The other day I was rummaging through my spare room—well, calling it a spare room is generous since it's mostly a graveyard of old consoles and tangled cables—when I found my original Mega Drive six-button controller. Still had that satisfying click. You know the one. Made me plug the whole system back in, naturally.Three hours later, I'm hunched over Streets of Rage 2 like I'm sixteen again, except my back's making noises that would've terrified…
Three controllers dangling from extension cords, the fourth player holding a mad-looking three-pronged contraption that looked like it escaped from a science lab—that's my clearest memory of the N64 launch window. My mate Dave had somehow convinced his parents that 64-bit was "educational technology," and suddenly his living room became mission control for what felt like the future of gaming.Looking back now, the Nintendo 64 wasn't just another console generation. It was the machine that…
I wanted to get something off my chest before I go into detail on Return to Monkey Island. Joe here, and while the rest of the crew are arguing about whether modern adventure games can recapture the essence of the classics, I have spent the last month playing through Ron Gilbert’s triumphant return to his own franchise. Released on September 19, 2022 (Wikipedia), this is not another modern adventure game revival cash-in. This is Gilbert…
There I was, controller gripped like my life depended on it, watching Marc Summers navigate some kid through an obstacle course that looked like someone had thrown paint at a jungle gym and called it television. Double Dare wasn't just a game show—it was basically childhood wish fulfillment wrapped in green slime and broadcast directly into our living rooms every afternoon at half past four.You know that feeling when you're eight years old and absolutely…
There's something almost mystical about the way certain objects feel in your hands. A well-worn hammer, maybe. Your gran's wooden spoon. Or, if you grew up glued to a telly in the early '90s, the Sega Genesis six-button controller.I can still feel the exact weight of it now—not too heavy, not plasticky-light like some of the knock-offs you'd find in dodgy electronics shops. The Genesis pad had this perfect heft, like someone actually thought about…
The RF switcher was warm under my fingers that Christmas morning in 1998, the familiar ritual of channel-hopping until the N64's signal locked in properly. Channel 36, usually. Sometimes 37 if the weather was being difficult. Mum was already warning about turkey prep time, but I had something more important to attend to—a rectangular grey cartridge that promised to let me pilot an X-wing through the Death Star trench run I'd memorized from VHS rewatches.Rogue…
We all thought that making a list of the best fighting games of all time would be violent. Samuel was immediately spewing out frame data like some sort of holy scripture. Joe was passionately defending Sega’s 3D approach while also discrediting every single thing that Capcom has done since 1991. Marcus began calculating the frames of recovery from hits on his phone. Elena was demanding we recognise the superior design philosophy of SNK’s fighting games.…
The Game That Sold Nintendo on Rare I’ve been playing games since the Atari 2600. A collection of CRTs quietly hum away downstairs in my basement in Minneapolis, and they’re not going anywhere. Call me a nostalgiaophile, but video games and accounting are the two careers I understand: systems. I get manufacturing. I get making every dollar count. Donkey Kong Country is technical prowess mixed with commercial genius. It was Nintendo proving they could still…
I am a Phoenix area high school history teacher who has been a Sega fan my whole life. I have spent many years saying that Sega got taken down by poor timing in the market and that the Genesis was better than the SNES. I have also spent a lot of time writing about how the Dreamcast was robbed and should have done much better. I continue to fight to keep using the term “blast…
The clatter of dice on my bedroom floor still echoes in my head sometimes, which probably sounds daft until you realize I'm talking about the sound effects in Shining in the Darkness. That metallic rattle when you'd roll for initiative—pure digital dice music that somehow felt more authentic than the actual plastic cubes scattered around my Dungeons & Dragons books.I stumbled into this gem completely by accident, the way most of the best gaming discoveries…