This week on The A.V. Club’s Twitch stream, we’re diving into the apocalypse—albeit an apocalypse of a particularly lush and furry sort. That’s right: We’re playing Biomutant, the new action-RPG from THQ Nordic and Experiment 101.
eSports are at a crossroads. For centuries, traditional athletics have honored the presence of the shirtless dad as a cheerleader for his children’s teams. The shirtless dad may run right up to the dugout on a hot summer’s day to shout advice to a team of kids who already have a coach. The shirtless dad may jump up…
When Pokémon first landed, 25 years ago this fall, it broke a lot of fundamental assumptions about video game design. There was its instant inescapability, obviously, with the accompanying animated series and its compulsively catchy theme song, immediately burying themselves in the minds of the planet’s children while…
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?
Gary “King Pokémon” Haase is, despite his lofty title, just a 67-year-old guy from Las Vegas who has a hard time selling off any of his enormous Pokémon card collection. And yet he holds this royal title thanks to the decades of obsessive collecting that’s resulted in him accumulating the world’s most valuable stash…
The Binding Of Isaac is the most successful video game ever made about a small child committing suicide by asphyxiating in a box.
We explore some of Wikipedia’s oddities in our 6,297,990-week series, Wiki Wormhole.
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?
Despite some minor improvements, Cyberpunk 2077 still is a pretty godawful train wreck of an overpromising, underdelivering video game. Meanwhile, Frasier is still pretty great, if we’re remembering it correctly. And yet, like a tossed salad and scrambled eggs, the two are not exactly a combination many would think…
Adult trading card speculators have gone and ruined Pokémon for the kids. Now that the franchise’s long-running card game has been embraced by investment-minded buyers (spurred on in part, we write with regret, by Logan Paul) who needed to find yet another dumb way to try to grow their bank accounts, the cards’…
Resident Evil Village has been out for almost a week at this point, which means we’ve now spent roughly a week’s worth of time thinking about all the cool stuff in Resident Evil Village. (Certainly, we’ll never look at mannequins designed to look like an approximation of our dead wife the same way again.) As such,…
Resident Evil Village already includes an embarrassment of monsters, from werewolves and vampires to haunted dolls and whatever kind of fish-person hybrid this guy is. But a modder who goes by JTeghius Kittius has decided that the game’s existing line-up of horrors wasn’t complete, and has rounded it out by swapping…
Time loop stories are power fantasies addressing a powerlessness we all share: The inability to make the past better than it was. “If I’d just done this one thing different,” we tell ourselves when the sleep won’t come. “If I’d only known better.” Paired with that other great “Wouldn’t it be nice” hypothetical—a…
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?
You know how it is: You log on to your PlayStation, realize another month has come and gone, and then suddenly bolt upright because you forgot to mail off the rent check again. But then, once that adrenaline spike has been properly disposed with, you start thinking about the fact that there’s a new batch of free PS…
The Resident Evil games have always looked to Hollywood creature features for inspiration. But as the series shambles into its 25th year, Capcom has reached back further than ever before, past even the ravenous ghouls of George Romero’s 1968 Night Of The Living Dead, to a kind of ground zero of things that go bump in…
Going to work for a corporate entity with a shiny image like Nintendo requires some sacrifice. Many companies, including those in the entertainment industry, require morality clauses. These rules bar participants from acting in a way that the company finds inappropriate in a way that can hurt their product. Generally…
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?
Of the many mundane activities we’ve stopped participating in over the last year, the handshake is... well, probably among the least important of them. And yet, after so many months of going without the once-routine motions of reaching out our fleshy little digits so they can be enclosed within another’s, a virtual…
Confession time: The selection schema for the games we play on the A.V. Club Twitch channel is often a shockingly un-scientific process, boiling down, roughly, to, “What do we really want to play right now?” Which both explains why our stream is once again running a day late this week (due to press embargoes) and why…
In 2009, video game publisher THQ advertised an instantly forgettable mini-game collection called Big Family Games by trying to send a working, 24 karat gold-plated Nintendo Wii to Queen Elizabeth II. Big Liz didn’t end up taking possession of the console, which means that the golden Wii drifted through filthy…
Nintendo has a habit of being slow to adopt popular trends in the video game community, with the company usually preferring to hold back and develop its own wacky technology until those popular trends have become impossible to ignore. HD graphics and disc-based media are two notable examples (though Nintendo has gone…
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?
Fans of our A.V. Club Twitch broadcasts might have noticed that we missed yesterday’s regular stream. There’s a very simple reason for that: We really wanted to stream Housemarque’s new, beautiful, and brutal sci-fi roguelike Returnal this week, and the embargo on video footage wasn’t up until today.
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?
