Here’s something people forget about arcade-to-home conversions – they used to be terrible. You’d get watered-down versions with missing features, reduced enemy counts, simplified graphics. There was this assumption that home hardware couldn’t handle what arcades could do. Then Sega decided to prove everyone wrong by bringing Crazy Taxi to Dreamcast essentially perfectly. I spent enough time defending Sega’s arcade approach to understand something about their philosophy – the arcade cabinet wasn’t just a revenue…

I’ve been gaming since the early 1980s, which means I’ve watched enough ambitious projects fail to recognize when a developer is genuinely swinging for the fences. Shenmue is one of those swings. Yu Suzuki, one of gaming’s most visionary designers, got Sega to fund an open-world adventure game that by any rational business metric should never have existed. You’re investigating your father’s murder in a Japanese neighborhood. You talk to NPCs. You pick up clues.…

Look, we need to address something immediately – the Dreamcast failed. Commercially, spectacularly, catastrophically failed. Sega released a brilliant console with incredible games at exactly the wrong moment in history. The PlayStation was already entrenched. The PS2 was coming with DVD capability that the Dreamcast didn’t have. The industry had already decided Dreamcast wouldn’t survive, and they were right. By March 2001, Sega had stopped making consoles entirely. But here’s the thing that makes the…

I’ve been gaming since the early 1980s and I’ve watched the emulation landscape evolve from niche hobby to mainstream accessibility. The question “are emulators legal?” gets asked constantly and the answer is technically complex because the legality of emulation itself is different from the legality of what you run on emulators. Understanding the actual legal situation requires understanding what emulation is technically and what copyright law actually says. The short answer that gets people in…

I need to start by saying – that title has a typo. It says “RPM” instead of “RPG.” But honestly, it’s kind of perfect because Paper Mario plays like it’s constantly in motion, constantly doing something unexpected, constantly rewarding you for paying attention. The team reviewed this and liked it so much that nobody bothered fixing the typo, which is probably indicative of something about the whole experience. Coming from an IT management background, I…

I’ve been gaming long enough to recognize a pattern – games that are immediately beloved become sacred, and games that are quietly good get forgotten. Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards is the second type. It shipped late in the N64’s lifecycle. It came out in the shadow of Majora’s Mask and Paper Mario. Nobody was talking about it. So it just disappeared. Then I replayed it recently and realized something – this is a masterclass…

I’ve been analyzing game balance since the 16-bit era, and Mario Kart 64 sits in this weird position where casual players dismiss it as dated and technically competent players dismiss it for being less refined than later entries. Both groups miss something crucial – the item balance in Mario Kart 64 is genuinely inspired. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s perfect for what the game is trying to do. My background in accounting means…

Here’s a historical fact that people forget – on-rails shooters were basically dead by 1997. The arcade versions had been popular, sure, but home gaming had moved on to free-roaming games where you controlled every aspect of movement. The idea that you could release a game where your path is predetermined, where your only real agency is aiming and shooting, and that game would be brilliant – that goes against basically every design principle games…

I played Banjo-Kazooie in 2023, completely fresh, with no childhood attachment. I expected a charming relic of gaming’s past – the kind of game that’s “good for its time” but would feel dated compared to modern design. Instead, I found myself playing something that’s just plain good, full stop. And more importantly, I realized something about how the collectathon genre immediately got worse after this game established the template. Every collectathon since Banjo-Kazooie – and…

I’ve been gaming since 1982 when I opened an Atari 2600 on Christmas morning. I’ve watched the entire industry transition from arcade-focused to home-console dominated to whatever we call this modern era. That perspective teaches you something – sometimes the best thing isn’t the most popular thing. Sometimes it’s the thing that came out at exactly the wrong moment with the wrong timing and gets overshadowed by something that came before. Perfect Dark is that…