Richard DiCicco

I tense up whenever I take a corner in F-Zero, clenching my jaw as I whip around a hairpin turn, just barely missing the wall and glancing another pilot. My fingers claw the Super Nintendo pad’s buttons almost like I’m steering Captain Falcon’s machine for real, careening down the streets of Port Town at 400 km/h. The only thing on my mind is crossing that finish line before the computer can. It’s all I have room to think about.

Everywhere I travel, I look for a retro video game store. But when I moved to Charlottesville, I was shocked to find not a single one—especially because my hometown Richmond has several. Vinyl? Sure. Books? Tons. But vintage games were not available in C’ville.

If 2013 was the Year of Luigi, 2023 may as well have been the Year of Mario. Though only three new games in the Mario franchise were released in ‘23—with one being a remake—the mustachioed plumber himself was everywhere.

In addition to The Super Mario Bros. Movie and its requisite Hollywood marketing machine dominating the spring, speculation over his new voice actor fueled many a headline through the summer in the leadup to Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s October release.

When the final showing of King Hedley II wraps at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, the Charlottesville Players Guild will have strode through the entire 20th century on one stage. Dozens of actors will have stepped into the lives of characters generations apart, some even reprising their roles across multiple plays. And audiences will have been swept up in a rich world of Black history, music, folklore, and drama from the pen of legendary playwright August Wilson.

Today, Sega works with Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo rather than competing with them, but it was once a major player in the video game industry's "console wars." Surely, the Sega Saturn could have been a victory lap for the one company that could slug it out with Nintendo.

For 15 years, Metroid Dread was just a rumor. Now, it’s real, it’s been out for over a month, and it’s fantastic. Samus Aran’s latest adventure is packed with just about everything a Metroid fan could ask for, from wild boss fights to a massive labyrinthine map.

As the fifth and apparently final entry in the 2D 'arc' of the series, Dread is infatuated with the franchise’s history, taking plenty of inspiration from its narrative predecessor, 2002’s Metroid Fusion. But while playing Dread, we couldn’t help but spot flashes of a different Metroid game—the Wii’s eternally divisive Metroid: Other M.

Any longtime Nintendo fan knows that the company’s third-party publishing partners can be fair-weather friends. Plenty of the industry’s biggest franchises have been absent from Nintendo hardware for quite some time. In some cases, Nintendo’s own bold decisions over cartridges and standard definition gaming have cost them key entries in series that were once synonymous with their brand.