I was digging through my old PSP games last weekend—you know how it is, the drawer that became a time capsule—when I found my copy of the Sega Mega Drive Collection. That little UMD disc sitting there brought back a flood of memories about what felt like portable gaming perfection back in 2006.See, I'd been carrying handhelds since the original Game Boy days, but there was always this compromise you had to make. Battery life…
Last Tuesday I found myself digging through a box of old electronics in the spare room—you know how it is, looking for one thing and finding seventeen others you'd forgotten existed. Buried under a tangle of USB cables and a Dreamcast that's missing its power brick was my old PSP, still in its original soft case. The battery was deader than disco, but after plugging it in and waiting for that familiar charging light, I…
Timothy is writing this one because Sam point blank refuses to touch it. “A console RTS is an oxymoron,” he said, before muting himself on our call for ten minutes to go analyse Street Fighter frame data instead. Carl had to talk him back onto the topic three separate times. Meanwhile John thinks Halo Wars 2 is one of the most interesting risk taking strategy games of the last decade, and Joe just wants to…
Rummaging through my gaming collection last week, I stumbled across something that made me pause mid-dig through the plastic cases: the Sega Genesis Collection for PS3. Still wrapped in that slightly yellowed cellophane that screams "bought it, meant to play it, life happened." You know how it is. The thing sat there looking at me like an old mate I'd promised to ring but never did.Here's the weird bit—I'd completely forgotten buying this compilation. Must've…
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,…
There's something magical about the way a floppy disk used to click when you slotted it into your school's ancient PC. That plastic-on-metal snap meant adventure was loading—and more often than not, it meant learning was about to happen without you even realizing it.I spent countless hours in computer labs that smelled like that particular cocktail of warm electronics and industrial carpet cleaner, hunched over beige monitors that hummed like sleepy refrigerators. We'd file in…
# Halo 5: Guardians Right, I’m not the usual person you’d expect to write about a modern console shooter. My patch is arcade PCBs, CRT monitors and keeping thirty year old power supplies from catching fire. But Carl asked me to cover Halo 5: Guardians because the argument in our group chat wasn’t really about story or sandbox balance. It was about frame rate, resolution and what Microsoft’s hardware actually let 343 Industries get away…
There's something oddly magical about playing Super Mario 64 on a dual-screened handheld while sitting on a train that's gently swaying through the English countryside. I mean, you're holding what amounts to Nintendo's greatest 3D platformer ever made—arguably their most important game since the original Super Mario Bros.—and it's been squeezed into a device that fits in your jacket pocket. That's still mental to me, even though the DS version came out back in 2004.I…
Saturday morning, 2005. I'm staring at what looks like a chunky grey sandwich with screens, wondering if Nintendo's lost their minds. The DS had landed, and with it came something I'd never expected—a portable version of the game that basically taught me how to exist in three dimensions. Super Mario 64 DS wasn't just a port, though. This was Mario's plumber crew getting the full treatment, and honestly? It changed everything about handheld gaming for…
Tim is mistaken when he says that Jak and Daxter was just “another mascot platformer.” Joe is closer to correct that it was the last great traditional 3D platformer before all of them turned into open world. However, Joe is missing the technical innovations that made it possible. Technical innovation enabled both the artistic vision and the engineering excellence necessary to make Jak and Daxter a great platformer. The GOAL programming language, the seamless world…