My mate Dave had this theory about movie games back in the day – they were all rubbish because developers got about six weeks and a photocopied script page to work with. Most of the time, he wasn't wrong. E.T. on the Atari 2600 nearly killed the entire industry, and don't get me started on Hudson Hawk for the NES. But then 1993 rolled around, Spielberg's dinosaurs were stomping across cinema screens worldwide, and Sega…
You know that moment when you realize you've been doing something wrong your entire life? Like when you discover you've been tying your shoelaces the hard way, or that there's actually a proper way to peel a banana. That's exactly what happened to me the first time I picked up an N64 controller and tried to walk Mario around Princess Peach's courtyard.I'd been gaming since the Atari days, right? Spent countless hours with a joystick…
Cleaning out the spare room last weekend—you know, that archaeological dig every gamer eventually faces—I found myself holding two controllers that basically tell the entire story of how we learned to play games with our thumbs. The Nintendo 64's three-pronged beast and the Switch Pro Controller, separated by about twenty years of design evolution. Holding them side by side felt like comparing a prototype spaceship to its sleek descendant.The N64 controller still looks alien, doesn't…
Picture this: you're twelve years old, it's 1995, and your mate's just pulled out what looks like a chunky Game Boy that somehow runs actual Mega Drive games. Not watered-down handheld versions—the real thing. Streets of Rage 2, Sonic 2, Gunstar Heroes, all crammed into this brick-sized marvel that Sega called the Nomad. My brain nearly fell out.I'll be honest, my first reaction wasn't "wow, portable 16-bit gaming!" It was more like "how many AA…
The smell of a freshly opened game box—you know the one I'm talking about. That slightly plasticky, new electronics scent mixed with the crisp pages of an instruction manual. I was hunched over our coffee table last weekend, carefully lifting the cardboard flaps on a mint-condition Saturn game I'd finally tracked down on eBay, and it hit me like a time machine. Suddenly I'm twelve again, saving pocket money for months just to afford one…
The other day my eight-year-old asked me why Sonic looks "weird" on our modern TV, and I realized we'd been playing the Blue Blur through some dodgy composite cables that made him look like he'd been dipped in vaseline. That got me digging through my emulation setup again, because let's be honest—original Mega Drive hardware is brilliant, but it's also thirty-odd years old and sometimes you just want to play Sonic 2 without worrying about…
The red and white logo hit differently back in '91. I remember staring at it on the box art at our local Currys, that bold GENESIS text looking like it belonged on a spaceship rather than sitting next to the tired-looking Master System games gathering dust. My mate Dave had gotten one for Christmas—lucky sod—and when I first saw that logo boot up on his telly, I knew Sega meant business. This wasn't the cute,…
Sometimes I catch myself humming the Green Hill Zone theme while doing the washing up, and my wife looks at me like I've finally lost it completely. But that's the thing about Sega – their music just burrows into your brain and sets up permanent residence. I was never really a "sides" person during the console wars; I mean, I had my Mega Drive first, sure, but I'd sneak round to my mate Dave's for…
# The Last of Us Part 2 Right, I know what some of you are thinking. David doesn’t write about narrative adventure games, he’s the bloke banging on about PCB boards and monitor calibration on cabinets nobody under thirty has heard of. Why’s he covering a Naughty Dog game that made half the internet lose its mind in 2020? Carl asked me to do this one specifically because everyone else on the team has an…
You know what's funny about growing up with sports games? My dad never got them. He'd watch Match of the Day religiously, knew every player's transfer history back to the Jurassic period, but couldn't understand why I'd want to *play* football on the telly when I could kick a ball outside. "It's not real," he'd say, shaking his head as I lined up another penalty in Sensible Soccer. Thing is, he was wrong and right…