It’s been 24 years since the original release of Square’s SaGa Frontier, one of the stranger entries in the company’s juggernaut run across the PlayStation One era. To celebrate the milestone, Square Enix is gearing up to release a glossy new Remastered version of the game on PS4, Switch, PC, and mobile systems,…
As reported by Deadline, Epic Games—the video game publisher behind Fortnite and current owner of Rocket League and Fall Guys, among other things—has just raised a new $1 billion in funding, bringing its current evaluation to $28.7 billion. Disney paid $4 billion for Lucasfilm in 2012, so Epic could essentially buy …
Roblox, the online game platform pretty much every kid is glued to right now, is advertised with the tagline, “Powering Imagination.” This seems to bear out for at least one user, whose imagination was powered up well enough that they decided to fake press credentials in order to ask questions during recent White…
During the first great Pokéwave of the late ‘90s, Martin “Ztorm” Culpepper accepted the grave responsibility of teaching the world’s youth how to survive the blood and fur-littered battlefields of the eternal Pokémon wars. Determined to shepherd his pupils to glorious victory, Zstorm created training videos filled not…
Those wild-eyed mavericks over at Sony have gone and done it again: Bloomberg reports today that the entertainment giant is gearing up to take its chances on one heck of a longshot bet, apparently putting into motion plans to remake obscure and niche video game title The Last Of Us. Those of you not tuned into the…
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?
The most shocking thing to happen in the first 10 hours of Outriders, the new online shooter from Square Enix and People Can Fly, is that it actually, suddenly, gets interesting for a minute. After hours of gunning down hundreds of identical assholes and generic space monsters, grinding your character’s admittedly…
Hey, do you like being absolutely terrified and anxious at the same time? Do you want to not be able to sleep for the near future? Then boy, do we have a video game for you. Host became one of the most talked-about indie films made in the Covid-19 pandemic, showing that low-budget movies can actually be scary as hell…
One of the Nintendo Switch’s most notable features is that it can easily be used as either a home video game console or as a portable, handheld device. Naturally, someone has decided to go ahead and destroy that capability by painstakingly creating a functioning Switch that’s about as big as a grown person.
It’s been almost 10 years since Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl released the original The Binding Of Isaac, evolving a quickly-assembled game jam game into one of the heralds of a new style of indie gaming: The roguelike. Since its original release, Isaac has devoured thousands upon thousands of hours of human…
In February, we reported that the traditional live and in-person version of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (a.k.a. “E3,” the annual event where nerdy celebrities and overworked video game journalists can come together to learn about the latest advancements in Assassin’s Creed technology) had been canceled for the…
The pleasures of the Monster Hunter franchise can be kind of difficult to describe to outsiders. Sure, there’s the obvious stuff—hit dinosaur with hammer, take parts from dinosaur to make better and shinier hammer, hit meaner dinosaur with above, repeat—but the ritual drudgery that Capcom’s series revels in as a…
When we first covered Sinfeld Chronicles—a horror game based on Seinfeld and other New York City-set comedies—it had already established itself as one of the more delightfully strange pop culture send-ups we’d ever seen. Now, with the release of a new, real fever dream of a trailer for (the now-renamed) Sinfeld…
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?
The history of both mandated Zoom calls and playing video games online is filled with triumphs and tragedies. For every lawyer who accidentally activates a kitten filter in virtual court and debauched Gilbert Gottfried remote bat mitzah there’s a Toobin. For every Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gaming fundraiser or voting…
We’ve been fascinated by the look of Hidden Fields’s Mundaun ever since the folk-horror game was announced 8 months ago, sporting a pencil-sketched aesthetic, a lot of very moody villagers, and a whole host of scarecrow monsters that don’t look any less terrifying for being made of straw. Now that the game’s finally…
There was a time—from roughly April of 1989 until the mobile revolution of the last 10 years—when “mobile gaming” meant something very different to the vast majority of people. Specifically, it meant Nintendo. Even as the Console Wars raged at home, the Japanese giant’s iron-fingered, battery-powered grip on the…
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?
Twenty-five years after it burst onto the original PlayStation—dragging a whole host of undead imitators in its wake—explaining the effect of Capcom’s original Resident Evil remains anything but straightforward. How did a first-time directorial effort–one that reportedly came close to being canceled, and had lead…
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?
We may not necessarily love all the ways the success of Bungie’s Destiny has re-aligned the priorities of big-budget gaming over the last near-decade—the rise of the “games as service” model, the baseline assumption that any shooter must have a co-op multiplayer component built into it (complete with plenty of…
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?
Although online gaming has been an important aspect of the hobby for decades, it’s rarely been more important than now, as social distancing—and please, for the love of all that’s holy, keep social distancing, folks—forces us to find ways to connect with our friends and loved ones across increasingly vast spaces.…
For Los Angeles’ Electronic Entertainment Expo (a.k.a. “E3,” a.k.a. the thing where they announce a bunch of new video game stuff), the COVID-19 pandemic came at a particularly inopportune time. The event had been desperately fighting off irrelevance for years, as video streaming technology improved right alongside…
Big news in the world of Pocket Monsters today, as The Pokémon Company announced ambitious new plans for its long-running pet-war franchise. As with, like, all video game news these days, the big announcements were largely backwards looking, albeit in an ambitious sort of way, as the partially-Nintendo-owned company…
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?