My mate Dave convinced me to start cataloguing every N64 game I could get my hands on about three years ago. "You've got loads of them anyway," he said, gesturing at my slightly concerning pile of grey cartridges. "Might as well write down what's worth playing." What started as a weekend project has turned into this bizarre archaeological dig through Nintendo's 64-bit library, and honestly? I'm still finding gems I'd completely forgotten existed.The thing about…
I was rummaging through my loft last weekend, dodging cobwebs and trying not to step through the ceiling, when I found it—my old Sega Master System, still wrapped in that tatty towel I'd used to protect it during house moves. The sight of that familiar black plastic shell sent me tumbling back through decades of Sega memories, from those early 8-bit days right through to the Dreamcast's bittersweet finale.You know, Sega's journey through the console…
My mate Dave popped round last Tuesday with his laptop, looking like he'd discovered fire. "You've got to see this," he said, firing up what looked suspiciously like Mario 64 running in a window on his desktop. The catch? No N64 in sight, just some software called Project64 doing things that would've blown my teenage mind.Here's the thing about N64 emulation—it's brilliant when it works, absolutely maddening when it doesn't, and somehow both at the…
There's this moment burned into my brain from Christmas 1996. I'm sitting cross-legged on our living room carpet—you know, that rough brown stuff that left marks on your shins—holding an N64 controller for the first time. The thing looked like it was designed by aliens who'd heard about human hands but never actually seen them. Three prongs? What were they thinking?But then I pressed start on Super Mario 64, and everything changed.That plumber's face filled…
You know that argument that split playground friendships back in the day? The one that made kids choose sides like they were picking teams for PE? I'm talking about the great console divide that had us all convinced we had to pledge allegiance to either the chunky grey cartridge or the sleek black disc. But here's the thing—when it came to Mario, both the Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 delivered something special, just in completely…
Ok, let me take you back to when star wars games actually mattered. When Lucasarts still knew what they where doing and way before Disney stole the lot. I mean the good Star Wars games, not the shite EA keep churning out. My first experience with a Star Wars game wasn’t on my bedroom computer (we weren’t rich enough for that luxury). Nope it was at the arcade down the road in Stretford wedged in…
Picture this: you're twelve years old, clutching a dog-eared copy of GamePro, staring at that glossy two-page spread showing Mario in glorious 64-bit 3D. The magazine's promising something called "Ultra 64" – yeah, that's what they called it back then – and your brain's doing cartwheels trying to imagine what comes next. We'd conquered the Death Star trench run in Super Star Wars, we'd collected every last coin in Super Mario World, and now Nintendo…
Cleaning out the spare room last weekend, I found it tucked behind a box of PlayStation memory cards—my Pikachu Nintendo 64, still in its original box, looking as gloriously ridiculous as the day I impulse-bought it from Electronics Boutique. The yellow shell catches light like a toy car, and honestly? After all these years, it still makes me grin like an idiot.See, this wasn't just another console variant. This was Pokemon fever made manifest in…
My N64 sits on the shelf next to a stack of cartridges that probably cost more than my first car. Well, that's not saying much—my first car was a rusty Escort that made more noise than a Rumble Pak having an existential crisis. But these grey plastic rectangles? They're worth their weight in nostalgia, and some of them are genuinely worth their weight in actual money these days.The thing about the N64 is that it…
I remember buying Diablo — hell, I remember the day that changed my life. It wasn’t alcoholism, girls, or any of the other problems you might expect from a university student. I was living in Manchester one snowy February Tuesday night in 1997 staring at the cover of a video game in a store named Electronics Boutique. There was a guy wielding a sword and standing in front of a red backdrop. That game would…