What good is technology if we don’t use it to better ourselves as a species? That was likely the question running through the mind of Reddit user duncsmaps while they spent an untold amount of time recreating the entire apartment set from Friends using the Far Cry 5 engine. Upon completion of their masterwork,…
Summer is close to its halfway point, which if you’re responsible in any way for a school-aged child, means you’ve probably spent at least one hot, sticky afternoon waiting in interminable lines and wincing at the price of Dippin’ Dots already this year. (The goths, meanwhile, have been banished from Disneyland and…
If you’re a gamer of a certain age, the name “Leisure Suit Larry” probably still strikes you as scandalous. Before sex became more or less commonplace in gaming blockbusters, the idea that there was a game out there built around the pursuit of sex was a blush-worthy one. As MEL Magazine puts it in a new breakdown of …
You do not need us to tell you that Twitter is bad. Nor do you need us to tell you that video games are, by and large, good. Both are compulsive time-sucks, one giving us naught but tension and a vague sense of apocalyptic introversion and the other one giving us big, interesting places to explore and mechanized…
Video game commercials are a strange, squirming beast. Where ads for TV shows and films are dependent on conveying the general story and selling the star power of its cast, video games have a harder sell. Games are about selling the world and flaunting its gameplay, but even that’s not enough. Game commercials have…
There’s been nearly 30 Castlevania games since the series debuted in Japan in 1986 and subsequently moved to the Nintendo a year later. Game quality has varied, but one aspect of the games has remained consistent: Those badass tunes. We did our own deep dive into the game’s signature musical style a few years ago, but…
Though your parents, yanking the power cord from the Nintendo 64 until you’d “finish your damn homework,” couldn’t tell the difference between Super Mario 64 and The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time, everyone with an ounce of goddamn sense in their heads knows there’s no comparison between the two video games. In one,…
Nobody buys a video game for its soundtrack, but, as the Game Boy’s Robocop made achingly clear, sometimes that soundtrack ends up being the most memorable part of the game. The rush of nostalgia that accompanies the pixelated tunes playing beneath The Legend of Zelda or Super Mario Bros. is enough to summon any…
In Jelly Mario, a new browser game from programmer Stefan Hedman, something horrible has happened not only to Mario but to the entire Mushroom Kingdom. When Mario attempts one of his famously crisp and precise jumps, he floats and rotates away, his legs wriggling uselessly beneath him. When Mario collides with an…
Rainbow Road, the final course of the Special Cup in the various iterations of Super Mario Kart, is a notorious pain in the ass. Nothing throws off a fun afternoon playing video games with your friends like someone insisting you take a 20-minute tour of the vibrantly colored space track filled with Thwomps, Chain…
Open-world game designers have a seemingly impossible task. They have to create beautiful looking, fully functioning games with clear and engaging narratives, but they also have to make the player feel like they can do whatever they want and that the choices they make effect how the game plays out. This is best…
Shopping malls are a great place to go if you want to feel very depressed. Made obsolete by online giants like Amazon, most malls are dying, if not already dead. Wandering around a mostly empty mall can feel like walking through a ghost town. If you listen close you can hear the wailing specters of Brookstone massage…
Ever wanted to know what a Terminator crossed with a dinosaur sounds like, but were too afraid to ask? Well, now you can find out for yourself with the simple yet addictive new game Monster Breeder, which comes to us from musician, animator, and creator of popular internet things Neil Cicierega. Like everything else…
So-bad-they’re-good video games haven’t quite achieved the cultural cachet of movies like The Room or Troll 2, in part because games are an active experience rather than a passive one. It’s a lot easier to sit back and watch a trainwreck than it is to understand its inner mechanics and slog through them. Credit goes,…
Next time you’re traveling through Lithuania and find yourself needing a haircut, we’d recommend stopping by Red Light Barbers in Vilnius. Not only can they do a mean fade, but they also offer a special service where they make shot-for-shot remakes of classic mid-2000s video games. Or maybe they just do that for their…
Rarely can a film’s video game adaptation say it improved upon the film from which it drew inspiration, but the 1989 Game Boy version of Robocop, Paul Verhoeven’s ultra-violent genre classic, has at least one thing on its source material: An unforgettable theme song. No shade to Basil Poledouris’ score, but the game’s…
As video game designers continue to inject more realism into their narratives, they’ll inevitably find themselves designing fully-functioning bathrooms for players to interact with. After all, the real world has bathrooms all over the damn place! As this article from Heterotopias points out, these digital washrooms…
“All your base are belong to us” remains the gold standard for that joyous disconnect that occurs when translating a piece of art from one language to another, but it’s certainly not the only example of such comedic serendipity. Just look at this list of names that some Japanese guy conjured up when working on the…
Most big companies are so scared of their shareholders that their commercials tread a few comfortable lines, whether it’s having annoying people singing bad versions of popular songs or doing some variation of whatever the hell Geico’s been doing for the last gazillion years. The stakes were lower in the ’80s and…
The signature neon-and-smoke Blade Runner aesthetic is all over video games, from Hideo Kojima’s 1988 Snatcher to more recent efforts like the Deus Ex series, Gemini Rue, and futuristic bartending sim VA-11 HALL-A. In games, Blade Runner and cyberpunk are synonymous.
