Back in 1991, I was twelve years old and completely convinced that my Genesis was about to change the world. I’d been defending Sega since getting my Master System three years earlier – you know how it is when you’re the weird kid with the “wrong” console – but Sonic felt different. This wasn’t just another exclusive game to add to my arsenal of playground arguments. This was ammunition. I still remember unwrapping that first…
My mate Steve turned up at my fifteenth birthday party in ’96 with this knowing smirk and a Mega Drive cartridge hidden in his jacket pocket like he was smuggling state secrets. “Right, forget whatever else you’ve got planned,” he announced, which was exactly what you wanted to hear when you’d been politely enduring my mum’s friends asking about my GCSE choices for the past hour. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 wasn’t just another fighting game—it…
My buddy Mike texted me last week while he was cleaning out his garage – found his old Genesis collection in a milk crate behind some Christmas decorations. “Dude, what was that weird Sonic game where you looked down at him like you’re flying overhead?” Three seconds later I’m typing back “Sonic 3D Blast” because honestly, that game’s been living rent-free in my head ever since I set up proper Genesis emulation on my Steam…
Last Saturday I was down in my game room doing that thing we all do – you know, pulling cartridges off the shelf pretending I’m organizing when really I’m just fondling plastic and having flashbacks. That’s when I grabbed my copy of Sonic 3D Blast, and man… even after all these years, that blue spine with the chunky yellow lettering still makes me stop and think. This game was so damn weird. Still is, honestly.…
I’m forty-seven years old and I still can’t get that damn Song of Healing out of my head. Four simple notes that somehow managed to burrow into my brain back in 2000 and set up permanent residence. My wife caught me humming it while balancing our checkbook last week – she just shook her head and muttered something about “that weird Zelda game” under her breath. Twenty-four years later and Majora’s Mask is still messing…
I can still picture that moment in 1997 when I first wrapped my hands around the N64’s bizarre three-pronged controller and booted up Mario Kart 64 for the first time. My buddy Mike had managed to snag the system at launch – his job at Best Buy had its perks – and we spent that entire Saturday afternoon discovering what would become the definitive kart racing experience of our generation. Coming from Super Mario Kart…
My buddy Mike showed up at my place last weekend with this battered Saturn console he’d rescued from an estate sale, and man, watching him fire up Guardian Heroes on my basement CRT brought back all these memories of why Sega’s weird dual-CPU machine deserved so much better than the beating it took in the marketplace. I mean, here I am, forty-seven years old, getting legitimately excited about a twenty-five-year-old beat-em-up because it’s still doing…
Right, so there I was last weekend, trying to sort through the disaster zone that passes for our spare bedroom—you know the type, where broken electronics go to die alongside those Christmas decorations you swear you’ll use again but never do—when I stumbled across something that stopped me dead in my tracks. A proper thick stack of A4 paper, held together with what remained of a rusty staple, covered in coffee rings and my own…
Back in 1993, I was deep into my Sega fanboy phase—you know, the kind where you’d defend Altered Beast as a masterpiece just because it came with your Genesis. I’d already burned through Sonic 1 and 2 probably fifty times each, had my copy of Streets of Rage 2 practically memorized, and was starting to branch out into the weirder corners of the Genesis library. That’s when I stumbled across Rocket Knight Adventures at my…