This week’s Nintendo Direct featured news that a lot of gamers had been waiting for: that the company was putting to use its vast library of handheld games by making them available for the Nintendo Switch Online library. As of the end of the presentation on Wednesday, you could hop onto [...]
Here’s a funny story about how video games can make for some very weird cross-cultural connections. Specifically, going deep on Final Fantasy VI taught me the word jihad back before many non-Muslims living in America would have a reason to learn it. But that doesn’t mean I encountered it in a [...]
"This is not an etymology blog. This is a video game history blog. However, in looking into the histories of things, we often end up examining the roots of the language we use to describe them. I think the intersection of the Final Fantasy versions of Bahamut, Behemoth, Leviathan and Kujata [...]
"This is the first installment of a series I’ve wanted to do for a while, whether as its own blog or as a podcast, but I’ve decided it’s going to live here. In my head, I was calling it Questing Beast, and it was going to focus on the histories [...]
To set the scene, I was a regular reader of video game magazines, so I was fairly well-versed in titles I hadn’t actually played yet. I tried to be cool and say that I knew that this new Mega Man adventure introduced a new character who was Mega Man’s brother, and [...]
This is not a Mario blog, even if this is the third Mario-related post in a row. There’s actually a much bigger one coming in the not-too-distant future, but I’m only offering up so much of this one franchise because I happen to know a lot about the Mario games — [...]
The prettiest pink princess in video games did not always look how she looks today, it turns out. She wasn’t even always pink. In doing research for the previous post on how the Goomba might have gotten its name from a language that’s not Italian, I found an early design for [...]
I’ve already written about the origin story of the Goomba, the lowliest enemy in the Super Mario games, and how and why there’s confusion about whether the Goomba is a mushroom or a chestnut. But this site exists to explore the origins of things and also to revisit the accepted stories [...]
When I started this project earlier this year, people saw what I was doing and responded with something along the lines of “Oh, it’s a blog.” And every time I heard that word, I could tell that it struck me wrong. Not that there’s anything wrong with blogs or blogging; after [...]
If we’re having a discussion about dogs in the Mario series, then I guess it should begin with Poochy, the noseless dog who debuted in Yoshi’s Island and has since become a recurring canine buddy. But if not Poochy, then the next candidate would probably be the Chain Chomp, the recurring [...]
