It’s been two months since the PS Vita’s American release–where are we exactly? I love my PS Vita, but it’s been collecting dust. Why is that? Why am I not using my PS Vita as much as I did a few weeks ago? Is something wrong with it, or is something wrong with me? The Vita is suffering from what I now dub this as, “why the hell did I even buy this thing in the first place?” syndrome.

I was tuned into NYC’s Hot 97 the night that Funkmaster Flex unveiled “Glaciers of Ice” over the radio airwaves. The collective hip hop populace lost it. Not only was the track absolute fire, but we were throughly convinced that RZA sampled Castlevania to create what sounded like an organ from hell. RZA is known for digging through the crates, grabbing obscure samples, chopping them up, and sometimes distorting them. This is crew that referenced anime and martial arts flicks, so this had to be a Castlevania sample, right?

Here’s a dirty little secret that I’ll share with those who have dreams of running their own video game sites: The higher up that you are on the editorial ladder, the less you game. When jugglig deadlines, dealing with PR, writing copy, editing copy, analyzing page views, and pondering monetization, it can quite difficult to pull yourself away to re-lose yourself in the hobby that you so love. Sadly, that was my state of being until I purchased a PS Vita and downloaded Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles from PSN.

I recently detailed my PS Vita post-launch emptiness and how I sought to fill that void by downloading Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles, a 4-year old downloadable PSP game that contains the exquisite Rondo of Blood (both the original and the polygonal remake), and the magnificent Symphony of the Night. It is easily the best “Vita” game that I own. Here’s why.

My PS Vita, as I type this article, is on a nightstand downloading Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles. And that’s a problem.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the game. In fact, I’ve gushed over Rondo of Blood in the past, and will probably do so again. But I’m suffering the post-launch system blues, man, and there isn’t much on the horizon that’s acting as a ray of light. I’m playing my PS Vita at a relentless pace– Mutant Blobs Attack, Shocktroopers 2, and Street Fighter Alpha 3 are seeing the brunt of my entertainment-seeking assault– but I fear that’s going to slow down dramatically as their freshness wanes.

When I was just a lad of 15 years, I had to make a major choice in the fall of 1989: would I beg my mother for a SEGA Genesis or a Turbo Grafx-16 to satiate my gaming lusts that holiday season? I plundered the pages of Electronic Gaming Monthly and Video Games & Computer Entertainment for months on end in order to get the nitty-gritty on the two systems. The result? I decided to go TG-16.

It smells of beer and cigarettes at the door, like any other bar. But this bar is special. Sure, the establishment has a wide variety of beers (many from local breweries) and indie rock pumping through its sound system, but this bar stands out from the rest of NYC’s watering holes because aligning its walls is an ode to the golden age of gaming: the arcades.

It’s vey rare that one gets the chance to meet one of the most honored, respected, and beloved game designers of all time, but that’s just what happened in Alexandria, Virgiinia on March 16th. A select number of video game journalists–less than a dozen, actually–were invited to participate in a two hour roundtable question and answer sessionswith Hideo Kojima, the mastermind behind Boktai, Zone of Enders, Snatcher, and his penultimate work, the Metal Gear Solid series.

Capcom and SNK have churned out stellar fighting games since the halcyon arcade days, with each company pushing the other in a competitive war for quarters. Between the pair, they’ve produced gems such as Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting, King of Fighters ’98: Ultimate Match, Street Fighter III: Third Strike, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, Capcom vs. SNK 2, SNK vs Capcom: The Match of the Millenium, and dozens others.

Flash forward to 2011. Both 2D fighting game giants have released iOS fighters: King of Fighters-i and Street Fighter IV: Volt. Both are incredibly fun and surprisingly deep iPhone games, but only one can take the crown as the Apple fighting game champ. So we’re forcing them into battle with a head-to-head comparison.

It’s no secret that the Atari Jaguar was a terrible failure–one of gaming’s worst. The last dud in the sordid history of Atari’s Tramiel family ownership, the Jaguar followed the Lynx’s underrated hardware debut in the late 1980s with an early ’90s abomination of poorly designed hardware and software that barely competed against its 16-bit forebears, much less the higher-tech NeoGeo, 3DO, CD-I, 32-X, and Sega Saturn technologies against which the system was supposedly targeted.