There's something about that electric blue plastic that still makes me grin like an idiot. I'm talking about the Pikachu N64, obviously—that wonderful, ridiculous console that Nintendo dropped on us in 2000, complete with Pokémon Hey You, Pikachu! and a microphone that barely worked but somehow didn't matter.I remember the exact moment I saw one for the first time. My mate Dave had somehow convinced his mum to get him one for his birthday, and…
My mum used to say television was the devil's picture box, but even she couldn't resist the absolute chaos of Blankety Blank. Saturday teatime meant Terry Wogan winking at celebrities who'd clearly had a liquid lunch, and those felt-tip pens that squeaked against the answer boards like fingernails on a blackboard. I was probably seven, maybe eight, sitting cross-legged on the carpet with a plate of beans on toast, watching grown-ups make complete pillocks of…
Sometimes you don't realize a game has ruined you for everything else until years later, when you're fumbling through another run-and-gun shooter wondering why it feels like chewing cardboard. That happened to me recently when I fired up some modern indie thing that promised "classic arcade action." Twenty minutes in, I switched it off and dug out my Model 2 Genesis. Time to remember what perfection actually felt like.Contra: Hard Corps hit the Mega Drive…
Last Sunday I was digging through a box of N64 cartridges in the loft—you know how it is, searching for one specific game and somehow ending up with dust in your hair and a sudden urge to replay everything you'd forgotten you owned. Anyway, buried beneath copies of Mario Kart that still smell faintly of childhood birthday parties, I found Glover. That weird little rubber ball game that nobody quite knew what to make of…
The worst part about Donkey Kong 64 isn't the backtracking or the bloated collect-a-thon madness that every reviewer mentions. No, the worst part is how it absolutely ruined my summer of '99 because I couldn't put the bloody thing down.I'd just gotten the Expansion Pak—that chunky red brick that made your N64 feel properly next-gen—and DK64 was bundled with it. Free game, right? Except nothing's free when it costs you three months of daylight and…
My mate Dave knocked on the door last Saturday morning holding a battered cardboard box like it contained the Holy Grail. Inside? His dad's old 486 DX2/66 complete with a double-speed CD-ROM drive that made sounds like a cement mixer having an argument with itself. "Thought you might want this," he said, grinning. That's when it hit me—we're living through the archaeology of our own childhood, and the 90s PC gaming scene is buried treasure…
Right, so you've got yourself a Mega Drive—or Genesis if you're across the pond—and you're staring at those AV outputs wondering why your games look like they're being broadcast through a fishbowl. Trust me, I've been there. Back when I first plugged my Mega Drive into mum's Panasonic CRT using the RF switchbox that came in the box, I thought the fuzzy, slightly off-color picture was just how Sonic was supposed to look. Spoiler alert:…
Standing in my mate's bedroom that summer of '89, watching him unwrap what looked like a sleek black spaceship, I had no idea I was witnessing the opening shot of a war that would define my teenage years. The Sega Genesis—or Mega Drive as we called it in the UK—sat there gleaming like something from a sci-fi film, all curves and air vents where my chunky NES was all right angles and beige plastic."Sixteen-bit," Dave…
The plastic shell cracked under my thumb with that satisfying *pop* that meant business. I was eight, maybe nine, wrestling with a copy of Super Mario 64 that had picked up some dust bunnies from underneath my mate's sofa. Dad was watching from the kitchen doorway, shaking his head at my technique—"You'll break the bloody thing," he muttered, not understanding that cartridge maintenance was basically surgery and I was the family's unofficial Nintendo surgeon general.Those…
My mate Dave convinced me to start cataloguing every N64 game I could get my hands on about three years ago. "You've got loads of them anyway," he said, gesturing at my slightly concerning pile of grey cartridges. "Might as well write down what's worth playing." What started as a weekend project has turned into this bizarre archaeological dig through Nintendo's 64-bit library, and honestly? I'm still finding gems I'd completely forgotten existed.The thing about…