The Top Ten Sports Games Ever Made This ranking will break all of your friendships. As soon as David proposed that we rank the greatest sports games of all time, Samuel was already muttering something about Amiga superiority, and Elena was preparing her usual defence of the Dreamcast. Then Joe jumped in and said that NBA Jam deserved to be ranked at the top due to the fact that “chaos beats simulation every time”, prompting…
Management Simulators That Were Fun To Play Bullfrog Productions built management games that really worked. And the best example of that is Theme Hospital. Released in 1997 for Windows, this was a true management simulator. The company took the boring world of health care and made it laugh-out-loud funny without laughing at anyone. When Bullfrog made management sims, they kept them fun to play. Not many games have done that before or since. Other business…
Last night I was digging through a dusty box in the spare room—you know, the one that's been sealed since we moved house three years ago—and I found my old Sega cartridge collection. Thirty-odd games stacked like plastic dominoes, each one carrying enough memories to power a Mega Drive for a week. It got me thinking about how Sega's library across all their systems was this brilliant, chaotic tapestry of creativity that never quite got…
Sam’s thoughts on Sonic 3 & Knuckles’ achievement in technology: The entire Sonic team brought everything they had learned from making the prior 3 Sonic games together with the addition of the lock-on technology to create the biggest and most ambitious platformer on Mega Drive at that time. This was not just the best Sonic game to date — It was the first true representation of how to combine both creativity and technological advancements to…
I have to say – when my daughter first started telling me about Chrono Trigger years ago (2011), I wasn’t that intrigued. Coming from a gaming background where 16-bit still looked “bad” to me because of Super Metroid (another game I picked up because of my daughter – I got it a year before Chrono Trigger), I thought it was just another old RPG that I would never play. She mentioned it to me over…
The Technical Evolution of Racing Games: From Vector Graphics to Polygons I get what it takes to send code out on constrained hardware. I know the impossible optimisations you need to develop a game that has some sort of responsiveness when you’re limited by kilobytes of memory and a CPU that’s clocked at single-digit megahertz. Racing games offer the ideal way to see the technical development of the 80s and 90s since each generation had…
“We knew it was going to get messy when we decided to rank the greatest PC games of the 1990s.” “It wasn’t until the argument spilled into the chat for a week straight that we realised it was going to take some effort to reach a consensus.” The disagreements raged on for three weeks; we established strict guidelines in order to resolve these debates. We agreed upon criteria that included: 1) The game must have…
Walking into my local indie game shop last weekend, I spotted something that made my heart skip a beat—a pristine copy of Moonwalker for the Mega Drive, complete with that distinctive silver spine and Michael Jackson's unmistakable silhouette. The asking price was steep enough to make my wallet whimper, but seeing that game again transported me straight back to 1990, when everything about it seemed impossibly cool and slightly mad in equal measure.You have to…
The 10 Greatest JRPGs Ever Made: A New Player Ready Crew Ranking Ranking the greatest JRPGs of all time was bound to destroy whatever harmony existed amongst the members of the New Player Ready crew. Joe immediately started saying that Final Fantasy VII needed to be at the top of the list due to the fact that it “altered everything regarding mainstream gaming”. Samuel then presented several passionate defences of 16-bit era design philosophies and…
Saturday morning, 2005. I'm staring at what looks like a chunky grey sandwich with screens, wondering if Nintendo's lost their minds. The DS had landed, and with it came something I'd never expected—a portable version of the game that basically taught me how to exist in three dimensions. Super Mario 64 DS wasn't just a port, though. This was Mario's plumber crew getting the full treatment, and honestly? It changed everything about handheld gaming for…