There's this weird thing that happens when you're rifling through a charity shop's games section and you spot something that instantly transports you back twenty-five years. Last Saturday, wedged between a copy of FIFA 99 with a cracked case and some Racing game I'd never heard of, sat…

The smell hits me first when I think about Altered Beast – that specific scent of carpet fibers warming under the CRT, mixed with the plastic of a freshly unwrapped Mega Drive cartridge. My mate Danny had just gotten his Genesis for Christmas, and we were both buzzing…

You know what's funny? I was digging through my old Mega Drive collection last weekend—the usual Saturday routine of "I'll just reorganize these for ten minutes" that somehow turns into three hours of nostalgia—when I pulled out Castlevania: Bloodlines. That familiar weight in my hands, the satisfying click…

The smell of a freshly opened N64 cartridge hits different when it's October 1998 and you're holding what should've been impossible. There I was, gripping a copy of Resident Evil 2 for Nintendo 64—a game that had no business existing on a 64MB cartridge when the PlayStation version…