Playing Out of Control

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...