Josh Wirtanen    If I were to pick a Golden Age of sports video games, I would probably have to go with the early s. This was a glorious era of those super arcadey hits like Jerry Glanville’s Pigskin Footbrawl , NBA Jam , and Mutant League Football . Those titles were intentionally over the...

Josh Wirtanen    There was an awkward period in the history of the platformer where developers were still figuring out what worked and what didn’t. A similar thing happened in the mid s with the emergence of the D platformer, but I’m rewinding a decade earlier, when the side scrolling D platformer was...

David Sanchez    Make no mistake about it: There are a lot of reasons to love Wario Land: Super Mario Land these days the first being that the game is just a super fun action platformer. It’s more about taking out cleverly placed enemies than it is about performing tricky jumps. The level designs are great, too...

Josh Wirtanen    I always love looking at magazine ads from the s. From the absurd to the shocking to the the absolutely way too saucy, these ads are often a portal into an entirely different world. The ad for Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow I posted below which I discovered in the January, issue of Ultra...

Josh Wirtanen    A while back, I wrote an article called How Did Nintendo Power’s Top Scoring System Work That article explored the Top games lists that were featured in Nintendo Power magazine and attempted to find out how the scoring system was tallied. I was able to show reader surveys, which was one of...

Josh Wirtanen    In , a humble little game development studio called Silicon Synapse changed its name to Blizzard Entertainment. On top of porting The Lost Vikings to Amiga, they released three new games that year. The first was the much maligned Death and Return of Superman for SNES, published by Sunsoft in...

Josh Wirtanen    Welcome to the world of survival horror. That’s one of the most recognizable lines of text in video game history, up there with It’s dangerous to go alone Take this. But where did it originate You’re probably thinking it was in the introduction to the first Resident Evil. That’s how I would...

Josh Wirtanen    I’ve been obsessed with Flashback: The Quest for Identity for decades. The game released in for Amiga, despite the fact that it was initially intended to be a Sega Mega Drive Genesis release. It did end up on Genesis the following year, and that’s where I first discovered it, though it’s hard...

Josh Wirtanen    I had a Sega Genesis growing up rather than a Super NES. While that means I initially missed out on game changers like Chrono Trigger, Super Mario World, EarthBound, and Final Fantasy VI, it does mean I got to enjoy Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster’s Hidden Treasure. If you think I’m making a joke here...

Mandi Odoerfer    I love Pokémon. I also love cheap, terrible bootleg games. What happens when you combine the two Something magical. Legit Pokémon games may be thin on story, but they’re charming and infinitely quotable. Pocket Monster Carbuncle for Game Boy Color , on the other hand, was translated with...

Josh Wirtanen    The concept behind Primal Rage which came to arcades in was to make a brutal fighting game very much like Mortal Kombat, only with dinosaurs. Some might call that premise ridiculous, while others will argue that it’s actually ridiculously awesome. Personally, I think it’s a bit of both, and...

Julian Watkins    I have played some version of every Far Cry game to date. It’s one of those series where each entry is mostly the same in its DNA and execution, just slightly re branded with differing locals and despots. Of course, entries have built upon those that came before them, like Far Cry adding RPG...

Josh Wirtanen    The Prince of Persia series has legions of hardcore fans, and our own Hassan Ali is among them. At the E gaming expo in , Ubisoft delighted Prince of Persia fans with a trailer for Prince of Persia. This wasn’t the original Prince of Persia game which came out in , but another game...

Hasan Ali    Bloop sound GameCube. The Cradle of the Progenitor Virus. Leon S. Kennedy Invading Contamination... Possessed The camera zooms out, and the game title appears: BIOHAZARD . This vague assortment of words and the equally bewildering imagery that accompanies it makes up the first ever teaser...

Josh Wirtanen    Licensed games don’t have to be awful. In fact, in the mid s, there were plenty of great ones. From the up advertainment game Cool Spot to Disney’s legendary Aladdin, the bit era actually had some true masterpieces in the licensed game category. Batman Forever for Sega Genesis, Game Gear,...

