Your Move

My first console video game was Sonic the Hedgehog in 1992, and from the first moment I played, I was hooked.

For as long as I can remember, graphics in video games have astounded me, and have been a major driver in the industry. Particularly, I remember how everyone was amazed when machines like the Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation started making 3D games possible. When Final Fantasy VII came out on the original PlayStation in 1997, the graphics amazed me - huge enemies and vast landscapes. Looking back, though, the graphics have not aged well. Bright, textureless polygons with some really weird

One year ago this month, Pokemon Go was released worldwide for smartphones. Since then, the game has been downloaded more than 750 million times.

One of the least well-known games in the Final Fantasy series is Final Fantasy XII, released in 2006 on the PlayStation 2. It came out near the end of the PlayStation 2’s life, but is getting a new enhanced release on the PlayStation 4, which came out this week. The game was sort of an anomaly in the Final Fantasy series - most games are independent stories, but Final Fantasy XII is set in a world called Ivalice, which was established in earlier games Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy Tactics. The

Not often can you call Microsoft an underdog, but 15 years ago when the original Xbox was released, they had an upward battle to fight. The Xbox’s competitors were Sony’s PlayStation 2, which remains the best selling video game console ever, and Nintendo’s GameCube. The Xbox was an American console, inside and out. The processor in the machine was created by Intel, and it had an Intel graphics chip. The console itself was big and heavy, and the controller was huge - eclipsing the relatively tiny

Before the entire video game industry in the United States crashed in 1983, video game consoles were largely a United States product. Atari, Coleco, Magnavox, and Mattel were the big players - all US companies. However, with the industry’s crash, there was a vacuum.

Many factors caused the Video Game Crash starting in 1983, but one of the most significant was Atari’s overconfidence. Atari was the leader in home video game consoles throughout the early ‘80s, and took their nearly indomitable lead and squandered it with a string of disappointing games coupled with over-optimistic sales projections. Pac-Man, Namco’s 1980 arcade hit, was incredibly popular, and Atari acquired the license to make the game for their home console. Once they decided to make it,

Once upon a time, Atari was the name in video games. Sure, there was the Colecovision and Intellivision, but Atari was the dominant force in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. But that all came to an abrupt end in the mid ‘80s with a huge recession in the industry which is known as the Video Game Crash. In 1979, Activision became the first third-party video game publisher, publishing games to work on Atari’s consoles. This cut Atari out of the sales loop, and they sued Activision, but failed to get

With Mario Kart 8 Deluxe , for the Nintendo Switch, what’s old is new again.

Late last year, Nintendo released the NES Classic Edition, a $60 miniature game console with 30 classic Nintendo games on it. I never got one - in fact, I’ve never seen one.