You know that moment when you realize you've been doing something wrong your entire life? Like when you discover you've been tying your shoelaces the hard way, or that there's actually a proper way to peel a banana. That's exactly what happened to me the first time I…

Cleaning out the spare room last weekend—you know, that archaeological dig every gamer eventually faces—I found myself holding two controllers that basically tell the entire story of how we learned to play games with our thumbs. The Nintendo 64's three-pronged beast and the Switch Pro Controller, separated by…

The smell of a freshly opened game box—you know the one I'm talking about. That slightly plasticky, new electronics scent mixed with the crisp pages of an instruction manual. I was hunched over our coffee table last weekend, carefully lifting the cardboard flaps on a mint-condition Saturn game…

The other day my eight-year-old asked me why Sonic looks "weird" on our modern TV, and I realized we'd been playing the Blue Blur through some dodgy composite cables that made him look like he'd been dipped in vaseline. That got me digging through my emulation setup again,…