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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

Why does a future-noir brawler starring a sword named after a Camelot heirloom exist on the Super Nintendo? (Because the ’90s were legally obligated to ship at least one game per fiscal quarter containing the letters X and K side-by-side, obviously.) From its first splash screen X-Kaliber 2097 looks like someone stuffed Final Fight, a stack of Marvel comics,