James Cameron’s Aliens is as different from its original as a refutation. Ellen Ripley must now find it in herself to defeat evil with a self-assured grin, rath...
Perfection is irreducible: it has no smaller parts and can be subordinated only to itself. It can never be defined in comparison to other things. So perfection ...
Earlier this year, I wrote an article called “Nintendo’s Apology (and Why We Shouldn’t Take Them Back),” in which I stated not uncertainly that the deceased CEO...
The Christmas season values nothing that is important in video games. Where Christmas gives, video games take; where it symbolizes life, they advocate death. Ga...
Infinity is incompatible with design. Even gameplay freedom requires conditions coordinated to create it, as we might have learned when No Man’s Sky edified a l...
In a great game, every moment is a tutorial. You can’t learn the difference between Solitaire and Rummy by sitting with a deck of cards, but video games come un...
Ugly things are easy to maintain since they have no standards of form: a ragged rose bush can be allowed to grow forever once beauty no longer applies to it. As...
The animator Don Bluth escaped the Disney paddock and froze out in the entrepreneurial cold. But his animation sings, in his time, as the art most likely to gra...
Survival horror should never have been a genre. All games are survival games – the struggle against death defines their gameness. Since the limitation of resou...
The best video game stories emerge out of gameplay. Without mechanics too divergent from its inspirations, The Binding of Isaac contains a narrative mood so dis...
Call of Duty: WWII is as loud about war as a blockbuster, stocked with the series’ signature desensitization tactics and above average amounts of tranquilizing ...
Devil May Cry was so difficult to beat it was an anachronism. The early 2000s were priding themselves for renovating retro with accessible action in games like ...
Many have advocated to consider video games an art. But what makes it an art? The claims have usually been aesthetic, proving the existence of art through a sty...
The idea of exploring an outmoded castle feeds into the difficulty that usually accompanies the theme. These are the adventures of the unaligned, the underdogs,...
The term “microtransaction” has been negatively connotated to the status of an industry-specific swear word. The act of paying for more game or unlocking cosmet...
I genuinely worry for people who think Sonic Forces is going to be good. There’s just no reason from the promotions or the promises to suspect that it will be a...
Procedural generation rewards replayability. Minecraft never ceases to be the experience it advertises because your control over diverse elements remains consta...
Bubsy’s intrusion on this Fall’s release schedule coincides even more closely with Super Mario Odyssey than his last game, Bubsy 3D, coincided with Super Mario ...
