There's something almost criminal about how Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards gets overlooked in those "best N64 games" conversations. I mean, everyone rattles off the usual suspects—Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, GoldenEye—and fair enough, those are masterpieces. But then Kirby 64 sits there like the quiet kid in class who turned out to be brilliant at everything but never made a fuss about it.I picked up my copy from a Blockbuster that was closing down,…
There's something almost mythical about how perfectly everything aligned for wrestling games in the late 90s. I mean, you had this weird convergence of technology finally catching up to ambition, the Monday Night Wars making wrestling cooler than it had any right to be, and developers who genuinely seemed to understand what made grappling fun rather than just flashy. And right there in the middle of it all was WWF No Mercy, sitting on that…
There's something beautifully ironic about finding a massive collection of Sega Genesis games sitting pretty on a PlayStation console. I mean, back in the day these were sworn enemies—you picked a side and stuck with it like supporting a football team. Yet here I was in 2006, sliding that Sega Genesis Collection disc into my PS2 and feeling like some sort of gaming diplomat bringing peace to the living room.The timing couldn't have been better,…
You know that sinking feeling when you're holding something brilliant but nobody else seems to get it? That's how I felt clutching my Game Gear in 1991, watching mates queue up for grey Game Boys like lemmings heading for a cliff. Sure, the Game Boy had Tetris—fair play, absolute masterpiece—but my Game Gear had Sonic in full colour, proper sound that didn't wheeze through a tin speaker, and a backlight that meant I could actually…
The smell of orange squash and the sound of a CRT warming up—that's what Saturday afternoons meant to me in the 90s. But there was something else competing for my attention between cartoon blocks and trying to convince mum to let me stay up past eight. Nickelodeon had figured out something brilliant: they'd turned getting messy into appointment television.I'm talking about those game shows that made every kid secretly wish they could ditch their good…
Picture this: you're hunched over a three-pronged controller that looks like it was designed by aliens who'd only heard vague descriptions of human hands. Your mate Sarah's got the yellow controller—the one with the sticky A button that everyone pretends isn't gross but definitely is. Tom's wielding the translucent purple one like it's Excalibur, and I've somehow ended up with basic grey. We're about to settle the age-old question of who's actually the best at…
You know what's been eating at me lately? I was scrolling through some old gaming magazines—the proper print ones with that glossy paper that would stick to your fingers in summer—when I stumbled across an ad for Streets of Rage 2. There's Blaze, all sixteen-bit pixels of her, and suddenly I'm twelve again, arguing with my mate Dave about whether she was "too distracting" during boss fights. Which, let's be honest, she absolutely was.The thing…
Finding a forgotten gem in your collection is like discovering a twenty in an old jacket pocket—unexpected, delightful, and somehow worth more than its face value. That's exactly what happened when I was rummaging through a box of N64 carts last weekend, pushing past the usual suspects of Mario and Zelda, when my fingers hit something I'd completely forgotten about: Beetle Adventure Racing.Now, I know what you're thinking. A racing game sponsored by Volkswagen sounds…
Christmas morning, 1998. I'm unwrapping what looks suspiciously like a console-shaped box when my dad mutters something about "not understanding why they made the controller look like a spaceship crashed into a telephone." Inside was my first N64, bundled with a golden cartridge that would absolutely ruin my understanding of what video games could be.That first boot of Ocarina of Time? Still gives me goosebumps. Not just because of Zelda's lullaby drifting through our living…
You know what I miss about being thirteen? The absolute certainty that a thirty-second TV advert could change your entire worldview. I'm talking about those Sega commercials from the early '90s—the ones that didn't just sell you games, they sold you an entire identity wrapped in attitude and blast processing.Picture this: Saturday morning, I'm sprawled on the carpet with a bowl of Frosties going soggy, when suddenly the telly explodes with speed lines and that…