Man, I gotta be honest – when I first got my hands on an N64 controller back in ’96, I thought Nintendo had completely lost their minds. Three handles? What am I, some kind of mutant? And don’t get me started on that analog stick that made weird clicking noises every time you moved it. My Sega Saturn’s controller was perfect – clean, simple, made sense. This Nintendo thing looked like it was designed by…
There I was, standing in a grotty service station on the M6, watching my mate Dave’s face light up like he’d spotted buried treasure. “Bloody hell, John – look what’s hiding over here.” Tucked between a knackered fruit machine and one of those claw grabbers full of teddy bears nobody ever wins, sat a proper OutRun cabinet. Blue and red livery, attract mode cycling through those sun-soaked coastal highways that were burned into my retinas…
Right, so there I was last weekend, trying to sort through the disaster zone that passes for our spare bedroom—you know the type, where broken electronics go to die alongside those Christmas decorations you swear you’ll use again but never do—when I stumbled across something that stopped me dead in my tracks. A proper thick stack of A4 paper, held together with what remained of a rusty staple, covered in coffee rings and my own…
Back in 1993, I was deep into my Sega fanboy phase—you know, the kind where you’d defend Altered Beast as a masterpiece just because it came with your Genesis. I’d already burned through Sonic 1 and 2 probably fifty times each, had my copy of Streets of Rage 2 practically memorized, and was starting to branch out into the weirder corners of the Genesis library. That’s when I stumbled across Rocket Knight Adventures at my…