There’s an ancient and oft cited survey floating around the web that claims that Mario is more popular than Mickey Mouse. Sure, sounds believable. Even if the source of the poll has gone unaccredited since 1990. So, in order to present the following article in terms our audience can understand: Mickey is basically the Mario of everything else. ...

Licensed games come and go, so most of us don’t bat an eye when titles based on movies and TV shows fall into obscurity. Today, they’re ephemeral by nature, seemingly designed with an expiration date only as far off as the coinciding property’s DVD release date. ...

Long before we had stacks of plastic guitars and enough withered dance mats to blanket all of San Francisco’s homeless, Nintendo was dropping superfluous add-ons at an alarming rate. And each time they shoved a new one out there, we lapped it up like a delicious treat, fully expecting longtime support for this latest and surely greatest peripheral. ...

They (whoever “they” are) say you should never meet your heroes. The logic behind that tidy parcel of wisdom is that if you get too close you'll see how human and pathetically ordinary your heroes actually are. But things are quite different in Japan. Meet the oddest Japanese videogame heroes and you won't be underwhelmed or disappointed: instead, you'll be hypnotised by some podger's perpetual hip gyration dance and ripped to ...