John is doing this one because Carl knows exactly what will happen if Sam gets anywhere near a Metal Gear Solid 4 review. Sam will spend four thousand words on the frame data for Octocamo transitions and never once mention that this is a game about a dying soldier crawling through a Middle Eastern warzone whilst his own body falls apart around him. Tim played this for the first time last year and spent our…
Standing in my mate Dave's bedroom in 1996, staring at his brand-new N64 with Super Mario 64 spinning in the cart slot, I felt something shift in my understanding of what games could be. Not just technically—though watching Mario's face stretch and squish in real-time was pure wizardry—but fundamentally. This wasn't just a step up from 16-bit. This was games stepping through a doorway into somewhere completely different.See, I'd been a proper SNES devotee up…
“`html Timothy began the fight before the Zoom meeting was fully loaded. He was defending Time Crisis against Samuel’s extreme dismissal of “gimmicky light gun nonsense.” Joe had his usual Sega bias going strong, claiming OutRun deserved the number one position because “it sold a lifestyle, not just a game.” MARCUS was constantly interrupting everyone to give them details about frame rates and polygon counts that no one asked about. David was quietly supporting Donkey…
You know what makes me angry? The whole notion that everybody has said the NES was a defining console generation and they are correct — and I was NOT part of that generation. When American kids were unwrapping their brand spanking new NES’s in ’85 I was hanging out in Manchester with my ZX Spectrum waiting for Nintendo to release “that magic” machine to the UK for another 18 months. And by the time they…
Timothy here, and I am going to admit something that will likely cause my teammates to roll their eyes. Up until last month, I had never played Time Crisis. Yes, I know, Joe is probably already typing an angry response telling me that I missed out on one of the quintessential arcade experiences of the 90s. However, since I came to this as a newcomer, I can confidently say that Time Crisis has held up…
I am Tim, and I’ve got to say something that is going to make Joe roll his eyes so hard he’ll dislodge them from his eye sockets. For approximately six months, I thought Galaga was nothing more than a straightforward space shooter. In the end, I was completely wrong, and finding out how wrong has been one of my most humbling gaming experiences; it reminded me of why the classics, well, they remain classics. Coming…
I have an excellent memory for when and where I played specific games. When thinking about Metal Gear Solid, I remember it like it was yesterday. Mike’s basement. January 1, 1999. I was hanging out with my friend Mike down in his basement, pizza boxes and all. The smell of old pizza boxes mixed with that distinctive basement stench that no amount of air freshener could hide. He had picked up this new game that…
Christmas of 1985 was not supposed to go like this. I had my heart set on a bike that I had been coveting for months. I made my parents hint at it incessantly. I put little circles around the red Schwinn in the Sears catalogue. I wrote reminders in their calendars to go buy it for me. What I got was a Sega Master System because it was on clearance at Kay-Bee Toys and they…
Marcus here, and I’d like to explain before Carl starts to argue again why Daytona USA is the arcade racing experience that revolutionised our perception of racing games. What I’m going to say has nothing to do with nostalgia – it’s about technical innovation, accessibility and the rare union of leading edge technology and pure arcade entertainment. Daytona USA was released in 1994 (Wikipedia), the first game on the Model 2 arcade system board developed…
Nothing quite prepared me for the moment I first throttled a motorcycle down the asphalt while simultaneously clubbing a rival rider with a chain. I mean, obviously I was sitting on our living room carpet, not actually astride a Kawasaki—but Road Rash 3 had this way of making the Mega Drive controller vibrate through your bones until you forgot where your thumbs ended and the handlebars began.This was peak EA, back when they'd slap "if…