I remember buying Diablo — hell, I remember the day that changed my life. It wasn’t alcoholism, girls, or any of the other problems you might expect from a university student. I was living in Manchester one snowy February Tuesday night in 1997 staring at the cover of a video game in a store named Electronics Boutique. There was a guy wielding a sword and standing in front of a red backdrop. That game would…
Samuel is writing this one because Carl reckons a proper old school gamer voice is exactly what a game this praised needs, someone who won’t just pile on more superlatives without checking whether they hold up against everything that came before. Joe still insists the original Red Dead Redemption on 360 is the “purer” game because it doesn’t ask you to brush a horse, and John has been banging on for months about how Arthur…
Hey kid—I’ll level with you. I grew up a Sega kid. I cut my teeth on our family’s Packard Bell PC playing LucasArts adventures. Hang with me here, Genesis freak—what I learned from those games is that games didn’t need cutting-edge graphics or blazing fast processors to entertain me. I first played The Secret of Monkey Island at my cousin Mike’s house in Tucson in July of 1992. Mike’s father worked at some computer company…
John’s working on that one so we won’t have to deal with Sam ranting again about how point-and-clicks died because they never implemented save states correctly. Gabriel Knight is not simply another old point-and-click adventure title sitting in Sierra’s archives. It proves that the way the Amiga treated story and atmosphere would utterly destroy console gaming if done right. In 1993 (Wikipedia), Jensen produced her magnum opus, reminding everyone that computer gaming was far superior…
There's this moment, right? You're standing in Woolworths on launch day, sweaty tenner crumpled in your palm, staring at this weird three-pronged controller that looks like alien technology escaped from Area 51. The N64 cartridge slots are bigger than your head, the console itself is this matte black monument to what-if. But it's that demo unit running Super Mario 64 that stops you dead.Mario's just…standing there. Waiting. And then some kid grabs the controller and…
You know what still bugs me after all these years? Walking into a mate's house in 1991, seeing that sleek black Mega Drive sitting under their telly, and asking "Got any Mega Man games?" only to get that blank stare. The same stare I'd give when they'd ask about Sonic on my NES.Back then, I didn't really understand the politics of it all. I just knew that my little blue robot hero lived exclusively in…
RIGHT, LET’S GET THIS ONE RIGHT FROM THE START. Tim thinks modern adventure games can’t understand how to make puzzles and whilst he’s right, he’s missing the point as to why the classics worked. Beneath a Steel Sky is not just another point-and-click adventure from the 1990s. Beneath a Steel Sky is the cyberpunk adventure that proved you could merge serious topics with accessible gameplay. Whilst developed in Australia in 1994 (Wikipedia), Beneath a Steel…
There's this fighting game that everyone seems to have forgotten about, buried somewhere between the Street Fighter II fever and the Tekken 3 hysteria. I'm talking about Mace: The Dark Age on Nintendo 64, and honestly? It deserves way better than the dusty shelf it's been relegated to in gaming history.I stumbled across my copy last weekend while hunting through a box of old cartridges—you know how it is, looking for one thing and finding…
Alright, let’s get one thing straight right out of the gate – I was a Sega kid growing up in the early 90s and treated my Sega Genesis like it was my own personal video gaming deity. Sonic was king and Streets of Rage had it’s nice rappin’ beat, but I spent most of my time shooting fools while my friends played Super Nintendo games. Sega did what Nintendon’t, and we held that mentality proudly.…
Beginning as a young gamer and now as an adult, I will write this review for Tim to show him why Age of Empires II is the best Real Time Strategy (RTS) game ever produced. As he continues to tell me that Command & Conquer is better than AOE2, I will show him why the engineering decisions in AOE2 are the basis for all RTS games today. Not just nostalgia, but the design of the…