Category: Feature

Harry Potter is truly the fandom that lived. Hogwarts Legacy, the latest big-budget entry in the 26-year-old franchise, grossed over $1 billion as of May, selling 15 million copies — despite a number of outlets declining to cover it, citing Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling’s history of making transphobic statements....

Nowadays, Teen Titans’ rise can feel a bit inevitable. After all, it came on the heels of anime access in the U.S. moving from VHS tapes at your local comic or video stores to the mainstream. The Sci-Fi Channel’s Saturday Anime block introduced an entire generation to masterpieces like Akira,...

When a PlayStation 5 controller comes down the assembly line at Corsair’s Duluth, Georgia, warehouse, it’s disassembled to make way for new parts carefully installed by SCUF Gaming’s assembly team. SCUF’s bespoke PS5 controllers start at $200 and go up from there, upgrading Sony’s standard DualSense design with new grips,...

It looks like something out of an eldritch fantasy horror, perhaps a Diablo game: a modestly sized chest covered in sharp, bony extrusions, gnarled ligaments, and twisted veins, all rendered in a pale, ghostly, fleshlike color. It’s repulsively organic, but also has an occult, ceremonial air. In fact, this cursed...

It’s been a long road for fans of Black Dynamite since the uproarious Blaxploitation comedy burst onto screens in 2009. And it’s been an even longer road for star and co-writer Michael Jai White, who has spent much of the intervening decade and a half pulling together the movie’s long-awaited...

When Star Wars hit theaters in 1977, fans had no idea it would be a trilogy, let alone remain a household name 45 years later. But they knew they had seen something special, and they wanted more. So they created their own extended universe. Fan zines with art, fiction, and...

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a massively detailed game, and players of all kinds are bound to want to look something about it up at some point. Whether they’re searching for weapon stats or class builds, or trying to make their Astarion x Reader fanfic as accurate as possible, they’re probably...

I assumed Final Fantasy 14 glamour hunters — the players who devote hundreds of hours to collecting pieces of gear and in-game wardrobe pieces in Square Enix’s MMORPG — were an unapproachable group of players. From the outside, they seem capable of clearing any and all raids, no matter the...

Gran Turismo and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem have one big thing in common that certainly wasn’t planned: Both movies suggest that playing a lot of racing games will make you an awesome real-world driver. In TMNT, extensive experience with Forza Horizon prepares mutant shut-in Donatello to drive a...

Chess has always been a part of Henry Lien’s life. He’s played it since he was 5 years old or so, his tiny hands just big enough to hold the pieces. He grew up in a part of the Bay Area, Marin, which is known for producing a few excellent...