Ok, let me take you back to when star wars games actually mattered. When Lucasarts still knew what they where doing and way before Disney stole the lot. I mean the good Star Wars games, not the shite EA keep churning out. My first experience with a Star Wars game wasn’t on my bedroom computer (we weren’t rich enough for that luxury). Nope it was at the arcade down the road in Stretford wedged in…
Picture this: you're twelve years old, clutching a dog-eared copy of GamePro, staring at that glossy two-page spread showing Mario in glorious 64-bit 3D. The magazine's promising something called "Ultra 64" – yeah, that's what they called it back then – and your brain's doing cartwheels trying to imagine what comes next. We'd conquered the Death Star trench run in Super Star Wars, we'd collected every last coin in Super Mario World, and now Nintendo…
I am Carl and I wanted to write this review to help us resolve the argument going on in our group chat for the last 6 months. Joe has always said that Civilization II is the best game in the series. Sam always raves about how great he believes Alpha Centauri is, it is part of a totally different series, Sam, whilst Tim says the new games are always better because they look nicer. John…
Cleaning out the spare room last weekend, I found it tucked behind a box of PlayStation memory cards—my Pikachu Nintendo 64, still in its original box, looking as gloriously ridiculous as the day I impulse-bought it from Electronics Boutique. The yellow shell catches light like a toy car, and honestly? After all these years, it still makes me grin like an idiot.See, this wasn't just another console variant. This was Pokemon fever made manifest in…
I am John, and I need to make a statement prior to this review. Whilst the rest of my teammates are arguing ad nauseum over whether Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle represented LucasArts at its zenith, they are all forgetting the true masterpiece. Sam and Max Hit the Road didn’t simply perfect the adventure game format. It demonstrated that American developers could create something with a true subversive edge, whilst still producing content…
My N64 sits on the shelf next to a stack of cartridges that probably cost more than my first car. Well, that's not saying much—my first car was a rusty Escort that made more noise than a Rumble Pak having an existential crisis. But these grey plastic rectangles? They're worth their weight in nostalgia, and some of them are genuinely worth their weight in actual money these days.The thing about the N64 is that it…
I remember buying Diablo — hell, I remember the day that changed my life. It wasn’t alcoholism, girls, or any of the other problems you might expect from a university student. I was living in Manchester one snowy February Tuesday night in 1997 staring at the cover of a video game in a store named Electronics Boutique. There was a guy wielding a sword and standing in front of a red backdrop. That game would…
Hey kid—I’ll level with you. I grew up a Sega kid. I cut my teeth on our family’s Packard Bell PC playing LucasArts adventures. Hang with me here, Genesis freak—what I learned from those games is that games didn’t need cutting-edge graphics or blazing fast processors to entertain me. I first played The Secret of Monkey Island at my cousin Mike’s house in Tucson in July of 1992. Mike’s father worked at some computer company…
John’s working on that one so we won’t have to deal with Sam ranting again about how point-and-clicks died because they never implemented save states correctly. Gabriel Knight is not simply another old point-and-click adventure title sitting in Sierra’s archives. It proves that the way the Amiga treated story and atmosphere would utterly destroy console gaming if done right. In 1993 (Wikipedia), Jensen produced her magnum opus, reminding everyone that computer gaming was far superior…
There's this moment, right? You're standing in Woolworths on launch day, sweaty tenner crumpled in your palm, staring at this weird three-pronged controller that looks like alien technology escaped from Area 51. The N64 cartridge slots are bigger than your head, the console itself is this matte black monument to what-if. But it's that demo unit running Super Mario 64 that stops you dead.Mario's just…standing there. Waiting. And then some kid grabs the controller and…