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Is EarthBound the lovingly warped sitcom of Japanese RPGs or the avant-garde late-night radio play that Nintendo somehow smuggled onto American shelves in the summer of ’95? (Do rhetorical questions answer themselves? Only if you hit “B” fast enough.) Reviews at launch called it childish, stinky (literally, more on the scratch-and-sniff fiasco in a minute),

Nintendo’s 16-bit catalog is stacked with heroic verbs, jump, blast, power-up, occasionally kart, but every so often a cartridge sneaks onto the shelf that replaces those verbs with a single, desperate imperative: run. Clock Tower (Super Famicom, September 14 1995) is that cartridge. It hands you a teenage orphan, a mansion dripping with gothic dread,

The early ’90s were a fever dream: pagers beeped like low-bit rattlesnakes, Jurassic Park made us whisper “clever girl,” and every playground echoed with off-key renditions of “A Whole New World.” Smack in that pop-culture casserole landed Capcom’s Aladdin for the Super Nintendo, a platformer where the most valuable item is a piece of fruit and the hero’s