Reviews

Picture Tetris raiding a public library after hours, stuffing its pockets with vowels, and sprinting toward the nearest Super Nintendo. That, in a nutshell, is Wordtris: falling-block fundamentals fused to a spelling bee that never remembered to take its Ritalin. Bizarre or classic? Both, classic in its well-shaped DNA, bizarre in the way it forces you to pray for

Is a soccer cart that lets you bicycle-kick from midfield, edit a 3-5-2 diamond on battery back-up, and cram four sweaty friends onto one floral couch a bizarre relic or an unsung classic? (Spoiler: it’s both, so don’t play coy.) World Cup Striker, pal-region face of Rage Software’s Striker engine, rechristened Elite Soccer in the USA, landed in late 1993, months before

If you were a North American kid in 1994, the kind who called the sport “soccer” while clutching a Game Boy, World Cup USA ’94 on Super Nintendo felt like a cultural ambush. Was it bizarre or classic? Both: a FIFA-sanctioned simulation grafted onto a 16-bit cart that curls shots like a boomerang and pipes one PCM crowd

Is World Heroes for the Super Nintendo the guilty-pleasure energy drink of 2-D fighters—cheap cane sugar, questionable aftertaste—yet somehow the thing you reach for when Street Fighter II feels too polished? (Rhetorical, obviously; we both know you’ve tasted worse.) Dropped onto Neo Geo boards in summer 1992 and squeezed onto an SNES cart a year later, ADK’s time-hopping