Frogger 3D: He’s Back! 

The 90s reboot of Frogger kicks ass. I swear to god. This game is great. As great as Frogger can be, anyway. It’s like someone took the original and injected it with shark hormones and nitroglycerin.

Hyperbole aside, the Frogger remake (occasionally subtitled Frogger 3D or Frogger: He’s Back!) is easily the best in the series. It expands upon the original in clever, interesting ways without betraying its roots or stretching the formula to absurd lengths. Read more »

Happy 15th, PlayStation! 

Hard to believe that fifteen years ago today, the original PlayStation was released in America. The PlayStation was one of those great water cooler moments for gaming, with a ubiquitous format that everyone played, shared, and experienced together. Though much of the charm is purely childhood association and nostalgia, who can imagine their get-togethers and unfortunate slumber parties being the same without the communal spirit of that magical disc machine, without having to swap memory cards to get to the same part of Final Fantasy VII, only to discover that your friend embarrassingly named Cloud something like “BUTT”?

But more importantly, what would the face of gaming be like without the… mystery? Starting with the advent of online modes and an oversaturation of high-profile media blitzes, game consoles started to lose a bit of allure and mystique that came from popping a game in. But the PlayStation was special. Maybe it was that cacophony of synths and humming bells that chimed up every time it booted, or the simultaneously inviting-and-foreboding PlayStation logo that would drop off into nothingness before an opening cutscene cued.

Whatever the source of its magic, the PlayStation just carried this transcendent air, that the games were somehow operating on a level above you, that the system was this untouchable device that could make dreams unfold. No matter how small and restricted a game would be, the world around it felt like it might expand infinitely in every direction, and somehow, some secret always seemed just on the verge of materializing.

Maybe the Nintendo 64 turned on faster, with cleaner graphics and better games. The crazy thing is that 15 years on, for all the outdated tech and emulators, putting in a PlayStation game is still a little foreboding, mysterious, and exciting. In an era where games are exposed by betas and previews months in advance, that’s irreplaceable.