Daniel Keast

I actually have a physical UK copy of this game, I think it’s supposed to be one of the rarest ever made. It was released after the Saturn was already effectively dead. I bought it second hand I think off of eBay when that site was new and you had to post cheques in the mail. It only cost me £30 I think.

This is an RPG on the PlayStation made by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the man that created the Final Fantasy series. It’s set in modern day New York, and you play a cop that is dealing with horrific incidents caused by mitochondria coming alive and trying to take over the Earth.

This is a GameBoy Advance game where you play a series of “microgames” one after the other. Each one lasts a handful of seconds, and you have to figure out what you have to do, and what the controls are before you run out of time. The aim in each section is to finish a certain amount of them without losing all your lives. Each level is themed around a different character, and has it’s own intro and ending cutscene.

I was obsessed with this game before release, I was reading up on Internet forums about it when it was going to be on the Nintendo 64. The director of the game was on a lot of forums answering questions and doing interviews. It released for the GameCube in the end, after being delayed several times.

This is the second Mario platformer for the GameBoy. The graphics are significantly improved, it looks quite a bit like Super Mario World on the SNES, although it is obviously in greyscale and much lower resolution. It also has a world map where you select levels like the SNES game too.

I picked this game at random as something to play with my youngest son, Joe. I’d never played this version before, and we managed to get all of the retro achievements within about twenty minutes. It only has two of the original games four levels, and is obviously very simple graphically. We both had a lot of fun playing through it though, it definitely has a lot of the feel of the arcade game.

I bought this with the Dreamcast at the UK launch of the machine. I was absolutely amazed with the graphics and speed. The first level with a section where a killer whale is destroying a jetty behind you while you run into the screen was unlike anything I’d seen before.

I bought this with the PlayStation 1 on launch day in the UK, I went halves with my brother to be able to afford it. We both finished the game that day since it’s only really a single track. It has multiple difficulties, and on the higher one an extra section of the track opens up. You then have “extra” difficulties where you drive the track mirrored. We ended up playing the demo disk that came with the PlayStation quite a lot too, I was very impressed with one where you’re controlling a dinosaur.

This is the US NES version of the Famicom game Dragon Quest. It was never released over here in the UK, and I didn’t even hear about it at the time. I first encountered RPGs reading about them in Super Play magazine for the SNES.

This is a Game Boy Advance remake of the original Metroid for the NES. I’ve never finished the NES one since I always get lost, it lacks the map of Super Metroid and the graphics aren’t detailed enough to make the areas as distinct. I’ve finished this one a couple of times now, and it’s excellent. It’s a pretty short game like all Metroids, but the whole thing flows excellently and there is no padding.

This is the 1994 Game Boy version, not the original 1982 arcade machine or any of the ports. It starts as if it was a simple port of the original game, but quickly becomes so much more than that. After you finish the first four levels you are taken to a map screen where you chase Donkey Kong in an attempt to rescue Pauline across groups of four levels. In the first three levels of each group you need to find a key, then carry it to an exit door. Each forth level is a boss fight against Donkey Kong.

This is the Master System version rather than the Mega Drive one. I’d never really played it before, but had heard comments that it is better than the 16bit version. I did enjoy it quite a lot, but I don’t believe that to be the case at all.

I had this as a part of the Mega Games 2 cartridge for my Mega Drive as a kid. Mobygames says that it was only available as a pack in with the Mega Drive 2, and never for sale separately. I must have bought it second hand as I had the original model with the headphone socket on the front.

This is a cute indie game where you solve people’s problems by taking photos of things. It’s almost entirely in black and white, with a very charming art style. It features an overhead third-person perspective, 3D graphics, and a rotatable camera.

This is a game I got in a Humble Bundle. I hadn’t heard of it before and have just gotten around to playing it. It’s a story-focused puzzle platformer, there are a set of individual screens where you have to figure out how to get to the top right using a series of platforms. There are several different types of platforms that behave differently, from disappearing after you jump off of them to teleporting you to another with the same pattern.