This year didn’t see much in the way of original gaming content. Instead, developers chose to try to fix some of the problems they caused in previous years. Some of them even succeeded!

At its heart, World of Warcraft is the terminus of the hunter-gatherer instinct, the boundary marking the point where humanity’s basic need to accumulate and build meets technology’s victory over the difficulty our ancestors faced in these same tasks. More ...

Despite an unprecedented amount of child-centric safeguarding (NetDevil goes so far as to require avatar names be submitted for approval), LEGO Universe has the potential to become a gateway drug for MMOs. Wrapping countless hours of fetch quests and loot ...

Harmonix needed a gimmick to breathe life back into Rock Band, something to bring old-school fans back into the lucrative title-buying fold. Something that eats shame and craps thrown devil-horns like their first plastic guitars did back in 2005. Something ...

Fable III is a game sinking to the bottom of Lake Xbox, with the series’ future unconscious in the passenger seat and the guilty developers nowhere to be found.

If you were expecting Fallout: New Vegas to be a wasteland monomyth along the lines of its predecessor, think again. It's a Cormac McCarthy spaghetti western that draws liberally from some of the older Fallout mythos to gets back to ...

Game developer Turbine has recently raised the bar on desperation moves by offering a majority of its flagship title on a free-to-play basis. Instead of charging a flat monthly rate for access (with an additional upfront cost to purchase the ...

Let me tell you about a little game called Arcanum. Released by Troika Games back in 2001, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura was Troika’s manifesto, a sprawling isometric steampunk rebuke to Troika’s former masters at Interplay, whose meddling in ...

That opening cut scene is the apex of the game—the rest of The Other M is a disjointed, unsatisfying mess.

Eleven million sold or not, the specifics of a franchise that nearly stole away an entire generation of South Korean gamers is surprisingly hard to pin down for the uninitiated. “Warcraft in space” doesn’t make sense to those unfamiliar with ...

Summer will soon be at an end, and if you ask me, it can’t come fast enough. The only thing worse than the unbearable conditions outside is the tepid wave of crap that gamers had to wade through this summer ...

The years have been kind to digital distribution. It’s been the brass ring among forward-thinking industry figures for a long time, but digital distribution has come into its own over the last few years, leveraging broadband’s ever-increasing market penetration to ...

Holy crap. Someone made a great Transformers game.

Side quests, missions from strangers, poker tournaments, impromptu duels after being caught cheating during poker tournaments, impromptu desert excursions while on the run from the law after killing a man in a duel after being caught cheating in a poker ...

Avalanche Studios’ Just Cause 2 is the latest in a line of modern-day open-world “Machiavelli by way of John McClane” simulators. The good people at Avalanche knew that they were getting into a dangerously oversaturated field (having perpetuated said over-saturation ...