The Manhole – An adventure with no end and no goals

At some point in the late Nineties I bought a copy of Duke Nukem 3D on the Sega Saturn. During the train journey home, I went through the usual ritual of poring over the back of the box and reading the instruction manual while anticipating the moment I’d finally get to play. Except this time something was different. Tucked into the manual, poking out from behind the Duke was another CD. It was Myst, the world famous adventure puzzle game that had sold a million CD-ROM drives. I knew exactly what I had to do. I took the CD out of the case and wisely left it on the train for another passenger to deal with!

Taito LD Collection – Learning to love the laserdisc

There was a time in my life when I dismissed laserdisc games as an inferior form of gaming; an evolutionary dead end in the history of videogames. And yet, I’ve always held at least a passing interest in them. In the mid Nineties I was thrilled by Road Avenger on Mega CD. Then, in the mid-2000s, I would listen to Retro Gaming Radio (perhaps the world’s first podcast, having started in 1998) and would feel an infectious enthusiasm for Shane R. Monroe’s love of Dragon’s Lair and the animation of Don Bluth. Years later, I’d try the game for myself via a blu ray release and die repeatedly, wondering what I was missing that prevented me from loving the game just as much.

Badlands – Laserdisc gaming on MSX

When I first discovered the MSX, one of the things that most appealed to me was just how many different models there are. Since MSX was a hardware standard rather than a single console or computer, the format was available to multiple manufacturers to make it their own.

Bomb Jack – See how it runs!

Bomb Jack never used to hold much significance to me. Before 2004 I was aware of it but I’m not sure I’d even played it before. But then the editor of Retro Gamer sent me a disk in the post… It was a homebrew port of Tecmo/Tehkan’s 1984 arcade game, converted to the MSX 2 by a small Spanish team called Kralizec. Apparently I was the only person the RG staff knew who owned a real MSX, and so I wrote a little review for them, about a third of a page in size. I think it might have been the first game I ever reviewed professionally, which is a big reason it remains so special to me… The other big reason, as I quickly discovered, is that Bomb Jack is absolutely brilliant! Why did no one tell me?

Road Fighter – The joy of score attack

I honestly can’t remember the first time I played Road Fighter, but I can remember when I fell in love with it. It was exactly the time when I realised that it’s not really a racing game at all but a finely tuned score attack game.

Dragon Slayer – A vintage RPG, or just too retro?

We all have our favourite era of retro games, right? For me it’s definitely the mid to late Nineties. The arcade thrills and technological polish of the Mega Drive and Saturn eras really appeal to my specific tastes, almost certainly because I was a teenager, prime age for formative game liking, at the time. Of course, I also love 8-bit games, and every era since, but is it possible for a game to be… too retro? Can a game be so mechanically old fashioned; so arcane that it impedes enjoyment no matter how popular it was at release? For the longest time, I’ve definitely thought of a certain era of games, particularly early Eighties computer games, as “too retro”. Which makes the prospect of playing Dragon Slayer, arguably the first action RPG ever made, a pretty daunting one.