For most people, the words role-playing game conjure images of sweaty Dungeons & Dragons-obsessed weirdos, wearing cloaks and screaming “Lightning bolt!” at each other. But even non-RPG players gave the genre a try when Final Fantasy VII debuted back in 1997. The beautiful graphics and heart-tugging story made it an…

Native American heroes are a rare commodity in videogames. Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, released a decade ago, is the most prominent example. Now Turok finally has company. The best way to describe Prey is “Doom meets Cherokee mysticism.” And while most critics are fawning over this first-person action/horror title, don’t believe…

For comic geeks, an X-Men game that promises to fill in the backstory between movies sounds hotter than a date with Jean Grey. Finally, we get to discover what Wolverine has been up to between films — besides winning Tony Awards as alter ego Hugh Jackman, of course. That’s the…

If the creepy, self-flagellating albino monk in The Da Vinci Code really wanted to suffer, he’d drop his flesh-shredding cat-o’-nine-tails, pick up a controller, and play The Da Vinci Code videogame. It’s that bad. Now it can be told: The Da Vinci Code game is one of the crappiest, crap-lousy…

If you’ve gazed at a record player and imagined you could scratch as well as the next guy, you’re not alone. Guitars, drums, bass — all these instruments appear to require real skill or at least blisters. But who can’t drop a needle? The problem is, cutting beats and transplanting…

With scrappy warblers like Kellie Pickler and Bucky Covington trying to out-twang each other on American Idol, country music is hotter than a corn dog at a county fair. One reason is that almost anybody can sing it. Even mopes who argue that NASCAR isn’t a real sport have been…

As celebrity career paths go, Sonic the Hedgehog has been tiptoeing dangerously close to Baldwin Brothers territory lately. Last year brought the embarrassing Shadow the Hedgehog, a dark title in which Sonic’s brooding alter ego wielded a gun, earning it the unflattering nickname “Grand Theft Hedgehog.” Still, at first blush,…

Maybe it’s because we’re hung up on our past more than ever — riding a wave of giddy, nonstop nostalgia and absorbing anything that will help recapture the bliss of the good ol’ days — but Capcom’s Mega Man X Collection feels more fun than ever. The follow-up to last…

Movie-based videogames have a well-deserved reputation for sucking. Ever since Atari’s E.T. — a game so ill-conceived that thousands of unsold cartridges were dumped en masse in the desert, creating the crappiest buried treasure of all time — Hollywood tie-ins have bombed big-time. Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game…

2005 may be the last hurrah for this generation’s aging consoles, but sugar, they’re going down swingin’. The PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Game Cube age gracefully, pushing their hardware to the limit one last time and developing some brilliant games in the process — from tear-jerking, giant-slaying adventure to piss-in-your-pants…

With a Blade TV show in the works from Spike TV and powder-faced My Chemical Romance fans carrying the goth torch at Hot Topic, this would seem the perfect time to resurrect the Castlevania franchise. Castlevania debuted 20 years ago on the Nintendo Entertainment System and was an instant classic,…

If Hollywood wants to learn from the videogame industry — which outgrossed the box office last year — it should pay careful attention to Shadow of the Colossus, a game with the epic scale of a summer blockbuster but the emotional heart of an indie flick. Shadow is brought to…

Deep down, we all want money for nothing and chicks for free. Back in 1985, when Dire Straits first revealed this eternal truth, it seemed that any goofball with a DayGlo headband could pour himself into package-hugging spandex and become a rock star. But it turned out that noodling on…

We’ve all been kicked in the junk by Marvel superheroes before. Watching Elektra was like two hours of nut-pummeling by a relentless, sac-hating donkey. But superhero films — even bad ones — gross bazillions of dollars. So it’s no surprise that Marvel is cashing in with a slew of licensed…

Last year’s Katamari Damacy was so quirky, it should have been subtitled “Marketed to Stoners.” Its star, a little green prince, was forced to roll a giant gravity ball to atone for the sins of his father, the King of the Cosmos, who had gotten drunk one day and knocked…