Christmas morning, 1987. I’m seven years old. I’m looking at this orange plastic gun that came bundled with our new Nintendo. My brother had been playing Super Mario Bros. for hours on end, but when we popped in that Duck Hunt cartridge everything changed. I aimed the Zapper at the TV — our console TV, a big Zenith with faux wood panelling that weighed about 200lbs — centered the reticle on-screen, pressed the button, and…
I’m Joe, and before Carl gets started telling me OutRun wasn’t a Genesis exclusive (which it really should have been) let me tell you why Sega’s 1986 arcade game OutRun is the best driving game ever created — not the most realistic, nor the most technologically advanced; the best. Where every other racing game was trying to sell you on the fact you’re really racing a car, OutRun was selling you a dream of cruising…
OK. Full disclosure time; I’ve been playing Sonic games since 1991. For reasons I don’t quite understand, I’m still obsessed now almost thirty years later. Well. Ok. Maybe I do know why I got into Sonic all that time ago, just can’t work out why I haven’t mellowed with age. Summer of 1991; Dave’s house in Stockport. His big brother had bought himself a shiny new Sega Mega Drive, along with a game about a…
Timothy here. I am going to have to say that I have been bothered by a lot since I first started playing Golden Axe about 3 months ago. Joe says this is a masterpiece that defined the Genesis, whilst Carl nods along and Sam talks about “frame data” being “primitive but functional”. As someone who did not grow up feeding quarters to arcade machines, I have to ask: what made this worth all those lunches?…
I was nineteen-years-old opening it for the first time. I was meant to be studying for a calculus mid-term, but Kevin and I were barricaded inside his dorm room clutching textbooks and scribbled notes while simultaneously paging through his collection of GamePro magazines. Procrastination will do that to you: suddenly everything is interesting except for the thing you should be doing. Hidden away in the back pages of GamePro was a preview for Final Fantasy…
Christmas morning, 1996. I'm sitting cross-legged on carpet that's probably seen better decades, staring at a box that looks like it was designed by aliens who'd never seen a games console before. The Nintendo 64. That weird three-pronged controller sticking out like a threat. Mum's already muttering about "another bloody machine for the telly," but I can't hear her properly because my heart's doing that thing where it forgets how to beat normally.The game bundled…
Joe’s been going on and on about Streets of Rage for weeks now, so I’m happy to take over for this post because I wanted to talk about something else entirely – basically, the fundamentals of the whole thing. As usual, we’ve been arguing about arcade hierarchies and I’m sick of hearing about it, so I thought I’d give the nod to a game that should be recognised for changing the face of gaming culture…
The Game Boy kept me sane during what might have been the longest car trip in recorded history. I didn’t own any video games that summer of ‘91 aside from Tetris. Dad was driving cross-country from New Jersey to Kansas to visit relatives. You know, the quintessential family vacation that everybody takes because that’s what families did back then. My brother Jake and I were fighting about everything and nothing for six hours straight when…
When I came to Space Invaders for the first time, I will admit I saw no more than just the most rudimentary elements of a game. A black screen with white dots floating around – that was supposed to be the basis of everything? However, after spending quality time playing the game and understanding what it achieved, I have come to appreciate what Tomohiro Nishikado accomplished with the creation of Space Invaders. In 1978, the…
Christmas 1985 wasn’t supposed to be like other Christmasses we’d had as a family. It wasn’t because my dad suddenly came up with some crazy innovative idea – far from it. It was because my dad talked mum into letting him buy a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) for our house. Dad was a big fan of our ZX Spectrum – probably still is – but somehow getting a Nintendo was him pulling off a feat…