Sonic the Hedgehog. Popping this cart into a Genesis feels like putting on your favorite pair of shoes or getting under your covers on a cold, December night. It’s just comfortable.

Unlike the games that follow it, the original Sonic the Hedgehog is fairly bare bones. There’s no multiplayer, and not even an options menu unless you enter a code on the title screen. There’s nothing to distract you from pressing start and embarking on Sonic’s first adventure around South Island.

That streamlined approach makes for an immediately…

It is hard not to compare Scarlet Nexus to other games. Developer Bandai Namco Studios and producer Kenta Iizuka want you to think it’s some wholly unique creation. In a prerelease interview, Iizuka said that despite some Nexus team members having experience working on fellow Bandai Namco series God Eater, and “I myself personally love the idea of a futuristic world under threat and dark heroes who control forbidden powers”, I think this is where the similarities end.

Similarities are nothing to be ashamed of. Nier: Automata plays similarly to its PlatinumGames soul sister Bayonetta, but that doesn’t stop Nier…

When I say Super Smash Bros. Melee, what’s the first thing to come to mind? Is it the host of new characters, like the newly playable Princess Peach or the Prince of Darkness Ganondorf? Maybe it’s the North American debut for Marth and Roy, formerly sequestered to the Japan-only Fire Emblem. Or, it could be the intense amounts of crunch that game director Masahiro Sakurai endured over a 13-month stretch to deliver a worthy sequel to his mash-up fighting game?

For me, it has to be the game’s debut.

Unveiled four months…

Plenty of story beats from Space Jam could rank as my second favorite scenes. For one, there’s the racially transcendent moment when Bill Murray professes, “Larry’s [Bird] not white. Larry’s clear.” This claim has since been corroborated as fact by numerous documentaries, interviews, and anecdotes, which generally amount to describing Bird as one bad mo-fo.

For two, there’s when Michael Jordan struts onto the Looney Tunes practice court in his dress shoes and completely tears the wood flooring from its base. I’d like to think that this scene alone is responsible for all of the “SNEAKERS ONLY” signs plastered…

Almost 46 years ago The Jacksons left Motown, the Black music powerhouse, to sign with Epic. The reason, as professed by Tito? “Motown sells a lot of singles. Epic sells a lot of albums.” He wasn’t wrong. On Motown, only one of the Jacksons’ 10 albums- 1972's Lookin’ Through the Window earned certification, taking silver on the UK charts.

By contrast, The Jacksons dropped six albums on Epic, beginning with the US gold certified The Jacksons. Three more hot sellers followed — 1978’s Destiny (platinum), 1980’s Triumph (platinum), and 1984’s Victory (double platinum). But perhaps the biggest change came in…

Mario Golf: Super Rush is exhilarating. Let me clarify that — Mario Golf: Super Rush’s intro movie is exhilarating. Over the span of a few minutes runtime, the game’s intro cutscene featured enough character development and cinematic action to have me excitedly anticipating supershotting my way to victory. Bowser, Wario, and Waluigi meeting their demise at the hands of King Bob-Omb? Sign me up. This is fantastic!

The gameplay that follows, however? Less so.

The developers at Camelot Software Planning did their best to translate that opening sequence into Super Rush’s gameplay. Mario and company can run to their golf…

When NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on Mars, I was half-hoping that somewhere in the photos I’d see the vague outline of an astronaut. For years Hollywood has doctored images of Martian landings, teasing the idea that life exists somewhere on that dusty, red-soiled planet.

I’m still waiting for the first human to land on Mars but in the meantime, Philadelphia soul and funk legend Dexter Wansel continues the time worn tradition of pondering what life might look like on the Red Planet on his latest album, The Story of the Flight Crew to Mars. …

I might have overpaid for Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade. Despite owning the 2020 version of the game and being eligible for the PS5 upgrade, I splurged for the physical copy. Next generation game prices are still something to get used to, but the allure of adding another PS5 game, and one of my favorite titles at that, to my collection was too much to bear.

Truthfully, Intergrade is a modest upgrade at best. FFVII Remake was already a visually stunning and tactilely enjoyable experience the first time around, so the updated version doesn’t need much more to carry the…