Playing Out of Control

The Game Boy landed in America on July 31, 1989, and it was the first console that did not care where your television was. Backseat, pool bag, porch, tent. So the last list of the summer run has a different rule: these are the games that went WITH you. The cartridge that was actually in the bag when you left the house. Tetris is number one and it is not close, because the pack-in was the smartest...

The Nintendo 64 turned thirty this summer, and it came out of the box built for a room full of people: four controller ports, standard, right on the front. This week’s feature ranks the ten N64 games that actually play like summer, two ways at once — the vibe of the season, and the four-player couch that WAS the season. Last week’s rule holds: a summer game plays like summer, the release calendar...

School’s out, the pool’s open, and I made a list: the ten Super Nintendo games that actually play like summer. One rule, and I am holding myself to it: the release calendar does not get a vote. A summer game FEELS like summer. The beach, the backyard, the road trip, nowhere to be. Donkey Kong Country leads, because Aquatic Ambience sounds like warm water and David Wise built it on hardware that ha...

Happy Fourth of July. For the holiday I ranked the most American video games ever made, and seven of the ten were made outside the USA. Bad Dudes, where you punch ninjas to rescue the President. The Oregon Trail, manifest destiny with a hunting minigame. Vice City, America as a fever dream, painted in Scotland. And Metal Wolf Chaos, the most American game ever made, considered too niche to sell to...

A special episode, an emergency one, because something is happening in gaming right now that I could not sit on until the schedule said it was time. Game preservation is losing, and I want to talk about why, what we actually lose, and what, if anything, we can do about it. The short version: follow the money. The box was always cheap, the games were always the business, and going all digital lets...

June 23rd gave us both Sonic the Hedgehog and the Nintendo 64, five years apart to the day. In episode two we celebrate Sonic at 35, the N64 at 30, and Quake at 30, then dig into a week where physical media took a beating and quietly came back. GTA VI is shipping with no disc. Xbox pushed the Series X to 750 dollars. One Sega veteran wants to make all 4,500 Sega games playable before he retires. A...

Episode one. We’re back. After years away, Playing Out of Control is on again. This week was a big one. In the news: Microsoft, the Xbox studio closures, and what the word “subsidy” really means for your library and for backward compatibility. The full editorial, The Subsidy, is up on the site. Then the lighter wins, because there were a lot of them. GoldenEye’s cancelled Xbox 360 remaster recompi...