There's this moment—and if you were there, you know exactly what I'm talking about—when you first saw Perfect Dark running with the Expansion Pak installed. Not just running, mind you. Actually *running*. Smooth framerates, four-player split-screen that didn't chug like a diesel engine in January, textures that looked less like abstract art and more like, well, textures.I remember standing in Electronics Boutique (before it became GAME, before GAME became whatever it is now), holding that…
Joe has been going on about this for weeks; saying Street Fighter II should receive a lot of the credit for essentially inventing competitive gaming as we know it. We have all pointed out to Joe that fighting games have existed since before 1991, but Joe will not listen to that either. Joe continues to go on about the frame data of the game, and how he is the first person to find out about…
My controller throwing moment happened because of summer of ’89 and Mega Man. I hurled my controller across the basement like I was Joe Nathan pitching for the Twins. Seriously… tossed it across the room. I remember the exact moment it happened too because my dad came stomping downstairs in his work attire (shirt and tie) asking me at almost midnight what that crashing sound was. Poor NES controller. By then it was barely held…
I remember the moment gaming became something more to me. Christmas Day, 1991. Age thirteen. Sitting on the floor in front of the TV in my Minneapolis living room. I had opened three gifts that morning, each of which had contained clothes. This fourth one was boxy-shaped, felt like it weighed enough to be a videogame, and rattled like a SNES cartridge when I shook it. Holy shit, I thought, as I tore the paper…
Right, let me tell you something about Donkey Kong that most people get wrong as well. Everyone yells and shouts about how it “introduced Mario to the world”, but they’re missing the real point of Donkey Kong. In fact, Jumpman wasn’t even called Mario at this stage – he was just Jumpman. More importantly, Donkey Kong didn’t just introduce a character – it bloody well created the platformer genre as we know it today. Before…
The smell of a freshly opened N64 cartridge—that slightly chemical tang mixed with possibility—still hits different when I think about WWF No Mercy. My cousin Jamie brought it round one Saturday afternoon in late 2000, grinning like he'd discovered fire. "This one's actually good," he said, which was high praise coming from someone who'd endured WCW vs. nWo World Tour's clunky controls and still complained about them two years later.See, wrestling games had this reputation…
Sports games have always been one of my favourite genres. I accidentally fell into them. Match Day was released during my avid Spectrum playing years – back in 1985 I had saved months of my pocket money to buy International Karate, but my local computer shop had sold out. So buy something else, the computer shop owner said. He was a northern lad, big beard and a permanent smell of cigarette smoke about him —…
You know what's funny about ClayFighter Tournament Edition? I bought it purely because the box art looked mental. There's something about claymation characters punching each other's heads into silly putty shapes that just screams "this is going to be absolutely barmy," and honestly—it delivered on that promise in spades.I remember the day I picked it up from our local Toys"R"Us. Must've been '98 or '99, right in that sweet spot when N64 games were hitting…
The Add-On That Proved CD Gaming Was Coming, But Cost Too Much to Get There I am a history teacher from Phoenix who has been a fan of Sega since I was a kid. I have argued over many years that Sega got the shaft in terms of the timing of the market and that Sega made better business decisions than people are willing to admit. I will never stop saying that “blast processing” is…
In 2011, I went into a barroom brawl that had been going on for twenty years. Now, everybody was arguing about something that happened when they were 12 years old. I had missed this the first time around – I was working construction, and raising a kid – but I’m 41 years old now and I’m trying to figure out which 16-bit system I want to buy first, and everybody wants to give me an…