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.
More of everything — new heroes, mummies, aliens and the series’ best set-pieces — in a CD conversion that inherits both the sequel’s brilliance and its notorious slowdown, plus interest.
Nazca’s hand-drawn masterpiece on the format that made it affordable: every frame of animation intact, a thunderous arranged soundtrack, and loading you can forgive because the game behind it is this good.
A tank duel with an 8, a deduction game with a 9, football drawn as X’s and squares, the prettiest slot machine on the system and more from the unreviewed shelves.
Pac-Man as Videocart-27, Tetris in the framebuffer and a multicart holding the whole library: the tiny scene still writing games for the first cartridge console.
The inventor against the conqueror: what each machine genuinely did better, and why the better machine of 1976 became the worse platform of 1980.
The story of the Fairchild engineer who led the team that made the removable game cartridge safe to sell — and changed what a console was.
Two men a side, a goalie on the plunger, deflections on the twist and home gaming’s first pause button: the game inside every Channel F.
Videocart-1 itself: an unbeatable opponent who calls you a turkey, a shooting gallery, a paint program and a generative art toy — the whole future in four programs.
A naval hunt where the miss tells you how close you came — in sound. The beeper becomes a periscope in one of the library’s most original designs.
Five-card draw against a dealer who bluffs and holds kickers — called the best card game on any TV-game system, after the console was already gone.