There's something unsettling about firing up Shadow Man on the N64 after twenty-odd years. I mean, you forget how genuinely disturbing some games were back then—not in that try-hard, gore-for-shock-value way modern horror does, but in a proper, creeping dread sort of way that made you glance over your shoulder even though you knew it was just pixels on a screen.I picked up my copy from Electronics Boutique sometime in late '99, I think. The…
You know what? I've been thinking about that dusty corner of my game collection again. There's this one cart that sits between my beloved Ocarina of Time and the slightly warped copy of GoldenEye—Quest 64. Funny thing is, most people either don't remember it at all or they remember it as "that weird RPG that wasn't very good." But here's the thing… they're wrong.I picked up Quest 64 in the summer of '98, right after…
Picture this: I'm rifling through a car boot sale last autumn, knee-deep in someone's gaming collection, when I spot it—a pristine Mega Drive 2 sitting in a cardboard box like it's been waiting for me specifically. The seller wanted fifteen quid for it, which felt like highway robbery until I plugged it in at home and remembered why Sega's second swing at their 16-bit masterpiece was, in many ways, better than the original.The Genesis 2—or…
My mate Dave called me yesterday asking about "blast processing," and I had to laugh. Not at him, mind you—but at the memory of teenage me parroting that marketing phrase like it was technical scripture. Course, back then I couldn't tell you what processing actually meant beyond "makes Sonic go fast," but bloody hell did it sound impressive when you were trying to convince your SNES-owning mates that your Mega Drive was the superior machine.The…
There it was, sitting in the electronics section of Target next to the phone chargers and screen protectors – an AtGames Sega Genesis Flashback console that looked like someone had shrunk my childhood Sega and wrapped it in the kind of packaging that screams “impulse purchase.” Twenty-eight bucks. I mean, that’s less than what I paid for lunch yesterday, so obviously I grabbed it. My wife wasn’t thrilled when I came home with yet another…
Found myself digging through a dusty electronics store last Saturday – you know the type, smells like old circuit boards and broken dreams – when I spotted something that made me stop dead in my tracks. There, wedged between a stack of VHS copies of “Titanic” and some scratched-up PlayStation discs, sat a Game Gear that had definitely seen better days. Screen cracked like a spider web, battery compartment corroded to hell, but man…holding that…
You know what’s funny? I spent forty years thinking racing games were just cars going around in circles, maybe because the only exposure I had was watching other people play them for five minutes here and there. Then I discovered retro gaming in my forties and started working backwards through all these classics everyone kept talking about. San Francisco Rush on the N64 wasn’t even on my radar initially – my daughter had mentioned it…
Been having a proper clear-out of the spare room – you know how it is, start looking for an old cable and three hours later you’re knee-deep in boxes you haven’t touched since the last house move. That’s when I found them again: two gold N64 cartridges that honestly might be worth more than my car at this point. Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, sitting there looking as precious as the day I first…
I still remember the exact moment I knew Super Smash Bros was something special. It was March 1999, and I’d just picked up my copy from the local Electronics Boutique – yeah, back when that was still a thing. My buddy Mike was over, we’d hooked up the N64 to my old 27-inch Zenith CRT, and we were staring at the character select screen like we’d discovered buried treasure. Mario. Link. Pikachu. All in the…
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 gaming worlds that only overlapped when we’d swap cartridges and argue about whether his version of Sonic ran faster than mine. Spoiler alert: it actually did, but…