With new games of all sizes filling real and digital shelves every week, it can be near impossible for anyone to keep up. So during the first week of every month, we’ll be here to help with a curated selection of new, notable games we think should be on everyone’s radar for the month ahead.

A scandal has rocked the very niche (but very intense) world of competitive arcade gaming today, as hot sauce magnate Billy Mitchell—the big-haired, smiling “heel” of Seth Gordon’s 2007 documentary hit The King Of Kong—has had several of his records on the Nintendo classic Donkey Kong called into question. As reported…

Video games these days are more or less interactive movies—the breadth of the story is cinematic, as is the quality of the acting and the intricacies of the sound design. Programmers of yore would laugh at a phrase such as “intricacies” in terms of video game sound design, as what they had to work with in the early…

Last week, the World Video Game Hall Of Fame at the Strong Museum Of Play announced its 2017 inductees, and though they don’t get a star-studded ceremony like the inductees at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame do, that doesn’t necessarily mean that this batch of historically important video games are any less worthy of…

Generation-X kids were pretty well off during their formative years, pop-culture-wise: They could play some Donkey Kong, chat with their friends via AOL, and amuse themselves with great TV like The Ren & Stimpy Show, He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe, and Doug. But none of these elements would have been as…

Like any pop-culture phenomenon worth its salt (or perhaps sugar, as the case may be), some of the biggest video games of the ’80s found their way off of screens and into the cereal aisle. As to be expected, they were uniformly of the ludicrously sweet variety, with sugary corn puffs or marshmallows shaped vaguely…

July 9 marked the 35th anniversary of one of the true milestones in video gaming history. On that fateful date in 1981, the original cabinet version of Nintendo’s seminal Donkey Kong arrived in American video arcades, ready to deprive the nation’s youth of its free time and pocket change. Prior to that, as difficult…

Some of us are still holding out, but the writing’s on the wall. Donald Trump is going to be our next president (at least until he assumes the title of “Generalissimo Para La Vida”). That means that we could soon be getting tax breaks for ordering Trump Steaks. The Donald’s megalomaniacal vision and over-the-top…

In Hear This, The A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Songs we discovered in video games.

It’s hard to believe that Donkey Kong turns 34 today, considering he’s still throwing barrels with the same verve he did in 1981. Back then, Nintendo’s American headquarters was operating out of a warehouse owned by Mario Segale, who became the namesake for Donkey Kong’s nemesis (originally known as “Jumpman.”)

It’s already a banner week in the (apparently extant?) field of running games on things they weren’t meant to run on. First, security researcher Michael Jordon has successfully run Doom on a Canon Pixma printer. Jordon worked for months on the port to expose a security flaw in Canon’s line of printers. He explains,…

Last Friday, the world crowned a new king of Kong. Robbie Lakeman, a relative newcomer to the competitive Donkey Kong scene, hit a score of 1,141,800, overtaking former record-holder Hank Chien by just 3,200 points. Donkey Blog, a site run by Chris Psaros and dedicated to all things competitive Donkey Kong, published …

1. Batman et al., The Revenge Of Shinobi (1989)
One of the growing pains faced by the flourishing Japanese video game industry in the 1980s was increased scrutiny of copyright and trademark issues. In their domestic market, Japanese studios might have been able to casually appropriate popular Western characters without…