The RF switcher was warm under my fingers that Christmas morning in 1998, the familiar ritual of channel-hopping until the N64's signal locked in properly. Channel 36, usually. Sometimes 37 if the weather was being difficult. Mum was already warning about turkey prep time, but I had something more important to attend to—a rectangular grey cartridge that promised to let me pilot an X-wing through the Death Star trench run I'd memorized from VHS rewatches.Rogue…
We all thought that making a list of the best fighting games of all time would be violent. Samuel was immediately spewing out frame data like some sort of holy scripture. Joe was passionately defending Sega’s 3D approach while also discrediting every single thing that Capcom has done since 1991. Marcus began calculating the frames of recovery from hits on his phone. Elena was demanding we recognise the superior design philosophy of SNK’s fighting games.…
The Game That Sold Nintendo on Rare I’ve been playing games since the Atari 2600. A collection of CRTs quietly hum away downstairs in my basement in Minneapolis, and they’re not going anywhere. Call me a nostalgiaophile, but video games and accounting are the two careers I understand: systems. I get manufacturing. I get making every dollar count. Donkey Kong Country is technical prowess mixed with commercial genius. It was Nintendo proving they could still…
I am a Phoenix area high school history teacher who has been a Sega fan my whole life. I have spent many years saying that Sega got taken down by poor timing in the market and that the Genesis was better than the SNES. I have also spent a lot of time writing about how the Dreamcast was robbed and should have done much better. I continue to fight to keep using the term “blast…
The clatter of dice on my bedroom floor still echoes in my head sometimes, which probably sounds daft until you realize I'm talking about the sound effects in Shining in the Darkness. That metallic rattle when you'd roll for initiative—pure digital dice music that somehow felt more authentic than the actual plastic cubes scattered around my Dungeons & Dragons books.I stumbled into this gem completely by accident, the way most of the best gaming discoveries…
The Commodore 64 was released in January 1982, although it was in production since Spring 1982. It was released into the market in late August 1982. It utilised a MOS 6510 CPU (a 6502 derivative) operating at 0.985 MHz PAL or 1.023 MHz NTSC frequencies with 64 KB of RAM (38 KB usable for BASIC programs). The Commodore 64’s VIC-II graphics processor supported a 320×200 maximum resolution with 16 colours and 8 sprites. The Commodore…
If you just want the answer, the best Monkey Island game is Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. The Secret of Monkey Island comes a very close second, The Curse of Monkey Island takes third, and Escape from Monkey Island props up the bottom. Getting to that order, though? That nearly ended a friendship. The full list, best to worst, is below, along with why each game landed where it did. Quick Rankings 1. Monkey Island…
You know that weird thing where a smell can transport you instantly? Well, the other day I caught a whiff of something—maybe it was the ozone from an old CRT warming up, or that particular plastic scent of a cartridge slot—and suddenly I was twelve again, sprawled on my mate's living room carpet, arguing about whether Sonic was faster than the Road Runner. That's the magic of the Mega Drive, isn't it? It doesn't just…
Last night I was rifling through a dusty box in the spare room—you know, that archaeological dig we all promise to do "next weekend"—when I found my old N64 cartridge collection wrapped in a tea towel like precious gems. There it was: Mario Kart 64, the plastic slightly yellowed but the label still crisp. I held it up to the light, and suddenly I was sixteen again, cramped on a mate's bedroom floor with three…
Standing in my mate Dave's living room in late 2000, gripping that familiar three-pronged controller with sweaty palms, I had no idea I was about to experience one of gaming's most underrated Bond adventures. Dave had just unwrapped The World Is Not Enough for his N64, and honestly? We were skeptical. GoldenEye 007 had set the bar stratospherically high three years earlier, and Perfect Dark had raised it even further. Another Bond game felt risky—like…