How can someone look at all these different styles, let alone the ones that literally look like they’re drawn by a six-year-old, and think, “Yeah, that’s fine”?

It’s all bad

Here are the salient details, minus the fluff:

The haul had an estimated value of €47.5m, Mr Langella said, a figure which includes the value of the consoles and hundreds of licenses for the pirated programs.

They were “all from China” and were imported to be sold in specialised shops or online, Mr Langella said.

All the devices were fitted with non-certified batteries and electrical circuits and did not meet EU technical or safety standards. The seized games have been destroyed.

Nine Italian nationals have been arrested and charged with trading in counterfeited goods. If found guilty, they face up to eight years in prison.

No, it’s up to Capcom to produce a product that people want to buy. That’s how markets work.

It’s like the AI text adventures you see now

but actually good and written by a human with lots of warmth and humor, unlike the pale AI imitations

The same way you beat any game in the 1980s and early '90s: lots of pattern memorization based on trial and error. In the arcade, that means lots of quarters.

Once a game like Dragon’s Lair was memorized, you could play through the entire thing on only a couple quarters, to the astonishment of arcade bystanders.

Kids and teenagers had more time back then because smart phones and Instagram and YouTube didn’t exist. People underestimate what a huge time sink those can be.

No one had Internet access. You could play a game, play an instrument, read a book, go to the mall and the arcade and maybe catch a movie, go outside, or watch whatever happened to be on the 3-4 network TV channels (or possibly cable if your family had the money). And TV back then was mostly terrible.

So if you had $10 in your pocket, that was an entire afternoon of entertainment at the arcade and movie theater.