Hard Vacuum

For the fourth year in a row, we're comparing E3 hype to gaming reality. Sony was the subject of our first…

What do you want out of a video game? What should you hold against a video game, and what should you let slide?

Commander Shepard, the hero of the popular Sci-Fi franchise Mass Effect, can be a man or a woman; the player…

The House of Blue Leaves fight scene in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 1 is one of the most gruesome scenes in…

Twenty years ago today, Sega released the first Sonic the Hedgehog videogame. It was a joyous occasion—and it was…

Sitting there with my DualShock in my lap, I struggled to recall the last time a video game blindsided me this hard,…

How would Tim write a Super Mario novel? Who is the David Mamet of video games? Why are gamers so inarticulate? What…

A globe of fire temporarily replaced a portion of the blackness on the horizon. The fire shimmered close to where my…

The motion controller wars start now.

You don't want me to try to describe the surreal galaxies of the first three worlds of Super Mario Galaxy 2, so how…