You know that feeling when you're standing in Electronics Boutique, clutching a twenty-pound note that's burning a hole in your pocket, and some marketing wizard in a shiny suit is trying to convince you that what your perfectly good Mega Drive really needs is a CD drive the size of a small coffee table? That was me in 1993, staring at the Sega CD display unit like it was alien technology—which, honestly, it might as…
The first time I laid eyes on Shinobi III's opening sequence, I was planted cross-legged on our living room carpet with a cup of lukewarm tea going cold beside me. My mate Dave had brought his Genesis round—we called it Mega Drive back then, obviously—and he was practically vibrating with excitement about this ninja game he'd picked up from Cash Converters. "Trust me," he said, jamming the cartridge in with that satisfying click we all…
My mate Dave had this theory about movie games back in the day – they were all rubbish because developers got about six weeks and a photocopied script page to work with. Most of the time, he wasn't wrong. E.T. on the Atari 2600 nearly killed the entire industry, and don't get me started on Hudson Hawk for the NES. But then 1993 rolled around, Spielberg's dinosaurs were stomping across cinema screens worldwide, and Sega…
Christmas 1997 was rough for my wallet but heaven for my brain. I'd scraped together enough pounds to grab Diddy Kong Racing alongside my shiny new N64, mainly because Mario Kart 64 was sold out everywhere and the bloke at Electronics Boutique said "trust me, this one's different." Different doesn't even cover it. That cartridge rewired what I thought racing games could be.See, up until then, karting meant Super Mario Kart on the SNES—brilliant, obviously,…
There's this moment—you know the one—when you're digging through a mate's Genesis collection and you spot something you've never heard of. The cartridge looks official enough, decent art, but the name rings absolutely no bells. That's exactly how I stumbled across Crusader of Centy back in '94, wedged between Sonic 2 and Streets of Rage in my cousin's slightly chaotic game drawer. The label had this kid with a sword and what looked like a…
I remember walking into Electronics Boutique in 1998, scanning the shelves for something different. The usual suspects were there—GoldenEye, Mario Kart 64, Star Fox 64—but then I spotted it. A bright orange cartridge with four familiar faces grinning back at me: Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny. South Park, the TV show that made my parents cringe and my teenage self laugh until my sides hurt, had somehow made it onto the Nintendo 64.The bloke behind…
You know what still gets me? The other day I was showing my nephew some old PlayStation games, and he asks me, completely innocent, "Why didn't they make Crash Bandicoot for Nintendo 64?" Just like that. Kid's eight years old and he's asking the question that haunted an entire generation of platform gamers.I had to stop and think about how to explain console exclusivity to someone who's never lived through a proper console war. These…
Picture this: you're twelve years old, it's 1995, and your mate's just pulled out what looks like a chunky Game Boy that somehow runs actual Mega Drive games. Not watered-down handheld versions—the real thing. Streets of Rage 2, Sonic 2, Gunstar Heroes, all crammed into this brick-sized marvel that Sega called the Nomad. My brain nearly fell out.I'll be honest, my first reaction wasn't "wow, portable 16-bit gaming!" It was more like "how many AA…
You know that moment when you realize you've been doing something wrong your entire life? Like when you discover you've been tying your shoelaces the hard way, or that there's actually a proper way to peel a banana. That's exactly what happened to me the first time I picked up an N64 controller and tried to walk Mario around Princess Peach's courtyard.I'd been gaming since the Atari days, right? Spent countless hours with a joystick…
Cleaning out the spare room last weekend—you know, that archaeological dig every gamer eventually faces—I found myself holding two controllers that basically tell the entire story of how we learned to play games with our thumbs. The Nintendo 64's three-pronged beast and the Switch Pro Controller, separated by about twenty years of design evolution. Holding them side by side felt like comparing a prototype spaceship to its sleek descendant.The N64 controller still looks alien, doesn't…