Physical media collectors love to repeat that a disc can't be deleted from a server and stays with its owner forever. Optical media doesn't know about that promise, and it falls apart on its own...

Localizing science fiction isn't really translation – it's more like inventing names from scratch. A term that sounds mundane and technical in English can easily turn into pompous nonsense straight out of a kids cartoon...

The concept of a "weak computer" has drifted so far over the past decade that hardly anyone agrees on where the line sits anymore. Machines with 32GB of memory, eight-core Xeons, and a GTX 1080...

Video games rarely punish you for winning. Usually it's the opposite: credits roll, you get a reward, your allies are happy, and there's a sense of accomplishment. So it hit one player especially hard, having...

Remasters almost always try to sell the same idea: what was dark and murky is now bright and clean. The problem is that in games, "dark and murky" is often not a bug – it's...

The gap between a screen hero and the person playing him is usually measured by the size of the PR budget. Sometimes, though, it works the other way around, and an actor turns out to...

Mods for The Elder Scrolls Skyrim have no ceiling – only the limits of your hardware and your taste. You start by upgrading grass textures, and a year later you've got 1800 plugins installed, Helgen...

Melee combat in a post-apocalyptic wasteland already sounds like something for people who've given up on caution. Going up against raiders and super mutants with your bare fists, on survival difficulty, where a single burst...

Physics in Bethesda games rarely behaves the way developers intended. But sometimes two harmless elements combine into something that sends an enemy flying past the horizon faster than they can process what just happened. The...

Any attempt to build a complete list of games from an entire era ends the same way – someone always finds a gap the size of Homeworld. And when the topic is Windows 95 and...

A joke made for future hardware doesn't stay a joke forever. Developers in the 90s hid gags in places they figured nobody would reach for another twenty years, and then technology caught up and spilled...

There's a special kind of discovery that only very old games can offer: a player who's logged a couple thousand hours in a beloved title suddenly stumbles on content they've never seen before. Not a...

A good measure of how alive a game still is isn't its launch-day scores but how many people argue about its mechanics from memory two decades later. EA action games based on Peter Jackson trilogy...

Game technology keeps improving at breakneck speed, but writing departments don't get the same treatment – if anything, they're usually the first thing studios cut. Developers can render individual skin pores, simulate fabric physics down...

Some quests are memorable for their story, and some are memorable for making players grab a notebook. "Thank Me Later" falls into the second category: two dozen identical purple stones scattered across Skyrim without a...

Coming up with new cards when you're making a deckbuilder must be tough. You have to keep finding inventive ways to push players and the game without breaking it. But for the Slay the Spire...

Character creators have basically become the unofficial exam for any game with a portrait system: shape up some nameless barbarian and everything looks fine, but try to recreate your own face, and the whole thing...

Software for a controller that can ban users sounds like a contradiction in terms. A program whose only job is to make vibration, adaptive triggers, and lighting work on a DualSense in PC games shouldn't...

Refusing to try a game is rarely about taste. More often it comes down to cold calculation: someone already knows how much time, patience, and money a game will demand, and decides not to open...

Any open-world game eventually tempts players into an experiment: what if you just sprint straight to the final location? Skip the quest chain, ignore every clue, and head directly for wherever the story would take...