Here’s the thing about Final Fantasy VII that people who didn’t live through 1997 don’t understand – this game was a cultural moment. Not just in gaming. In mainstream culture. People who’d never played a video game heard about FFVII. Cloud became iconic. Aerith’s death scene had people…

Look, there’s not much to debate here – PlayStation won the console wars of the 1990s. Sega and Nintendo had brilliant games and brilliant hardware, but PlayStation had games. Across every genre. RPGs that made the west care about JRPGs. Stealth games that redefined game design. Platformers that…

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…

Right, let me set the scene properly here. It’s 1991, I’m twelve years old, and I’m standing in Argos clutching a crumpled catalog page with the Mega Drive circled in red biro. I’d been saving up for months – paper round money, birthday cash from my nan, the…