My mate Dave brought something over yesterday that made me do a proper double-take. Picture this: I'm halfway through explaining why my CRT still has a place in 2024 (something about integer scaling and input lag), when he plops down this sleek little collection disc. "Check it out," he says, grinning like he'd found buried treasure. The Sega Genesis Collection. Fifty-something games from the Mega Drive era, all wrapped up in modern packaging that somehow…
You know what's funny? I was elbow-deep in my spare parts drawer last Tuesday, hunting for a replacement fuse, when I caught sight of my old N64 power brick sitting there like a grey plastic tombstone. Thing weighs more than some modern laptops, doesn't it? That got me thinking about something I've been meaning to tackle properly—the whole power supply situation with Nintendo's 64-bit marvel, and why getting it wrong can turn your beloved console…
Right, Marcus here. Whilst the rest of the team argue over whether RollerCoaster Tycoon merits its legendary status (spoiler alert: yes, it absolutely does), I am taking a step back to evaluate the game that set the stage for all the theme park management games that followed. Prior to Chris Sawyer crafting his masterpiece in assembly code, Bullfrog Productions created Theme Park in 1994. In terms of technology, they accomplished something truly remarkable with the…
Alright, truth time. I’m a Sega freak. I never should have cared about PC gaming. But some guy named Blue Disc made me care one summer day in 1994. I was at my friend Tony’s house when he shoved a blue CD case in my face. “Dude, you have to see this.” Tony’s family had recently purchased one of those primo Compaq Presario desktops with a CD-ROM drive — which was basically a freaking spaceship…
ok, making a top 10 list of the greatest SNES games almost destroyed friendships for multiple people. One of our guys, Carl, had to referee arguments that escalated to the point of people going fists. Another guy, Joe, would try to list things lower because he played for Sega. Tim wrote an essay about Chrono Trigger even though he only discovered it within the last 5 years. Sam argued for Street Fighter II like a…
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…
The smell of Saturday morning cartoons still hits me when I boot up my old Mega Drive. There's something about the way those Power Rangers games captured that exact feeling of rushing downstairs in pyjamas, cereal bowl in hand, ready for an hour of pure televisual chaos. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers on the Genesis—or Mega Drive if you're from my neck of the woods—wasn't just a game. It was interactive Saturday morning telly, complete with…
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…