Josh Wirtanen    Super Mario came out in to revolutionize the way the world thought about video games. It wasn’t the first D platformer just off the top of my head, Jumping Flash and a French game called Alpha Waves both predate it , but it was the one that created the blueprint for such games going...

Josh Wirtanen    I first played Sonic the Hedgehog when it was fairly new probably or . I tend to revisit it occasionally, maybe once every five years or so, to see if it still holds up after all these years. And yes, it does. Sonic is absolutely great. I love how the game starts you off immediately...

Julian Watkins    I recently compiled a list of every Spider Man game ever released, followed by a list of every X Men game which includes some titles that were never actually released . With Tony Hawk frenzy hitting fever pitch, it seems like a good time as any to grab a skateboard and roll down memory lane,...

Julian Watkins    The origins of video games have been explored in documentary form more times than one can count. Those classic stories, rooted both in reality and rumor, have been recounted in various interviews and behind the scenes footage over the years, so this is a well that will probably never run dry....

Retrovolve Staff    When LucasArts got the Star Wars video game license back from Broderbund Software in , they leaned into their dogfighting experience and created the Star Wars: X Wing series. See, Lawrence Holland had worked on a few World War II dogfighting games for LucasArts already including Battlehawks...

Josh Wirtanen    Think the Game Boy is dead Think again. The little gray box of bit glory is still alive and well but what else would you expect from a gaming console that’s been to space and back Not only is there a chiptune scene, where folks make music on Game Boys, but Greenboy Games is still releasing...

Hasan Ali    Every two months or so, I used to send an email to Codemasters, publisher of the classic Brian Lara Cricket video game series, to tell them how much I wanted a new cricket game from them. I got almost the same response every time, something along the lines of: Thank you for your suggestions. We...

Retrovolve Staff    The Retro World Series Summer League Online continues This Saturday August , , they’ll be hosting online tournaments for Crash Team Racing and Pokémon Stadium . Crash Team Racing was a classic kart racer for the Sony PlayStation, which recently got a jam packed remake. It is the original...

Retrovolve Staff    You know the number one thing people associate baseball with asked someone in the marketing department for Virtual League Baseball. Chili dog farts. At least, that’s the impression you might get from this ad. We’ve covered some weird ads before at Retrovolve, from Crash Bandicoot’s trip to...

Mandi Odoerfer    Is there anything you feel uneasy about begins GARAGE: Bad Dream Adventure. It will be alright. Please trust Garage. You are certain to find whatever it is you desire. And with those strange words of reassurance, you’re briefly plunged into darkness. As its title might imply, GARAGE: Bad Dream...

Julian Watkins    Recently, I plummeted down the rabbit hole of chronicling every Spider Man video game that ever existed. Compiling that list satisfied my curiosity for a little while, but curiosity is a persistent little rascal. And wouldn’t you know it, I’m back at it. This time, I’m looking at the history of The...

Josh Wirtanen    If you’re at all familiar with the evolution of Mario, you might have spent decades believing that Mario’s wall jump ability was introduced in Super Mario N . And you’d be partially right. But while the wall hopping maneuver was officially added to Mario’s arsenal with the groundbreaking Nintendo...

Josh Wirtanen    Hal Hawkins wanted to buy a boat. He loves fishing, and he had some free time, so it seemed like it was probably a good time to enter the world of boat ownership. However, he ended up doing something completely different, something that, if you ask me, is much cooler than buying a boat. He ended up...

Josh Wirtanen    There is very little that is normal about Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow. The music is bizarre, the instruction manual is deliciously hardboiled, and Donald Duck’s name has been completely removed from the game. Yes, Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow is a game that stars Donald Duck as the playable...

Retrovolve Staff    If your one complaint about SNK’s Neo Geo X was that it doesn’t quite replicate the arcade experience, then boy howdy, do we have some news for you. SNK has teamed up with Gstone Group to create the SNK Neo Geo MVSK Home Arcade. This two player arcade cabinet comes packed with classic SNK games,...