Remember when your biggest life decision was whether to watch Transformers or risk it all for a chance at getting slimed? I was probably seven when I first saw Double Dare, and honestly, it rewired my entire understanding of what television could be. Saturday mornings weren't just cartoons anymore—they were interactive chaos where kids my age were living the dream.My mum never understood why I'd abandon perfectly good Weetabix to watch children get covered in…
Right, so picture this: I'm sat in the dentist's waiting room in 2005, and there's this kid next to me absolutely absorbed in what looks like a Game Boy that someone's fed too many vitamins. Turns out it's the new Nintendo DSi, and this little tyke is playing Super Mario 64 on it. My first thought? "That's not right." I mean, proper Mario 64 belonged on the N64, with that chunky three-pronged controller and a…
There's this peculiar satisfaction that comes with tracing circuits, you know? Like being an electronic detective with a multimeter instead of a magnifying glass. Last weekend, I found myself bent over my workbench—that's the kitchen table, if I'm being honest—with an N64 power supply that had decided to give up the ghost mid-session of Mario Kart. The red power LED was doing this stuttering dance that meant only one thing: time to crack open the…
Looking back at those chunky CRT monitors and wondering exactly what we were staring at for hours on end? The numbers might surprise you—or maybe they'll make you feel ancient. Either way, let's talk pixels.I was cleaning out my old tech drawer last weekend (you know, the one where cables go to die), and I found this ancient VGA cable that got me thinking about resolution. Back then, we didn't obsess over 4K or argue…
Right, let me tell you something about Kirby that might surprise you—the pink puffball's jump to 64-bit wasn't just another platformer getting the polygon treatment. It was something special, something that caught me completely off guard when I first got my hands on it.I remember walking into Electronics Boutique (yeah, that was still a thing) sometime in 2000, looking for something to justify the N64 controller gathering dust beside my telly. The salesman—probably seventeen, definitely…
There's something almost mythical about what Angel Studios pulled off when they squeezed Resident Evil 2 onto an N64 cartridge. I remember the first time I heard about it—probably through a mate who worked at Electronics Boutique, whispering about how Capcom was attempting the impossible. You had to understand the context here: RE2 was this sprawling, cinematic beast on PlayStation, crammed onto two discs with FMV sequences, uncompressed audio, and all the digital headroom that…
The plastic creak of four N64 controllers plugged into that chunky grey beast still makes my chest tight with anticipation. Saturday afternoons in 1998 meant one thing in our house: claiming the living room for what my dad called "that bloody racket" and what we called heaven. Four mates, one TV that weighed more than a small car, and Gauntlet Legends spinning in the cartridge slot like it held the secrets of the universe.I'd discovered…
You know what's funny? I can still smell the electronics section at Woolworths on September 26th, 1996. That weird mix of plastic, cardboard, and whatever they used to make those display units shine. I'd been saving pocket money for months, counting down days like it was Christmas and my birthday rolled into one gaming holiday.The N64 launch wasn't just another console release for me—it was the moment everything I thought I knew about video games…
My mate Steve still owes me twenty quid from a bet we made in 1997. The wager? Whether anyone would ever top GoldenEye 007's four-player split-screen battles. He reckoned Quake II would murder it within six months. Poor sod's been dodging that debt for twenty-seven years now, and honestly, I'm not even mad anymore because he was spectacularly wrong.You have to understand something about gaming in the late nineties—proper multiplayer on consoles wasn't really a…
Standing in front of that burgundy CRT television in 1996, watching Mario's pixelated face stretch and scrunch in the file select screen, I had no idea I was witnessing the birth of something that would fundamentally rewire how we think about moving through digital space. My mum was somewhere behind me complaining about the "telly being upside down again" because we'd switched from the regular aerial to the N64's RF adapter, but I couldn't hear…