Just about anything could become a game on the Nintendo Entertainment System. By the late 1980s the NES dominated America's console mark...

It’s tradition to spend December summing up your favorite releases of the year, and that leaves me in a bind. This was a very busy year for ...

I’ve waited over twenty years to properly play Trials of Mana . I probably shouldn’t have. The Japanese version, Seiken Densetsu 3 , came ou...

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is famous for two things. It has the world's largest air force museum, and it has Hangar 18, the now-ord...

Square Enix’s recently localized Collection of Mana is notable on several fronts. It’s a solid if unadorned presentation of the first three...

Time isn’t the enemy it once was in video games. Modern titles might rank and penalize players based on how long it takes to clear a stage, ...

I was all set to discuss how I dislike the fact that many intriguing modern games merely echo older ones. A lot of my most-wanted list is fi...

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 hang around certain people long enough, you’ll hear them say that fighting games aren’t about storylines. Oh, they have plots and cha...

Let’s take yet another look at Bounty Arms . We here at the Bounty Arms Preservation Society (tax-exempt status pending) are dedicated to re...

I’m pretty sure that Super Baseball 2020 is my favorite sports game. That’s probably because I’m not really into sports games on the whole. ...

Hey! Do you like video games? To be specific, do you like arcade games from the 1980s and 1990s? Do you like mastering them and spouting tri...

So what was I up to in 2018? Well, I did a few reviews and guest-hosted my old column several times at Anime News Network. My geek highlight...

A new version of Phantasy Star appeared on the Switch this month. As with most games in the Sega Ages line, developer M2 added plenty of gr...

I don’t hesitate to call Crystalis the most rewarding game from the NES era. I never grow weary of replaying it and noticing something new...

Any discussion of Crystalis and its unfairly short legacy brings up a question: Why didn’t SNK make another one? The answer is usually “Beca...

Was Crystalis a big success? I would guess not. SNK never revisited it, and this was a company that gave Prehistoric Isle a follow-up. Cry...

Crystalis gets ideas from many sources, but it most blatantly plunders  Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Castle in the Sky . That’s...

NES titles get guarded praise at best when it comes to storylines. This was a era when video games had the barest of plots, and players were...

It’s strange that Crystalis even exists. In the late 1980s SNK was a company forged in arcades and accustomed to a diet of eye-catching, qui...