Sometimes I catch myself humming the Green Hill Zone theme while doing the washing up, and my wife looks at me like I've finally lost it completely. But that's the thing about Sega – their music just burrows into your brain and sets up permanent residence. I was never really a "sides" person during the console wars; I mean, I had my Mega Drive first, sure, but I'd sneak round to my mate Dave's for…
My mate Dave had this habit of picking the weirdest games at the rental shop. While everyone else was grabbing the obvious choices—Sonic, Streets of Rage, whatever had the shiniest box art—Dave would emerge from the Genesis section clutching something called General Chaos, grinning like he'd discovered fire. I thought he'd lost his mind. The box looked like a Saturday morning cartoon had exploded all over it, complete with tiny pixelated soldiers that seemed more…
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…
There's something oddly therapeutic about the gentle click of a plastic shell coming apart, revealing the circuit board secrets inside a console that's been refusing to cooperate. I've got a Game Gear sitting on my workbench right now—the screen went dark last Tuesday while I was showing my nephew Streets of Rage—and honestly, I'm not even annoyed. These machines talk to you if you listen, and this one's been whispering about capacitor problems for months.My…
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…
Nothing quite prepared me for the moment I first throttled a motorcycle down the asphalt while simultaneously clubbing a rival rider with a chain. I mean, obviously I was sitting on our living room carpet, not actually astride a Kawasaki—but Road Rash 3 had this way of making the Mega Drive controller vibrate through your bones until you forgot where your thumbs ended and the handlebars began.This was peak EA, back when they'd slap "if…
Standing in my mate Dave's bedroom in 1996, watching him fire up Radiant Silvergun for the first time, I knew I was witnessing something special. The Saturn had been sitting there looking a bit sorry for itself next to his PlayStation, but when those opening notes hit and the screen erupted in geometric bullet patterns, suddenly Sony's grey box felt very ordinary indeed.That's the thing about Sega's 32-bit wonder—it always felt like it was hiding…
Last Friday night, I found myself elbow-deep in Amazon's recommendation algorithm when it suggested something that made me pause mid-scroll: the Sega Flashback Games Collection. Now, I've got a complicated relationship with these plug-and-play devices—half of me lights up at the convenience, while the other half mutters about RGB cables and original hardware. But curiosity won, as it always does when Sega's involved.The box arrived Tuesday, and honestly? First impressions were solid. AtGames has been…
There's this game that sits in my memory like a secret nobody else seemed to share. Fatal Labyrinth for the Mega Drive—or Genesis if you're across the pond. I stumbled across it in one of those rental shops where the boxes were arranged like library books and half the cases had the wrong manual stuffed inside. The cover art looked properly medieval, all dungeons and mysterious towers, which was exactly the sort of thing that…
Right, so there I was last weekend, digging through a box of cartridges my mate Dave gave me when he moved house—you know how it is, "here, take this lot before my missus makes me chuck them out." Most of it was the usual suspects: Sonic, Streets of Rage, couple of FIFA games with players who've been retired for twenty years. But tucked underneath a loose copy of Road Rash was this odd little cart…