The Curse of Monkey Island Review: Hand-Drawn Visual Style & Perfect Voice Acting Hello, Marcus here, and I want to talk about something that has bothered me in the way people discuss point-and-click adventure games for years. People say The Curse of Monkey Island is nothing more than “a lot of nice looking graphics,” and don’t understand what LucasArts did to advance the technology behind their games. The Curse of Monkey Island was released on…
The Only Reason We Have Modern RPGs: Baldur’s Gate II Was The First To Get It Right I’m Joe, and I have to say one thing before we look at BioWare’s work of art. Carl thinks the current crop of RPGs, like The Witcher 3, are the ultimate expression of the RPG genre, while Tim believes that JRPGs do a better job of telling stories. Both of them are wrong, and this is why: Baldur’s…
I was digging through my game collection the other night—you know, that annual ritual where you convince yourself you're "organizing" but really you're just reliving the good times—when my fingers found that familiar purple spine. Beyond Oasis. Even after all these years, that cartridge still makes me smile like an idiot.See, here's the thing about Sega's approach to RPGs in the mid-90s. While Square and Enix were crafting these massive, turn-based epics that demanded forty-hour…
Escape from Monkey Island Review: The 3D Experiment That Divided Fans The first thing about Escape from Monkey Island is that LucasArts took a huge risk by moving Guybrush Threepwood into the third dimension. Half the fans of the adventure game community went wild with excitement and the other half were terrified. As someone who has been a fan of the series since the early 1990s and spent countless hours with this divisive title, I…
I am a history teacher from Phoenix, Arizona and I’ve watched people write off the Sega Genesis for nearly 30 years now. They say the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) had better games. They say Nintendo dominated the 16-bit era. They say the Genesis was technically inferior. None of that is true. The Genesis was not inferior; it was simply different. While the market was moving toward home-developed games, the Genesis focused on arcade-style gameplay.…
The other day I was digging through my old game collection—you know how it is, just one of those random Saturday afternoons where you end up elbow-deep in cardboard boxes that smell like 1993. Found my copy of X-Men on the Mega Drive, and honestly? My heart did this weird little skip. That blue plastic case with Wolverine snarling on the cover brought back everything: the weight of the six-button controller, the satisfying click when…
King of Fighters ’98 Review: How SNK Perfected the Team Fighter Formula Hello everyone, my name is Elena, and before Sam starts telling me about the importance of frame data and precision, and before Joe starts bashing KOF saying Fatal Fury is better, I want to tell you why King of Fighters ’98 is the ultimate team-fighting game. This is not just nostalgia; this is mechanical perfection, balance of rosters, and how SNK created what…
The N64 controller was in my hands, palms already sweating from anticipation. I'd just fired up Perfect Dark for the first time, and honestly? Nothing could have prepared me for what Rare had accomplished. This wasn't just GoldenEye's prettier sibling—this was something entirely different, something that pushed every single transistor in that grey console to its absolute breaking point.I remember the exact moment it clicked for me. Joanna Dark was creeping through the Carrington Institute,…
Why the Master System Should Have Won But Got Crushed by Market Dominance I grew up swapping floppy disks and reading Amiga Power cover to cover, absorbing every word like gospel. Now I’m an IT manager in Manchester who’s spent his career maintaining systems while daydreaming about Sensible Soccer and Speedball 2. I champion the glory days of British computer gaming, a period I genuinely believe was unfairly overshadowed by American console dominance. The Sega…
How the Super Nintendo Proved Specs Aren’t Everything I’ve been playing video games since the Atari 2600. I keep stacks of CRTs running on dusty shelves in my basement in Minneapolis. I have an accounting degree, so I think in systems. If someone tries to sell me on some wide sweeping philosophy without understanding the technical mechanics behind it, I get very irritated. That’s why when people try to tell me that the Genesis was…