The lad next door got a Genesis for Christmas ’91. I’d had my Mega Drive since the year before. Exact same machine, you’d think, just different badges stuck on the front. But at twelve years old, those differences felt massive – like we were playing in completely separate…

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…

Man, the smell. I can still conjure it up perfectly – that weird cocktail of cheap pizza grease, cigarette smoke from the adult section, and that distinctive electrical tang from CRT monitors running hot all day long. Walk into Tony’s Pizza & Games on a Saturday afternoon in…

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…