The smell of a freshly opened N64 cartridge hits different when it's October 1998 and you're holding what should've been impossible. There I was, gripping a copy of Resident Evil 2 for Nintendo 64—a game that had no business existing on a 64MB cartridge when the PlayStation version filled an entire CD. Hell, it needed two discs on Sony's machine. Yet Angel Studios (later Rockstar San Diego) had somehow crammed Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield's…
The three-pronged controller was sitting on my mate's coffee table, and I knew my life was about to change. Not in some dramatic way—I mean, I was still going to eat beans on toast for dinner and argue with my mum about tidying my room. But something fundamental was shifting when Mario's face appeared on that file select screen, elastic and grinning like he'd just learned a secret about reality itself.I'd been gaming for years…
My N64 controller still bears the scars of barrel rolls. There's a slight depression in the Z-trigger where my index finger lived for what felt like entire summers, and if you look closely at the stick, you can see where years of frantic banking left tiny grooves in the plastic. That's the mark of Star Fox 64, a game that turned my living room into a cockpit and made me understand why my dad always…
Something weird happened the other night. I was sorting through a box of old Genesis carts—you know how it is, just meant to grab Streets of Rage 2 for a quick nostalgia hit—when I found my copy of Castlevania: Bloodlines wedged behind some Ecco the Dolphin nonsense. The plastic was slightly yellowed, that distinctive cream that screams "I've lived through the Clinton years," and suddenly I'm sixteen again, arguing with my mate Dave about whether…
There's something magical about watching four mates lean forward on a sofa, each clutching their own third of a three-pronged controller, while Rainbow Road's neon barriers fly past and someone inevitably yells "BLUE SHELL!" like it's a war cry. That was Mario Kart 64 in its natural habitat—your living room, circa 1997, with the smell of microwaved pizza rolls and the distant hum of a CRT warming up.I've spent the better part of twenty-five years…
Standing in my mate Dave's living room on a Tuesday evening in 1993, watching him unpack a shiny new Mega Drive, I had no idea I was witnessing the opening shots of what would become gaming's most legendary battlefield. The box art promised "blast processing" – whatever that meant – and honestly, we were too busy arguing about whose turn it was to plug the RF lead into the telly to care about marketing nonsense.But…
Timothy’s turn to write this one, which the rest of the crew found hilarious because I came to Hollow Knight in 2024, seven years after everyone else had already formed their opinions and fought about them. Carl warned me before I started that “everyone already has a take on this game, so don’t expect anyone to change their mind based on what you write.” Joe just laughed and said something about how I’d “get filtered…
I still remember the first time I saw that chunky white controller with its stylus attached by a coiled cord, sitting next to what looked like a flattened Mega Drive. The Sega Pico landed in our living room sometime in '94, courtesy of my aunt who worked at Toys"R"Us and had this knack for finding the weird educational stuff nobody else's parents knew about. "It's supposed to help with reading," she told my mum, which…
There's something oddly therapeutic about organizing old game boxes by chronology, which is exactly what I found myself doing last weekend when my wife politely suggested the loft needed "a proper sort." Between dusty cardboard and that peculiar smell of aging plastic, I ended up tracing Sega's entire console journey from the Master System right through to the Dreamcast's final bow. Amazing how holding these machines again brings back the specific weight of each controller,…
Saturday afternoons in the mid-90s had this specific rhythm – mum making tea, dad doing something mysteriously important in the garage, and me hunched over the coffee table with three mates, all of us clutching those bizarre three-pronged controllers like alien artifacts we'd finally learned to decode. The N64 had landed in our house about six months earlier, and honestly? Racing games had become our weekend religion.I'd been skeptical at first, you know. The controller…