Issued almost two decades ago, the Nintendo Wii console remains one of the most groundbreaking gaming hardware releases ever. John Bowe remembers it well… Released worldwide over the winter of 2006/2007, Nintendo’s Wii marked a return for a company whose past ten years had seen them gain plenty of criticalRead More →
John Bowe decides to ask editor Christian Cawley why he still loves those old video games like Turrican. A couple of years ago I sat down with my brother to play a round of Pro Evo on his PlayStation 4. A simple enough task; we’d been playing Pro Evo togetherRead More →
Sony’s 1996 PlayStation Expo proved to a wider audience to see that big games were coming in the console’s second year. 1996 had already been a great gaming year by the time winter had heaved itself over the horizon and marched onwards with a sackful of Christmas incomings. It hadRead More →
Street Fighter Alpha’s versus King of Fighters. We’ve all been through them and made our judgements, but never like this before. Last time out I detailed an exercise in roping my wife Anna and her best friend Margaret into judging the style of ten combatants from each franchise. This theyRead More →
We pitch King of Fighters and Street Fighter Alpha in a new competition: fashion! Match-ups and smack-downs. We love them and the tensions between them. Liverpool vs Man. United, The Stones vs The Beatles, Rocky Balboa vs a training montage. Pretty intense stuff, but nothing on the Street Fighter Alpha,Read More →
Art is so important in video games. See if you agree with this Top 5 PlayStation art direction examples… Style stands out. Sometimes embarrassingly so. See your teenage years. But get it right and you have aesthetic, design and sophistication. See no album cover, ever. Video games have it though.Read More →
A point-and-click adventure. Of all the genres bleating at the margins, I always found this one to be at the furthest reaches of my understanding. Just pointing and clicking and then a little bit of text. It didn’t even sound good to me in a counter-intuitive sense. Like a comicRead More →
John Bowe looks at some of the best games of 1997, including some of the top titles of the 90s. 1996 had been the best of gaming times and regardless of whichever manufacturer you favoured, everyone was having the best of it. The players most of all. Mario 64, VirtuaRead More →
Guess who’s back? Back again. Sega’s back, tell a friend. What do you mean that you didn’t think they’d ever actually gone away? Agreed, but it has been a largely pathetic couple of decades, barring the odd classic (insert personal choice here. For instance, Outrun 2). But the exciting thingRead More →
Incredibly, 2023 saw the 30th anniversary of FIFA International Soccer on 16-bit consoles. Most of us seem to have a long lived relationship with Electronic Arts, it appears to me. Before they became the uber-brand of today they were an uber-brand of yesteryear, outfitting their cartridges with extra size andRead More →
