When imagining the environmental sounds George Gomez must be used to, it may explain why he doesn’t rest: the erratic flicking of a pinball table’s flippers, the raucous ricocheting of a metal ball desperately trying to escape its containment, and electronic...

When it comes to cheap yet worthwhile Atari 2600 games, the usual suspects like Asteroids, Missile Command, and Space Invaders tend to dominate the conversation. And for good reason: they’re iconic, easy to find, and still offer plenty of arcade fun. In fact, many of...

“I got a pocket full of quarters, and I’m headed to the arcade.” The song Pac-Man Fever embodied my childhood, but the times have changed. Physical arcades are becoming harder to find, and the ones that do exist face numerous challenges: The cost of electricity to...

When Jack Tramiel left Commodore in January 1984, he started a new company called Tramel Technology with several ex Commodore employees, and his three sons in top executive positions, with the goal of selling a new home computer. When Warner Communications announced...

The story of JRPG music begins in that same ironic place so many JRPG stories begin, with Final Fantasy for the NES in 1987. After initially being thrown into the game without much explanation, the four warriors of light are rewarded with a bridge to take them further...

Every now and then, a truly great game will emerge, revitalizing a beloved genre and reminding us why we fell in love with it in the first place. In 2025, that game was Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a turn-based RPG developed by Sandfall Interactive, which wears its...

JRPGs are a genre that didn’t always take off in popularity on the NES the way Japanese developers had hoped. Despite all this, several titles were still localized over the years, so let’s give a gander at a few of the most notable ones. For the purposes of this...

People who play Japanese role-playing games, such as myself, have become somewhat desensitized to the strangeness that these games can evoke. After all, there are very few genres where pre-teen kids are frequently flung into life-threatening circumstances, and all...

So you’re thinking about playing Chrono Trigger. Your friends and peers have already told you it’s the greatest JRPG ever made, but you were born too late to experience it in its heyday on Super Nintendo. It only gets worse if you decide you want to live that...

If you were yearning for a solid role-playing game in the late 80s and resided in North America and happened to own a Sega Master System console, you were certainly in the right place at the right time. As luck would have it, you were unknowingly on the cusp of being...