There is a particular electronic chime, beep-beep-BEEP, LOCK, hat still ricochets around the ossified folds of my gamer brain. If you ever wrestled a Super Scope onto your shoulder in 1992, you know the sound: the moment X-Zone’s crosshair snaps crimson, grants missile authorization, and dares you to turn another on-screen war machine into confetti. […]

Picture Mario in a sanitary hairnet, Yoshi gulping pastries like a green Kirby at a bake-off, and an assembly line of checkerboards, donuts, and heart-shaped biscuits sliding toward oblivion while Sousa-inspired snares rattle your speakers. Sound like a hallucination brought on by too many midnight Chips Ahoy? Welcome to Yoshi’s Cookie, the Super Nintendo puzzler

How many RPGs open by asking you to burn down a helpless village, only to hand you the keys to a flying whale and hurl you at the literal surface of the Moon before the sixty-minute mark? Not many, and that is why Final Fantasy IV, never mind the confusing “II” on my childhood cartridge,

Picture your first glimpse of Mario in 1993: not side-scrolling, not kart-racing, not even teaching typing, but perched on Yoshi’s saddle brandishing a two-foot plastic cannon that ate six AA batteries before lunch. Absurd? Totally. Underrated? Absolutely. Fundamental? More than you think. Yoshi’s Safari is the SNES rail shooter everybody forgot to invite to the

Picture it: the very first thing your heroic White Bomber does is get snatched, vacuum-tube style, into a fluted beaker that looks ordered from Villainous Laboratories Quarterly. Scientific accuracy? Zero. Dramatic effect? One hundred. Logical sense? Do we even want that in a Bomberman? (Exactly.) Super Bomberman 2 is a cartridge that begins by imprisoning its protagonist