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…
Look, we get it: It’s probably not terribly easy being the social media team for the United States Marine Corps, an organization that is, even in the best of circumstances, a lot more likely to have its applicants be shot at than most any other career path you might hope to name. And god knows there are only so many…
In June, we reported that Showtime had ordered 10 episodes of a show based on the Halo video games, making it the latest in a very long line of attempts to turn Halo into something other than a video game (though the original spin-off novels are supposedly really good, at least according to some kids that this…
The internet has largely killed off the once-cherished art of the video game strategy guide; after all, it’s hard to get hyped for an analog guidebook when one or two quick Google searches can get you a written walkthrough, dozens of screenshots, and roughly a million Let’s Plays of every game ever created to help you…
Why does Nintendo even bother? It spends millions of dollars every year developing new Super Mario games, convincing people to spend $80 on Nintendo Switch controllers, and producing new stuffed toys based on Pokémon, when all it really needs to do is come up with new ways to sell people the same games they’ve been…
Welcome back to Trailer Happy Hour, where we track the rise and fall of pop culture properties, as expressed entirely in moody clips that feature various rock and pop songs being played in a happier or more depressing fashion than what you normally hear. Today we’ve got face tentacles, mind-controlling serial killers,…
If there’s one thing the internet has proven, it’s that there’s meme potential everywhere. While some of us walk the earth, thumbing through websites, watching movies, and playing video games with only a surface appreciation of what’s on the screen, others identify something more.
According to Entertainment Weekly, Showtime has stepped into its Mark IV Mjolnir armor and ordered 10 episodes of a show based on that Halo games. Various attempts to turn Halo into a live-action feature film or a TV show have been made since the first game came out in 2001, but Showtime has actually hired a…
Despite numerous attempts—many of them responsible for some of the strangest, most interestingly upsetting online content of the last few years—Adult Swim has never managed to match the sheer viral punch of Too Many Cooks. The 2014 short caught the internet totally off-guard when it debuted, unannounced, at 4 a.m. on…
Earlier this week, Warner Bros. published a new mobile game based on Westworld that has players blatantly disregarding the message of the show and building the best robot-murder theme park they can. One look at the details and images from the game, and anyone who’s played Fallout Shelter can tell its borrowing quite a…
Everyone has a Mario Kart character they consider “the best.” With all the fervor of a kid on a playground, explaining why their Spider-Man toy can totally whip a friend’s Batman toy’s ass, even grown adults will call on every argument in the book to defend their choice of squealing go-kart cartoon.
Assembling video game trailers is tricky business. With the ever-increasing scope and complexity of games, it can be difficult to begin to communicate what a project is in the narrow confines of a sizzle reel. Some publishers stick confidently to what they have and wrap it in a flashy package to get audiences…
E3 is winding down, meaning the big announcements like the new Halo and the new Smash Bros. have already been made, leaving only the announcements that are—to be fair—not as exciting as a new Smash Bros. or a new Halo. One such announcement comes from Telltale Games, the studio behind a lot of well-regarded adventure…
Earlier today, Nintendo devoted 25 whole minutes of its E3 Nintendo Direct news blast to introducing the new Super Smash Bros. for the Switch. The game was teased earlier this year, without so much as even a name reveal, and the company made up for those few months of silence by dropping as many details as the human…
We’ve spent years trying to figure out what Death Stranding is, beyond it being the new game from Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima and his new Kojima Productions studio, but Sony’s bizarre E3 press conference/performance art presentation finally gave us our best look yet. As it turns out, Death Stranding is a game…
Sony took a unique approach to this year’s big PlayStation E3 showcase, opting to corral its audience into an ominous church tent before letting them into the usual big theater show. It turns out the set was an echo of the first demo of the night: The Last Of Us Part II. The publisher had shared two…
It’s 3 p.m.! Let The A.V. Club briefly make use of the waning hours of your productivity with some pop culture ephemera pulled from the depths of YouTube.
With Fallout 4 finally giving fans of Bethesda’s massive, open-world adventures their post-apocalypse fix, it was time to start clamoring for a new entry in the studio’s other series, The Elder Scrolls. It’s been nearly seven years since The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released and took over the damn world, and now,…
