Reviews

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,

We already know the SNES vault teems with genre classics, Super Metroid’s atmospheric isolation, Chrono Trigger’s time-bending epics, Street Fighter II’s button-mashing ballet, but every once in a while, a title sneaks in, flings open the Danger Room doors, and dares you to survive a pixel-perfect mutant meltdown. Enter X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse, Capcom’s 16-bit love