Reviews
1K ZX Chess ZX81 Review: Checkmate in 672 Bytes
David Horne’s Artic program plays legal chess in 672 bytes on the unexpanded 1K ZX81 — a size record that stood for thirty-three years.
Author: Sal Benedetto
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.
Reviews
Mazogs ZX81 Review: The Long Walk Home
Don Priestley’s Bug-Byte classic sends you into a huge random maze for the treasure — then makes you carry it home, weaponless, past everything.
Reviews
3D Monster Maze ZX81 Review: Terror in One Kilobyte
Malcolm Evans’ 1981 maze of fear — a T. rex, an exit, and no weapon — is the first survival horror game and the ZX81’s masterpiece.
Features
Nintendo DS Hidden Gems: Nine Brilliant Games You Missed
Beyond Mario and Pokémon lies the DS’s treasure chest: a space epic, a robot-dog adventure, a slime’s solo outing and six more brilliant games the charts forgot.
Features
Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection: The Night Nintendo Went Online
In November 2005, Nintendo — the company that skipped online on the GameCube — launched free online play on a handheld, and Mario Kart DS made millions try it the same week.
Features
Cards That Played Everything: The DS Homebrew and Flashcart Scene
Flashcarts began as piracy’s favourite tool — and became the DS’s unofficial second platform, home to emulators, media players, fan translations and a homebrew scene that never died.
Features
Two Screens and a Stylus: How the DS Rewrote Game Design
Maps that lived below the action, swords drawn with a pen, surgery by fingertip: the DS’s second screen and stylus didn’t add a gimmick, they rewrote the grammar of game design.
Reviews
Radiant Historia DS Review: Time Travel Done Right
Atlus’s late-era gem braids two timelines, a grid-based battle system and the DS’s best-written war story into a time-travel RPG that out-thinks Chrono Trigger’s shadow.
Reviews
The World Ends with You DS Review: Shibuya Is the Battleground
Square Enix’s Shibuya masterpiece fights on two screens at once, dresses its stats in fashion labels and weaponises teenage alienation. The World Ends with You is the DS’s boldest RPG.
Reviews
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective DS Review: One Night to Solve Your Own Murder
Shu Takumi’s Ghost Trick gives a dead man one night, a lamp’s worth of poltergeist powers and the best plot in the DS library. A flawless, funny, heartbreaking masterpiece.