You know what's funny about growing up with sports games? My dad never got them. He'd watch Match of the Day religiously, knew every player's transfer history back to the Jurassic period, but couldn't understand why I'd want to *play* football on the telly when I could kick a ball outside. "It's not real," he'd say, shaking his head as I lined up another penalty in Sensible Soccer. Thing is, he was wrong and right…
My mate Dave called me up last Tuesday, proper excited about something he'd found in his loft. "You'll never guess what I've dug up," he said, and honestly, knowing Dave's collecting habits, it could've been anything from a mint condition Jaguar CD to a box of cereal from 1987. Turns out it was his old Nintendo 64 with four controllers, all the sticks still tight as the day they left the factory. Lucky sod."Right," he…
# Halo 5: Guardians Right, I’m not the usual person you’d expect to write about a modern console shooter. My patch is arcade PCBs, CRT monitors and keeping thirty year old power supplies from catching fire. But Carl asked me to cover Halo 5: Guardians because the argument in our group chat wasn’t really about story or sandbox balance. It was about frame rate, resolution and what Microsoft’s hardware actually let 343 Industries get away…
The day I first heard the Imperial March crackling through my CRT's blown speakers, courtesy of an N64 cartridge, I knew something special was happening. Here was the console that had already blown my mind with Mario's polygonal face, now promising to deliver the galaxy far, far away right into my living room. And you know what? It mostly delivered.Star Wars games on the Nintendo 64 weren't just ports or afterthoughts—they were proper attempts to…
# Little Big Planet I came into this one blind. Everyone on the team has history with Little Big Planet except me, which apparently makes me the perfect person to write about it because Carl wants “someone who doesn’t get weepy about Sackboy.” Joe actually said the words “you weren’t there for the marketing campaign” like that’s a real argument about game quality. Sam just kept talking about physics based platforming as if that explains…
Carl asked me to cover this one because apparently I’m the only person on the team who’ll admit to crying during a video game, and Heavy Rain made me properly well up during the origami killer reveal on my first playthrough back in 2010. John still takes the mickey out of me for that. Fair enough, really, because Heavy Rain asks you to do things no other game was asking players to do at the…
Samuel normally spends his evenings coaxing dust out of cartridge slots and defending the honour of the Mega Drive, so when Carl asked him to cover Final Fantasy XIV for the site, the room went quiet for a second. Then everyone laughed, because Samuel covering a subscription based MMO on PS4 felt like asking a vinyl collector to review a streaming service. Here’s the thing though, Samuel has put more hours into this game than…
Last night, I was reorganizing my game collection—you know how it is, the eternal quest for the perfect shelf arrangement—when I grabbed my grey N64 cartridge of Super Mario 64. The weight of it felt familiar in my hands, that specific density of quality plastic housing something magical. Got me thinking about Nintendo's first-party lineup for the 64, and honestly? They didn't just make games for that console. They made statements.I remember the exact moment…
My mate Dave had this habit of picking the weirdest games at the rental shop. While everyone else was grabbing the obvious choices—Sonic, Streets of Rage, whatever had the shiniest box art—Dave would emerge from the Genesis section clutching something called General Chaos, grinning like he'd discovered fire. I thought he'd lost his mind. The box looked like a Saturday morning cartoon had exploded all over it, complete with tiny pixelated soldiers that seemed more…
Sam is writing this one, mostly because nobody else on the crew wants to defend Killzone 2’s controls, and somebody needs to before Tim starts moaning again about “why does aiming feel like wading through treacle.” That treacle feeling is the entire point, and it’s taken me roughly 400 hours across three console generations to convince the rest of the crew that Guerrilla Games made one of the most deliberately designed shooters of the PS3…