Picture this: you're eight years old, Saturday morning, and your mate's older brother has just fired up Sonic the Hedgehog for the first time. That opening Green Hill Zone music hits – you know the one, that bouncy Yamaha FM synthesis that somehow sounds like liquid sunshine – and suddenly every other console sounds like it's playing through a tin can. That was my introduction to the Mega Drive, and honestly? It ruined me for…
My mate Dave had this theory about comic book games in the early nineties—they were all rubbish, he'd say, because nobody could figure out how to make superpowers feel super on a 16-bit console. Then he borrowed my copy of the X-Men game for the Mega Drive, and I didn't see him for three days straight. His mum rang my house asking if he was dead or just "doing that thing with the TV again."The…
You know what still makes my blood boil? Walking into a GAME store in 1999 and seeing rows upon rows of PlayStation cases while the Dreamcast section looked like a forgotten corner booth at a failing car boot sale. Three games. Maybe four if someone hadn't nicked Crazy Taxi again.I was there, mate. I had the console on launch day—well, launch week anyway, because I'm not completely mental and the queues looked insane. But I…
Funny how a three-minute indie track can absolutely demolish you, isn't it? I was minding my own business last Tuesday, scrolling through Spotify's weekly recommendations while my kid demolished a packet of Monster Munch nearby, when Alex G's "Nintendo 64" started playing. Three notes in and I'm transported back to 1997, sitting cross-legged on beige carpet with that distinctive three-pronged controller in my hands.You know that feeling when a song perfectly captures something you didn't…
Look, I'll be honest with you—there's something almost criminal about how Comix Zone slipped through the cracks. I mean, here we had this absolute gem sitting on the Mega Drive, doing things that no other game was even attempting, and most people just… missed it. Completely.I remember the exact moment I first laid eyes on it, actually. Summer of '95, round at my mate Craig's house. His older brother had just come back from uni…