Happy Fourth of July, America. Time to spend the day playing Sid Meier’s Colonization, the quintessential game about American independence, over and over until you pass out.

I play Gran Turismo games because they’re like an interactive version of a glossy car brochure. Others, like Dirt, I play for the sensation of barely keeping in control of a car that looks a lot like the one actually parked in my garage. But then there’s F-Zero GX.

Here’s something I’d never noticed before: two of the most memorable stages from Street Fighter II are likely a tribute to Hard Times, a 1975 Charles Bronson movie about...street fighting.

Today, the term “gaming chairs” is synonymous with those gaudy padded monstrosities you see in the background of a Twitch video. But in the late 80s/early 90s, a Japanese company had a much simpler idea.

We tend to associate video game intros with lavish, pre-rendered cinematic sequences. Something to help kickstart the story, set the tone. Which is fine, but there’s been a video game intro stuck in my head for over seven years now, and it wasn’t trying to tell me a story. It was trying to teach me something.

For his work on novels like War of the Worlds and The Island of Doctor Moreau, British author HG Wells is rightly lauded as a visionary. What often gets lost amongst the applause for his ideas on science fiction, though, is another area he was a pioneer: the field of tabletop wargaming.

Even if someone’s uncle really did work at Nintendo, guess what: he probably didn’t get that kid down the street a copy of Mario for free.

Far off in the distance, beyond the murky arctic waters, the vague silhouette of a tower can be seen through the mist. You raise your sniper rifle for a closer look. A solitary island is nestled away from all the chaos. What secrets does it hold?

Once a means of passing the time while sailors engaged in back-breaking labour on a ship, 2013 saw sea shanties take centre stage in Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed IV, where they promptly stole the show.

We all know Nintendo is a company with a long history. In over 100 years they’ve made everything from playing cards to LEGO sets to video games. But as important as some of those products were (or still are!), few are as important as the Nintendo Companion.

In 1994, Jean-Jacques Beineix made a documentary called Otaku. It features a nine-minute tour of Nintendo’s offices, and it is wonderful to watch.

Being Australian, I don’t have much time for baseball. That doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy baseball video games, though. Especially when they’re from the future.

The original Castlevania released 31 years ago on the Famicom in Japan. It launched a franchise that dominated games for decades. But there’s one game in the series that’s woefully underappreciated, the Game Boy Advance’s Circle of the Moon.

Super Metroid has one of the most famous themes in video games. If you’ve ever wondered where it came from, you’ve got the nightmarish working conditions of 1990s video game development (and some impromptu one-man karaoke) to thank for it.

Before the emergence of online stores, if you wanted to play old video games and they weren’t available locally, there was simply no way to buy them. But you could download them, and one of the biggest and most important sites around was Home of the Underdogs.

One of Nintendo’s most important innovations in video games has been the invention of the d-pad, which is still used prominently on controllers today. To get there, though, they had to go through some less successful prototypes. Some with stupid names.

Earthworm Jim first released on the Sega Genesis today in 1994. The strange side scroller married offbeat humor and experimental level design. The result was a hodgepodge of a game that was frustrating but engaging.

Say the words “Jet Set Radio” to a fan and, once they stop smiling, they’ll tell you all about the game’s “vibe”, its music, its eccentric cast, the way it let them dabble in a little virtual tourism of the Japanese capital. On acid. Which is funny, because the game isn’t actually about any of those things. It’s about…

Hideo Kojima is famous for being the driving force behind stuff like Metal Gear and Snatcher. But today, we’re going to talk about another of his games: Boktai, a quirky little Game Boy Advance title that asked the player to go outside and get some sun.

Years before Sega did what Nintendon’t the two gaming giants briefly went head to head in the newly discovered market of 3D gaming. It didn’t go very well for either of them.