He-Man and The Masters of the Universe is less a toy line or a cartoon than it is a case study in ruthless, well-timed marketing. The rush o...

Many worlds collided in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game for the NES. It saw the Turtles at the height of their popularity ...

If you ever want someone to realize just how excessive video game magazines were in the mid-1990s, you don’t need to say a thing. Just grab...

Last month brought the first trailer for Spielberg’s Ready Player One movie, based on Ernest Cline’s book about a virtual-reality treasur...

What’s the anime-manga industry up to these days? Monster girls, from the look of it. Mike Toole recently wrote an Anime News Network articl...

I realize that I let Rygarfield fall behind schedule, as I've made only two strips in fifteen months. I’m not worried, though. All of ...

The first two Lunar games remain cases of RPG clichés done unimpeachably right. They button up every little part of the genre that grew old ...

I discussed the Demo Demo PlayStation series here before, partly because it has the only publicly released bit of Bounty Arms and partly bec...

I'm afraid that Rygarfield has not yet emerged as this century’s hottest new comic strip. At first I didn’t know what the problem might...

You know what’s wrong with webcomics? They just don't have broad appeal. Name any webcomic, and you can find a great mass of people who ...

Flash Hiders and Battle Tycoon rarely draw notice in the history of fighting games. The two titles were the now-defunct Right Stuff’s ...

Toren Smith passed away on March 4. Many remember him as a pioneer in the manga-translating world, and there’s a lot to his story: how he sc...

A wise observer once described Gainax as two diametrically opposed anime studios in one. Good Gainax takes chances and creates interesting ...

It’s time I talked about toys. I’ve acquired a number of them over the years: some bought, some received as gifts, and some offered as promo...

Captain Commando was a veritable chameleon among game mascots. As mentioned in a recent feature at 1up.com , the Capcom icon started off as ...

Game manuals are a dying breed. As the industry shifts toward online distribution and cheap packaging, manuals grow thinner and less informa...

Comics based on video games usually stumble for two reasons. Most games have threadbare, cliche stories to start with, and their comic versi...

Sony’s Demo Demo PlayStation series is less than a footnote in the system’s history. They’re very similar to the Play Play demo discs that...