Timothy here. I am going to have to say that I have been bothered by a lot since I first started playing Golden Axe about 3 months ago. Joe says this is a masterpiece that defined the Genesis, whilst Carl nods along and Sam talks about “frame data” being “primitive but functional”. As someone who did not grow up feeding quarters to arcade machines, I have to ask: what made this worth all those lunches?…
I was nineteen-years-old opening it for the first time. I was meant to be studying for a calculus mid-term, but Kevin and I were barricaded inside his dorm room clutching textbooks and scribbled notes while simultaneously paging through his collection of GamePro magazines. Procrastination will do that to you: suddenly everything is interesting except for the thing you should be doing. Hidden away in the back pages of GamePro was a preview for Final Fantasy…
Christmas morning, 1996. I'm sitting cross-legged on carpet that's probably seen better decades, staring at a box that looks like it was designed by aliens who'd never seen a games console before. The Nintendo 64. That weird three-pronged controller sticking out like a threat. Mum's already muttering about "another bloody machine for the telly," but I can't hear her properly because my heart's doing that thing where it forgets how to beat normally.The game bundled…
Joe’s been going on and on about Streets of Rage for weeks now, so I’m happy to take over for this post because I wanted to talk about something else entirely – basically, the fundamentals of the whole thing. As usual, we’ve been arguing about arcade hierarchies and I’m sick of hearing about it, so I thought I’d give the nod to a game that should be recognised for changing the face of gaming culture…
The Game Boy kept me sane during what might have been the longest car trip in recorded history. I didn’t own any video games that summer of ‘91 aside from Tetris. Dad was driving cross-country from New Jersey to Kansas to visit relatives. You know, the quintessential family vacation that everybody takes because that’s what families did back then. My brother Jake and I were fighting about everything and nothing for six hours straight when…
When I came to Space Invaders for the first time, I will admit I saw no more than just the most rudimentary elements of a game. A black screen with white dots floating around – that was supposed to be the basis of everything? However, after spending quality time playing the game and understanding what it achieved, I have come to appreciate what Tomohiro Nishikado accomplished with the creation of Space Invaders. In 1978, the…
Christmas 1985 wasn’t supposed to be like other Christmasses we’d had as a family. It wasn’t because my dad suddenly came up with some crazy innovative idea – far from it. It was because my dad talked mum into letting him buy a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) for our house. Dad was a big fan of our ZX Spectrum – probably still is – but somehow getting a Nintendo was him pulling off a feat…
There's this moment—and if you were there, you know exactly what I'm talking about—when you first saw Perfect Dark running with the Expansion Pak installed. Not just running, mind you. Actually *running*. Smooth framerates, four-player split-screen that didn't chug like a diesel engine in January, textures that looked less like abstract art and more like, well, textures.I remember standing in Electronics Boutique (before it became GAME, before GAME became whatever it is now), holding that…
Joe has been going on about this for weeks; saying Street Fighter II should receive a lot of the credit for essentially inventing competitive gaming as we know it. We have all pointed out to Joe that fighting games have existed since before 1991, but Joe will not listen to that either. Joe continues to go on about the frame data of the game, and how he is the first person to find out about…
My controller throwing moment happened because of summer of ’89 and Mega Man. I hurled my controller across the basement like I was Joe Nathan pitching for the Twins. Seriously… tossed it across the room. I remember the exact moment it happened too because my dad came stomping downstairs in his work attire (shirt and tie) asking me at almost midnight what that crashing sound was. Poor NES controller. By then it was barely held…