You know that sinking feeling when you're holding something brilliant but nobody else seems to get it? That's how I felt clutching my Game Gear in 1991, watching mates queue up for grey Game Boys like lemmings heading for a cliff. Sure, the Game Boy had Tetris—fair play, absolute masterpiece—but my Game Gear had Sonic in full colour, proper sound that didn't wheeze through a tin speaker, and a backlight that meant I could actually…
There's something beautifully ironic about finding a massive collection of Sega Genesis games sitting pretty on a PlayStation console. I mean, back in the day these were sworn enemies—you picked a side and stuck with it like supporting a football team. Yet here I was in 2006, sliding that Sega Genesis Collection disc into my PS2 and feeling like some sort of gaming diplomat bringing peace to the living room.The timing couldn't have been better,…
There's something almost mythical about how perfectly everything aligned for wrestling games in the late 90s. I mean, you had this weird convergence of technology finally catching up to ambition, the Monday Night Wars making wrestling cooler than it had any right to be, and developers who genuinely seemed to understand what made grappling fun rather than just flashy. And right there in the middle of it all was WWF No Mercy, sitting on that…
There's something almost criminal about how Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards gets overlooked in those "best N64 games" conversations. I mean, everyone rattles off the usual suspects—Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, GoldenEye—and fair enough, those are masterpieces. But then Kirby 64 sits there like the quiet kid in class who turned out to be brilliant at everything but never made a fuss about it.I picked up my copy from a Blockbuster that was closing down,…
There's something about sitting in front of a massive CRT on a Saturday afternoon, analog stick getting properly sweaty as you guide a gorilla through jungle canopies, that modern gaming just can't replicate. The N64 era gave us platformers that felt like they were carved from pure joy, and honestly? Rare's Donkey Kong Country series on that system was platforming at its absolute peak.I remember the first time I plugged Donkey Kong 64 into my…
Six AAs. That's what stood between you and portable 16-bit bliss back in 1995, and let me tell you, the Sega Genesis Nomad burned through those batteries like they were made of spite and false promises. I remember seeing one in the wild for the first time at a mate's house—this chunky black brick that somehow managed to swallow entire Genesis cartridges and spit out full-color Sonic on a tiny screen. My brain couldn't quite…
I'd been tinkering with my N64 controller collection last night—cleaning the analog sticks, replacing that infamous bowl-shaped plastic bit that always wore out—when my daughter wandered over and asked why the controller looked "so weird." Three prongs? Who designs a three-pronged controller? Fair question, really. But as I held up that grey plastic boomerang, muscle memory kicked in like an old friend.See, before Super Mario 64, we'd all been living in a flat world. Sure,…
You know what's weird? I was sorting through a box of old Mega Drive carts last Tuesday—the kind of procrastination that happens when you should be doing actual work—and I found my copy of Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. Just holding that chunky plastic shell again brought back this rush of memories from 1990, when celebrity tie-in games were about as common as decent arcade ports and twice as likely to be absolute rubbish.But Moonwalker? That game…
The other day, my kid found one of my old Sega Genesis cartridge boxes in the loft—you know, those long cardboard affairs that could double as rulers if you were desperate enough. Streets of Rage 2, spine slightly bent from where I'd grabbed it too eagerly one too many Saturday mornings. She held it like it was some archaeological find, which… fair enough, really. "Dad, what's this?" she asked, and suddenly I'm explaining the entire…
You know that moment when you're digging through a dusty cardboard box in your mate's garage sale and your fingers brush against something that makes your heart skip? That happened to me three summers ago when I found a pristine copy of Rocket Knight Adventures tucked between some random Mega Drive clamshells. The bloke selling it had no idea what he had—probably figured it was just another mascot platformer trying to ride Sonic's coattails. Twenty…