The first-person dungeon crawler transformed for me once I was introduced to Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey on the Nintendo DS. Before SMT, my experience was with ruthlessly difficult titles such as Might and Magic and Wizardry, which ...

It is a rare thing that I would ever purchase a console for one game, and it’s usually for some pretty strange titles. Back when Katamari Damacy came out on the PlayStation 2, I bought the game before I even owned the system fearing i...

There are two kinds of people. And maybe sometimes some overlap in between. There are people who think Top Gear is a UK television show where the host punched a man on the face and now is on Amazon Prime instead. And then there are those wh...

(Image courtesy of Cookiemagic) A couple of years ago I took my daughter to a Tetris tournament. It was the first gaming event of any kind for either of us, one held by a local, used video game shop that recently underwent a retooling of ow...

Detention was my favorite place to be after school. I was a bit of a smart ass back then, which I suppose hasn’t changed much, and my mouth got me into trouble more often than not. I frittered away a lot of my time goofing around, and...

Boobs.Now that I have your attention, I want to tell you what I think about the PC version of Senran Kagura: Peach Beach Splash, a highly sophisticated simulation representing what happens when you put a group of intricately complex, three-...

Clone systems everywhere, in my dreams, and my nightmares. Clone systems coming out of my ears. It feels like not that long ago the first cheap NES clones were coming out. They felt so novel back then, a way to play your old games without d...

When I first opened the Power Stick by Retro-Bit, nostalgic memories came flooding back. Images from my childhood of playing games in front of the glow of the television screen in the middle of the night cuddled up under a blanket, and toss...

All this talk about “sportsball” on Twitter during the Super Bowl sort of eluded me. Yes, I get it; gamers and geek culture are not generally associated with being sports fans. I can’t even properly say I am one myself. I ...

My friend Johnny and I had a complicated relationship based around loneliness, a mutual sense of humor, drugs, booze, and video games. I’m not sure if we were ever really friends. One time he tried to open up to me about his dad and t...

I like to gush about how good I think Doom 2016 is. Some naysayers on the sidelines like to point out its flaws, and I respect that; nothing is perfect, and I could write a doctorate on the fundamental differences between new and old Doom a...

Out of nowhere, a three hundred pound man in an Avengers t-shirt barrels through the crowd, stomping on a child who falls to the ground clutching a Steam gift card between rigor-mortis frozen fingers. An old man is pushed violently under a ...

I have a heavy bias toward Star Control. It is one of the first PC games I ever fell in love with alongside MYST, though my original introduction to the series took place on the Sega Genesis. The original Star Control is likely not worth go...

The SNES Classic has been out a while now and my daughter and I have been enjoying it quite a bit. The best thing about it is the controllers. Having played with a Raspberry Pi, it was tough to find a suitable controller to use in the third...

The other day I spent a couple of hours at work reading about sailboats. Like a ten-year-old with a new fascination after discovering Treasure Island or some other seafaring fantasy, I was obsessing over famous ships from the past, and the ...

Star Control II is one of the best games ever made. Getting that out of the way, I was pretty happy when Stardock announced last year that they would be reviving the series. The original creators Paul Reiche and Fred Ford will not be d...

So hey, remember the 3DO? A CD-based game system that came out in the nineties and was meant to revolutionize gaming, cost nearly a thousand bucks, and was quickly forgotten? With several different manufacturers producing their own versions...

Initially ARK: Survival Evolved didn’t leave much of an impression on me. Not only did I forget I actually owned the game, but that I had played it as well during early access at some point. It got lost among a sea of other games of i...

I remember the first Christmas I ever worked in a mall at an EB Games, getting geared up for the holiday and ready to lose our minds at the absolute insanity of Boxing Day that was to come. In the mall they had these little kiosks where the...

The SNES Classic pre-orders have come and gone and the dregs left behind without one will be forced to scramble wildly, clawing desperately at one another like a depiction of hell in a Hieronymus Bosch painting for the scraps. I don’t...

There is nothing I hate more than a shit controller. I am probably more serious about my controllers than I am games themselves; I spend an unreasonable amount of time researching input solutions for my retro gaming habit. And just a few ye...

Ultima Online is my favorite MMORPG. I don't usually dig the genre too much, but when Chris brought up Albion Online by Sandbox Interactive, it looked similar, so I thought I'd have a go at it. What I got was a much different experienc...

Sick as a dog today but I had to take a moment to post this. My buddy Ken Horowitz, author of Playing at the Next Level: A History of American Sega Games and owner of Sega fansite Sega-16 posted a video featuring a ROM made for Sega Genesis...