Modern big-budget role-playing games have largely mastered the art of convenience. From glowing compass breadcrumbs to quest markers dotting every square inch of a mini-map, modern design rarely lets the player get lost—or fail.
Honor Games and publisher Axyos Games have taken the opposite tack with YAR: Forgotten Throne.
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When a thriller series crosses the thirty-book threshold, you usually know what you’re walking into. Fast-moving chapters, a chilling antagonist, snappy banter between Alex Cross and John Sampson, and a race against the clock across Washington, D.C. James Patterson perfected that formula decades ago. But every so often, an installment strips away the procedural armor and reminds you why this family mattered to readers in the first place.
The Family Cross is one of those books.
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Every once in a while, a retro rerelease drops that makes you realize just how unhinged—and intensely creative—the golden era of arcade games really was. Most people remember Capcom, Konami, and SNK dominating arcades in the 1990s, but across the Atlantic in Spain, a studio named Gaelco was cooking up their own distinctly wild brand of coin-op action.
Thanks to QUByte Interactive’s preservation efforts, two of Gaelco’s most eccentric cult arcade titles have arrived on Xbox under one banner: the Thunder Hoop Collection (QUByte Classics).
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Yesterday afternoon, I walked into the AMC to catch Clayface in Dolby Cinema, hoping for a decent comic-book-adjacent thriller. What I got instead completely shattered every expectation I had going in.
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If you’ve spent any time with two-wheeled racing games over the last decade, you know the genre can be a fickle beast. Milestone held the keys to the MXGP championship for years, delivering solid entries that often struggled to break free from feeling iterative. When Nacon and Artefacts Studio took over the reins and promised an Unreal Engine 5 ground-up rebuild, the motocross community held its collective breath.
After putting around thirty hours into MXGP 26 – The Official Game on Xbox Series X—eating my fair share of digital roost and picking my virtual rider out of the fencing at Matterley Basin—I’m ready to weigh in. Is this the generational leap off-road fans have been waiting for, or does it stall at the starting gate?
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Every once in a while, a movie comes along that feels like a minor miracle simply because it exists—and Coyote vs. Acme is that miracle wrapped in an Acme-brand stick of dynamite.
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Most modern platformers treat failure like an eraser. You mistime a dash over spikes, you misread a telegraph, you hear the crunch of death, and two seconds later you’re back at the checkpoint like nothing ever happened. It’s an unspoken contract between developer and player: practice until you execute perfection.
Peppered: An Existential Platformer (developed by Mostly Games and published by LynxByte Games) tears that contract in half and tosses it into an office recycling bin.
In this game, when you fail, the world doesn’t rewind. It just keeps rolling, taking notes on your humiliation and steering the narrative down an entirely different rabbit hole.
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I have a small confession to make: until late August, I had never actually watched the original The Fast and the Furious from beginning to end.
Sure, I knew the mythology. I’ve caught twenty-minute chunks on cable on lazy Sunday afternoons, I know all the “family” memes, and I know that Dom Toretto lives his life a quarter-mile at a time. But somehow, across two and a half decades, I just never sat down in the dark and let the whole story play out.
So when our local theater announced a 25th-anniversary re-release, I figured it was finally time to fix that blind spot. I grabbed a ticket for a late-August evening showing, expecting maybe a dozen nostalgic millennials scattered across empty rows.
Instead, the place was completely sold out.
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There is an undeniable magic to the brownstone steps of 123 Sesame Street. For generations, that corner of the neighborhood has represented warmth, curiosity, and community. With Sesame Street: Friends & Fun, developer Infinigon and publisher Outright Games bring that world to life in an interactive format that honors the television show’s legacy while delivering a genuinely delightful console experience.
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Over the past several months, as I’ve started exploring Buddhism, it has felt almost impossible to scroll through social media without encountering Thich Nhat Hanh. His gentle demeanor, clips of him walking with effortless presence, and bite-sized quotes on mindfulness seem to populate every corner of the internet. It’s easy to absorb those short, uplifting snippets and think you understand his message, but sitting down with an entire body of his work is a completely different experience.
Being Peace was my very first time reading one of his books, and to put it simply, it was incredible.
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