The smell of a freshly opened N64 cartridge—that slightly chemical tang mixed with possibility—still hits different when I think about WWF No Mercy. My cousin Jamie brought it round one Saturday afternoon in late 2000, grinning like he'd discovered fire. "This one's actually good," he said, which was high praise coming from someone who'd endured WCW vs. nWo World Tour's clunky controls and still complained about them two years later.See, wrestling games had this reputation…
You know what's funny about ClayFighter Tournament Edition? I bought it purely because the box art looked mental. There's something about claymation characters punching each other's heads into silly putty shapes that just screams "this is going to be absolutely barmy," and honestly—it delivered on that promise in spades.I remember the day I picked it up from our local Toys"R"Us. Must've been '98 or '99, right in that sweet spot when N64 games were hitting…
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…
Four controllers plugged into those bizarre N64 ports, my mate Dave arguing about who gets the see-through purple one, and someone's mum shouting from the kitchen that we'd better not wake the baby. That was Saturday afternoon perfection, circa 1997, when GoldenEye 007 turned my living room into a digital battleground that would define multiplayer gaming for generations.I still remember unwrapping that grey cartridge on a soggy November morning. The box art looked serious—Pierce Brosnan's…
The Christmas of '97 still haunts my wallet. I'd been saving pocket money for months, doing extra chores that my mum definitely didn't need done but tolerated anyway because she knew what I was after. The N64 had been out for a year, and every kid at school was either bragging about Mario 64 or lying about having played it at their cousin's house.What I wasn't expecting was DOOM. Actual, proper, demons-and-shotguns DOOM on a…
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…
My mate Dave called me mental for keeping a working Mega Drive plugged into my old CRT, but honestly? He just doesn't get it. Last weekend I was digging through my collection—you know the drill, plastic cases stacked like wonky dominoes behind the telly—and I stumbled across something that made me proper nostalgic. Warriors of the Eternal Sun, still sitting there in its battered case, the manual pages yellowed like old tea bags.See, here's the…
Saturday afternoon, 1991. I'm hunched over our family's beige Amstrad PC, the monitor humming like a disgruntled refrigerator, when my mate James rocks up with a floppy disk that looks like it's been through a washing machine. "Trust me," he says, sliding it across the desk like contraband. "This'll blow your mind."The disk label, written in fading biro, simply read "Captain Comic." I'd never heard of it, but that was half the thrill with shareware…