The sound of cardboard hitting cardboard still makes my ears perk up. Proper weird, that—but there's something about that distinctive *thwack* of milk caps colliding that takes me straight back to Year 5 break times when everyone smelled like Ready Brek and had grass stains on their knees.I remember the exact moment Pogs invaded our playground. Must've been early '94, maybe late '93. This kid called Marcus turned up one Monday morning with a leather…
My mate Dave brought something over yesterday that made me do a proper double-take. Picture this: I'm halfway through explaining why my CRT still has a place in 2024 (something about integer scaling and input lag), when he plops down this sleek little collection disc. "Check it out," he says, grinning like he'd found buried treasure. The Sega Genesis Collection. Fifty-something games from the Mega Drive era, all wrapped up in modern packaging that somehow…
Last night I was digging through a dusty box in the spare room—you know, the one that's been sealed since we moved house three years ago—and I found my old Sega cartridge collection. Thirty-odd games stacked like plastic dominoes, each one carrying enough memories to power a Mega Drive for a week. It got me thinking about how Sega's library across all their systems was this brilliant, chaotic tapestry of creativity that never quite got…
You know what’s funny? I spent forty years thinking racing games were just cars going around in circles, maybe because the only exposure I had was watching other people play them for five minutes here and there. Then I discovered retro gaming in my forties and started working backwards through all these classics everyone kept talking about. San Francisco Rush on the N64 wasn’t even on my radar initially – my daughter had mentioned it…
Man, sometimes I lie awake at night thinking about all the gaming rumors that consumed my teenage brain in the late 90s. You know the ones I’m talking about – those whispered legends about secret Nintendo projects that some kid’s uncle who “totally worked at Nintendo” had definitely seen behind closed doors at E3. The Nintendo DS 64 was probably the biggest one that got me, this mythical dual-screen N64 handheld that felt so real…
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…