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.
The Model 1 arcade blaster brought home nearly intact: flat-shaded TIE fighters, a trench run, a second player on the guns, and the 32X earning its keep at last.
AM2’s polygon pioneer with two extra cars, five tracks and a split-screen mode: not just the best racer on the 32X, but the fullest home Virtua Racing of its generation.
Sonic’s spin-off that left Sonic at home: a tethered two-character platformer of springy genius and springy frustration, and the 32X’s most beautiful 2D game.
TxK’s exile, a piano that grows a tree, an import puzzle crown jewel: ten superb Vita games from the second shelf.
A decade after the obituaries, the Vita scene keeps shipping ports, translations and tools. Inside gaming’s most durable afterlife.
Sony shipped the streaming future in 2011 and the market declined it. The story of Remote Play’s first good implementation.
Falcom reclaims its lost fourth chapter on the hardware it was built for: a thirty-hour forest, mapped by surviving it.
Derek Yu’s roguelike landmark in a flawless conversion, its Daily Challenge married to the handheld’s rhythms. No Vita capture survives in the free archives, so the hardware itself illustrates our review.
Vanillaware’s model remake: five interlocking books, a reborn combat system and tragedy intact — the Odin Sphere the PS2 promised.
Thirty-six years ago today, Guybrush Threepwood stepped onto Mêlée Island wanting to be a pirate, and adventure games were never the same. Ron Gilbert’s comedy masterpiece — insult sword fighting, an unkillable hero, a villain defeated with root beer — gets the full flagship treatment: the design manifesto that outlawed death, the jokes that outlived the genre, and why it still sets the standard in 2026.