Right, so picture this: I'm eight years old, sitting in the back of my dad's Ford Escort, and mum's just handed me this chunky black brick that looks like it escaped from a sci-fi movie. The Game Gear. God, that thing was massive compared to the Game Boy everyone else had, but it had something Nintendo's grey wonder didn't—a proper colour screen that actually lit up. Course, what nobody mentioned in the adverts was that…
The sound hit me first. That metallic crunch when Scorpion's spear connected, followed by the digitized grunt that my Mega Drive's YM2612 chip somehow made sound more menacing than it had any right to. I was hunched over our living room carpet—the brown one with those weird geometric patterns that looked like a computer had hiccups—frantically scribbling move commands on the back of a school exercise book. Down, forward, high punch. Got it. But what…
The other night I was cleaning out my game room—well, it's really just the spare bedroom with too many consoles stacked on IKEA furniture—when I stumbled across my old Dreamcast VMU. That little memory card with the screen still works, by the way. Thirty minutes of Chao Adventure before the CR2032 gives up, but still. There's something poetic about Sega's last proper console being remembered through a memory card that outlasted the system itself.I bought…
You know that feeling when you're rifling through an old cardboard box and find something you'd completely forgotten about? Last weekend I was digging through my gaming storage looking for a specific memory card, and I stumbled across this folded-up magazine clipping from 1999. Edge magazine, talking about the Dreamcast's "inevitable follow-up" and what Sega might do next in the console wars.Made me laugh, honestly. Here we are in 2025, and Sega's still making brilliant…
Remember that kid on the school bus with the massive Game Gear who'd burn through six AAs before reaching the next stop? That was me, clutching Sega's nuclear-powered handheld like it was going to solve world hunger. The thing weighed more than my school bag and had the battery life of a mayfly, but bloody hell, it had a backlit color screen when everyone else was squinting at green-tinted Game Boy pixels.I've been chasing that…
Some games just stick to your ribs, you know? Like that perfect Sunday roast your nan made—the one where everything aligned and you're still chasing that exact combination of crispy potatoes and gravy twenty-five years later. Flashback for the Mega Drive was one of those meals for me, cinematically speaking.I first spotted it in Electronics Boutique, that glossy box art promising something different. The screenshots looked…proper. Not cartoony, not chunky pixels trying their best to…
There's something almost criminal about how good Banjo-Kazooie still feels in your hands. I was rifling through my cart collection last weekend—proper cartridges, not ROMs, the ones with that satisfying plastic heft—when I spotted that familiar yellow spine wedged between Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time. Pulled it out, blew on it (I know, I know, it's supposedly bad for the pins), and within minutes I was twelve again, watching that opening cutscene where Banjo's…
Standing in my local game shop last Tuesday, holding a pristine Sega Genesis 2 in its original box, I couldn't help but smile at how wrong we all got it back in '94. There I was, thirteen years old, absolutely livid that Sega had "ruined" my beloved Mega Drive by making it smaller and—horror of horrors—removing the headphone jack. The audacity! How was I supposed to sneak midnight sessions of Sonic & Knuckles while mum…
The sound still gets me. You know that metallic *click* when you slot a cartridge into the N64? Four of us hunched around a 21-inch CRT, controllers tangled like headphone cables in a pocket, and someone—always someone—arguing about who gets the good controller with the tight stick. "This one drifts left!" "Well, mine doesn't rumble!" The negotiations could take longer than the actual matches.I was probably sixteen when GoldenEye landed in our local Blockbuster. The…
There's something about that chunky, dimensional "N64" that still makes me stop and stare when I spot it on a shelf or boot screen. You know the one—that three-dimensional block logo that sits there like a tiny piece of architecture, all beveled edges and mathematical precision. It's been nearly three decades since Nintendo unveiled it, and honestly? It looks more modern than half the flat, minimalist logos companies are churning out today.I remember the exact…