I became an anime nerd in the late 1990s, and it wasn't a bad time for that. There's a lot to analyze there: the rise of manga and a...

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...

If you asked me to pick my favorite toy from my childhood, I would consider that question carefully and wonder if you were surreptitiously s...

Game companies may need a lot of things to survive in the industry, but in my book they need only one thing to be memorable: a good logo. Th...

El Viento remains a fascinating artifact from a facinating era. Like many early 1990s games heavy on anime style and resolute heroines, El ...

My previous entry sunk deep into the history of Dino Land , a middleweight pinball-video game from Telenet Japan and Wolf Team. While it h...

Hey, I haven’t written about Trouble Shooter lately! I should, because this little two-game carnival of side-scrolling action and heavily a...

I haven’t been to the Toy Fair in a long, long time, but I always like looking at the new trinkets it brings. After all, a good chunk of t...

I seldom buy new Transformers. It isn’t easy. Hasbro’s modern toys are little plastic torpedoes locked on to the nostalgia nodes of every ki...

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