This week’s SEO Play came out on Monday as usual, but I was not able to write about it, because I was lost in Stardew Valley. Yes, I did manage to escape my corporate chains here at Polygon, and I immediately fled to that place where I felt safest, most at home: the pastoral wonderland of Stardew Valley. There I toiled for hours on my sweet parsnip farm, building relationships with the people around me. It was a dream come true! But then I was brutally taken from my simple home and dragged back the the Big City, to work for The Man! They said I had to write this blog post, to make sure that everyone else knows that you can play Stardew Valley on consoles now. Oh, and lots of other things too. Is fertilizer worth it? And is there an end? I answer all these questions and more,...

YouTube personality SethBling has emulated the Atari 2600 inside Minecraft. It’s a clever use of the game’s command blocks, which act as the brains of the operation. But don’t get too excited. While SethBling has provided a tool to load Atari ROMs into Minecraft, once they’re in there you’re only going to be playing at around 60 frames per... four hours. Instead, think of his project as a tremendous way to explain how games are made. SethBling has assembled an array of more than 2,000 command blocks in his design. The way he has them configured, they read stone and dirt as either ones or zeros. When an Atari game is pushed into Minecraft it resolves itself as a 4 kilo-block chunk of land, a three-dimensional representations of raw game code. It proves to be a remarkable visual...

One of the biggest things that sets American comics apart from, say, French or Japanese comics is the dominance of the superhero genre — and the long-standing American perception that comic books, regardless of their subject, are not suitable reading for adults. Today, on Issue at Hand, Polygon’s show about the past, present and future of comic books, we (and by we, I mean I, your comic book expert) cover one of the biggest reasons that American comics are the way they are: the Comics Code. Why were comics in the ’60s so silly? Why were comics in the ’80s so dark? What’s that little white box on all my old comics? Was there really a 1972 comic called Bizzare Sex #1 with the cover story “The Giant Penis That Invaded New York?” Yes. Yes, there was.

Banjo enthusiast and game designer Shigeru Miyamoto appeared on tonight’s episode of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon primarily to help promote the release of Super Mario Run and hype up the launch of the Nintendo Switch. But he also made some time to sit in with The Tonight Show house band The Roots to pluck a familiar tune: the unmistakable Super Mario Bros. theme. It’s a pretty straightforward rendition — though host Jimmy Fallon joined in to freestyle on the Question Block — but it’s still cool to see Miyamoto and Questlove on the same stage playing together. Miyamoto and Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé attended The Tonight Show in advance of Super Mario Run’s launch and to give us our first live look at The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild playable on a Nintendo...

A dozen minutes of competitive jousting