I came to Super Mario 64 late, which probably gave me an unfair advantage in understanding it. Most people who grew up with this game have it wrapped up in nostalgia – their first experience with 3D gaming, their first memories of the N64. I first played it in 2021, sitting in my basement after a long day at the construction site, with zero childhood attachment and just my own assessment of whether the design…
I remember the exact moment I realized what Ocarina of Time was doing, and it wasn’t when I first booted it up. It was about three hours in, standing in the Lost Woods after figuring out the path wasn’t random but actually followed specific musical cues, realizing that Nintendo had taken a 2D puzzle game and translated it perfectly into three dimensions without compromising a single design principle. That’s when I understood this wasn’t a…
Look, ranking the ten best N64 games nearly ended friendships again. Carl had to mediate arguments that got genuinely heated. Joe kept trying to downrank everything because he’s still bitter about the Genesis not getting these games. Tim discovered the N64 late and started making fresh-perspective arguments that annoyed everyone. Sam demanded frame-perfect analysis of multiplayer balance. John wouldn’t shut up about how the Amiga could have done 3D better. But after three weeks of…
My buddy Mike showed up at my place last weekend with this battered Saturn console he’d rescued from an estate sale, and man, watching him fire up Guardian Heroes on my basement CRT brought back all these memories of why Sega’s weird dual-CPU machine deserved so much better than the beating it took in the marketplace. I mean, here I am, forty-seven years old, getting legitimately excited about a twenty-five-year-old beat-em-up because it’s still doing…
Man, I gotta be honest – when I first got my hands on an N64 controller back in ’96, I thought Nintendo had completely lost their minds. Three handles? What am I, some kind of mutant? And don’t get me started on that analog stick that made weird clicking noises every time you moved it. My Sega Saturn’s controller was perfect – clean, simple, made sense. This Nintendo thing looked like it was designed by…
I’ve been analyzing gaming hardware since the 1980s, which means I’ve held every controller generation from the original NES pad through modern ergonomic marvels. The question of whether original controllers or modern alternatives are better for retro gaming isn’t simple because it depends on what you’re playing and what matters to you. Some games were designed specifically for their original controllers and simply play better with authentic hardware. Other games work equally well or better…
There I was, standing in a grotty service station on the M6, watching my mate Dave’s face light up like he’d spotted buried treasure. “Bloody hell, John – look what’s hiding over here.” Tucked between a knackered fruit machine and one of those claw grabbers full of teddy bears nobody ever wins, sat a proper OutRun cabinet. Blue and red livery, attract mode cycling through those sun-soaked coastal highways that were burned into my retinas…
Right, so there I was last weekend, trying to sort through the disaster zone that passes for our spare bedroom—you know the type, where broken electronics go to die alongside those Christmas decorations you swear you’ll use again but never do—when I stumbled across something that stopped me dead in my tracks. A proper thick stack of A4 paper, held together with what remained of a rusty staple, covered in coffee rings and my own…
Here’s something I teach in my history classes – the question “which was better” often misses the actual interesting question, which is “why did different people prefer different things?” The SNES versus Mega Drive debate is a perfect example. People spent literal decades arguing about this, and the argument was never about which console was objectively superior. It was about what each console represented and who it served. The Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the…
Back in 1993, I was deep into my Sega fanboy phase—you know, the kind where you’d defend Altered Beast as a masterpiece just because it came with your Genesis. I’d already burned through Sonic 1 and 2 probably fifty times each, had my copy of Streets of Rage 2 practically memorized, and was starting to branch out into the weirder corners of the Genesis library. That’s when I stumbled across Rocket Knight Adventures at my…