Disclaimer: This article doesn’t focus solely on Crash 4: It’s About Time. As we all know by now, it’s meant to set up my review of Crash 4, so there will be some major spoilers for the entire Crash Bandicoot timeline. Crash Bandicoot has always felt like the PlayStation mascot. Growing up in America, Crash was everywhere. Orange boxes, toy stores, comic books, cereal cards; he was omnipresent. But I wasn’t American. I grew up…
I was sixteen years old and had roughly $12 to my name. During my free time I found myself spending quite an excessive amount of time lurking around the electronics department of our local Toys R Us. Think back to what video game stores used to look like — everything was locked-up behind glass or you had to take those flimsy little paper ticket thingies. But they always had a demo unit tucked-away somewhere in…
There's this game that sits in my memory like a secret nobody else seemed to share. Fatal Labyrinth for the Mega Drive—or Genesis if you're across the pond. I stumbled across it in one of those rental shops where the boxes were arranged like library books and half the cases had the wrong manual stuffed inside. The cover art looked properly medieval, all dungeons and mysterious towers, which was exactly the sort of thing that…
Right, so there I was last weekend, digging through a box of cartridges my mate Dave gave me when he moved house—you know how it is, "here, take this lot before my missus makes me chuck them out." Most of it was the usual suspects: Sonic, Streets of Rage, couple of FIFA games with players who've been retired for twenty years. But tucked underneath a loose copy of Road Rash was this odd little cart…
There are numerous reasons I’m a 42 yr. Old construction foreman and I’ve had so many vivid memories of obtaining my first handheld video game as a child. I purchased my first Game Boy at a garage sale in 2009 for $5. After my daughter said “retro handhelds”, I spent the next 3 hours trying to figure out why anyone would want to play games on a tiny, dimly lit screen. When I purchased the…
When I’m down in my basement game room organising my collection – and my wife tells me that I have obsessive-compulsive disorder; she’s probably right – there is one console that freezes me in place every time. That gorgeous white, curvy beauty on my shelf – my Dreamcast – still takes my breath away every time I glance at it. It didn’t sell enough units to be considered the most successful console of all time,…
My mate Dave called me mental for keeping a working Mega Drive plugged into my old CRT, but honestly? He just doesn't get it. Last weekend I was digging through my collection—you know the drill, plastic cases stacked like wonky dominoes behind the telly—and I stumbled across something that made me proper nostalgic. Warriors of the Eternal Sun, still sitting there in its battered case, the manual pages yellowed like old tea bags.See, here's the…
Saturday afternoon, 1991. I'm hunched over our family's beige Amstrad PC, the monitor humming like a disgruntled refrigerator, when my mate James rocks up with a floppy disk that looks like it's been through a washing machine. "Trust me," he says, sliding it across the desk like contraband. "This'll blow your mind."The disk label, written in fading biro, simply read "Captain Comic." I'd never heard of it, but that was half the thrill with shareware…
You know what drove me absolutely mental last weekend? I was trying to show my mate Dave how clean my Knulli setup looked on my RG35XX, scrolling through what I thought was my perfectly organized Genesis collection. Instead, I'm clicking through a digital nightmare—ROMs scattered like confetti, duplicates everywhere, and games buried in folders that made no sense. Dave just stood there watching me frantically search for Streets of Rage 2 while I muttered increasingly…
There's something about that electric blue plastic that still makes me grin like an idiot. I'm talking about the Pikachu N64, obviously—that wonderful, ridiculous console that Nintendo dropped on us in 2000, complete with Pokémon Hey You, Pikachu! and a microphone that barely worked but somehow didn't matter.I remember the exact moment I saw one for the first time. My mate Dave had somehow convinced his mum to get him one for his birthday, and…