How great were cartridges? I’m guessing that most of you have experienced a game cartridge in your lifetimes (even before the N64), and what an experience they were. How many times did you have to blow into the chip-end of it when your game didn’t work? Game interactivity was alive and well a long time before the Wii. My first cart game was Secret Command on the Sega Master System II, and my tiny buddies and I used to trade games in primary school. Wonder Boy for Paper Boy for instance. Or working game for non-working game (no matter how hard you blew, so you get parents involved). And our Sega clique used to mock the Nintendo kids because of their huge carts in comparison. Gameplay wasn’t really an issue back then: “Zelda? But you have to load your game like a video HAHA!”

Credit must go to Nintendo for their great DOUBLE cartridge idea of the Super Game Boy, so that you could play Game Boy games in comparatively better colour on the SNES than the default black and muddy yellow/brown/whatever it was. Maybe it was this that inspired remastering old B&W films into colour?

No credit then for when they insisted on continuing to use carts for the N64 when their rivals were embracing proper CD technology. No load times? Unfortunately for them FMV was being lapped up by the hoardes, and it spelt a premature death for the system. Plus, you do kinda get sick of constant fog to hide a disadvantaged draw distance. So now its DVDs (or “game cards” for the DS)… but strangely I still miss how utterly ridiculous carts used to be, how they used to fry if you left them in a car boot on a hot day (admittedly that was my fault), and how massively unproportional imported carts (from Asia or wherever) used to be for some of the older consoles. And I definitely prefer blowing into my game rather than wiping it with a glass-cloth (as if we do that – the shirt you’re wearing is fine).