The dusty plastic smell hit me first—that familiar cocktail of old electronics and childhood weekends. I'd just pulled out my Mega Drive from the storage box in the loft, carefully wrapped in the same old towel mum used to dry the dishes. Beneath it sat a stack of…

I was rifling through a box of old gaming magazines last weekend when I stumbled across a yellowed copy of CVG from 1991. There it was on the cover—Sonic the Hedgehog, except the logo underneath read "Mega Drive" in those chunky blue letters. My brain did that little…

There's something about the way a Sega game announces itself that Nintendo never quite managed to replicate. Don't get me wrong—I've got nothing but love for the Big N, spent countless hours with that grey brick of joy they called the NES. But when I fired up my…

My daughter caught me grinning like an idiot at my Switch last Tuesday. There I was, sprawled on the sofa with Super Mario 64 running in portable mode, and she asked why I looked "weird happy." How do you explain to a seven-year-old that you're holding thirty years…