taped spines and pages that smell faintly of someone else's childhood—I stumbled across a yellowing preview of Shenmue III that made me laugh and wince in equal measure. Not because it was wrong, exactly, but because it captured that eternal Sega optimism: the company that always promised the future and somehow delivered it sideways, upside down, or three years too…
My first experience with the game DOOM was in 2011 when my daughter told me I had to “play this old shooter.” She said, “Dad you can’t possibly understand gaming history without playing DOOM.” I was somewhat hesitant to play it initially due to wondering how well an “old” computer game could be. Boy was I mistaken. After loading a source port version of DOOM onto my laptop (yes, I know that’s not the same…
The Most Effective Strategy Games Ever Created: A Finalised Ranking Which Almost Drove Us Crazy We knew that listing the most effective strategy games ever produced would ultimately result in another couple of weeks of broken friendships and a growing number of group chat blockages. Marcus immediately began arguing that real time games are less mentally taxing than turn based games whilst David said that any strategy game which did not include multiplayer could never…
The plastic shell cracked under my thumb with that satisfying *pop* that meant business. I was eight, maybe nine, wrestling with a copy of Super Mario 64 that had picked up some dust bunnies from underneath my mate's sofa. Dad was watching from the kitchen doorway, shaking his head at my technique—"You'll break the bloody thing," he muttered, not understanding that cartridge maintenance was basically surgery and I was the family's unofficial Nintendo surgeon general.Those…
It is hard to put into words exactly how I reacted the first time I threw a punch in a video game, that actually hit something that resembled a human being. I know this will sound insane now, but that is how I remembered it. At forty-one years old, I had been studying the history of gaming for approximately one year. During that time I went through all of the classic games that my daughter…
My mate Dave convinced me to start cataloguing every N64 game I could get my hands on about three years ago. "You've got loads of them anyway," he said, gesturing at my slightly concerning pile of grey cartridges. "Might as well write down what's worth playing." What started as a weekend project has turned into this bizarre archaeological dig through Nintendo's 64-bit library, and honestly? I'm still finding gems I'd completely forgotten existed.The thing about…
“Alright, let’s get this settled,” Carl declared after what was meant to be an informal Thursday night phone call. “Greatest stealth games of all time. Ranked properly. No fudging with honourable mentions.” Three weeks of the most vicious arguments since the Street Fighter 2 tier list debacle ensued. Timothy continued to argue that Thief did it first and therefore deserves to be recognised more than anyone else. Joe nearly walked off the group chat when…
Tim wrote this review so we get the view of someone who found out about this classic way after everybody else decided that it did indeed count as the 4th Indiana Jones movie. So here’s why the 1992 point and click adventure game is the definitive Indiana Jones experience outside of the original trilogy. When LucasArts combined their SCUMM adventure game engine with the Indiana Jones licence they produced something truly remarkable. Fate of Atlantis…
The other day my kid found my old Game & Watch collection buried in a shoebox behind some Christmas decorations. "Dad, why is this Game Boy so thick?" he asked, holding up my pristine Donkey Kong unit like it was some ancient artifact. I couldn't help but laugh—here's this device that once felt like pure magic in my eight-year-old hands, and to him it looks clunky as a house brick.But that got me thinking about…
When I was 40 years old, and spending my time to catch up on every aspect of gaming history that I missed out on during my childhood, I was going to experience something that would completely change my perspective of what can be accomplished in the video game industry. The events surrounding this occurrence occurred approximately 2011, when my daughter continued to encourage me to play more SNES games and specifically encouraged me to play…