The smell hit me first—that particular mix of pizza grease and teenage determination that only a proper four-player split-screen session could produce. We're talking summer of '97, my mate Dave's living room, and the N64 controller cables snaking across the carpet like some sort of electronic pasta disaster. His mum had given us strict instructions about not spilling anything on the new beige carpet, which naturally made every sip of Tango feel like defusing a…
Tim here and I’ve got to say that I’ve had some concerns since I started my retro gaming journey. Everyone seems to rave about this game called Doom, how it changed everything, how it essentially birthed the first-person shooter as we know it today. Since I’ve come to this game completely cold, without experiencing the supposed revolution it brought, I was sceptical of how good a 30-year-old game could be. Well, I was wrong. Doom…
Timothy here — and I need to get something off my chest immediately. When I was first looking into retro gaming a few years ago, everybody would tell me I needed to play the original Mega Man games. “They’re classics,” they’d say. “You gotta play the Mega Man series.” Well, I did, and honestly, they were like doing homework. Stiff controls, crazy difficult spikes, and graphics that seemed ancient even to me. I was about…
Last night I found myself elbow-deep in a cardboard box that's been following me through three house moves, excavating Mega Drive carts like archaeological treasures. My wife rolled her eyes as I held up Shinobi III and made that satisfied "ahhhh" sound you make when you find a twenty in last winter's coat pocket. "You know you've got that on about four different compilations now," she said. True. But there's something about the weight of…
Sam has been arguing for months that the original Rayman should be taken seriously in platformer discussions. And I think he may be right after playing Ubisoft’s debut PlayStation exclusive, which took around two dozen hours to complete. It was released in the United States on 7 September 1995 via Wikipedia. Although originally intended as a quirky character design, Rayman turned out to be the first genuinely good platformer for PlayStation, showing the potential of…
The cartridge slot clicked with that familiar satisfying snap, and there I was again—standing in that cursed carnival town of Termina, watching the same three-day cycle begin anew. My mate Dave had warned me about Majora's Mask when he lent it to me back in 2001. "It's proper weird, this one," he'd said, tapping the gold cart like it might bite. "Not like normal Zelda."He wasn't wrong. Where Ocarina of Time felt like an epic…
You know what's funny? I can pinpoint exactly when my relationship with stress changed forever. It wasn't meditation, wasn't therapy, wasn't even that weird breathing app everyone keeps recommending. It was a plastic cartridge shaped like a tiny grey brick, and it taught me that sometimes the best way to solve real-world problems is to plant virtual turnips.Harvest Moon 64 landed in my life during what I'll diplomatically call my "quarter-life crisis before quarter-life crises…
There's something magical about stumbling across a game that shouldn't work but absolutely does. Picture this: 1995, and Disney's about to unleash their first fully computer-animated film on the world. Pixar's still this scrappy little studio that most people couldn't even pronounce properly, and here comes Toy Story—this revolutionary thing that looked like nothing we'd seen before. Naturally, the suits decided it needed a video game tie-in. What they gave us on the Mega Drive…
Right, let’s get one thing straight from the start – David here and I need to talk about something that has been driving me crazy about our team discussions. Tim has been saying for months now that modern ARPGs like Path of Exile have completely surpassed Diablo II in every way. Absolute nonsense. Yes, they may be more complex; yeah, they probably do look shinier with their flashy graphics; and, sure, they are most likely…
This is the story of how GoldenEye conquered my university experience and why everything that happened was absolutely fantastic. It all started back in October 1997, when I finally got myself an N64 (a ludicrously expensive bit of technology at the time – I had to save up roughly two and half months wages from my part time job). My purchase included the N64 bundle game GoldenEye 007. Honestly I wasn’t that bothered about it.…