Great games don't die, they just get remastered. On this week's episode of the Power Button podcast, Blake Grundman and I spend an hour discussing three games from yesterday that are back for more today. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening for the Nintendo Switch first appeared on the Game Boy in 1993 and consumes our first segment, then Blake takes us back into Destiny 2 to discuss elements of the original Destiny that have been upgraded for the sequel's latest DLC. Finally, I'm always eager to discuss 2009's Ghostbusters: The Video Game and the recently released Remastered edition is... Continue reading

Nintendo dropped forty minutes worth of Switch news and announcements in a recent Nintendo Direct so on this week's podcast we're discussing all of the most interesting material from that broadcast including Banjo-Kazooie launching in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Super NES games arriving on Nintendo Switch Online, Overwatch inbound for Switch, Doom 64 getting a second look after all these years, new teases for The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, and much more. Join us as we inspect and dissect the Direct. Download this week's episode directly from PTB, listen with the player below, find us on Stitcher, subscribe via... Continue reading

Today is the twentieth anniversary of Sega's release of its final console (not counting reissued mini hardware), the Dreamcast, in North America. It seems like everyone in the gaming community has a Dreamcast story to share today, and so do I. In fact, I have just one Dreamcast story. Only one. And this is it. 1999 was the year that I graduated high school and moved away to the big city to start college, so by September of that year I was on a trajectory that took me away from video games for a brief while. My main console was... Continue reading

Nintendo seems to have drained the well of worthwhile available Nintendo Entertainment System games to bring to its Nintendo Switch Online service judging by the past few months worth of lackluster releases, so now is a perfect for the company to switch gears and get to the truly good stuff: Super NES games. Debuting today as part of the paid service, twenty games are available for play including some all-time heavy hitters such as Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Mario Kart, and Star Fox along with some obscurities like Stunt Race FX... Continue reading

This week on the podcast we're celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive by recapping the evolution of the hardware, sharing our favorite Genesis memories, and looking ahead to the release of the Sega Genesis Mini. Join us for an hour of discussion. You'll have a blast (processing)! Download this week's episode directly from PTB, listen with the player below, find us on Stitcher, subscribe via iTunes and Google Play, toss this RSS feed into your podcast aggregation software of choice, and be sure to catch up on past episodes if you're joining us late. Remember... Continue reading

In the days before Steam and the Epic Game Store, PC gamers would encounter new games in the form of shareware passed around for free via BBSs or for a small fee at your local Wal-Mart or Best Buy. Gaming classics including Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Commander Keen, and Rise of the Triad all existed as games that offered the first episode for free and then, if you liked what you saw, you could send away for the remaining episodes of the game for a standard price. Gamers were even encouraged to trade these free introductory episodes with friends; as... Continue reading

Namco and its partners hit it big with Pac-Man in 1980, but how do you take a maze craze and go larger for a new wave of success after the original experience starts to feel stale? Hardcore Gaming 101 is chronicling all of Pac-Man's oddball sequels and spinoffs such as puzzler Pac-Attack and the educational Professor Pac-Man, but the game that you absolutely need to notice is 1994's Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures for the Super NES and Sega Genesis. Dumping all of the maze stuff and focusing more on Pac-Man and his family as characters, Pac-Man 2 requires players... Continue reading

Everyone wants to believe that a worn copy of Super Mario Bros. may be worth big money someday, but as Chris Kohler at Kotaku recently reported, there's actually some value in familiar games as collectors from other markets swoop into the video game world to pay thousands for games that most people would pass over as common. On this week's podcast, Blake Grundman and I discuss this new influx of interest in retro games and whether or not it's good for the gaming community at large. Then we see if either of us has any hidden gold in our collections... Continue reading

In celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of Nintendo's famous Game Boy, Blake Grundman and I spend this week's podcast discussing the iconic portable gaming system and remembering our favorite handheld memories. From our own Game Boy origin stories to classic games such as Super Mario Land, Tetris, and Wario Land to underwhelming licensed games including Ren & Stimpy: Space Cadet Adventures and Home Alone, we honor the big gray brick and recommend a few games you may have overlooked in the past three decades. Oh, and of course I'm going to tell you to play Bionic Commando. You had to... Continue reading

These days if you find a slot on a piece of Nintendo hardware it's likely that it's a place for a standardized piece of technology such as an SD card or a USB port, but the company used to have a knack for adding proprietary ports and slots to its consoles that were used for increasingly esoteric add-ons and upgrades. Check out this fun article from the Nintendo World Report archives chronicling the history of Nintendo's various expansion ports from Nintendo Entertainment System to Nintendo 64 to Nintendo GameCube and beyond. How many of these add-ons did you own? Hint:... Continue reading

We're back! We've been on a forced hiatus for a few months due to my sudden health issues and Blake Grundman's conflict with the Norwegian tax authorities, but now that everything is getting back to normal we are here to discuss recent gaming happenings including Nintendo's announcements about the Switch Lite and a better battery for the original Switch, time spent with Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, and Blake finally getting around to Marvel's Spider-Man. Join us for an hour of catching up. Download this week's episode directly from PTB, listen with the player below, find us on Stitcher, subscribe... Continue reading

