The Witcher 3 I got assigned this one because I’m the only person on this team who has actually opened a decompiler out of curiosity rather than nostalgia. Joe wanted to talk about how Skyrim did open world questing “first” (it didn’t, not really), Sam kept trying to turn this into a discussion about parry frames in the combat system, and Carl just wanted someone to write two thousand words without anyone getting muted on…
I was rummaging through my loft last weekend, dodging cobwebs and trying not to step through the ceiling, when I found it—my old Sega Master System, still wrapped in that tatty towel I'd used to protect it during house moves. The sight of that familiar black plastic shell sent me tumbling back through decades of Sega memories, from those early 8-bit days right through to the Dreamcast's bittersweet finale.You know, Sega's journey through the console…
Hey guys, Joe here. Why has it been twenty plus years since the greatest “F*** You” in video game history? As Carl stressed about the frame rates and Sam cried about the balance patches, I’m still angry about the biggest trolling game design in history. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty didn’t simply break the 4th wall. It loaded it with C4 and asked you to question if walls really existed in the first…
There is no doubt that the best way to enjoy Street Fighter II is at an arcade. I will admit that I was immediately hooked upon entering the Pizza Ranch in July 1991, and observing a high school kid doing things in a video game that I didn’t know existed. The kid was playing Guile, the military dude with the super long hairdo, and he was launching those curved energy blasts while yelling “Sonic Boom!”…
My mate Dave popped round last Tuesday with his laptop, looking like he'd discovered fire. "You've got to see this," he said, firing up what looked suspiciously like Mario 64 running in a window on his desktop. The catch? No N64 in sight, just some software called Project64 doing things that would've blown my teenage mind.Here's the thing about N64 emulation—it's brilliant when it works, absolutely maddening when it doesn't, and somehow both at the…
Right, let me tell you something about Warcraft II that people have totally got backwards. Everyone bangs on about how StarCraft revolutionised real-time strategy and made Blizzard famous. Rubbish. It was Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness that actually did the dirty work, and I will die on this hill because I spent hundreds of hours with both of them on the original hardware. Not nostalgia by the way. I still have the CDs, I’ve run…
There's a cardboard box in my attic that weighs more than it should. Inside, wrapped in old towels, sit the machines that taught me what "fun" could be. Sometimes I climb up there just to hold them—plastic cases that once hummed with electricity and possibility, now silent but somehow still warm to the touch.My journey started with that famous wooden rectangle. The Atari 2600 didn't just play games; it occupied our living room like a…
Tim here, and I am going to defend a game that may not be clear to anyone who only knows stealth through modern stealth titles such as Hitman or Metal Gear Solid. Thief: The Dark Project was not a friendly game. Thief did not label enemy locations on your mini-map. Thief would not save your game automatically after 30 seconds. As someone who missed this game when it first came out, I had to unlearn…
There's this moment burned into my brain from Christmas 1996. I'm sitting cross-legged on our living room carpet—you know, that rough brown stuff that left marks on your shins—holding an N64 controller for the first time. The thing looked like it was designed by aliens who'd heard about human hands but never actually seen them. Three prongs? What were they thinking?But then I pressed start on Super Mario 64, and everything changed.That plumber's face filled…
Look, I’m just going to be honest with you about Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun. It sundered our community when it was released on 27th August 1999 (Wikipedia), and, like, we’re still arguing about it to this day. Joe believes it’s the peak of the series’ ambition, Tim thinks it betrayed everything that made the first one special, and my feelings lie somewhere in the middle where I admire what Westwood were trying to do…