Console games used to be designed for friends and families to play together in their living rooms. Split-screen functionality, with as many as four players using the same screen, was a standard feature. XBox Live launched in 2002, and games haven’t been the same since. Online party joining and voice chat freed game developers from …
This is the year 2019. We stream movies and TV shows in 4k, back up photographs to the cloud, take part in video conferences when we work from home, and live-stream video updates about our lives. Oh, and we play video games. We play them online with the help of clunky antiquated hardware—an Xbox, a …
It’s hard to believe that many gamers today—especially console gamers—have never experienced a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. The labyrinthine systems and infinite grind at the core of The Elder Scrolls Online are familiar to anyone who cruised the pixelated forests of Everquest or World of Warcraft on a PC. These and other MMORPG arrangements—the …
There’s a simple reason many gamers refuse to loot. It takes you out of the action and into inertia. You open a barrel, for example, and it contains an axe. You closely examine it, and then compare it with your equipped axe. Yours is better. Unsatisfied, you open another barrel. You find a gem. Hurrah! …
If you’re like me and you didn’t play games as a child, picking up a controller can be a daunting experience. I could find the window defogging button on a rental car faster than the L1 button on a controller. The flashing colors and explosions of light on the screen were as inscrutable as a …
Fortnite: Save the World is the PvE component of the cultural phenomenon known as Fortnite. As adults in our 30s, jaded and out of the loop, we wanted nothing to do with a game beloved by children and millennials. We’re all familiar with (and sick of hearing about) Fortnite’s slick building interface, addictive pickaxe-looting playstyle, …
In Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker, teams of four fight to the death or in missions involving the manga’s villains, heroes, and lovable tailed beasts. Ninjas jump and dodge through the air across sandy cliffs and cloud-drenched towers. They unleash fireballs, lightning attacks, and devastating special ninjutsu skills in conjunction with triangle-square weapon combos. The game …
Path of Exile was released for PS4 on March 26th, and we’ve been enjoying it for the last month. We can’t resist a game crawling with mobs and flashing with glorious seizure-inducing skill animations. It’s hard to believe Path of Exile is free to play—we would gladly have paid $40 for a game of this …
ARK: Survival Evolved is an open-world sandbox survival game that can be played solo, privately with friends, or on public dedicated servers. It has an enormous die-hard fan base who have sunk thousands of hours into the game on every platform available. When a game has an army of supporters that outnumbers the North Korean …
Borderlands 2 was the first co-op game we played together. Before we set up two Playstations and gamesharing, the Borderlands franchise offered a split-screen sanctuary to co-op gamers such as ourselves. We enjoyed Borderlands 2 so much that we played Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel and paid for Playstation Now to play the original Borderlands. The original …
