There's this moment, right? You're standing in Woolworths on launch day, sweaty tenner crumpled in your palm, staring at this weird three-pronged controller that looks like alien technology escaped from Area 51. The N64 cartridge slots are bigger than your head, the console itself is this matte black monument to what-if. But it's that demo unit running Super Mario 64 that stops you dead.Mario's just…standing there. Waiting. And then some kid grabs the controller and…
You know what still bugs me after all these years? Walking into a mate's house in 1991, seeing that sleek black Mega Drive sitting under their telly, and asking "Got any Mega Man games?" only to get that blank stare. The same stare I'd give when they'd ask about Sonic on my NES.Back then, I didn't really understand the politics of it all. I just knew that my little blue robot hero lived exclusively in…
There's this fighting game that everyone seems to have forgotten about, buried somewhere between the Street Fighter II fever and the Tekken 3 hysteria. I'm talking about Mace: The Dark Age on Nintendo 64, and honestly? It deserves way better than the dusty shelf it's been relegated to in gaming history.I stumbled across my copy last weekend while hunting through a box of old cartridges—you know how it is, looking for one thing and finding…
The sound of cardboard hitting cardboard still makes my ears perk up. Proper weird, that—but there's something about that distinctive *thwack* of milk caps colliding that takes me straight back to Year 5 break times when everyone smelled like Ready Brek and had grass stains on their knees.I remember the exact moment Pogs invaded our playground. Must've been early '94, maybe late '93. This kid called Marcus turned up one Monday morning with a leather…
Picture this: it's 4pm on a Tuesday in 1994, and I'm sprinting home from school like my life depends on it. Not because of homework—that could wait. Not because mum had promised fish fingers—though that was a bonus. No, I'm running because Nickelodeon's afternoon block was about to kick off, and missing the opening credits of "Legends of the Hidden Temple" felt like a personal failure.You know that feeling when you burst through the front…
The sound hit me first. That metallic crunch when Scorpion's spear connected, followed by the digitized grunt that my Mega Drive's YM2612 chip somehow made sound more menacing than it had any right to. I was hunched over our living room carpet—the brown one with those weird geometric patterns that looked like a computer had hiccups—frantically scribbling move commands on the back of a school exercise book. Down, forward, high punch. Got it. But what…
The other night I was cleaning out my game room—well, it's really just the spare bedroom with too many consoles stacked on IKEA furniture—when I stumbled across my old Dreamcast VMU. That little memory card with the screen still works, by the way. Thirty minutes of Chao Adventure before the CR2032 gives up, but still. There's something poetic about Sega's last proper console being remembered through a memory card that outlasted the system itself.I bought…
Remember that kid on the school bus with the massive Game Gear who'd burn through six AAs before reaching the next stop? That was me, clutching Sega's nuclear-powered handheld like it was going to solve world hunger. The thing weighed more than my school bag and had the battery life of a mayfly, but bloody hell, it had a backlit color screen when everyone else was squinting at green-tinted Game Boy pixels.I've been chasing that…
Some games just stick to your ribs, you know? Like that perfect Sunday roast your nan made—the one where everything aligned and you're still chasing that exact combination of crispy potatoes and gravy twenty-five years later. Flashback for the Mega Drive was one of those meals for me, cinematically speaking.I first spotted it in Electronics Boutique, that glossy box art promising something different. The screenshots looked…proper. Not cartoony, not chunky pixels trying their best to…
There’s something satisfying about rooting for the underdog. That’s probably why my Sega Saturn shares pride of place on a shelf with my PS5; and why I’ll freely admit I use it more often than my spanking new Sony console. I spent three hours playing Guardian Heroes last Sunday – and my wife came downstairs, caught sight of those huge pixel sprites plastered across her 55-inch TV screen and gave me “that look”. You know…