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Destiny proved that always-online RPGs could work on consoles, provided the MMO-style experience was grounded by solid gameplay. Activision’s space epic FPS took the inherent fun of blasting aliens in Halo, then gave players a reason to stick around for hundreds of hours with endlessly replayable quests, addictive progression, and …

The best scares from the nineties The ’90s. When a horror movie won the best picture Oscar. When the Japanese sent their vengeful spirits worldwide. When the found footage phenomenon took off. When cool directors like David Lynch and David Fincher decided to give horror a new respectability, and new …

Best of the best We threw a lot of shade around with our Worst Box Art of 2015 lineup, so it’s only fair that we give credit where credit’s due to the best boxes of last year. Thankfully, narrowing this list down was much easier than the mind-rending onslaught of …

Jump in The Xbox One has made a terrific turnaround since its initial unveiling in 2013. Halo, Tomb Raider, Rare Replay, backwards compatibility, and tons of value-packed bundles make owning an Xbox One more attractive than ever. The Xbox One is a complex system, filled with way more features and …

Devil’s Third shouldn’t exist. Six years in development, bounced between three publishers, and shifting between four different engines in the process, the first game from notorious developer Tomonobu Itagaki since Ninja Gaiden 2 finally came to Nintendo Wii U this past week. Was it worth the wait? That’s a complicated …

Warning: Story spoilers below Croteam is a small, independent studio best known for a series of games called Serious Sam; first-person shooters that harken back to a simpler era of games, where all you needed were big guns, bigger explosions, and headless goons that charge screaming at you full bore …

Playing protagonist musical chairs It’s a real feat for a game to actually surprise you. We’ve entered an age where every character reveal, every playable mode, multiplayer feature, or gameplay quirk is carefully calculated and announced at the most opportune moment to build hype to an absolute fever pitch. By …

Until now, every VR demo I’d ever tried felt like a ride at a theme park; a fleeting burst of excitement built to run the same exact way every time. None of them lasted more than a few minutes, because anything longer would’ve threatened to ruin the magic when the …

Miss Oswald has faced the raven and embarked on her final adventure, which leaves a Companion vacancy in the TARDIS. The Doctor clearly has some business he needs to settle back home, but once that’s sorted he’ll be looking for someone new to rattle around the universe with. Given New …

Making progress is a lot like making moonshine: damned difficult to see exactly what’s going to happen while you’re actually doing it. Simply, it often takes hindsight to truly appreciate progress. When it comes to video game design, few single developments have been considered quite such major shifts as that …