“This isn’t an article about the evils of free to play manipulation to get you to spend money. This is about how we can target you, because we (and our partners) know everything about you.” Some brutal reading at TouchArcade

Podcast: D.C.’s Wary Embrace of Video Games

Although the trauma of congressional hearings in the 1990s and early 2000s over video games published by studios as diverse as Nintendo and Rockstar remains fresh to many game designers, the perception of games and their players is slowly changing in the nation’s capital. On the most recent episode of my podcast, Shall We Play…

Final Fantasy Adventure Gets Yet Another Remake

Final Fantasy Adventure, which came out in 1991 for the Game Boy and was actually not a Final Fantasy game but instead the predecessor to Secret of Mana, got a remake in 2003 for the Game Boy Advance called Sword of Mana, which isn’t a strict remake but in fact overhauls just about everything from…

Five Video Games That Put My Children Right To Sleep

For some parents all it takes is a cuddle or a short story to send their little darlings into dreamland. Not me. I have to play video games to get the kids to go down. Poor me. Welcome to the second installment of BRB, Kids Are Screaming. It’s been three months since my last confession,…

Madden NFL 16’s Best Mode Almost Turns Football Into Hearthstone

Ten years ago, I wrote one of the most wrongheaded articles of my career. In a review of 2005’s Blitz: The League for Slate, I predicted that Madden NFL’s then-new monopoly on the National Football League’s license for video game football would restore variety to the virtual gridiron. Surely the single-minded pursuit of NFL realism…