If you’re old enough to remember the NES launch in America, you’re likely old enough to remember residual hand wringing in Washington, D.C. about the so-called Cold War “missile gap.” In the 1950s and ’60s, that doctrine stated that the Soviet Union had a numeric...

Enix’s Dragon Quest is one of the most important Japanese RPGs, as it establishes many of the genre conventions that are used to this day. But it certainly wasn’t the first of its type, as Japanese gamers had been experimenting with their own ideas on computers....

Their frustrations are often built on the backs of nostalgia, an aching for a bygone era when they first saw Nidorino and Gengar do battle on their Game Boy. That yearning for a youth long gone is what inspired Satoshi Tajiri, Pokémon’s originator, to come up with the...

As one-half of the aforementioned moniker, the Metroid and Castlevania franchises served as the bedrock upon which all other non-linear, multi-scrolling 2D platformer video games were built. When you play other Metroidvania titles like Guacamelee! (DrinkBox Studios,...

It was all about Time Crisis and The House of the Dead. Time Crisis hit me harder overall. This rail shooter takes you through different missions across the series. Each mission typically has three stages, and each stage has four areas you fight through. I have never...

Doom dominated unlike any other PC game before it. Developed by id Software, this seminal first-person shooter defined the genre from that point forward, and any competitors to come in the years after were simply labeled as “Doom clones”. A technical marvel and true...

Before John Carmack, Tom Hall, and John Romero unleashed the blistering corridors of Wolfenstein, they cut their teeth on smaller 3-D experiments: Hovertank 3-D for DOS and the Apple II’s Catacomb 3-D, the latter running on an embryonic version of the engine that...

Beat-em-ups, also known as belt scroll action games in Japan, were all the rage in the 1980s and 1990s in arcades. Players controlled beefy characters who pummeled their way through thugs of a dubious nature with their fists, or a special weapon if they were lucky,...