Hail, ye Nintendo faithful! Loyal folk that you are, a Wii U now rests beneath your TV. The console’s now been around for a couple years, and it’s amassed a fairly lineup stable of good games.

The first and sometimes the only thing people say about Dark Souls is that it’s hard. Really hard, migraine hard, ready-to-shoot-yourself challenging. The players say it (“I can’t take this!”). The people who are scared to play it, say it: “Wait, that’s the one that’s really hard, right?”

Those black suits. Those weapons. Martial arts. The image of the ninja is rooted more in fiction than fact. Everything you think you know is probably more “wrong” than “right”.

Being Australian, I don’t have much time for baseball. That doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy baseball video games, though. Especially when they’re from the future.

You have an Xbox 360 controller waiting for you in your living room and a console hungry to entertain you. It’s an older console, sure. But it still has a ton of great games.

The PlayStation Vita is something of an oddity—a pricy, powerful portable gaming console adrift in a sea of smartphones, touchscreen controls, and inexpensive app-store games. All the same, we have a fondness for Sony’s beefy handheld, and the many unusual games you can play on it.

Metal Gear is a series that’s (at least partly) about giant mecha and Cold War drama. It may be pure fantasy, but in the early 1960s, the US did actually build a giant two-armed military machine: the “Beetle”.

If Football—that is, the American National Football League football—used the same naming scheme as “Dungeons & Dragons,” we’d call it “Beer Commercials & Cheerleaders.”

I run the Fine Art feature on Kotaku because it’s an aspect of the creative process that I have a big interest in, and the utmost respect for. Indeed, there was a point in my life where I hit a fairly substantial crossroads, and if I hadn’t gone down the path that led me here, I’d have ended up pursuing a career in…

Let’s take a look at video games’ favorite scene from the Star Wars series: the battle of Hoth. Developers have been trying for over 30 years to get it right.

This is the Darth Vader we all know. But the character might not have been the same if famous Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune had taken the role.

For over twenty years, a video game has tormented mums, dads and office workers the world over. And it has nothing to do with orcs, racecars or terrorists.

On December 16, 1997, an episode of the then-unstoppable Pokémon animated series was broadcast in Japan. Barely thirty minutes later, nearly 700 children were on their way to hospital.

Aside from the obvious connection—there are famous football video games—football and gaming have another strange association: a long history of companies like Nintendo and Sega appearing as shirt sponsors for some of the biggest clubs in the world.

A good video game menu is like a good roadie: It stays out of the way. But still, far too many menus waste far too much of our time. People want to play games, not mess around in menus!

We’re ten years removed from the last time Star Trek was on TV, and, aside from free-floating rumors, we’re no closer to getting a new TV show.

Let me tell you a story. It involves an arcade game, the CIA, epilepsy, suicide and one of the greatest urban legends in all of video gaming.