Sports games have always been one of my favourite genres. I accidentally fell into them. Match Day was released during my avid Spectrum playing years – back in 1985 I had saved months of my pocket money to buy International Karate, but my local computer shop had sold out. So buy something else, the computer shop owner said. He was a northern lad, big beard and a permanent smell of cigarette smoke about him —…
In 2011, I went into a barroom brawl that had been going on for twenty years. Now, everybody was arguing about something that happened when they were 12 years old. I had missed this the first time around – I was working construction, and raising a kid – but I’m 41 years old now and I’m trying to figure out which 16-bit system I want to buy first, and everybody wants to give me an…
Disclaimer: This article doesn’t focus solely on Crash 4: It’s About Time. As we all know by now, it’s meant to set up my review of Crash 4, so there will be some major spoilers for the entire Crash Bandicoot timeline. Crash Bandicoot has always felt like the PlayStation mascot. Growing up in America, Crash was everywhere. Orange boxes, toy stores, comic books, cereal cards; he was omnipresent. But I wasn’t American. I grew up…
I was sixteen years old and had roughly $12 to my name. During my free time I found myself spending quite an excessive amount of time lurking around the electronics department of our local Toys R Us. Think back to what video game stores used to look like — everything was locked-up behind glass or you had to take those flimsy little paper ticket thingies. But they always had a demo unit tucked-away somewhere in…
When I started playing city-building games I didn’t take them too seriously. I’m used to the idea of games teaching me something, but playing SimCity was the first time I truly experienced educational games. I had played many games before picking up SimCity, but never had a game mirrored my career as closely as this. I’ve worked as a construction manager for over a decade. Managing construction crews is all about deadlines, resources, balancing budgets,…
Let’s just get this out of the way: I never played Banjo-Kazooie upon its release back in 1998. I know, blasphemy, right? So there I was rocking my Amiga 1200 like it was going out of style and thinking console gamers were all nerds with pricey toys who refused to use “real computers.” Yeah, Nintendo had been releasing N64 games for years at this point, and I’m sure I was quite the asshole about it.…
Everything changed for me that summer in 1991. I was fourteen years old and incredibly awkward like all teenagers are and my friend Mike got a Sega Genesis. I had been playing Nintendo since Christmas of 1985 when my folks got me that NES. It was in my blood at that point. But Mike kept inviting me over to play this “system he got” and told me to “trust me man, it’s different.” Trust me…
The first time video game music made me cry was listening to the ending of Final Fantasy VI on my Genesis. Okay, Final Fantasy VI was only on SNES and this was my American imported Genesis, but you get the point. I believe I was 16 years old. It was 3 am on a school night, and I had finally finished the beast of a game that was 70 hours long. As the credits played…
The first thing I have to confess is that I thought video games were a solo experience for a long time. Honestly, growing up poor in Wyoming with dreams of Nintendo Systems that all the other kids had, I figured once I grew up I’d have a game room with one television and when the kids wanted to play video games, one of them would be on the controller and the other three of us…
Metroid was the “click.” I remember well the first time I realised that Metroid was going to be different – and it wasn’t going to be on a Sega console – I know that sounds sacrilegious since I am a die-hard Sega fan. I am ten years old in 1987 and my neighbour Danny had just gotten this weird Nintendo game that none of us kids could make heads or tails of. We had all…