Your Move

The first Street Fighter game, released in 1987 by Capcom, was mostly unremarkable.

In early 1991, before Sonic the Hedgehog was released on the Sega Genesis, several magazines received a cartridge with an early version of the game. All the media coverage of Sonic before it came out was from this prototype, which had several big differences from the final version of the game. Most of these cartridges were returned to Sega, and for decades, this version of the game was lost.

In 1983, George Lucas founded Lucasfilm Games, a video game development company to work alongside his Lucasfilm production studio. Although Lucasfilm is obviously known primarily for its Star Wars movies, the rights for making Star Wars games were in the hands of various other third parties.

Cyberpunk 2077 is awesome. It’s a triumph of game engineering, features a huge, lively worlds, and is one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played. It will certainly land on many peoples’ Game of the Year lists. That is, unless you’re playing on the original Xbox One or PlayStation 4.

The hottest Christmas gifts this season are the new round of game consoles from Sony and Microsoft - the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X, respectively. At least, I assume they are, considering every time they go on sale, they’re snatched up instantly.

Last Sunday, the Nintendo Entertainment System celebrated its 35th anniversary. On October 18th, 1985, the system went on sale in New York City, with a nationwide launch in the fall of ‘86. The NES’s Japanese counterpart, the Famicom, had been out in Japan since 1983. But while arcades were still popular in the United States, the home video game market was essentially dead. Nintendo’s fledgling American division was tasked with convincing retailers that their system was different from the Atari games they were unable to sell. With 90% of the Japanese home video game market, Nintendo was confident they could bring that success to America, too. Nintendo of America’s first attempt was called the AES - based on the Famicom, but with a typing keyboard, a musical keyboard, a tape drive, and wireless controllers. The idea, I think, was to position it as more of a home computer and educational device. They showed it off at the Consumer Electronics Show in January of ‘85, but retailers were

Super Mario is 35 years old this month, and Nintendo is releasing several Mario games in the next year to celebrate. The craziest to me is a new Mariokart game for the Nintendo Switch, named Mariokart Live: Home Circuit. In this game, you drive a real remote-control car with a camera on it through your actual house. You set up the track and checkpoints, and then the Switch overlays opponents, obstacles, and items on the track in real-time. The game supports multiple players, too. No word on how much the cars cost, but I’m betting they won’t be cheap. Nintendo is also re-releasing one of my favorite recent Mario games, Super Mario 3D World. The game was previously only available on the unpopular Wii U system, so I’m glad that more people will be able to experience it, because it’s delightful. I spoke about it way back in 2013 , calling the game ‘nearly perfect’, and I still agree. Nintendo has lots more planned, like a multiplayer take on the original Super Mario Bros called Super Mario

Consumer-grade Virtual Reality headsets have come a long way in a relatively short amount of time. The first model of the popular Oculus Rift headset was released in 2013. It was relatively primitive compared to today’s headsets, but it was many times cheaper than other head-mounted displays at the time. There have been several other headsets released between then and now, including models by Valve and HP. But aside from some cheap adapters that did little more than strap your phone to your face, the common element among headsets has been the requirement to connect them to an expensive console or gaming computer with a long cable. Then, last year, Oculus released the Quest headset - a completely wireless, self-contained VR system. And compared to earlier headsets, I can’t imagine ever going back to a tethered setup. The Quest straps to your face easily, and uses four cameras on its front to track you around your environment. When you play for the first time in a room, it will prompt

In 1999, Sega released their final home console, the Dreamcast. Among several features it had that were new to game consoles, there was a built-in modem. Few games used it, and even fewer used it well. But one used it phenomenally. Phantasy Star Online wasn’t the first online multiplayer game on the Dreamcast, but it was absolutely the most ambitious. You could customize your own character, choose your abilities, and pick which weapons you enjoy using the most. When you’d log in, you’d be transported to a lobby, where you could build a team of up to 4 players. You could take on the main story, or a number of different missions, which would be updated periodically. The story could take place in one of four areas - forest, caves, mines, or ruins - which all followed a pattern of moving through several environments before getting to a boss monster that would take your entire team to defeat. Playing this game 20 years ago presented certain challenges, not the least of which was getting

I’m still working from home, and as important as social distancing is these days, sometimes I just want to play games with other people! Lots of games have a multiplayer component, but if you want to play Overwatch or the latest Call of Duty with your friends, all of you need to have a copy of the game and be playing on the same platform. That’s an expensive prospect, and I don’t think I’d have much luck convincing people to drop hundreds of dollars to spend an evening playing Destiny with me. However, the Jackbox Party Pack games are practically made for playing remotely. They’re a collection of trivia and other simple games that can be played using a smartphone as a controller, and only the person hosting the game needs to buy a copy. If you on a Windows or Mac computer, you can share your screen using a video conference like Zoom or Google Meet, or stream the game on Twitch, and your friends can play with you using their phone. Most of the games support up to 8 players, although

