Switch

There seems to be a mounting consensus that the Wii U was a failure. It wasn’t. Sure, the console might not have lived up to the exceedingly lofty expectations set by its predecessor, but the ...

Originally released for the Nintendo 3DS in 2014, Sonic Powered’s Skypeace had one standout attribute: the game was priced at 99 cents. Four years later, the title has made its way onto Nintendo’s newest system, ...

Eliminating mundane duties like take-offs, reconnaissance, and landings, dogfighting games permit players to jump right into the action. Unfortunately, there’s not all that many of them anymore, with titles like Ace Combat, Crimson Skies, and ...

With a hardnosed punishment for dying and existence which hinges on the use of randomized items, Rogue-like mechanics play into our primal instincts for survival. As such, it’s not surprising that so many games integrate ...

While 1987’s Double Dragon wasn’t the first beat ‘em up game (Irem’s Kung Fu Master arrived two years earlier), it did help to push the genre forward. Instead of feeling like a stiff side-scroller, Double ...

Japanese role-playing games are often criticized for following formula too closely. But all too often, the person making this claim hasn’t played an entry in Gust’s Atelier series. After nineteen iterations across a twenty-year span, ...

When Pinball FX 2 was first launched in 2010, the franchise earned a passionate legion of fans thanks to its technical prowess. While eschewing recreations of real-world machines, the series offered a prolific roster of ...

In the grand pantheon of arcade shooters, few are more prestigious than 1981’s Defender. While the William Electronics-developed coin-op wasn’t an immediate success (creator Eugene Jarvis has blamed the groundbreaking five-button control method), the game proved ...

To combat stagnancy in the crime, thriller, and romance genres, the directors of Pulp Fiction, Memento, and (500) Days of Summer shirked chronology. Each film ditched the traditional, linear approach to storytelling, inviting innovation by ...

Rudyard Kipling once wrote that a person can’t have enough “red wine, books, or ammunition”. Although the adage was conceived long before gaming was envisioned, the third element accurately encapultes the thrill of a twin-stick ...