Maddeningly, we’ve all had the experience. You’re progressing through an enjoyable game, devoting your time and being rewarded for it, when all of a sudden there’s a glitch. A glitch that makes it impossible for you to carry on as you were. A game-breaking glitch. If anything, this seems to happen more often these days Mainly due because though dev...

When it comes to games with stories, I’m a completionist. I’m a story completionist rather than a gaming completionist—once in a long while I’ll aim for 100% completion in a particularly great game, but mostly I’m content to do the main content and a selection of the side quest-y stuff.  But I almost always finish the main campaign of games I ...

In 2010, I was a music minor in a composer’s group at my college that met once a week to discuss various issues in music and composing. One day I proposed to the group that at an upcoming meeting I’d make a presentation on video game music as a serious emerging venue for the musical art form. A couple gamers in the group got it, but there were a lo...

I never owned an Xbox system until I bought a 360. I was almost exactly ten years late to the Halo party when I fired up a hand-me-down copy of Halo 2 that fall. Halo 2 was showing its age by that point, of course, but it still made an impression in a couple of ways. First, it was clear that this was a shooter with an unusually elaborate universe a...

In 1941, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story called “The Garden of Forking Paths” that was basically a “wouldn’t it be cool” vision of a story that could include all of its different possible outcomes—when a decision was made, the story could follow each of the forking paths that result. Nearly 75 years later, Borges’ vision has co...

Where we game has changed a lot in recent years, not only with the success of the Nintendo Switch as a system where games are played in a space, not just on a screen.  Also, as mobile devices led to a huge wave of casual games and as increasingly powerful and affordable laptops and cloud servers let PC gamers take AAA games around the hou...

We know what you’re thinking. With all the retro systems out there, why are we talking about the GameCube? What do GameCube party games have that you can’t get from other systems? Actually, a lot of the best party games ever made are found exclusively on the GameCube, like Super Smash Bros Melee. And yes, we know that most of the franchises on this...

The late 1990s and early 2000s produced some of the most beloved retro games in history. Most often, we thank the N64, the original PlayStation, and the original Xbox for that. Soon after this era, gamers upgraded to newer PlayStations and Xboxes. And let’s not forget Nintendo’s revolutionary Wii, the first console designed primarily for motion-sen...

4 days ago, SNK tweeted an announcement that had retro-gaming nerds like us drooling in anticipation. Today, November 9, 2022, we see that promise fulfilled. SNK has just released its second volume of 10 long-lost Neo Geo Pocket Color games on Steam and Nintendo Switch. If you’ve read our recent account of the original console’s tragic failure, thi...