As I mentioned in my last post before settling back into hiatus, one of my joys of the pandemic era experience was discovering the Model 2 emulator, coded to run games made for Sega’s (surprise, surprise) Model 2 hardware. While I game had originally wanted to play — Virtual On — was tangled up in […]

I just wanted to play Virtual On. That’s all. The mecha-based arena fighter was one of the first games I picked up for my Sega Saturn in the day, and it been decades since I’d last booted it up. The wrinkle was that I didn’t want to play the Saturn version. Don’t get me wrong: […]

Plans fall apart, interests change over time, but an annual playthrough of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has been a fixture of my October festivities since 1997. The Japanese version of the game — along with Bushido Blade — was the reason I sprung for a region-free modded Playstation back in the day. The tantalizing […]

Recommended listening:

I was hoping to get a bit more substantive during this countdown but, as they say, the devil is in the details. Recommended listening:

1983 was the year of the Great Videogame Crash, when the flood of overproduced and undercooked product forced a severe market correction that effectively killed the home console market until the NES started gaining traction a couple of years later. The savvier developers shifted their focus to home computers, which offered more functionality and perceived […]

One of the more baffling aspects of fan behavior is the tendency to suspend qualitative judgement when it comes to fan’s objects of affection. Past experience, empirical evidence, and ominous portents get shoved to the margins when certain Pavlovian buttons are pushed. There will be plenty of post-situ moaning and whining about getting burned, but there […]