You know what drives me absolutely mental about modern gaming? The way marketing feels so calculated, so focus-grouped to death that you can practically smell the boardroom coffee in every trailer. Back in the 90s though—man, companies would just throw money at the weirdest ideas and somehow magic happened. Case in point: Cool Spot, a platformer starring 7 Up's red dot mascot that had absolutely no business being as good as it was.I stumbled across…
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…
# The Best Games Of The 2010s: Our Crew Finally Sits Down And Argues About It We knew this list was going to end in tears before we even opened the group chat. Samuel wanted to build the whole ranking around mechanical depth and multiplayer balance, which meant he spent forty minutes trying to convince everyone that Final Fantasy XIV deserved a top three spot purely because of how its job system rewards mastery over…
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…
My mate Steve's N64 still sits on his telly stand like a grey plastic monument to better times. Last Saturday, while his missus was at her sister's and the kids were glued to YouTube on their tablets, we fired up GoldenEye for what must've been the thousandth time. Same battered controllers—one with a wobbly stick, another missing the Z-trigger spring—same arguments about screen-peeking, same ridiculous grins plastered across our increasingly lined faces.The thing is, we…
# Call of Duty: Black Ops III Sam wanted this one. He’s been running frame data comparisons between Black Ops III’s specialist abilities for three years now, treating it like a fighting game with guns, and honestly, he’s not wrong to. But Joe called dibs on hating it first (Genesis bias doesn’t stop at consoles apparently, it extends to entire genres he’s decided are beneath him), and John wanted to write eight thousand words about…