Sitting in the spare room last night, surrounded by a frankly embarrassing collection of retro gaming kit, I found myself staring at the Sega Genesis Flashback sitting on the shelf. You know that feeling when you spot something familiar but slightly…off? Like seeing your childhood friend wearing a suit at a wedding. That's this thing in a nutshell.I'll be honest, when these plug-and-play consoles started showing up everywhere—garage sales, Argos, that weird electronics section in…
You know what I miss about being thirteen? The absolute certainty that a thirty-second TV advert could change your entire worldview. I'm talking about those Sega commercials from the early '90s—the ones that didn't just sell you games, they sold you an entire identity wrapped in attitude and blast processing.Picture this: Saturday morning, I'm sprawled on the carpet with a bowl of Frosties going soggy, when suddenly the telly explodes with speed lines and that…
The smell of orange squash and the sound of a CRT warming up—that's what Saturday afternoons meant to me in the 90s. But there was something else competing for my attention between cartoon blocks and trying to convince mum to let me stay up past eight. Nickelodeon had figured out something brilliant: they'd turned getting messy into appointment television.I'm talking about those game shows that made every kid secretly wish they could ditch their good…
Picture this: you're hunched over a three-pronged controller that looks like it was designed by aliens who'd only heard vague descriptions of human hands. Your mate Sarah's got the yellow controller—the one with the sticky A button that everyone pretends isn't gross but definitely is. Tom's wielding the translucent purple one like it's Excalibur, and I've somehow ended up with basic grey. We're about to settle the age-old question of who's actually the best at…
You know what's been eating at me lately? I was scrolling through some old gaming magazines—the proper print ones with that glossy paper that would stick to your fingers in summer—when I stumbled across an ad for Streets of Rage 2. There's Blaze, all sixteen-bit pixels of her, and suddenly I'm twelve again, arguing with my mate Dave about whether she was "too distracting" during boss fights. Which, let's be honest, she absolutely was.The thing…
Finding a forgotten gem in your collection is like discovering a twenty in an old jacket pocket—unexpected, delightful, and somehow worth more than its face value. That's exactly what happened when I was rummaging through a box of N64 carts last weekend, pushing past the usual suspects of Mario and Zelda, when my fingers hit something I'd completely forgotten about: Beetle Adventure Racing.Now, I know what you're thinking. A racing game sponsored by Volkswagen sounds…
Christmas morning, 1998. I'm unwrapping what looks suspiciously like a console-shaped box when my dad mutters something about "not understanding why they made the controller look like a spaceship crashed into a telephone." Inside was my first N64, bundled with a golden cartridge that would absolutely ruin my understanding of what video games could be.That first boot of Ocarina of Time? Still gives me goosebumps. Not just because of Zelda's lullaby drifting through our living…
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…
The sound of that Sega logo hitting—you know the one, that crisp "SEGAAA" announcer—still makes my ears perk up like I'm twelve again and someone just announced pizza for dinner. But nothing prepared me for the first time I loaded up Batman on the Genesis. Not the NES version with its purple Joker and questionable physics. This was different. This was *dark*.See, when you grew up watching Adam West's campy Batman reruns on afternoon telly,…