Last night, I started playing through Max Payne on Kotaku’s Twitch channel. Returning to the 2001 game after so many years reveals a smart and surprisingly funny game full of experimentation. And, of course, kickass bullet-time gunfights.

It’s a late night shift and things are quiet. That nosy journalist who always says she’s working on a book took her espresso and sat down in the corner. A dapper looking elf wanders in with his literal succubus of a girlfriend. It’s gonna be a slow night in Coffee Talk, but that’s fine.

I was recently on vacation and away from Monster Hunter: World while I enjoyed the wonders of California, and now that I’m home, I’m catching up on new quests. The largest and, to me, the most exciting of the game’s recent developments is the addition of Final Fantasy XIV’s Behemoth. While the fight can be frustrating…

Video games are an expensive hobby, often demanding a great deal of trust whenever you buy a new one. Buying a game winds up being a number of things. A purchase is a gamble. It’s an encouragement. It’s a participation in exploitation. And it’s a conversation with the many people who brought you the game.

Fans of Telltale’s The Walking Dead have watched protagonist Clementine grow from a small child into a confident teenager. The final installment in the series, The Final Season, thrusts Clem into new responsibilities and focuses on building a small community in the midst of the zombie apocalypse.

The Final Season’s…

I’m flying across the country tomorrow and need help keeping calm while I travel. Luckily, the Nintendo Switch has added dozens of exploration-focused titles to distract me, including the 2D Soulslike Salt and Sanctuary. Like Hollow Knight, it’s a game that fares much better on a portable console.

I was sick this week and decided to play Fallout 4 to relax. I’m not 100% on board with Fallout 4—I find its emphasis on action over roleplaying frustrating—but it’s full of fun characters. One of them, the robotic detective Nick Valentine, isn’t just one of the best character in the game. He’s one of the best in the…

Sea of Thieves is full of jerk players and giant sharks, but the game has never felt all that dangerous. The latest update, Cursed Sails, mostly corrects that. The addition of terrifying skeleton threats, battles packed with cursed cannonballs, and a brand new player ship brings a welcome sense of urgency to a game…

Most players will take days to complete The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, but speedrunners do it much faster. Thanks to a year full of new discoveries and attempts by hard-working runners, The Wind Waker HD has been completed, for the first time ever, in under an hour.

Unless you’re running tons of side missions, it can be difficult to raise funds in No Man’s Sky. If you’re not interested in farming or running errands, you might want to consider investing in cryo-pumps. They’re easy to craft and sell for obscene prices.

The first thing I did in No Man’s Sky after the Next update…

Octopath Traveler’s battle music has all of the zest you could want, brimming with quick drumbeats and arpeggiated chords. One simple trick ties together the game’s story and boss battles, creating amazing musical cues that make each new encounter even more exciting.

Octopath Traveler assigns each character an…

The YouTube channel Boundary Break usually checks out what goes on out of bounds in video games, but their latest video breaks down some of Nintendo’s most well-known hardware to show secret messages and exactly what made your Zapper sound so weird.