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5 Things I Love About Lord of the Rings: Gollum

5 Things I Love About Lord of the Rings: Gollum

Tears of the Kingdom: Brilliant and Frustrating

Tears of the Kingdom: Brilliant and Frustrating

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What Your Favorite Mainline Final Fantasy Game Says About You

By Jef Rouner
Feb 27, 2023

This year is the 25th Anniversary of the debut of Final Fantasy as a series. I’ve been obsessed with it since I first read about it in Nintendo Power and have played every mainline title at least once. So today, let’s look at what your favorite game says about you...
Opinion: How the Hogwarts Legacy Boycott Did and Didn’t Fail

By Jef Rouner
Feb 24, 2023

It’s safe to say that the backlash against the latest Wizarding World video game, Hogwarts Legacy, didn’t impact the sales enough to matter. The game continues to sell extremely well, a fact that every horrible person on Facebook feels the need to scream about in the comment sections of gaming...
5 Games That Should NOT Get TV Shows

By Jef Rouner
Feb 14, 2023

The success of HBO’s The Last of Us is likely to send producers scrambling to replicate the process with another hot ticket Triple A gaming franchise. While I’m always excited to see gaming get its due in other media, interactive entertainment doesn’t always translate well onto the screen. Here are...
The Last of Us Shows Why Easy Modes Are Important

By Jef Rouner
Feb 3, 2023

If you’ve been on the internet over the last week, it’s impossible to miss the buzz around HBO’s The Last of Us. The adaptation of the hit survival horror game is wowing fans and critics, particularly with the episode “Long, Long Time.” It’s also a perfect example of why games...
The Us-Like: Sony’s Exhaustive New Brand

By Jef Rouner
Dec 30, 2022

When I put out the Games of the Year list for 2022, there were two notable omissions: Horizon Forbidden West and God of War: Ragnarök. It’s not because they were terrible games. It’s because Sony Interactive Entertainment has gone all in on a very specific type of game and it’s...
Our 2022 Games of the Year

By Jef Rouner
Dec 13, 2022

There were some incredible video games that came out in 2022, and we did our best to play them all. Here are the five titles we felt deserved Game of the Year. Elden Ring From Software is well known for turning out exceptional games, so expectations were high when they...
Can Gaming Radicalize People to the Left?

By Jef Rouner
Sep 22, 2022

It’s become well established in social science literature that gaming has a problem when it comes to far right radicalization. It’s not that hard to understand why. Shooters with jingoist themes remain a very popular genre. Like other geek fandoms, far-right extremists have dedicated a fair amount of time to...
Is The Last of Us PS5 Rebuild Worth It?

By Jef Rouner
Sep 1, 2022

Developer Naughty Dog and Publisher Sony are releasing a PlayStation 5 rebuild of their seminal gaming classic The Last of Us, which first came out in 2013. The new version takes advantage of everything the latest consoles have to offer, essentially turbocharging one of the greatest games of all time...
5 Ways to Fix the Final Boss Fight in Elden Ring

By Jef Rouner
Aug 17, 2022

I finally beat Elden Ring after roughly 90 hours, and I’d estimate that 5 percent of that playtime was me screaming at the final boss, the Elden Beast, for being complete and utter bullshit. I’m by no means the first to say this, but the endgame of Elden Ring has...
Stray is the Most Delightful Game of 2022

By Jef Rouner
Jul 18, 2022

Ever since developer BlueTwelve Studio announced Stray at the Future of Gaming event two years ago, it’s been one of the most hotly expected games on everyone’s radar. The premise was simple: you’re a cat wandering around a dystopia, solving puzzles like a cross between Homeward Bound and City of...
Opinion: Of Course Ted Cruz is a Pay-for-Play Gamer

By Jef Rouner
Jun 23, 2022

On a recent episode of his podcast, The Verdict, Senator Ted Cruz he voiced his support for the bane of all video gamers’ existences: loot boxes. Loot boxes are a gambling mechanic that has taken over the industry as a money-making scam. Like a slot machine, they promise big rewards...
Which Video Game Character Has the Highest Salary?

By Jef Rouner
May 2, 2022

Video game characters may be the acme of escapism, but most of them do still have jobs within their own worlds. Which ones are paid the most? Online gaming site Solitaired did some number crunching to see who the biggest earner in the gamesphere is. Their pick for highest earner...
I Don’t Believe for a Second Hogwarts Legacy Won’t Eventually Have Microtransactions

By Jef Rouner
Mar 30, 2022

Hogwarts Legacy, the upcoming game based on J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World, got a dramatic State of Play reveal showing off some of its features, and like all things Harry Potter it was immediately a subject of controversy. There are lots of reasons to pass on Hogwarts Legacy when it comes...
Opinion: How “Git Gud” Is Ruining the Country

By Jef Rouner
Mar 4, 2022

The latest From Software title, Elden Ring, is out now. The developer is famous for its incredibly punishing difficulty in their games, and every new release comes with a very tired argument about whether there should be an easy mode. On one side are gamers who would like to experience...
Breaking Up With Final Fantasy VI After Pixel Remaster

By Jef Rouner
Mar 3, 2022

Since Final Fantasy VI was released in 1994, I’ve bought it four times. Once on the original SNES when it was still called Final Fantasy III, twice on the PlayStation on both disc and the online store, and once again for the Game Boy Advance version that had a new...
Review: Horizon Forbidden West

By Jef Rouner
Feb 14, 2022

To get it out of the way, Horizon Forbidden West is a beautiful, well-crafted game that has an engaging story and a brilliantly conceived post-apocalyptic world. The sequel to 2017’s critically-acclaimed Horizon Zero Dawn picks up shortly after the epic final battle with the Hades artificial intelligence. Now, former outcast...
Werewolves Versus The Wizard of Oz: Wolf Among Us is Back!

By Jef Rouner
Feb 11, 2022

Even for a company famous for making incredible video games out of licensed properties, Telltale’s The Wolf Among Us in 2013 was a high-water mark. Based on the popular DC comic series about mythical characters living secret lives in New York City, it was both a critical and financial success...
Best Video Games of 2021

By Jef Rouner
Dec 23, 2021

It’s been sort of a dismal year in gaming. Ongoing supply chain issues continue to stall the new generation of consoles and releases, and a series of exposes about the abuses rampant in the video game industry have made participating in a lot of it feel like a human rights...
Please Stop Putting Stamina Bars in Every Video Game

By Jef Rouner
Nov 23, 2021

Why do all my power fantasies lately want me to feel exhausted? Doesn’t life already do that enough? It’s time to end the ubiquitous presence of the stamina bar in every damn video game. The stamina bar isn’t a new concept by any means. Shadow of the Colossus used to...
Spiritfarer: How Being Broken Makes a Game More Beautiful

By Jef Rouner
Oct 8, 2021

Warning: Spoilers for Spiritfarer. Spiritfarer was released in 2020, but the updates that have continued to drop mean that just now in 2021 do I really feel the game is finished. Despite that, the title kind of remains slightly broken, but in a weird way it enhances the overarching themes...