If you played console games in the ‘80s or ‘90s, I’m betting you still have some of your old machines around. Maybe you have a Sega Genesis in a box in your attic, or a Super Nintendo in your childhood bedroom, at your mom’s house. The good news is, they probably still work! The bad news is, you probably don’t have the heavy, boxy TV that you played the games on anymore. Sure, you can plug an old system into your modern flat-panel TV with the cables it came with, but the picture you get is not going to be anything like what you remember. Those old analog TVs used a signal that today we call 480i. That means it displayed 480 lines, but it alternated between showing the even lines and the odd lines each frame. This happened 60 times a second, so fast that the image appeared as one solid picture. However, video game consoles up until around the PlayStation 2 “tricked” TVs into drawing every line, every frame. In this mode, sometimes called 240p, instead of alternating lines every frame,

Growing up, I was mostly a console gamer. There were some games, though, that pushed the boundaries of what games could do, and they were mostly on PCs. One such series focused on flying the X-Wing starfighters from the Star Wars movies.

I’m spending a lot more time at my computer desk lately, and I know I’m not the only one. Whether it’s for working from home, or for playing games, it’s important to have the right posture to avoid any repetitive stress injuries.

When I was in elementary school, you were either a Nintendo kid, or a Sega kid. Even though I was a bit of a weird hybrid because I had the Sega Genesis and a Nintendo Game Boy, in this particular culture war, I fell on the Sega side of the divide. And as far as I knew at the time, those were the only options. But there was a third pillar, one that was unknown to me until years later - the TurboGrafx 16.

In 1997, Final Fantasy VII brought the role-playing game series into 3D on Sony’s Playstation console. It was groundbreaking, but its early 3D graphics and poor language translation haven’t aged very well. Five years ago, they announced a remake of the game for the PlayStation 4. It’s out now, and it. Is. Wonderful. Final Fantasy VII Remake covers the first portion of the original game. This segment took about 6 hours in the original, but here it’s been expanded to 40 hours. Many parts are new or expanded, but although the story is far more faithful to the original than I anticipated, a few of the new segments overstay their welcome. That’s a small complaint, though, and most of the new content is integrated magnificently, and really makes the world in the game feel lived-in and real. Instead of the menu-based combat of classic Final Fantasy games, the combat here is generally more action-oriented. In some ways, the gameplay is more a refined version of Final Fantasy XIII’s system. The

I usually purchase physical copies of all my games. There are some distinct advantages to having the game on a disc or cartridge, instead of living as a digital license on some cloud server somewhere.

It’s been a long time since the last game in the Animal Crossing series came out - about seven years. I’ve had every game in the series since the original on Gamecube, where my sister and I would sit in front of our TV day after day to visit our village, harvest apples, and cultivate a happy populace.

PlayStation 2 is the best-selling game console of all time. First released in Japan 20 years ago this week, it sold over 158 million units over its lifetime. When the system was released in the U.S. in October of 2000, it sold half a million units on the first day, instantly making the PS2 the fastest-selling game console ever. Sony shipped 100,000 units a week for the rest of the year, and availability was still spotty for months thereafter. I asked for one for my birthday in January of 2001, and my Dad couldn’t find one until May. Back then, a reasonable DVD player would cost anywhere from $200 to $400, and most people didn’t have one yet. The PlayStation 2 launched at $300, and was one of the best DVD players you could get at the time, even ignoring the fact that it was also the most advanced video game console on the market. The value proposition was clear: if you wanted to watch DVDs, you could buy a standalone player, or spend roughly the same amount of money and get a DVD player

I’ve always been attracted to photography. My first camera was a little 110 film camera that added a Ninja Turtle to the corner of every photo. The problem with that was that, for a kid, film and developing were expensive and slow. In 1998, Nintendo released a digital camera I could afford - the Game Boy camera. It was a cartridge for Game Boy that had a little round camera pod attached to the top. This camera could turn around 180 degrees, so you could take photos of things in front of you, or take some of the world’s first digital selfies. The camera’s resolution is 128 by 128 pixels, a tiny fraction of a megapixel. And forget about color - the camera sees with the same palette as the Game Boy. That’s black, white, and two shades of gray. But the Game Boy camera was the most affordable entry into digital photography at the time, and at that point was the smallest digital camera in the world. There’s no easy way to hook the camera up to a computer to get the pictures - instead, you

As a guy with a January birthday, my options for a venue for my birthday parties as a child were limited by winter weather. In my mind, after I grew out of Chuck E. Cheese, there was only one cool option: Laser Quest.