There's something almost mystical about hooking up a Mega Drive to an old CRT and watching those first pixels dance across the screen. You know that moment when Sonic's blue fur catches the light just right? That's not nostalgia talking—that's the actual technical wizardry of Sega's 16-bit color system doing its thing.I've been tinkering with Genesis hardware for years now, and honestly, the more I dig into its guts, the more impressed I get. People…
Elena here, and I need to address something that’s been bothering me for years. When people discuss racing game history, they focus on arcade racers or PC sims, completely ignoring how Gran Turismo 2 fundamentally changed what console racing could be. This wasn’t just another sequel, it was the moment PlayStation proved it could deliver serious automotive simulation alongside its flashier exclusives. Released in Japan on December 11, 1999 (MobyGames), followed by North America on…
My mate Dave brought something over yesterday that made me do a proper double-take. Picture this: I'm halfway through explaining why my CRT still has a place in 2024 (something about integer scaling and input lag), when he plops down this sleek little collection disc. "Check it out," he says, grinning like he'd found buried treasure. The Sega Genesis Collection. Fifty-something games from the Mega Drive era, all wrapped up in modern packaging that somehow…
You know what's funny? I was elbow-deep in my spare parts drawer last Tuesday, hunting for a replacement fuse, when I caught sight of my old N64 power brick sitting there like a grey plastic tombstone. Thing weighs more than some modern laptops, doesn't it? That got me thinking about something I've been meaning to tackle properly—the whole power supply situation with Nintendo's 64-bit marvel, and why getting it wrong can turn your beloved console…
ok, making a top 10 list of the greatest SNES games almost destroyed friendships for multiple people. One of our guys, Carl, had to referee arguments that escalated to the point of people going fists. Another guy, Joe, would try to list things lower because he played for Sega. Tim wrote an essay about Chrono Trigger even though he only discovered it within the last 5 years. Sam argued for Street Fighter II like a…
The Top Ten Sports Games Ever Made This ranking will break all of your friendships. As soon as David proposed that we rank the greatest sports games of all time, Samuel was already muttering something about Amiga superiority, and Elena was preparing her usual defence of the Dreamcast. Then Joe jumped in and said that NBA Jam deserved to be ranked at the top due to the fact that “chaos beats simulation every time”, prompting…
The Technical Evolution of Racing Games: From Vector Graphics to Polygons I get what it takes to send code out on constrained hardware. I know the impossible optimisations you need to develop a game that has some sort of responsiveness when you’re limited by kilobytes of memory and a CPU that’s clocked at single-digit megahertz. Racing games offer the ideal way to see the technical development of the 80s and 90s since each generation had…
Walking into my local indie game shop last weekend, I spotted something that made my heart skip a beat—a pristine copy of Moonwalker for the Mega Drive, complete with that distinctive silver spine and Michael Jackson's unmistakable silhouette. The asking price was steep enough to make my wallet whimper, but seeing that game again transported me straight back to 1990, when everything about it seemed impossibly cool and slightly mad in equal measure.You have to…
Last night I stumbled across Alex G's "Nintendo 64" while scrolling through Spotify's rabbit hole of indie recommendations, and honestly? It hit me like a perfectly timed power-up when you're down to your last life. The song's barely three minutes long, but it managed to capture something I've been trying to articulate for years about what retro gaming actually means to those of us who lived it the first time around.You know that feeling when…
I remember opening my Christmas presents in 1998. I was 21 years old, driving home from Arizona State University for winter break and wondering what games I’d be getting. Little did I know that my parents had bought me a PlayStation and Spyro the Dragon. “You’ve been talking about that purple dragon game,” my mom informed me. I don’t think I had outright said I wanted it to anyone, but I suppose my sighing in…