The Christmas of '97 still haunts my wallet. I'd been saving pocket money for months, doing extra chores that my mum definitely didn't need done but tolerated anyway because she knew what I was after. The N64 had been out for a year, and every kid at school was either bragging about Mario 64 or lying about having played it at their cousin's house.What I wasn't expecting was DOOM. Actual, proper, demons-and-shotguns DOOM on a…
Disclaimer: This article doesn’t focus solely on Crash 4: It’s About Time. As we all know by now, it’s meant to set up my review of Crash 4, so there will be some major spoilers for the entire Crash Bandicoot timeline. Crash Bandicoot has always felt like the PlayStation mascot. Growing up in America, Crash was everywhere. Orange boxes, toy stores, comic books, cereal cards; he was omnipresent. But I wasn’t American. I grew up…
# Bloodborne Carl asked me to take this one because apparently I’m “the only person on the team who didn’t play this obsessively in 2015 and won’t just gush for two thousand words.” Fair enough. I came to Bloodborne in 2023, nearly a decade after everyone else had already formed their opinions, memorised the boss patterns, and argued themselves hoarse about whether it’s better than Dark Souls. I didn’t have any of that history. I…
I was sixteen years old and had roughly $12 to my name. During my free time I found myself spending quite an excessive amount of time lurking around the electronics department of our local Toys R Us. Think back to what video game stores used to look like — everything was locked-up behind glass or you had to take those flimsy little paper ticket thingies. But they always had a demo unit tucked-away somewhere in…
Last Friday night, I found myself elbow-deep in Amazon's recommendation algorithm when it suggested something that made me pause mid-scroll: the Sega Flashback Games Collection. Now, I've got a complicated relationship with these plug-and-play devices—half of me lights up at the convenience, while the other half mutters about RGB cables and original hardware. But curiosity won, as it always does when Sega's involved.The box arrived Tuesday, and honestly? First impressions were solid. AtGames has been…
There's this game that sits in my memory like a secret nobody else seemed to share. Fatal Labyrinth for the Mega Drive—or Genesis if you're across the pond. I stumbled across it in one of those rental shops where the boxes were arranged like library books and half the cases had the wrong manual stuffed inside. The cover art looked properly medieval, all dungeons and mysterious towers, which was exactly the sort of thing that…
Marcus is writing this one because Sam wanted to break down the parry timing frame by frame (he did, we will get to that), Joe kept trying to compare the boss fights to Contra on Genesis (there is a point there, but not the one he thinks he is making), and John just wants everyone to admit that a game this punishing has no business also being this beautiful. Carl asked me to sort out…
When I started playing city-building games I didn’t take them too seriously. I’m used to the idea of games teaching me something, but playing SimCity was the first time I truly experienced educational games. I had played many games before picking up SimCity, but never had a game mirrored my career as closely as this. I’ve worked as a construction manager for over a decade. Managing construction crews is all about deadlines, resources, balancing budgets,…
Let’s just get this out of the way: I never played Banjo-Kazooie upon its release back in 1998. I know, blasphemy, right? So there I was rocking my Amiga 1200 like it was going out of style and thinking console gamers were all nerds with pricey toys who refused to use “real computers.” Yeah, Nintendo had been releasing N64 games for years at this point, and I’m sure I was quite the asshole about it.…
Everything changed for me that summer in 1991. I was fourteen years old and incredibly awkward like all teenagers are and my friend Mike got a Sega Genesis. I had been playing Nintendo since Christmas of 1985 when my folks got me that NES. It was in my blood at that point. But Mike kept inviting me over to play this “system he got” and told me to “trust me man, it’s different.” Trust me…