I’ve got this muscle memory thing that happens every time I pick up a Sega six-button controller. My thumb just automatically finds those three top buttons—X, Y, Z—without me even thinking about it. It’s been like thirty years since I first held one of these things, and my hands still remember exactly where everything goes. That’s not nostalgia talking, that’s just good design burned into my nervous system. Back in ’93, I was fifteen and…
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…
Man, I gotta be honest – when I first got my hands on an N64 controller back in ’96, I thought Nintendo had completely lost their minds. Three handles? What am I, some kind of mutant? And don’t get me started on that analog stick that made weird clicking noises every time you moved it. My Sega Saturn’s controller was perfect – clean, simple, made sense. This Nintendo thing looked like it was designed by…
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…