Right, let me tell you something about Kirby that might surprise you—the pink puffball's jump to 64-bit wasn't just another platformer getting the polygon treatment. It was something special, something that caught me completely off guard when I first got my hands on it.I remember walking into Electronics Boutique (yeah, that was still a thing) sometime in 2000, looking for something to justify the N64 controller gathering dust beside my telly. The salesman—probably seventeen, definitely…
There's something almost mythical about what Angel Studios pulled off when they squeezed Resident Evil 2 onto an N64 cartridge. I remember the first time I heard about it—probably through a mate who worked at Electronics Boutique, whispering about how Capcom was attempting the impossible. You had to understand the context here: RE2 was this sprawling, cinematic beast on PlayStation, crammed onto two discs with FMV sequences, uncompressed audio, and all the digital headroom that…
The plastic creak of four N64 controllers plugged into that chunky grey beast still makes my chest tight with anticipation. Saturday afternoons in 1998 meant one thing in our house: claiming the living room for what my dad called "that bloody racket" and what we called heaven. Four mates, one TV that weighed more than a small car, and Gauntlet Legends spinning in the cartridge slot like it held the secrets of the universe.I'd discovered…
You know what's funny? I can still smell the electronics section at Woolworths on September 26th, 1996. That weird mix of plastic, cardboard, and whatever they used to make those display units shine. I'd been saving pocket money for months, counting down days like it was Christmas and my birthday rolled into one gaming holiday.The N64 launch wasn't just another console release for me—it was the moment everything I thought I knew about video games…
My mate Steve still owes me twenty quid from a bet we made in 1997. The wager? Whether anyone would ever top GoldenEye 007's four-player split-screen battles. He reckoned Quake II would murder it within six months. Poor sod's been dodging that debt for twenty-seven years now, and honestly, I'm not even mad anymore because he was spectacularly wrong.You have to understand something about gaming in the late nineties—proper multiplayer on consoles wasn't really a…
Standing in front of that burgundy CRT television in 1996, watching Mario's pixelated face stretch and scrunch in the file select screen, I had no idea I was witnessing the birth of something that would fundamentally rewire how we think about moving through digital space. My mum was somewhere behind me complaining about the "telly being upside down again" because we'd switched from the regular aerial to the N64's RF adapter, but I couldn't hear…
I've got this theory that the best cooperative games aren't the ones where you're constantly in sync, performing some beautiful ballet of coordinated moves. No, the really memorable ones are where you're both slightly out of step, bumping into each other, accidentally ruining each other's stealth approaches, and somehow still managing to pull off the impossible. That's exactly what made Bonanza Bros on the Mega Drive so bloody brilliant.Picture this: me and my mate Dave,…
You know what? I was digging through my old console collection last weekend, trying to find my copy of Mario Kart 64, when I picked up that distinctive three-pronged beast of a controller. My thumb automatically found that little divot in the analog stick—you know the one, where years of Mario's running had worn the plastic down to a perfect grip. And it hit me like a brick: this weird, alien-looking thing was basically gaming's…
You know what still makes my palms sweat? That first leap in Disney's Aladdin on the Mega Drive. Not the actual platforming—though that cave escape sequence was genuinely tense—but the moment I realized I was holding something that shouldn't have been possible on home hardware. This wasn't just another movie tie-in cash grab cobbled together in six months. This was hand-drawn Disney animation running at 60fps on a machine that cost less than a decent…
I've been staring at this thing for twenty minutes, and I still can't decide if it's brilliant or lazy. The Sega Genesis Game Flashback Collection sits on my coffee table like a time capsule wrapped in modern plastic – forty-two games crammed into a unit that's roughly the size of a paperback novel. No cartridges to blow on. No six-button controller debates. Just plug it into your telly and boom, you're transported back to 1991.My…