Alright, let’s get one thing straight right out of the gate – I was a Sega kid growing up in the early 90s and treated my Sega Genesis like it was my own personal video gaming deity. Sonic was king and Streets of Rage had it’s nice rappin’ beat, but I spent most of my time shooting fools while my friends played Super Nintendo games. Sega did what Nintendon’t, and we held that mentality proudly.…

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was my introduction to sports gaming. Growing up I played Sega Genesis games and Dreamcast games (Sonic, Streets of Rage, etc.). So naturally I wasn’t interested in sports games. To me they seemed stale and repetitive — kick ball, throw ball, try not to lose. What’s the fun in that? Don’t get me wrong, I think I just enjoyed how unpredictable and creative Sega games let you be. That is until…

To this day, I remember hearing those sounds, in passing during the day, or sometimes even in my sleep. If you were lucky enough to grow up with them too, you know what I’m talking about. The glory of a wash of static as the local electronics store ran their loop of EWAV during the daytime. The coins clinking into slot machines. The frantic beeping of Frogger. The laser noises of Defender whizzing around the…

I’ll never forget where I was when I realised the entire social structure of Woodridge High School would change forever — it was during fourth period English class, Spring of ’98, when Scott Thompkins attempted to conceal his Game Boy beneath his desk. We were supposed to be reading Catcher in the Rye in Ms. Harrington’s class (if you can call dragging your eyes across the pages “reading” Catcher in the Rye), but I could…

There’s something satisfying about rooting for the underdog. That’s probably why my Sega Saturn shares pride of place on a shelf with my PS5; and why I’ll freely admit I use it more often than my spanking new Sony console. I spent three hours playing Guardian Heroes last Sunday – and my wife came downstairs, caught sight of those huge pixel sprites plastered across her 55-inch TV screen and gave me “that look”. You know…

October, 1996. I was working at a video rental shop in Manchester, one of those video rental shops that only existed during video rental’s cool years. My boss Steve (named Steve for reasons he likely regretted later given his propensity for getting tattoos up and down his legs) kept catching me staring at Resident Evil’s cover while I was stocking shelves. “Take it home Friday,” he told me over the counter when we closed. “Don’t…

Alright, truth time. I’m a Sega freak. I never should have cared about PC gaming. But some guy named Blue Disc made me care one summer day in 1994. I was at my friend Tony’s house when he shoved a blue CD case in my face. “Dude, you have to see this.” Tony’s family had recently purchased one of those primo Compaq Presario desktops with a CD-ROM drive — which was basically a freaking spaceship…

I have to say – when my daughter first started telling me about Chrono Trigger years ago (2011), I wasn’t that intrigued. Coming from a gaming background where 16-bit still looked “bad” to me because of Super Metroid (another game I picked up because of my daughter – I got it a year before Chrono Trigger), I thought it was just another old RPG that I would never play. She mentioned it to me over…