I was rifling through a box of old floppies last weekend when I found something that made me pause mid-dig: a copy of Math Blaster Episode I. That familiar yellow disk with its slightly bent corner transported me right back to 1992, sitting in front of our family's Tandy 1000 while mum made toast in the kitchen. The smell of warming CRT mixed with marmalade is oddly specific, but there you have it.See, back then…
I was digging through my old PSP games last weekend—you know how it is, the drawer that became a time capsule—when I found my copy of the Sega Mega Drive Collection. That little UMD disc sitting there brought back a flood of memories about what felt like portable gaming perfection back in 2006.See, I'd been carrying handhelds since the original Game Boy days, but there was always this compromise you had to make. Battery life…
The moment I first plugged that distinctive three-pronged controller into port one, I knew something had shifted in my world. Not just in gaming—though that was obvious enough—but in how I thought about what entertainment could actually be. The N64 didn't just arrive in our living room; it bulldozed through every assumption I'd built up about what home consoles were capable of.I'd spent years wrestling with flat sprites, don't get me wrong. The Mega Drive…
The carpet in our front room had this particular pattern—brown swirls that looked like coffee stains someone had turned into art. I mention this because that's what I was staring at, cross-legged on the floor, when my dad walked in with a carrier bag from Dixons that would change everything. Christmas 1991, I think. Maybe early '92. The exact date doesn't matter as much as what happened next."Got you something," he said, which in dad-speak…
The smell hit me first when I fired up my Everdrive 64 last weekend—not dust warming on a CRT this time, but that familiar ozone crackle from my OSSC working overtime to push Mario's polygonal face into the modern age. There's something wonderfully absurd about watching a plumber who used to look like he was built from triangular cheese now appearing sharp enough to cut glass on my 4K monitor. Makes you wonder what Nintendo's…
Last Tuesday I found myself digging through a box of old electronics in the spare room—you know how it is, looking for one thing and finding seventeen others you'd forgotten existed. Buried under a tangle of USB cables and a Dreamcast that's missing its power brick was my old PSP, still in its original soft case. The battery was deader than disco, but after plugging it in and waiting for that familiar charging light, I…
Timothy is writing this one because Sam point blank refuses to touch it. “A console RTS is an oxymoron,” he said, before muting himself on our call for ten minutes to go analyse Street Fighter frame data instead. Carl had to talk him back onto the topic three separate times. Meanwhile John thinks Halo Wars 2 is one of the most interesting risk taking strategy games of the last decade, and Joe just wants to…
# The Last of Us Carl’s writing this one because Joe wanted to spend the whole intro explaining how Resident Evil 4 already did survival horror better in 2005, and Sam kept interrupting to talk about multiplayer hit boxes in Factions, and somehow nobody had actually said anything about the game itself after twenty minutes. So here’s the version without the shouting. The Last of Us landed in June 2013 as a PlayStation 3 exclusive…
There's something magical about the weight of a Sega Genesis six-button controller in your hands. I mean, really—you pick one up today and it still feels like holding lightning. Not the thin, weightless plastic of modern controllers, but something with heft. Something that meant business.I discovered this back in '92 when Street Fighter II Championship Edition landed on the Genesis. My mate Dave had convinced his mum to spring for the six-button pad bundle, and…
You know what still gives me goosebumps? That moment when you're holding the N64 controller for the first time, trying to figure out which prong goes where, and then Mario 64 loads up and suddenly everyone in the room goes dead silent. But that wasn't the game that broke my social circle. That wasn't the one that had us screaming at each other until someone's mum came downstairs with that look that means "turn it…