In recent years, the world of video games has undergone a remarkable transformation. What was once considered a pastime for a niche group of enthusiasts has now blossomed into a…
Gary Bowser’s sentence spurns muddy waters for hardware law
Remember The Pirate Bay era of the internet before streaming services became widespread, when music was still paid per song or per album? When LimeWire was a central hub for…
The Consolidation of the video game industry
The video game industry is currently in a very unique point in its history. Microsoft announced plans to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, Jan. 18. After Activision’s numerous lawsuits…
Entering the hellscape of Mario Party Superstars
Charting from the ancient days of penny arcade cabinets to the modern era, decades of game designers have carefully deliberated and pined over the concept of punishment in video games….
Backbone is a detective game without deduction
Good detective games are few and far between. The deductive process of interrogating witnesses, gathering evidence and piecing together clues to arrive at a climactic whodunit conclusion is hard to…
Resident Evil 8 is a lesser Resident Evil
Resident Evil is one of the most unpredictable video game franchises ever. For every masterpiece in the series there is a game that is proportionally terrible; for every regressive misstep,…
Get outside…in Minecraft
Picture this: it’s summer 2011. You’ve just graduated from 7th grade, and you’ve got nothing to do. You’re sitting in front of the family computer—when there was still a “computer…
Watch these video game movies instead of the new Mortal Kombat
There is a new Mortal Kombat movie out on HBO Max, the streaming platform quickly making a name for itself as the service where big licensed blockbusters whose releases were…
We owe it all to Game Boy
When the original Game Boy was in development in the late 1980s, everyone at Nintendo of Japan thought it was a piece of shit. Internally, it was given the disparaging…
Persona 5 strikers makes me want to replay the original Persona 5
The original Persona 5 was released in April 2017 for the Playstation 3 and 4, during one of the most tense moments of the contemporary American culture wars. A few…
Grudge match
Grudge match is a regular series where two or more Vanguard contributors debate on a divisive issue in pop culture. This edition features a discussion between Opinion Editor Nick Gatlin…