'Retro Rewind' can make it a Blockbuster night. The two-person development team says "nostalgia is a central element" of their 90s themed simulator. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Growing up in the early 2000s, few weekly rituals stuck with me quite like New Release Tuesday. Every week, without fail, I remember wandering the slightly-moldy-smelling, blue-carpeted aisles of our local Blockbuster while my mom scrutinized the newest covers.

The reborn Commodore 64 is an astonishing remake--but daunting if you weren't there the first time around. "Digital detox" approach is compelling. It's hard to overstate just how seismic an impact the Commodore 64 had on home computing. Launched in 1982, the 8-bit machine--iconic in its beige plastic shell with integrated keyboard--went on to become the best-selling personal computer of all time . Despite the success, manufacturer Commodore International folded in 1994, with rights to the name floating around for years.

This Game Boy clone is an uncompromising approach to the ultimate gamer nostalgia. But there are better options out there. A tad pricey for an old game console. There are better options for tinkerers. Buying it puts money in the pocket of the killer chatbots guy.

If you were around for the electropop zeitgeist of the early 2010s, chances are that Purity Ring feature prominently on your nostalgia playlist. And if you were a young adult at that time, well, there's also a high chance that you played Japanese role-playing games as a teenager – whether that was Chrono Trigger on an SNES or Final Fantasy on a PlayStation. Purity Ring's new single Many Lives is an attempt to recapture the feeling of the RPG that you discovered as a 12-year-old and immediately made into your whole personality. Inspired by games such as Skies of Arcadia, Phantasy Star Online and Secret of Mana, it is poised to tug on the heartstrings of fans of a certain vintage. This is a bold decision for a band who have previously collaborated with Deftones and covered Eurodance classics, but members Megan James and Corin Roddick have the gaming expertise to pull it off. "We're huge fans of the JRPG genre," they say, naming Nier: Automata and Final Fantasy X as major influences on the sonic atmosphere of their latest work.

James Harden scored 7 points during the Los Angeles Clippers' Game 7 loss to the Denver Nuggets. Nick Wright and Kevin Wildes discuss Harden's history of choking in the playoffs. NBA fans' viewing experience will look different later this year, but there will also be a touch of nostalgia. Last summer, Comcast/NBC Universal closed an 11-year agreement for the rights to regular and postseason NBA and WNBA games. Those games will be presented across the network's linear and streaming platforms beginning with the 2025-26 season.

Music evokes profound emotions, yet the universality of emotional descriptors across languages remains debated. A key challenge in cross-cultural research on music emotion is biased stimulus selection and manual curation of taxonomies, predominantly relying on Western music and languages. To address this, we propose a balanced experimental design with nine online experiments in Brazil, the US, and South Korea, involving N=672 participants. First, we sample a balanced set of popular music from these countries. Using an open-ended tagging pipeline, we then gather emotion terms to create culture-specific taxonomies. Finally, using these bottom-up taxonomies, participants rate emotions of each song. This allows us to map emotional similarities within and across cultures. Results show consistency in high arousal, high valence emotions but greater variability in others. Notably, machine translations were often inadequate to capture music-specific meanings. These findings together highlight the need for a domain-sensitive, open-ended, bottom-up emotion elicitation approach to reduce cultural biases in emotion research.

Before the internet, if you were an avid gamer then you were very likely to be an avid reader of games magazines. From the early 1980s, the likes of Crash, Mega, PC Gamer and the Official PlayStation Magazine were your connection with the industry, providing news, reviews and interviews as well as lively letters pages that fostered a sense of community. Very rarely, however, did anyone keep hold of their magazine collections. Lacking the cultural gravitas of music or movie publications, they were mostly thrown away. While working at Future Publishing as a games journalist in the 1990s, I watched many times as hundreds of old issues of SuperPlay, Edge and GamesMaster were tipped into skips for pulping.

Destiny is 10 years old, which is an aeon in video game terms. On the surface, this is a lavish online prog-rock space shooter made by Bungie, the creators of the Xbox classic Halo. You bundle together with friends, deploy somewhere amid the glittering vistas of a futuristic version of our solar system, and then shoot people/aliens/robots to get better loot. None of this is exactly unprecedented, and that's maybe the point. You could argue that Destiny's touchstones are games like Halo, for its gunplay, World of Warcraft, for its persistent online spaces, and – this is where it gets a bit odd, granted – the deathless British retailer Marks & Spencer.

Timothy Foster needed something to look forward to when he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma last summer. The 35-year-old software developer, from upstate New York, knew he would have lots of time to kill while he recovered from his chemotherapy infusions, but what is there to do when you're laid up in bed all day? Yes, he had owned an NES and SNES in the '90s, but the last video game he had played in earnest was NCAA Football 14--a beloved 2013 college football simulator that was the final entry in a series that was discontinued following an arcane legal dispute between the powers that be in campus athletics and publisher EA Sports. But the landscape of college football has changed dramatically over the past few years, following a windfall of suddenly legal name, image, and likeness deals that freed up players to make money from outside sources. All this ultimately cleared a path for a revival of the one video game Foster ever truly loved.

On my desk right now, sitting beside my ultra-modern gaming PC, there is a strange device resembling the spaceship control panel from a 1970s sci-fi movie. It has no keyboard, no monitor, just several neat lines of coloured switches below a cascade of flashing lights. If you thought the recent spate of retro video game consoles such as the Mini SNES and the Mega Drive Mini was a surprising development in tech nostalgia, meet the PiDP-10, a 2:3 scale replica of the PDP-10 mainframe computer first launched by the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1966. Designed and built by an international group of computer enthusiasts known as Obsolescence Guaranteed, it is a thing of beauty. Oscar Vermeulen, a Dutch economist and lifelong computer collector, wanted to build a single replica of a PDP-8 mainframe, a machine he had been obsessed with since childhood.