Saturday afternoons in 1991 had a particular rhythm. Mum would disappear into the kitchen with Radio 4 burbling about something appropriately serious, Dad would commandeer the garage for mysterious DIY projects that usually involved swearing at screws, and I'd have the living room to myself. The Mega Drive sat there like a black plastic altar, and more often than not, I'd find myself sliding that familiar blue cartridge into the slot. Michael Jackson's Moonwalker wasn't…
Shhh… don’t tell anyone but I still have my Gateway 2000 mouse pad at my workplace. I’m not sitting here at my desk trying to make some kind of retro gamer statement with it. I simply liked the mouse pad and it was the right dimensions to fit my mouse and well it must have been the right dimensions to withstand moving THREE times and every other mouse pad getting lost along the way. But…
The Curse of Monkey Island Review: Hand-Drawn Visual Style & Perfect Voice Acting Hello, Marcus here, and I want to talk about something that has bothered me in the way people discuss point-and-click adventure games for years. People say The Curse of Monkey Island is nothing more than “a lot of nice looking graphics,” and don’t understand what LucasArts did to advance the technology behind their games. The Curse of Monkey Island was released on…
I was digging through my game collection the other night—you know, that annual ritual where you convince yourself you're "organizing" but really you're just reliving the good times—when my fingers found that familiar purple spine. Beyond Oasis. Even after all these years, that cartridge still makes me smile like an idiot.See, here's the thing about Sega's approach to RPGs in the mid-90s. While Square and Enix were crafting these massive, turn-based epics that demanded forty-hour…
Escape from Monkey Island Review: The 3D Experiment That Divided Fans The first thing about Escape from Monkey Island is that LucasArts took a huge risk by moving Guybrush Threepwood into the third dimension. Half the fans of the adventure game community went wild with excitement and the other half were terrified. As someone who has been a fan of the series since the early 1990s and spent countless hours with this divisive title, I…
I am a history teacher from Phoenix, Arizona and I’ve watched people write off the Sega Genesis for nearly 30 years now. They say the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) had better games. They say Nintendo dominated the 16-bit era. They say the Genesis was technically inferior. None of that is true. The Genesis was not inferior; it was simply different. While the market was moving toward home-developed games, the Genesis focused on arcade-style gameplay.…
My mate Dave rang me last Tuesday, absolutely chuffing over some N64 console he'd found in his nan's attic. "Still got the box," he says, like he'd uncovered the Ark of the Covenant. Thing is, he wasn't wrong to get excited—that grey brick from 1996 can be worth proper money these days, depending on what you've got and how well you've treated it.I've been tracking N64 prices for years now, partly because I'm nosy and…
The N64 controller was in my hands, palms already sweating from anticipation. I'd just fired up Perfect Dark for the first time, and honestly? Nothing could have prepared me for what Rare had accomplished. This wasn't just GoldenEye's prettier sibling—this was something entirely different, something that pushed every single transistor in that grey console to its absolute breaking point.I remember the exact moment it clicked for me. Joanna Dark was creeping through the Carrington Institute,…
How the Super Nintendo Proved Specs Aren’t Everything I’ve been playing video games since the Atari 2600. I keep stacks of CRTs running on dusty shelves in my basement in Minneapolis. I have an accounting degree, so I think in systems. If someone tries to sell me on some wide sweeping philosophy without understanding the technical mechanics behind it, I get very irritated. That’s why when people try to tell me that the Genesis was…
Marcus here, and I’ve got something to admit. When Telltale announced a new Monkey Island game, the team had one of those heated Zoom arguments that Carl has to referee. Joe knows in his heart it’s rubbish since it’s not LucasArts, Tim is excited because episodic content is “the future of adventure games”, Sam is worried whether the puzzles will maintain the logical complexity of the earlier series. I stay quiet until I’ve played it,…