Authenticity means a lot to people, and it comes across in the way we talk about video games. Terms like "art game" or a "hardcore game" or an "indie game" all work to stick a flag in a game that says "This isn't for everybody," which is ju...

I've been tooling and retooling a list of the most influential indie games of the past ten years, and I don't think it's ever going to be done. It started with a list of 10 games (Super Meat Boy, Shovel Knight, Undertale, PUBG, etc) but tha...

It's been a long time since Nintendo was able to make a hit Star Fox game. Star Fox Zero was one of Miyamoto's biggest bombs, though it wasn't the first time the series struggled to appeal to its audience. The last all-...

River City Girls was announced earlier this year, then few months later, it was out in the wild. That didn't leave WayForward much time to build hype, but their short-but-sweet marketing strategy seems to have worked. Since its release las...

The announcement that SNK's Terry Bogard is coming to Smash was met with polarized responses. Fans of Himbo's and the King of Fighters series were overjoyed, while fans of not-those-things were somewhat irritated, decrying Terry as just "Ke...

[Image from 41 Strange] Push Dustin and New WabiSabi just dropped a bomb on the Smash community and the speculation train is already running at a fever pitch. According to a now-deleted listing on Nintendo UK's website, the next Super Smash...

Watching developers play other people's games is always interesting. Most of the good ones end up looking at the other dev's work both for what it is while also thinking about how it was made, making for more layered, insightful commentary...

Video games can have an effect on the way people think. I've seen this first-hand with my kid, who just turned four. He sees in a way that I don't. Things I take for granted as harmless or meaningless can affect him for days, or even weeks....

Unless it was made by just one person, it's a bad idea to give all the credit for a game's success or failure to a single individual. Koji Igarashi has produced many of the best games in the Castlevania series, but he's far from the only re...

Technically, Konami is still making games with some of their classic franchises. They have a new Contra game in the works, a new 2D Castlevania title set for release this year, and last I checked, the servers for Metal Gear Survive were sti...

The Angry Video Game Nerd does his best to be empathetic, especially compared to his successors. In this world of near-constant Youtuber and Twitch personality scandals, James seems like a downright sweetheart most of the time. Sam Beddoes ...

[Fan Art by Metroid McKay] The upcoming June issue of Nintendo Force (available in print for as low as $4.99 until June 23rd) features an interview with Maja, Chad, and Jared Moldenhauer, the "heads" of Studio MDHR, developers of Cuphead. C...

When I was a kid I used to lie around in the grass and ask myself questions like "What makes a Sega game special?"Of course, the answer to that question depends on what era of Sega you're talking about. When they started in with home consol...

1001 Spikes is one of my favorite games and I think you'd like it too if you gave it a try. At one point, I even joking-not-jokingly said it's better than Game of Thrones. Given how people turned on that show in its last season, I think a l...

[Editor's Note: One thing that has been made quite evident over the past several weeks is Hollywood has no problem weaponizing the audience's fear of spoilers to their advantage. The urgency to avoid all spoilers and see Avengers: Endg...

[Image from a 1982 issue of The Philadelphia Inquirer found by Cat DeSipra] Another year, another round of headlines about the World Health Organization's take on gaming addiction disorder. I can't blame people for continuing to spin their...

[Image from Your Wife, Last Night] Para-social relationships have become a daily part of many people's lives. Listening to the same personalities on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis can light up the brain in the same way real-li...

It wasn't long ago that I was researching how many videogames Winona Rider Ryder has been in. The number was surprisingly low. From the looks of it, the same is true for her ex-boyfriend Keanu Reeves. Other than a few games based on&n...

If reading the words "Titanfall-likes"made you frown, I hear you, but with the Titanfall series on indefinite hold, my guess is there are a lot of people out there who have a giant robot shaped hole in their videogame hopes and dreams right...

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...