Some games wear their influences on their sleeve; Timespinner has a full-body tattoo that reads "I ♥ Symphony of the Night" from the top of its head to the soles of its feet. That's by no means a bad thing. Aspiring to one of th...

I'm not going to lie about Assassination Nation. The content in this movie is, frankly, uncomfortable to sit through. The movie begins by showing trigger warnings of all of the horrible things that happen over the course movie and tells the...

You know what a lot of kids movies lack these days (I ask while waving my cane in the air at a cloud)? Charm. There's some amazing stuff going on for sure, but that certain "charming" characteristic is often missing. Maybe it's because chil...

The world of Yo-kai Watch has always been one I've admired from afar. I've viewed a few episodes of the anime and dabbled in the first few games of the series, but nothing so far has planted the seed of fandom inside of me. For many ye...

Just five years ago Gone Home first graced us with its haunting, immersive storyline. In a time when first-person narrative exploration was only an inkling of a genre, Gone Home took the concept and blew it out of the water. Five years lat...

Final Fantasy XIV waxes and wanes like a patch in a wind. Translation: some eras are better than others. While I generally go all-out on endgame-heavy even number patches with my Paladin, Bard, and Scholar: odd numbers (called "catch-up pat...

Point-and-click adventure games had a bit of a renaissance in the last decade, but have become harder to find ever since Telltale discovered a different formula with The Walking Dead in 2012. Luckily, indie developers are there to fill...

Scythe. You've heard of it but never played it because none of your friends wanna take the 80-dollar plunge for a game that people might not even enjoy. So you buy the bare-bones licensed Tabletop Simulator version, knowing it has no AI but...

Nintendo is onto something with Labo, at least beyond the realms of their typical level of peripheral support.  Remember the Vitality Sensor? No? What about more nostalgic hardware like R.O.B., who only worked for two games? How about ...

I have never made my disdain for Iron Fist more evident and apparent. Identity politics aside, the first season depicted what I believed to be a whiny white rich boy going on temper tantrums, in an aimless television show with sub...

I feel like virtual reality games get kind of a bad rap for being "simplistic" or "shallow." They're not always that way. When done right a VR game can take an ordinary experience and transform it into an immersive adventure, heightening it...

A Hat in Time can only be described as lovely. It took Gears for Breakfast six years but they finally pushed it out the door, and eventually fans will get their Nintendo platform port: even if the Wii U is out of the picture (yes it's been ...

The Senran Kagura franchise has always straddled the fine line between ambitious hack-and-slash and straight-up filthy fan service. It’s never been one to shy away from its more questionable content and each subsequent release has bas...

A lot of shoot 'em ups (shmups) come across my desk: like a lot. And I could be happier. There are a lot of genres out there that have been "dead" or "dying" for years, even decades. Folks don't see shmups in arcades anymore (hell they don'...

If there's one thing I learned from humans, it's that work is everything to us. It's what all politicians promise us. It's what family and friends complain about when the times are rough. It's seen as an opportunity to prove ourselves usefu...

If you were to tell me that your Uncle Who Totally Works At Sega said that Valkyria Chronicles 4, the latest game in the tactical role-playing franchise, was actually developed in 2009 as the original sequel to 2008's Valkyria Chronicles, a...

Lara Croft has always lived in her father's shadow. This famed archaeologist devoted the latter years of his life searching for The Divine Source, a Fountain of Youth-type mythological key to immortality. Like Ponce de León, he never...

Massive worlds to sift through have become signature trademarks for the Xenoblade series. The first was lengthy, X was MMO-esque in size, and Xenoblade 2 is par for the course. It makes sense then that the first expansion, Torna - The Golde...

What’s shocking about White Boy Rick is not the lower-middle class family drama of 1980s eastside Detroit; it’s not the violence (relatively mild for a drug film); it’s not the depiction of a young girl becoming ...

I came into The Predator with no real reverence for the series—I had seen the original film a long time ago, caught Predators on cable television once, and all I know about Predator 2 is that Gary Busey is in it. Instead, I watched th...

With a trailer that promised surreal, neon-lit landscapes as a backdrop to an unhinged spree of violent revenge, I marked Mandy as the one movie I needed to experience no matter what this year. I had seen Beyond the Black Rainbow almost a d...

My biggest disappointment of 2018 is that I am not able to use the subtitle “Hyakki-Suck” to describe Haunted Dungeons: Hyakki Castle. It really is just a darn shame, but you can’t win ‘em all. I have a little soft s...

Survival games aren't usually my thing. They require a vast amount of dedication and engagement, with menial tasks that I'm not typically looking for when escaping to a digital world. SCUM, however, caught my eye with just how over the top ...

SNK's roster of fighters have always been a stylish bunch. From Fatal Fury to King of Fighters and even Samurai Shodown, SNK's guys 'n' gals have always thrown down, and looked damn good doing it. This came to a head in the KoF games circa ...

While I’ve always been fond of playing shooters, brawlers and action-oriented games, one of the joys of my teenage years was kicking back with Tiger Woods PGA Tour with my best friend. After intense rounds of Unreal Tournament 2004, w...