Picture this: you're eight years old, Saturday morning, and your mate's older brother has just fired up Sonic the Hedgehog for the first time. That opening Green Hill Zone music hits – you know the one, that bouncy Yamaha FM synthesis that somehow sounds like liquid sunshine – and suddenly every other console sounds like it's playing through a tin can. That was my introduction to the Mega Drive, and honestly? It ruined me for…
My mate Dave had this theory about comic book games in the early nineties—they were all rubbish, he'd say, because nobody could figure out how to make superpowers feel super on a 16-bit console. Then he borrowed my copy of the X-Men game for the Mega Drive, and I didn't see him for three days straight. His mum rang my house asking if he was dead or just "doing that thing with the TV again."The…
You know what still makes my blood boil? Walking into a GAME store in 1999 and seeing rows upon rows of PlayStation cases while the Dreamcast section looked like a forgotten corner booth at a failing car boot sale. Three games. Maybe four if someone hadn't nicked Crazy Taxi again.I was there, mate. I had the console on launch day—well, launch week anyway, because I'm not completely mental and the queues looked insane. But I…
You know what drives me absolutely mental about modern gaming? The way marketing feels so calculated, so focus-grouped to death that you can practically smell the boardroom coffee in every trailer. Back in the 90s though—man, companies would just throw money at the weirdest ideas and somehow magic happened. Case in point: Cool Spot, a platformer starring 7 Up's red dot mascot that had absolutely no business being as good as it was.I stumbled across…
Funny how a three-minute indie track can absolutely demolish you, isn't it? I was minding my own business last Tuesday, scrolling through Spotify's weekly recommendations while my kid demolished a packet of Monster Munch nearby, when Alex G's "Nintendo 64" started playing. Three notes in and I'm transported back to 1997, sitting cross-legged on beige carpet with that distinctive three-pronged controller in my hands.You know that feeling when a song perfectly captures something you didn't…
Look, I'll be honest with you—there's something almost criminal about how Comix Zone slipped through the cracks. I mean, here we had this absolute gem sitting on the Mega Drive, doing things that no other game was even attempting, and most people just… missed it. Completely.I remember the exact moment I first laid eyes on it, actually. Summer of '95, round at my mate Craig's house. His older brother had just come back from uni…
My mate Steve's N64 still sits on his telly stand like a grey plastic monument to better times. Last Saturday, while his missus was at her sister's and the kids were glued to YouTube on their tablets, we fired up GoldenEye for what must've been the thousandth time. Same battered controllers—one with a wobbly stick, another missing the Z-trigger spring—same arguments about screen-peeking, same ridiculous grins plastered across our increasingly lined faces.The thing is, we…
Picture me, Christmas morning 1997, staring down at this bizarre three-pronged controller like it was some alien artifact. My cousin Jamie was already fiddling with it, holding it completely wrong—gripping it like a traditional pad with both hands on the outer prongs. I watched him struggle through the Mario 64 castle courtyard for about five minutes before his older brother Dan walked over and basically performed controller surgery."No, you muppet," Dan said, repositioning Jamie's hands.…
You know that feeling when you open a dusty cardboard box in your parents' loft and suddenly you're fifteen again? That's exactly what happened when I found my old Mega Drive last month, still wrapped in that horrible bubble wrap mum insisted would "keep the dust off." There it was—that sleek black wedge that absolutely demolished my Saturday mornings and pocket money throughout the early nineties.I'm not being dramatic when I say this console changed…
Saturday afternoon, nineteen-ninety-five. I'm sprawled on the carpet in my mate David's front room, controller in hand, watching this yellow star-shaped character stretch his arms across the screen like some sort of cosmic elastic band. The game was Ristar, and honestly? I'd never heard of it before that moment. David's older brother had picked it up from Blockbuster Video—you know, back when you could rent games for the weekend and pray the previous customer hadn't…