You know that feeling when you're standing in Electronics Boutique, clutching a twenty-pound note that's burning a hole in your pocket, and some marketing wizard in a shiny suit is trying to convince you that what your perfectly good Mega Drive really needs is a CD drive the…

The first time I laid eyes on Shinobi III's opening sequence, I was planted cross-legged on our living room carpet with a cup of lukewarm tea going cold beside me. My mate Dave had brought his Genesis round—we called it Mega Drive back then, obviously—and he was practically…

My mate Dave had this theory about movie games back in the day – they were all rubbish because developers got about six weeks and a photocopied script page to work with. Most of the time, he wasn't wrong. E.T. on the Atari 2600 nearly killed the entire…

Christmas 1997 was rough for my wallet but heaven for my brain. I'd scraped together enough pounds to grab Diddy Kong Racing alongside my shiny new N64, mainly because Mario Kart 64 was sold out everywhere and the bloke at Electronics Boutique said "trust me, this one's different."…