The year is 2011, and the haunting, distant sounds of the Aperture facility are reverberating through our unfinished basement. My brother's at basketball practice, I have free reign of the Xbox. I've spent the past half hour trying to solve...

The “pick me” girl has always existed in one form or another, you might recognize her as a proponent of the phrase “I’m not like other girls,” or for being “one of the boys.” This particular incarna...

Capcom didn't make things simple with the new Resident Evil Village demo that can only be played for a certain amount of time on certain days and certain platforms. It's enough to justify an explainer. I'm not here to recap all of that nons...

Twisted Metal was an institution on the PlayStation. Much like the landmark titles Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Resident Evil, it exploded its genre, resulting in a bevy of pretenders. For Twisted Metal, it was vehicular comba...

Part of what draws me to Famicom games is the fact that I missed out entirely on the culture around it. Not only am I of an age that would have given the Super Famicom more significance, but -- and this may shock you -- I’m not Japane...

PlayStation 3 games have gotten expensive lately — as have a lot of other old games that are either rare, genuinely desirable as something an adult would play and enjoy in 2021, or heaven forbid, both. I'm not about to sell off anythi...

Life is stressful, which is a phrase I hate saying because it reminds me of all the stressful things in my life. We’re living in crappy times, and many of us are in crappy situations. Thankfully, things are starting to improve for me,...

There’s a method to my madness when picking kusoge. A lot of the time, I go by reputation. I may not have played Carmageddon 64 or BMX XXX until I chose them as subjects for articles, but they’re generally understood to be crap ...

Discord, the voice chat and messaging service marketed towards gamers, can be an unkind place to women. But so can many online gaming spaces — according to a 2018 study published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addic...

After revisiting A Way Out a few months ago and just wrapping up It Takes Two over the weekend — it was surprisingly long! — it's been tough to muster my usual enthusiasm for other co-op games. I love teaming up with my girlfrie...

BMX XXX sounds like a terrible idea on paper. It’s technically a perversion of the Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX series, which itself is a perversion of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Acclaim decided that they weren’t making enough mo...

With Sony cutting off access to the PlayStation Store on PSP, Vita, and PS3 later this year, some of us have been exhaustively combing through recommendation lists to whittle down which digital games we want to grab before we're no longer a...

I love Moai. It’s an interesting aesthetic; huge, monolithic humans with warped proportions. But do you know who loves Moai more? Japanese video game developers. They show up as bosses and in the background all the time in a wide vari...

After hearing the PSP, Vita, and PS3 store shutdown news last week, I was disappointed, but I wasn't as fired up as some. More like all-around bummed and tired. We're really doing this, Sony? Welp, okay. With the recent clarification that w...

From April 2-6, Warner Bros. is running a special event in their free-to-play mobile RPG Looney Tunes: World of Mayhem featuring a chubby variant of Bugs Bunny, now officially called "Big Chungus." This version of Bugs first appea...

Hades was love at first sight for me. It has the bright and stylized art that I love, roguelikes are one of my favorite gameplay genres, and I was one of those Greek mythology kids who was obsessed with the Percy Jackson series growing up. ...

Walking down the street to check the mail at my hometown’s post office is an eerily different journey today than it was a year ago. I still pass the local pizza joint on the town square—a literal cornerstone of a small town comm...

Disco Elysium opens with you on the floor. Your character, whoever they are or whatever might be left of them, is face-down in a nondescript hotel room. You are surfacing, breaching the plane between the void and the living only to find you...

I may have accidentally gotten back into collecting Super Nintendo games. Yeah, let's go with "may." As many of you have no doubt experienced first-hand, it's been an expensive time for collectors from all walks of life. For anyone looking ...

Nineteen eighty-six was a transformative year for Nintendo. Super Mario Bros. had released at the end of the previous year and ushered in a slew of influential games. The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Kid Icarus (I guess), many of which were ri...

The Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection is an interesting remaster prospect. For many, they'll be experiencing the entire trilogy for the first time. Others just prefer the first: an absolute classic in the action genre, even still. Some m...

I’m not sure if this is unusual since I don’t typically discuss “emotions” with other “humans,” but I generally play psychological horror games to feel sad rather than scared. Video games lost their abili...

The Nintendo 64 and original PlayStation basically lived their lives during the “Attitude” or “Monday Night Wars” era of wrestling. If you’re unfamiliar, it was this incredibly tacky time where cartoonish machi...

River City Ransom was an important game in the development of my retro appreciation. My early attempts at familiarizing myself with the NES included such titles as Kid Icarus, Friday the 13th, and -- I swear this is true -- Total Recall. It...

Spoiler warning for the entirety of Kentucky Route Zero. If you haven't played yet, or don't want anything in the game spoiled for you, turn back now. Kentucky Route Zero is one of those games where I spent a lot of my first playthrough fee...