Evercade maker Blaze has expanded its cartridge-based ecosystem in some interesting ways over the past few years, but the one that has hooked me the most personally is the 'Alpha' line of bartop arcades.

We've already had Mega Man and Street Fighter-themed units, and now it's the turn of Taito to get its very own Alpha offering.

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Leicester might be globally famous for being the burial place of the last English king to die in battle – and, to a lesser extent, the scene of football's most unlikely underdog story – but the city has also become something of a hotbed of cool indie stores of late.

We've already reported on Super Game Shack and Leicester Vintage & Old Toy Shop as part of our Retail Therapy series, and now we've got another Leicester-based retailer to add to the ranks – and it's one with a strong Japanese flavour.

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Hey, stranger. Pssst. Over here, I want to tell you a secret. You've seen the film Bloodsport, right? Where a group of international warriors battle it out in a secret underground kumite tournament to discover the best? Well, did you know the Vectrex community has its own secret underground annual kumite? Apart from just about everything, it's literally exactly like Bloodsport. Honest!

Between 1st and 8th November, the Vector War XV took place, with this past Sunday the final scores and rankings being collated.

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In 1982, Jerry Momoda was playing Donkey Kong at The Spot Tavern in Renton, Washington, following his girlfriend's softball game, when he noticed something unusual.

To the side of him, out of the corner of his eye, watching him closely, was a man in a crisp white dress shirt and tie, who was taking a particular interest in his playing.

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Tim Girvin isn't a name that we're betting most Nintendo fans will be aware of, but we're almost 100% sure that you would have encountered his work in the past if you happen to have a passing interest in retro gaming.

A "strategic branding expert" and designer by trade, Girvin played a large and incredibly important role in establishing the visual identity of Nintendo of America's games and consoles in the '80s and '90s, becoming the company's secret weapon in making sure its products stood out in crowded malls and store windows across the US and North America.

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Years ago, after knowing each other for over 20 years, Tomonobu Itagaki —of his own accord— updated his Facebook profile and adjusted his relationship to me to be an “older brother.” He meant it in that Vin “I don’t have friends, I have family” Diesel way, minus the ham-fisted corniness. But it meant something. Itagaki-san was my family.

It’s still a bit raw for me to write this, and as a result, this whole long word dump is going to be an inelegant mess, but I think it’s better to get this on "paper" while the wounds are still fresh, so I don’t lose sight of recent events as the numbness scabs over my memories. If my name is at all familiar to you because of anything I’ve done in the past 27 years in gaming, just know that I have lost someone closer to me than your average ‘best friend’. I lost someone who was like a brother. And having grown up without any siblings, to call someone my brother is my highest expression of affection possible.

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It's the year 2025, and we have not one, but two new Barcode Battler decks. What a time to be alive!

Created by industry veteran Keith Webb of Tanukii Studios, who Nintendo Life interviewed about his DSi title Go! Go! Kokopolo, this new deck is a serious attempt to create a fun and engaging game which leverages the unique aspects of the hardware.

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The launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America is one of gaming's greatest success stories.

At the time of its original test market release in October 1985, the market for video game consoles in North America was considered to be dead, with memories still strong among retailers of the video game crash that had occurred just two years prior.

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A few years back, I took a look at Rey Esteban's excellent NES Endings Compendium Vol. 1, a book which – just as it says on the cover – takes a look at the final moments of a bunch of classic 8-bit Nintendo games.

Esteban (owner of the excellent vgmuseum.com) is back with a second volume, which covers games released during 1990.

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What was the first video game you ever played? This might be an easier question for some of you to answer than others, especially if you're under the age of 30; chances are, there was a console of some description in your house during your formative years, owned by an older sibling or even a parent.

While video games are now one of the most established (and profitable) forms of entertainment on the planet in 2025, when I was growing up in a small English town, they were somewhat harder to come by.

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It's fair to say that Nintendo surprised everyone when it recently announced it was bringing Virtual Boy games to Nintendo Switch Online alongside a replica accessory of the ill-fated tabletop console in February of next year.

Notable for being one of the company's rare missteps in the realm of home hardware, the Virtual Boy sold around 770,000 units according to contemporary reports, and recieved only a handful of games before the plug was pulled after less than a year on the market.

