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…
There's something magical about firing up a Genesis cart in 2024 that transports me straight back to my mate Steve's bedroom, circa 1991, where we'd argue over who got the six-button pad and whether Sonic 2's Chemical Plant Zone music was the greatest thing ever composed. Spoiler: it absolutely was, and still is.I've been revisiting my black plastic brick lately—partly because my seven-year-old discovered it in the loft and partly because modern gaming sometimes feels…
The other day my kid found my old Game & Watch collection buried in a shoebox behind some Christmas decorations. "Dad, why is this Game Boy so thick?" he asked, holding up my pristine Donkey Kong unit like it was some ancient artifact. I couldn't help but laugh—here's this device that once felt like pure magic in my eight-year-old hands, and to him it looks clunky as a house brick.But that got me thinking about…
I was rummaging through my loft last weekend, dodging cobwebs and trying not to step through the ceiling, when I found it—my old Sega Master System, still wrapped in that tatty towel I'd used to protect it during house moves. The sight of that familiar black plastic shell sent me tumbling back through decades of Sega memories, from those early 8-bit days right through to the Dreamcast's bittersweet finale.You know, Sega's journey through the console…
My mate Dave popped round last Tuesday with his laptop, looking like he'd discovered fire. "You've got to see this," he said, firing up what looked suspiciously like Mario 64 running in a window on his desktop. The catch? No N64 in sight, just some software called Project64 doing things that would've blown my teenage mind.Here's the thing about N64 emulation—it's brilliant when it works, absolutely maddening when it doesn't, and somehow both at the…
There's a cardboard box in my attic that weighs more than it should. Inside, wrapped in old towels, sit the machines that taught me what "fun" could be. Sometimes I climb up there just to hold them—plastic cases that once hummed with electricity and possibility, now silent but somehow still warm to the touch.My journey started with that famous wooden rectangle. The Atari 2600 didn't just play games; it occupied our living room like a…
There's this moment burned into my brain from Christmas 1996. I'm sitting cross-legged on our living room carpet—you know, that rough brown stuff that left marks on your shins—holding an N64 controller for the first time. The thing looked like it was designed by aliens who'd heard about human hands but never actually seen them. Three prongs? What were they thinking?But then I pressed start on Super Mario 64, and everything changed.That plumber's face filled…
Picture this: you're twelve years old, clutching a dog-eared copy of GamePro, staring at that glossy two-page spread showing Mario in glorious 64-bit 3D. The magazine's promising something called "Ultra 64" – yeah, that's what they called it back then – and your brain's doing cartwheels trying to imagine what comes next. We'd conquered the Death Star trench run in Super Star Wars, we'd collected every last coin in Super Mario World, and now Nintendo…
Cleaning out the spare room last weekend, I found it tucked behind a box of PlayStation memory cards—my Pikachu Nintendo 64, still in its original box, looking as gloriously ridiculous as the day I impulse-bought it from Electronics Boutique. The yellow shell catches light like a toy car, and honestly? After all these years, it still makes me grin like an idiot.See, this wasn't just another console variant. This was Pokemon fever made manifest in…