What the hell? What’s a Spartan soldier doing in DOA 4? Mario and Sonic at the Olympic games? Battletoads vs Double Dragon??

Gaming crossovers have been around for ages now, with a variety of characters and franchises merging together to form some insane results. Robocop vs Terminator was one of the early crossover titles I remember from my youth, and this was pretty cool way back before Aliens vs Predator came along with rubbish movies and hardly a single decent game apart from the Jaguar FPS and the side-scrolling arcade game. These days it just gets crazy, with… Read More

Soccer. You either love it, hate it, or belong to the casual World Cup watching crowd. Yeah there is way too much cheating and diving involved, and these days with clubs having players on astronomically overpriced wages (just look at Beckham) it really is difficult for fans to feel at all connected to their team. Still, people from all over the world play it and at its core it is still a beautiful game. And it really should be called ‘football’.

So here is a brief rundown of the video game football genre. It’s not a comprehensive list and, certainly, if you are not a fan of the sport then you can stop reading and merely look at the screenshots… Read More

I never played the original Elevator Action which Taito released in 1983 but the closest I came was when I borrowed a Game Boy version off a friend many years later but the cartridge didn’t work and I was accused of ruining it. In 1995 though, the sequel Elevator Action II (aka E A Returns) came out and quickly became one of my favourite games of all time. It had brilliant animation, great gameplay which supported 2 player co-op, and a Schwarzenegger-type character amusingly named “Jad The Taff”, whatever that means.

Actually all 3 of the playable characters had weird names. Apart from the muscular and slow Jad/Arnie there was Kart Bradfield

Ok I admit it, I used to buy and play pirated games for my beloved console the Sega Saturn. But I never got it mod-chipped (even though that would’ve been the long-term cheaper alternative) – I used to use a “spinning-disc” technique. What this involved was:

1. Opening the console

2. Taping the CD door sensor thing so that you could open the lid and the console wouldn’t reset

3. Loading a “real” game disc to start, then

4. Quickly changing the real disc with the pirate disc as soon as the real game was about to start and manually spinning the disc within that split-second window of opportunity (which involved great timing and precision)

As with all dodgy methods, doing this had some disadvantages. For instance with number 1… Read More