Family Guy has skewered pop culture for two decades and I always laugh the most when the production team sets their sights on a classic video game. In Season 17's "Griffin Winter Games", Peter Griffin and his daughter Meg are captured while trespassing in North Korea and must stage a thrilling escape in the style of a nostalgic video game. Peter suggests they use Rare's famed GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64 as their inspiration, and what follows is a loving tribute to the console's most beloved shooters. From the ammo count in the lower left corner of the screen... Continue reading

Nintendo's ongoing flirtatious partnership with the mobile gaming space continues with the upcoming Mario Kart Tour for iOS and Android in which the console Mario Kart experience is reformulated for a streamlined experience with microtransactions. While the company's Super Mario Run released as a one-time purchase and failed to meet sales expectations, follow up titles based on Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem included microtransactional elements and have, so far, lit up sales charts, so I'm not surprised that Mario Kart Tour follows that mold. The game is in beta for Android starting today and while players are bound by a... Continue reading

Ghostbusters seems to be poised for another resurgence as a new film is in production, the 2009 video game is rumored for a current console generation re-release, and Dan Aykroyd has written a prequel script featuring the Ghostbusters characters in high school. Now comes word that the amusement park simulation title Planet Coaster is crossing the streams with the supernatural spectacular featuring Aykroyd reprising his role as Ray Stantz who will mentor players throughout the campaign and William Atherton returning as Environmental Protection Agency antagonist Dickless Walter Peck. New rides and other surprises await in this crossover add-on. Ghostbusters fans... Continue reading

I spent a lot of time and energy both writing about and playing Ghostbusters: The Video Game in 2009, so you know that my interest is piqued when I see that Taiwan's gaming rating agency (their version of the ESRB) has rated a Xbox One version of the game slated for release (one would hope a PlayStation 4 version is in the mix somewhere too). Considering that the original developer, Terminal Reality, is long gone and the original publisher, Atari, isn't exactly a gaming powerhouse anymore, the listing credits the port job to Mad Dog Games who in recent years... Continue reading

Since the dawn of time, humanity has had a single collective dream: to have a wall-mounted shelf that resembles a stage from Donkey Kong and to stock that shelf with little 8-bit stylized figurines of Nintendo characters. Now I have achieved this dream. Gaze upon the Donkey Kong shelf and the tableau it presents with Donkey Kong himself on the top level guarding both Princess Toadstool and a classic Donkey Kong arcade machine (it lights up and plays sound, too!). Mario and Luigi are on their way to save the day and maybe earn a free game, plus Toad and... Continue reading

Today it's common for video game developers to speak up about their work either in unofficial forums such as social media or in proper interviews in publications, but thirty years ago nobody in a position of journalism power cared much about what a developer had to say. We've gnawed modern games like Super Mario Odyssey to the bone, but so many older games never had a chance to shine in a development context. One of those large voids in gaming history is the original Castlevania trilogy for the Nintendo Entertainment System as Konami isn't exactly known for keeping up with... Continue reading

I know it's hard to believe now in an age where Street Fighter fans have been able to play as M. Bison and Balrog for decades, but there was once a time when the four Shadaloo bosses were restricted to CPU control only. They were fruits you must not taste in the original release of Street Fighter II: The World Warrior in the arcades and that limitation carried over to the Super NES home version. Still, that didn't stop eager players from being absolutely sure that there had to be some hidden code that would unlock Vega, Sagat, and the... Continue reading

It's been quite a week for video game news as it feels like everyone had something to announce. Sony teased us with the first peek at the concept for the PlayStation 5, Microsoft introduced a new Xbox One S variant that lacks a disc drive, Nintendo dropped version 3.0 of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate featuring Joker from Persona 5, and Capcom baffled everyone with their confusing arcade stick home console box. Join us for an hour as we discuss all of these stories and more. Download this week's episode directly from PTB, listen with the player below, find us on... Continue reading

Sony gave us all a peek behind the curtain this week in an article at Wired in which the company's lead PlayStation hardware architect, Mark Cerny, explained the direction that the upcoming PlayStation 5 is headed. There's a lot of technical talk in the article, but the bottom line is that Cerny is aiming big with talk of solid state drives, 8K graphics, ray tracing, backward compatibility with the PS4 and existing PSVR, and much more. Here's a piece: To demonstrate, Cerny fires up a PS4 Pro playing Spider-Man, a 2018 PS4 exclusive that he worked on alongside Insomniac Games.... Continue reading

With virtual reality making a resurgence in the past few years with companies like Sony, Oculus, and HTC leading the modern wave of headsets, it's only natural to take a look back to the 1990s when VR first tried to break out in a major way. While Nintendo's failed Virtual Boy wasn't exactly true VR, it did gain a reputation for being something unique, special, and painful on the eyes. In this vintage article from Benj Edwards we can explore the genesis of the hardware from a little company aiming to create private PC displays all the way to Nintendo's... Continue reading