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It's hard to imagine now, given the incredible popularity of the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney games in the West, but it wasn't always a given that Capcom was going to release the series outside of Japan.

Back when Capcom launched the very first version of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance in 2001, in fact, the developer/publisher notably skipped out on launching the game outside of the country. Then, later on, during the development of its 2005 Nintendo DS remake, it almost reached the exact same decision again, believing that an adventure game about an Japanese defence attorney wouldn't sell well enough outside of Japan to turn a profit, especially with the money it would take to translate its lengthy script into English, and the cost of marketing and manufacturing.

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Nintendo has not been accustomed to failure over the past few decades, so it was a surprise to many to learn that the Kyoto-based giant is embracing one of its most costly failures: the Virtual Boy.

Reading the recent news story on the value of Athena's Virtual Bowling, in relation to Nintendo's surprising Virtual Boy announcement, I messaged Time Extension editor Damien McFerran about the fact that Volume 3 of The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers had an interview with Aziz Hinoshita.

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Tekken Advance is the one of the stranger entries in Namco's long-running fighting game series. Released for the Game Boy Advance in 2001, it is commonly mistaken for a straightforward port of Tekken 3, but is instead a non-canonical entry in the series that arguably shares a lot more in common with the PlayStation 2 title Tekken Tag Tournament, which was released one year prior.

The first ever Tekken to be launched for a handheld platform, it arrived at a time when Tekken was primarily associated with sophisticated arcade hardware and cutting edge Sony consoles, and, as a result, generated a lot of curiosity and attention from fans and gaming outlets, with many wondering how Namco and the game's developer Eighting were going to be able to squeeze the visually impressive 3D fighter onto a console primarily known for its sprite-based 2D games.

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As much as I love modern-day gaming hardware, it's all a little too safe for my liking.

Platform holders like Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft have a stranglehold on the industry now, and, outside of the likes of Valve, AYANEO and ROG – all of whom are producing the same basic product in the form of handheld PCs – there's little in the way of leftfield experimentation taking place.

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If you walk down the aisles of most toy stores today, you'll likely find no shortage of action figures based on video games: from toys modelled after characters from Fortnite, Minecraft, and Five Nights at Freddy's to other perennial favourites like Mario & Sonic. But this wasn't always the case.

Throughout the early '90s, most toy manufacturers had yet to capitalize on the explosive popularity of video games, believing the market for video game toys to be a niche that wasn't worth investing in. As a result, finding toys based on your favourite gaming characters could often be an impossible task, with the only exceptions being figures based on games that had already made the jump to another medium like film or TV, like Hasbro's GI-Joe-esque Street Fighter II figures and Playmate's Earthworm Jim series.

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By her own admission, Leslie Swan isn't a very good self-promoter, but she needn't worry as her credits do a great job of getting across her credentials for her.

Over her 28 years at Nintendo, she has been credited on dozens of games as a localization manager, working on pretty much all the mainline Zelda titles from Majora's Mask to Majora's Mask 3D, in addition to games like Animal Crossing, and WarioWare.

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In the games industry, there are names which have been around for so long they feel like part of the furniture: Shigeru Miyamoto, Peter Molyneux, Sid Meier, Warren Spector – these are individuals who have remained part of the gaming conversation for decades and continue to make notable contributions to the industry even today.

However, there are some legendary names which, despite achieving an astonishing degree of fame and success during their careers, have faded into the background.

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It's that time of year again folks. We would love to ask you some questions and would greatly appreciate it if you could take the time to respond to our anonymous survey.

Why is this important to us? Our websites survive mainly due to those who choose to advertise their games on our websites. Advertisers typically (and understandably) want to know who they are advertising to, therefore, our survey gives us a snapshot view of our audience in 2025.

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The entire Ridge Racer series is special, but there are certain entries in Bandai Namco's legendary franchise that attract more affection than others.

Towards the top of that list, you'll find Ridge Racer Type 4, a 1998 PS1 exclusive that, for many people, is the shining apex of a series that sadly seems to have faded from relevance in its owner's eyes.

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