You know what? I've been thinking about that dusty corner of my game collection again. There's this one cart that sits between my beloved Ocarina of Time and the slightly warped copy of GoldenEye—Quest 64. Funny thing is, most people either don't remember it at all or they remember it as "that weird RPG that wasn't very good." But here's the thing… they're wrong.I picked up Quest 64 in the summer of '98, right after…
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…
Been having a proper clear-out of the spare room – you know how it is, start looking for an old cable and three hours later you’re knee-deep in boxes you haven’t touched since the last house move. That’s when I found them again: two gold N64 cartridges that honestly might be worth more than my car at this point. Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, sitting there looking as precious as the day I first…
I still remember the exact moment I knew Super Smash Bros was something special. It was March 1999, and I’d just picked up my copy from the local Electronics Boutique – yeah, back when that was still a thing. My buddy Mike was over, we’d hooked up the N64 to my old 27-inch Zenith CRT, and we were staring at the character select screen like we’d discovered buried treasure. Mario. Link. Pikachu. All in the…
Christ, found my old copy of F1 World Grand Prix the other day while hunting through storage boxes for my Amiga joysticks. That blue N64 cart brought back a flood of memories, you know? The weight of it, the way you had to blow into the slot sometimes (probably made things worse but felt necessary), the ritual of sliding it into that grey beast with just enough pressure. Too soft and it wouldn’t connect properly,…
So there I was last Saturday, watching my daughter mess around with my N64 setup in the basement game room, and she’s completely fixated on that opening screen of Super Mario 64 where you can grab Mario’s face and stretch it like silly putty. “Why does his nose do that?” she asks, pulling it out until he looks like some kind of cartoon anteater. I couldn’t help but laugh because honestly, I did the exact…
So last weekend my daughter brings her boyfriend over to meet me properly, right? Nice kid, works IT for some company downtown. Anyway, he sees my game room and we get to talking about retro stuff, and he mentions he’s been playing GoldenEye online with his college buddies. I’m thinking he’s talking about that Xbox remake or something, but no – turns out he’s actually running the original N64 version through emulation with full netplay…
Christ, where do I even start with King K. Rool’s laugh? I mean, we’re talking about a sound that’s been rattling around in my head for twenty-five years now, and it still makes me want to check over my shoulder. This was back in ’99 – I was about twenty-five myself, working my first proper IT job and still living in a grotty flat share in Fallowfield. My flatmate Dave had somehow convinced his girlfriend…
That chunky six-button controller showed up at my friend Mike’s house on a random Saturday in 1993, and I swear it changed everything about how we thought about fighting games. Mike had been bragging about it all week at school – three extra buttons, he kept saying, like that somehow made him gaming royalty. I figured it was typical Mike exaggeration until I actually held the thing. The weight felt different, more serious somehow. Instead…
Coming to Pokemon Stadium at age 40 was like walking into a conversation everyone else had been having for twenty years. I’d missed the whole Pokemon craze when it first hit – was too busy working construction, raising my daughter, generally being an adult when all this pocket monster business was capturing kids’ imaginations. But diving into retro gaming meant I couldn’t ignore one of the most significant gaming phenomena of the late 90s, so…