Man, October of 1997 was an amazing month to be a gamer. I had recently purchased a brand new Pentium 166 MHz PC (yeah, back then PCs were rated by clock speed, and “Pentium 166 MHz” was basically the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti of computers). And I was pretty damn proud of my 32 MB of RAM. Enough bragging. Point is, I thought I was ready for whatever games could throw at me. I strutted…
You know that argument that split playground friendships back in the day? The one that made kids choose sides like they were picking teams for PE? I'm talking about the great console divide that had us all convinced we had to pledge allegiance to either the chunky grey cartridge or the sleek black disc. But here's the thing—when it came to Mario, both the Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 delivered something special, just in completely…
There's something oddly magical about playing Super Mario 64 on a dual-screened handheld while sitting on a train that's gently swaying through the English countryside. I mean, you're holding what amounts to Nintendo's greatest 3D platformer ever made—arguably their most important game since the original Super Mario Bros.—and it's been squeezed into a device that fits in your jacket pocket. That's still mental to me, even though the DS version came out back in 2004.I…
“`html A few years ago I realised that the last twenty years of stealth gaming had seen some incredible developments and in my mind there was one title that stands above all others for its innovative design and overall excellence – Hitman 2: Silent Assassin. Released in 2002 (Wikipedia), this was not simply a stealth game with added stealth elements. It was a fully-fledged murder puzzle that required players to use their analytical skills and…
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…