Funny how a three-minute indie track can absolutely demolish you, isn't it? I was minding my own business last Tuesday, scrolling through Spotify's weekly recommendations while my kid demolished a packet of Monster Munch nearby, when Alex G's "Nintendo 64" started playing. Three notes in and I'm transported back to 1997, sitting cross-legged on beige carpet with that distinctive three-pronged controller in my hands.You know that feeling when a song perfectly captures something you didn't…
# The Best Games Of The 2010s: Our Crew Finally Sits Down And Argues About It We knew this list was going to end in tears before we even opened the group chat. Samuel wanted to build the whole ranking around mechanical depth and multiplayer balance, which meant he spent forty minutes trying to convince everyone that Final Fantasy XIV deserved a top three spot purely because of how its job system rewards mastery over…
Look, I'll be honest with you—there's something almost criminal about how Comix Zone slipped through the cracks. I mean, here we had this absolute gem sitting on the Mega Drive, doing things that no other game was even attempting, and most people just… missed it. Completely.I remember the exact moment I first laid eyes on it, actually. Summer of '95, round at my mate Craig's house. His older brother had just come back from uni…
My mate Steve's N64 still sits on his telly stand like a grey plastic monument to better times. Last Saturday, while his missus was at her sister's and the kids were glued to YouTube on their tablets, we fired up GoldenEye for what must've been the thousandth time. Same battered controllers—one with a wobbly stick, another missing the Z-trigger spring—same arguments about screen-peeking, same ridiculous grins plastered across our increasingly lined faces.The thing is, we…
# Call of Duty: Black Ops III Sam wanted this one. He’s been running frame data comparisons between Black Ops III’s specialist abilities for three years now, treating it like a fighting game with guns, and honestly, he’s not wrong to. But Joe called dibs on hating it first (Genesis bias doesn’t stop at consoles apparently, it extends to entire genres he’s decided are beneath him), and John wanted to write eight thousand words about…
The carpet squelched under my trainers as I walked through that familiar smell of cheese, grease, and something vaguely lemony from the arcade cleaner. Mario's Pizza Palace wasn't winning any awards for ambiance, but it was our temple. Friday nights after school, pockets heavy with whatever coins we could scrape together from sofa cushions and birthday money, heading straight past the plastic booths to where the real action lived.OutRun sat in the corner like a…
Picture me, Christmas morning 1997, staring down at this bizarre three-pronged controller like it was some alien artifact. My cousin Jamie was already fiddling with it, holding it completely wrong—gripping it like a traditional pad with both hands on the outer prongs. I watched him struggle through the Mario 64 castle courtyard for about five minutes before his older brother Dan walked over and basically performed controller surgery."No, you muppet," Dan said, repositioning Jamie's hands.…
You know that feeling when you open a dusty cardboard box in your parents' loft and suddenly you're fifteen again? That's exactly what happened when I found my old Mega Drive last month, still wrapped in that horrible bubble wrap mum insisted would "keep the dust off." There it was—that sleek black wedge that absolutely demolished my Saturday mornings and pocket money throughout the early nineties.I'm not being dramatic when I say this console changed…
Saturday afternoon, nineteen-ninety-five. I'm sprawled on the carpet in my mate David's front room, controller in hand, watching this yellow star-shaped character stretch his arms across the screen like some sort of cosmic elastic band. The game was Ristar, and honestly? I'd never heard of it before that moment. David's older brother had picked it up from Blockbuster Video—you know, back when you could rent games for the weekend and pray the previous customer hadn't…
The rumble controller sits heavy in my hands, that familiar weight of the N64's three-pronged monster with its Pak hanging off the back like some kind of cybernetic tumor. I'm sixteen again, squinting through the crosshairs of my Arwing, and somewhere in the distance Fox McCloud is barking orders through tinny TV speakers. "Do a barrel roll!" he yells, and honestly? I'm still doing them thirty years later.Star Fox 64 wasn't just a game—it was…