You know what still gets me? The way that little paper Mario would flutter when he jumped. There was something so perfectly Nintendo about taking their most famous character and flattening him like he'd been run over by a steamroller, then somehow making that limitation feel like pure magic.I remember the exact moment I first saw Paper Mario running in that Mushroom Kingdom intro. My mate Dave had picked up a copy from Electronics Boutique—remember…
The thing about speed is that you don't really understand it until it's taken away from you. I learned this the hard way when my mate Dave brought his SNES round for a sleepover, and we spent half the night arguing about whether Mario moved too slowly compared to Sonic. Dave was wrong, obviously, but watching Mario's careful, considered jumps after months of Sonic's breakneck sprinting felt like watching paint dry in slow motion.See, I'd…
I'd been tinkering with my N64 controller collection last night—cleaning the analog sticks, replacing that infamous bowl-shaped plastic bit that always wore out—when my daughter wandered over and asked why the controller looked "so weird." Three prongs? Who designs a three-pronged controller? Fair question, really. But as I held up that grey plastic boomerang, muscle memory kicked in like an old friend.See, before Super Mario 64, we'd all been living in a flat world. Sure,…
Christmas morning, 1998. I'm unwrapping what looks suspiciously like a console-shaped box when my dad mutters something about "not understanding why they made the controller look like a spaceship crashed into a telephone." Inside was my first N64, bundled with a golden cartridge that would absolutely ruin my understanding of what video games could be.That first boot of Ocarina of Time? Still gives me goosebumps. Not just because of Zelda's lullaby drifting through our living…
Picture this: there I was, controller in hand, wiggling that stubby little analog stick on my N64 pad and watching Mario's face stretch and morph in ways that shouldn't have been possible on hardware that cost less than my dad's monthly beer budget. That moment—the first time you grabbed Mario's nose and gave it a proper yank in the file select screen—that's when everything changed. Not just for me, but for gaming as a whole.I'd…
The other day my eight-year-old asked me why Sonic looks "weird" on our modern TV, and I realized we'd been playing the Blue Blur through some dodgy composite cables that made him look like he'd been dipped in vaseline. That got me digging through my emulation setup again, because let's be honest—original Mega Drive hardware is brilliant, but it's also thirty-odd years old and sometimes you just want to play Sonic 2 without worrying about…
You know that moment when you realize you've been doing something wrong your entire life? Like when you discover you've been tying your shoelaces the hard way, or that there's actually a proper way to peel a banana. That's exactly what happened to me the first time I picked up an N64 controller and tried to walk Mario around Princess Peach's courtyard.I'd been gaming since the Atari days, right? Spent countless hours with a joystick…
Picture this: you're thirteen, it's 1991, and your mate's older brother just walked through the door with a black plastic case that looks like it could house nuclear launch codes. Inside? Sonic the Hedgehog for the Mega Drive. We didn't know it then, but we were about to witness the birth of speed as a gameplay mechanic, wrapped in attitude and served with a side of "blast processing" that we'd argue about for decades.Fast-forward to…
I was rummaging through a box of old Nintendo Power magazines last weekend when I found it—issue 129, October 1999, with that haunting Skull Kid on the cover. The memories hit like a freight train. Not just of the magazine, but of what came after. Majora's Mask. Christ, even typing that name gives me goosebumps.Most people remember Ocarina of Time as the N64's Zelda masterpiece, and fair enough—it was revolutionary. But Majora's Mask? That was…
The Mega Drive sat beneath our telly like some kind of sleek spacecraft that had crash-landed between mum's ceramic dog collection. Black plastic, those gorgeous curves, and that power LED that glowed red like HAL's evil twin. But when Sonic 2 arrived in November 1992—wrapped in that brilliant blue box with Miles "Tails" Prower spinning alongside our blue blur—everything I thought I knew about speed got rewritten.I'd already worn grooves into the original Sonic. Green…