From the Vault columnist. Grew up feeding quarters to the Ms. Pac-Man machine at his uncle's pizza place; still owns his childhood SNES and every Nintendo Power he ever begged his mother for. Writes the retrospectives and the hidden-gem hunts.
In April 2015, five months after Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric had limped onto the Wii U to some of the worst reviews in the series’ history, something quietly extraordinary surfaced: an early build of th
Few arcade games ask as much of a team as Gain Ground, and this Gain Ground Mega Drive review starts with the quality that still defines it: generosity under fire. Sega’s 1988 arcade original took Gau
Most lost games stay lost. Shadow Warrior: Wanton Destruction was finished, cancelled, written off as gone forever — and then turned up on a CD in a former executive’s archive, seven years later, and
Of all the projects Sega undertook in its years of looking backwards, the Sega 3D Classics line on Nintendo 3DS may be the most loving — and the most technically absurd. The concept sounds simple: tak
Some game music was never meant to stay trapped inside a four-channel chip. When British composer Dave Lowe sat down in the early 1990s to write the themes for Frontier: Elite II, he was imagining a f
Every great genre has a first draft, and for the run-and-gun, the Neo Geo’s first draft was Cyber-Lip. SNK’s two-player arcade shooter arrived in November 1990, months after the Neo Geo hardware itsel
Is GoldenEye 007 an arcade game? The argument is older than most of the game’s current players: this site first carried it in January 2008, recycling a forum proposition that Rare’s Nintendo 64 classi
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time shipped in 1998 with graphics that felt like the future. By the mid-2000s the future had moved on — and a community of fans had decided to move Hyrule with it, rep
Some fan projects remix a level or translate a manual. The Super Mario All-Stars NES port, which surfaced in March 2015, attempted something closer to impossible: taking a flagship Super Nintendo comp
Most photo filter apps apply a look. The Retrospecs app does something far more interesting: it emulates. John Parker’s iOS converter doesn’t sprinkle pixels over your pictures — it re-renders them th