Timothy here, and I am going to admit something that will likely cause my teammates to roll their eyes. Up until last month, I had never played Time Crisis. Yes, I know, Joe is probably already typing an angry response telling me that I missed out on one of the quintessential arcade experiences of the 90s. However, since I came to this as a newcomer, I can confidently say that Time Crisis has held up…

I am Tim, and I’ve got to say something that is going to make Joe roll his eyes so hard he’ll dislodge them from his eye sockets. For approximately six months, I thought Galaga was nothing more than a straightforward space shooter. In the end, I was completely wrong, and finding out how wrong has been one of my most humbling gaming experiences; it reminded me of why the classics, well, they remain classics. Coming…

Marcus here, and I’d like to explain before Carl starts to argue again why Daytona USA is the arcade racing experience that revolutionised our perception of racing games. What I’m going to say has nothing to do with nostalgia – it’s about technical innovation, accessibility and the rare union of leading edge technology and pure arcade entertainment. Daytona USA was released in 1994 (Wikipedia), the first game on the Model 2 arcade system board developed…

I’m Joe, and before Carl gets started telling me OutRun wasn’t a Genesis exclusive (which it really should have been) let me tell you why Sega’s 1986 arcade game OutRun is the best driving game ever created — not the most realistic, nor the most technologically advanced; the best. Where every other racing game was trying to sell you on the fact you’re really racing a car, OutRun was selling you a dream of cruising…

Timothy here. I am going to have to say that I have been bothered by a lot since I first started playing Golden Axe about 3 months ago. Joe says this is a masterpiece that defined the Genesis, whilst Carl nods along and Sam talks about “frame data” being “primitive but functional”. As someone who did not grow up feeding quarters to arcade machines, I have to ask: what made this worth all those lunches?…

Joe’s been going on and on about Streets of Rage for weeks now, so I’m happy to take over for this post because I wanted to talk about something else entirely – basically, the fundamentals of the whole thing. As usual, we’ve been arguing about arcade hierarchies and I’m sick of hearing about it, so I thought I’d give the nod to a game that should be recognised for changing the face of gaming culture…

When I came to Space Invaders for the first time, I will admit I saw no more than just the most rudimentary elements of a game. A black screen with white dots floating around – that was supposed to be the basis of everything? However, after spending quality time playing the game and understanding what it achieved, I have come to appreciate what Tomohiro Nishikado accomplished with the creation of Space Invaders. In 1978, the…

Joe has been going on about this for weeks; saying Street Fighter II should receive a lot of the credit for essentially inventing competitive gaming as we know it. We have all pointed out to Joe that fighting games have existed since before 1991, but Joe will not listen to that either. Joe continues to go on about the frame data of the game, and how he is the first person to find out about…

Right, let me tell you something about Donkey Kong that most people get wrong as well. Everyone yells and shouts about how it “introduced Mario to the world”, but they’re missing the real point of Donkey Kong. In fact, Jumpman wasn’t even called Mario at this stage – he was just Jumpman. More importantly, Donkey Kong didn’t just introduce a character – it bloody well created the platformer genre as we know it today. Before…

Look, I will be blunt with you – when the PlayStation came out, and everybody was talking about 3-D polygons being the way of the future, I thought we may lose something wonderful. Thirty years into this hobby, I watch kids dismiss everything that does not have ray-tracing, and it is an experience that reminds me why Metal Slug meant so much to me when it came out in arcades. This was not just another…