Just yesterday I saw a Cuphead plushie for sale at Target next to the Game of Thrones and Stranger Thing merchandise. The game's brand is bigger than the game itself, largely because of ease of availability. Being published by Microsoft mea...

Nintendo just released a new thirty-second ad for Smash Bros. Ultimate and it's one for the books. On the surface, it looks like it was designed to sell lanky pre-teens on a special brand of self-esteem that only comes from trouncing ...

Limbo features a lot of deaths, but as many have written about before, these deaths can be interpreted as a protest to the lax attitude most games take towards violence. Back in the old days, if a parent caught one of their children smoking...

Gears of War, God of War, World of Warcraft. The Darkness. Dark Void. Dark. You ten-year-olds raised on Fortnite out in the audience may not believe this, but these are all the names of popular videogames from ten-or-so years ago. Not ...

Last week at PAX East, I ended up on a panel with the developers of Soda Drinker Pro, one of the producers of Home Movies, and a talented stand-up comedian. The panel was moderated by a Max Headroom-style virtual host named Merrill Gr...

Yacht Club Games, the developers of Shovel Knight, had a historic showing at PAX East this year. Six years ago, Shovel Knight made its playable debut there. Now it's coming to a close there as well, with Shovel Knight: King of Cards and Sh...

When it comes to niche genres, they don't get much smaller than the "games featuring Winona Rider" subsection of your local mom-and-pop video store. Other than a few small roles in various Beetlejuice games from the 1990s, she's basically a...

The first thing I did at PAX East yesterday was hit up Matt Papa and Takuya Aizu of Inti Creates about a question I've had on my mind ever since they shadow-dropped Blaster Master Zero 2 last week: Will the game get character DLC? The ...

As of this very moment, Peter Glagowski, Rich Meister, Caitlin Cooke and myself are entering the Boston Convention Center to get a load of PAX East 2019. We'll be playing and previewing a bunch of games, so keep your eyes peeled for sudden ...

I've been waiting for this moment for a long time. In fact, I think it was over five years ago that I first started ranting about it. By granting the Zelda license to Brace Yourself Games, Nintendo has signaled to the world that they are wi...

Last week, with no warning, Tetris 99 was unleashed upon the world, and puzzle games will never be the same. Infusing the "me against the world" psychology of the battle royale genre and applying it to the highly accessible, generally non-v...

[Image by Fred Wood] Compared to the Wii U, the Switch is doing fantastic, with the fastest selling Smash game of all time, plenty of broad-appeal 1st party hits, and 3rd party support the likes of which Nintendo hasn't seen since the SNES ...

[Art by Jorge M Velez] Not a lot is known about the now-scrapped game that was once called Metroid Prime 4. Some rumors say it was being worked on by multiple teams across the globe, with Nintendo directing them towards a unified vision as ...

With Super Mario Odyssey, Nintendo came close to maxing out on the concept of being anyone you want to be. While that made for a one-of-a-kind experience within the Mario universe, there were actually a few other games that used the same ho...

Writing "Best of the Year" lists makes me feel pretentious and self-aggrandizing. That's probably because these lists operate under the pretense that the writer is able to both assess an entire year's worth of games and make some sort of ab...

Nic Rowen's review of Rain World seemed sympathetic but sad, which makes sense given that the game does a lot to invoke those two feelings. The bad news is, he was also feeling pretty disappointed when he said "I feel so badly for...

Shovel Knight turned five this year, and it shows no signs of slowing down. He's sold over three million copies and counting. There are not one, not two, but six different books that tell his story in one way or another. His ...

I love Smash Bros. I love it when it's fair and I love it when it's tragic. I love the way it sounds and I love the way it feels. I love the way it transforms non-stop carnage into a silly, joyous romp. I love how it invites my imagination ...

Screencheat has fared very well on non-Nintendo systems since it was first released in 2014, but now that it's on the Switch, it feels truly at home. Four-player competitive gaming really came into its own on consoles with the N64, th...

We live in a time when most people forty years old and younger were brought up adoring media that was designed to function as toy commercials, childhood companions, and near-religious texts at the same time. When I saw Michael Bay's Transfo...

I don't know what's going on with the Neo Geo Mini. Shortly after I got my hands on one, SNK announced that an upgraded Holiday version of the hardware would be going up for pre-order in the coming days. That's not a good sign. I have to gu...

When I first saw that the Kickstarter for Cheap Golf ended with 666 backers, I figured it was just a wacky coincidence. Now that I've played the game, I'm not so sure. On the surface, it looks like a smart and silly take on an Atari 2600 s...

In the past, she was in a band with Superman. In the present, she's Captain Marvel, one the most powerful space-fairing super heroes in modern film. How the heck do you top all that? If you're Brie Larson, the answer is simple - become one ...