Guides, history and buying advice for people who actually play games
Video Game Sources Editorial Team 
Taking care of old game cartridges and discs mostly comes down to three things: keep them clean and dry, store them upright away from heat and sunlight, and handle the contacts or reading surface as little as possible. None of this requires special products — the biggest enemy is neglect, not age itself. Cartridges and … Read more
A CRT filter is a visual effect, usually applied in an emulator or on modern hardware, that makes a digital image look like it’s being displayed on an old cathode ray tube television. It adds things like scanlines, a soft glow around bright pixels, and slight color bleeding. People want one because many retro games … Read more
Old games look wrong on a modern television because they were designed for a completely different kind of screen. CRT televisions blended pixels together, added a soft glow, and used a shape and refresh style that modern flat panels don’t replicate. The result on a modern TV is harsh, blocky, or oddly proportioned images the … Read more
Emulation is software that makes one device pretend to be another. An emulator reads the original game code meant for old hardware — a console’s processor, memory and graphics chip — and translates it in real time so the game runs correctly on completely different hardware, like a modern PC or phone. What exactly does … Read more
Preserving old video games is difficult because they are not one artifact but several fragile, interlocking ones: physical media that decays, hardware that fails, software licenses that expire, and online components that vanish the moment a publisher turns off a server. Unlike a film reel or a vinyl record, a game often cannot be separated … Read more
Some strategy games take hundreds of hours to learn because they aren’t really one game with one set of rules — they’re several interlocking systems (economy, diplomacy, combat, logistics) that all affect each other, plus interfaces built for information density rather than ease of entry. Mastery means understanding the whole web, not just one part … Read more
A good two-player co-op game gives both people something meaningful to do at every moment, not just a spectator role for whoever isn’t “driving.” It balances shared goals with individual agency, scales its challenge fairly, and makes communication easy without forcing players to narrate every action out loud. What’s the single most important ingredient in … Read more
Battle royale games took over by combining a format that was cheap to understand — drop in, loot, survive a shrinking map — with free-to-play pricing, streaming-friendly chaos, and a couple of games that arrived at exactly the right moment on exactly the right platforms. Once that combination clicked, nearly every publisher tried to copy … Read more
An immersive sim is a genre of game built around giving players many different tools to solve a problem and letting the world react consistently to whichever one they pick, rather than funneling them toward one scripted solution. It blends first-person action, light role-playing systems, and physics-driven environments into something closer to a simulated space … Read more
Rhythm games feel good because they turn a piece of music into a physical task with instant, honest feedback — press right and you feel it immediately, press wrong and you know at once. That tight loop between sound, action, and result taps into the same reward systems as playing a real instrument, but with … Read more
About what you read here. Everything on Video Game Sources is general information and our own editorial opinion. We research carefully and we say when the evidence is unclear, but we can be wrong, things change, and no article can know your particular situation. Please do your own research and make your own judgement rather than treating anything here as the final word. Prices, products and specifications around games and gaming hardware change constantly, and what suits one person will not suit another. Check current details yourself, and where a decision involves real money, safety or something you cannot undo, it is worth confirming with the manufacturer or retailer before you act.