In 1996, Nintendo released their third home console to the market, the Nintendo 64, a system four times more powerful than the measly 16-bit Super Nintendo. We argued a lot about numbers a lot back in the day like we knew what we were talking about or it actually meant something. “The PlayStation’s only 32-bit,…
Violence. Blood and gore. Martial arts. Ninjas. Cyborgs. Sorcerers. Four-armed half-dragon men. If this combination of words were presented as a clue on Jeopardy!, the correct response would be “What’s everything a kid in the ‘90’-s thought was totally rad?”. All of this and so much more were part of what endeared me to the…
“Blue streak, speeds by, Sonic the Hedgehog. Too fast, for the naked eye, Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic, he can really move. Sonic, he’s got an attitude. Sonic, he’s the fastest thing aaalllliiiivvveee.” These were the lyrics I looked forward to hearing every Saturday morning, the opening to ABC’s Sonic the Hedgehog, a show based on…
As someone whose first console was an NES and didn’t have a PC at home until 1996, the concept of upgrading to a better, newer console was something that didn’t really cross my mind. But, suddenly I started seeing commercials on television for something called a Genesis – doing what Nintendon’t – and pieces in…
In Canada we have a holiday called Victoria Day, also referred to as the May 24th weekend or affectionately May 2-4, even though it often happens a week or so before the twenty-fourth of the month. In any case, it marks the start of the camping season, and people will tow their campers to RV…
There’s a terrific anime streaming on Netflix called High Score Girl. It’s a slice of life story about a budding relationship between two young kids but filtered through the ‘90’-s arcade scene, in particular the booming popularity of fighting games like Capcom’s Street Fighter II. Due to how authentic the show is of the era…
Where I’m from, there are a lot of interconnected towns with very little to mark that you crossed over into a new one other than a sign welcoming you to a new place. A hub of sorts, though not that much larger than Harbour Grace, is Carbonear, a place where many come to get their…
There’s a scene in the Kevin Smith film Clerks where Randal Graves, a clerk at a mom and pop video store, goes to a Blockbuster-esque video store called Big Choice video to rent a movie – there’s a reason, you just have to see the film if you haven’t. Upon seeing the sheer amount of…
With the proliferation of comic book movies in cinemas nowadays, everyone has seen there fair share of iconic origin stories: Peter Parker getting bitten by a radioactive spider, gaining fantastical abilities that through a twist of fate cost him the life of his Uncle Ben; a young Bruce Wayne witnessing his parents killed before his…
Nestled on the eastern side of the island of Newfoundland on the Avalon Peninsula is the town I grew up in: Harbour Grace. A tidbit on Wikipedia puts the population of the town at around 3,000 people as of 2006, but I would wager it has shrunk by a significant margin since then. Today you’ll…
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