If you just want the answer, the best Monkey Island game is Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. The Secret of Monkey Island comes a very close second, The Curse of Monkey Island takes third, and Escape from Monkey Island props up the bottom. Getting to that order, though? That nearly ended a friendship. The full list, best to worst, is below, along with why each game landed where it did. Quick Rankings 1. Monkey Island…
You know that weird thing where a smell can transport you instantly? Well, the other day I caught a whiff of something—maybe it was the ozone from an old CRT warming up, or that particular plastic scent of a cartridge slot—and suddenly I was twelve again, sprawled on my mate's living room carpet, arguing about whether Sonic was faster than the Road Runner. That's the magic of the Mega Drive, isn't it? It doesn't just…
Last night I was rifling through a dusty box in the spare room—you know, that archaeological dig we all promise to do "next weekend"—when I found my old N64 cartridge collection wrapped in a tea towel like precious gems. There it was: Mario Kart 64, the plastic slightly yellowed but the label still crisp. I held it up to the light, and suddenly I was sixteen again, cramped on a mate's bedroom floor with three…
Standing in my mate Dave's living room in late 2000, gripping that familiar three-pronged controller with sweaty palms, I had no idea I was about to experience one of gaming's most underrated Bond adventures. Dave had just unwrapped The World Is Not Enough for his N64, and honestly? We were skeptical. GoldenEye 007 had set the bar stratospherically high three years earlier, and Perfect Dark had raised it even further. Another Bond game felt risky—like…
The Sega Saturn sits in my cabinet like a beautiful, misunderstood artifact from an alternate timeline where 2D sprites ruled the world and marketing departments made sensible decisions. But tucked inside that angular grey shell is something truly magical—a game that shouldn't exist, couldn't have been made anywhere else, and somehow captures the essence of dreaming better than any piece of entertainment before or since.I'm talking about NiGHTS into Dreams, obviously. And if you've never…
I remember the exact moment my childhood died. Not in some dramatic, tear-jerking way—more like watching your favorite teddy bear get caught in a washing machine and come out looking… different. I was nineteen, home from university for the weekend, and my mate Dave had brought round this game he'd bought from some bloke at a car boot sale. "It's got a squirrel," he said, like that explained everything.Conker's Bad Fur Day wasn't supposed to…
Why the Best Console of its Generation Lost To Market Momentum I own a pub in Bristol with a back room full of arcade cabinets and old school home systems. I operate on original hardware. I know the difference between original arcade cabinets and emulation. I know what it means to keep vintage hardware alive. Sega’s Dreamcast blows my mind. I get what Sega was going for: technical excellence, architectural mastery. Dreamcast was easily the…
The summer I first wrapped my hands around that bizarre three-pronged controller, everything clicked. Not immediately, mind you—I spent the first hour trying to figure out which prong went where, rotating the thing like I was solving a Rubik's cube. But when Mario's face appeared on that file select screen and I realized I could grab his nose and stretch it like digital Play-Doh, something fundamental shifted in my understanding of what games could be.See,…
There's something unsettling about firing up Shadow Man on the N64 after twenty-odd years. I mean, you forget how genuinely disturbing some games were back then—not in that try-hard, gore-for-shock-value way modern horror does, but in a proper, creeping dread sort of way that made you glance over your shoulder even though you knew it was just pixels on a screen.I picked up my copy from Electronics Boutique sometime in late '99, I think. The…
You know what? I've been thinking about that dusty corner of my game collection again. There's this one cart that sits between my beloved Ocarina of Time and the slightly warped copy of GoldenEye—Quest 64. Funny thing is, most people either don't remember it at all or they remember it as "that weird RPG that wasn't very good." But here's the thing… they're wrong.I picked up Quest 64 in the summer of '98, right after…