Back before your newfangled Spotifys and Apple Musics made endlessly streaming music extremely easy, people had to content themselves with listening to the built-in soundtrack when playing the same video game for hours on end. In the case of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, a series of mostly excellent skateboarding games that…

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?

Social media is exhausting, so it was only a matter of time until someone brought it to game night, where learning the rules takes longer than the game itself. The good news is that we all already know how to conjure up a fake, more appealing existence for ourselves online, and that’s exactly the goal of a new board…

At the very beginning of this year, Nintendo confirmed that it was working with Illumination Entertainment—the animation studio responsible for Despicable Me and the Minions—to develop an animated Super Mario movie, with Illumination founder Chris Meledandri and Super Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto on board as…

What scares you? It’s a question you know the answer to innately and immediately, as individualized as your fingerprint. Accordingly, horror games have tried everything in the book in order to scare players: disempowerment, alienation, animatronic jump-scares, eroticism, flagrant shattering of the fourth wall, and so…

If you use Slack to stay in touch with your friends or work colleagues, you most likely have the client on your computer and the app on your phone, ensuring that you’re never too far from funny gifs or check-ins from your boss to make sure you’re not just looking at funny gifs when you should be writing about pop…

The 1993 shooter Doom looks like every morally panicked adult’s nightmare vision of video-game violence made manifest. The screen is centered, always, on instruments of violence, its levels are filled with roaring demons, and the soundtrack comprises reprobate-courting MIDI speed metal. Still, the original Doom’s…

In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, iconic horror filmmaker John Carpenter has teased that he’d “love to direct” a new feature film at some point, but only on two conditions: He wants to make sure it’s “the right thing to do” at his age (he’s 70), and he refuses to back to the Arctic to make another Thing …

A lot of popular historical fiction—the type we see in games and movies and television—is full of shit. We’re so used to it being full of shit that, when Assassin’s Creed Odyssey opens during the Battle of Thermopylae, which, because it’s set in ancient Greece, is apparently obligatory, the player is mentally prepared…

Ron Perlman may not be Hellboy anymore, but he’s got a new way to hunt monsters now thanks to director Paul W.S. Anderson’s adaptation of Capcom’s Monster Hunter video games. The games are about methodically tracking down big, dinosaur-like beasts and using their bits to build increasingly powerful weapons and armor,…

Every few years, an obsession comes along in the gaming world that sweeps everything else off the board. Coverage of games like World Of Warcraft and Minecraft frequently takes on the tone of some kind of epidemic thriller, as reports spread of hooked kids, infuriated parents, and shattered relationships. Now, Fortnite…

Last night, Nintendo announced that just about all of the main Final Fantasy games from the PlayStation and PS2 eras were coming to their Switch console—except one. Missing from the line-up, despite the presence of Final Fantasy VII, IX, X, X-goddamn-2, and XII, was 1999's Final Fantasy VIII, a hilarious slight to a…

When Nintendo launched the Switch in March of last year, the system was missing some of the basic online functionality that is a cornerstone of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Various online-enabled games have come out since then that let you play against other people over the internet, but Nintendo has maintained…

Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft has been an iconic video game hero for decades, but all that’s ever really mattered about her character—beyond the lumpy polygons of her original model—was that she’s good at raiding tombs. Various games have indicated that she grew up in a big mansion with her father, and that he was a big…

Swing through the New York of Sony’s new PlayStation 4 exclusive, Marvel’s Spider-Man, and you’ll soon learn that Peter Parker is constantly being assaulted by sound. Gunshots, police sirens, voicemails from the various aunts, bosses, and exes that he periodically disappoints—Pete’s life is rarely quiet, a constant…

For a certain demographic, GoldenEye 007's multiplayer mode is imprinted on the mind. Say the word “Facility” (or, if you’re the neighborhood bozo, “Faculty”) and a flood of low-res grey and blue tiles are instantly conjured; mention “Slappers only!” and the body tenses in anticipation of a frantic, karate-chopping…

It has been a long time since we got a video game adaptation that considered legitimately good, not counting the stuff that dedicated fans really ate up like Warcraft or Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever, but nothing will ever stop producers from deciding that they’re the ones who will finally crack the video game adaptation…

For years, characters on sci-fi shows and police procedurals have been asking technicians to do the impossible with grainy, out-of-focus images. Suspect’s pixelated faces are transformed into crystal clear mugshots and reflections of partial license plate numbers become usable clues thanks to the vague, catch-all…

Starting a game of Tetris is one of the great meditative experiences. The blocks fall gently from the top of the screen, waiting for the player to guide them into orderly rows. Arrange the blocks properly and neatly enough and they blink out of existence, the screen ready for more tidy constructions. It’s a process of…

Rockstar Games has released a couple of trailers for Red Dead Redemption II already, but they were both centered on the story and the general tone of the game’s Wild West setting. Finally, with just a few months to go before we get what will hopefully be another heartbreaking ode to the pointlessness of cowboy…