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.…
Back in ’94, I was still primarily an Amiga lad, but I’d managed to convince my parents to get me a Mega Drive the year before – had to have Streets of Rage 2, didn’t I? Most of my mates were still on their Spectrums or C64s, but a few had made the jump to Sega’s 16-bit machine. The thing about console gaming in the UK then was that we were always a bit behind…
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…
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…
There I was, standing in a grotty service station on the M6, watching my mate Dave’s face light up like he’d spotted buried treasure. “Bloody hell, John – look what’s hiding over here.” Tucked between a knackered fruit machine and one of those claw grabbers full of teddy bears nobody ever wins, sat a proper OutRun cabinet. Blue and red livery, attract mode cycling through those sun-soaked coastal highways that were burned into my retinas…
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…