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Photo credit: Amazon.com. Editor's Note: This review has some spoilers, but most of the important details are left intentionally vague. Vicious  by V.E. Schwab is a superhero story about Victor Vale and Eli Cardale, two college students who ostensibly have it all—both are handsome rich geniuses, so intellectually gifted that even their professors look to them for guidance. In reality, they are tortured by their compulsion to test the limits of reality. While researching their undergraduate thesis, Cardale and Vale discover that superpowers do exist, and that the key to unlocking them is to temporarily die. They soon succeed in their quest to gain powers for themselves, but things go drastically wrong, and former friends Victor and Eli become mortal enemies. As far as superhero origin stories go, this is perfect. Schwab is an excellent writer who employs short chapters and multiple perspectives to keep the reader interested. And if you're familiar with her  Shades of Magic...

Unbeknownst to me at the time, I began playing the Anno series as a kid way back in the 1990s. Back then I only knew it as "1602 A.D." given that is what it said on the $9.99 disc I got at Walmart (also, I clearly remember a British person saying "1602 AD" every time the game started). It's better known as Anno 1602, and as a seven year old it blew my mind with its complexity. I had always been a fan of real-time strategy games while growing up, and Anno 1602 was neat in that it made trading and maintaining an economy equal to warfare and fighting in importance.  My memories are hazy now, but I remember Anno 1602 being just a bit too complicated for me at the time. I managed to get surprisingly far into the game, but didn't get a handle on how to manage my soldiers while crafting a functioning economy with working supply chains. I would go on to play similar but slightly less complex games like the original Tropico, and from there the Anno games would recede...

Academia preaches diversity while at the same time  locking its doors to people of color . This problem has only become worse in recent years, with the academic job market crashing just as new cohorts of non-white PhD Candidates are beginning to seek tenure-track positions.  This has not been helped by the fact that universities have tried to tackle the issue of job scarcity with solutions that perpetuate academia's lack of diversity.  Indeed, in attempting to find solutions to the lack of available tenure-track positions, universities have barred people of color from the Ivory Tower and secured its status as a white institution. One example might be the growth of  "diversity" programs  adopted by several PhD-granting institutions — I put diversity in quotes because they are referring to  career  diversity rather than how the word is generally defined. These programs attempt to re-imagine the PhD, making them less about preparing students for academia ...

Editor's Note: This article was originally published in response to the release of NBA 2K22 back in 2021, but we feel it is still relevant today with the release of NBA 2K26. Thus, we have decided to re-release this archived content. Enjoy. --- I've been playing NBA 2K for years now, my first being 2K6 on the original Xbox. At the time, I thought it was a revelation compared to NBA Live. The movement, the shooting, the presentation, everything felt better and more realistic.  Flashforward to the present, and I think it's true that most people view NBA 2K as a stagnant franchise. It has no competition in the industry, and its yearly releases are glorified roster updates with a few boondoggles taped on here and there to encourage folks to spend money on microtransactions.  That said, at its core, the 2K series still deliverers a good basketball experience. This is primarily true of its offline singleplayer modes, like MyNBA, or what is usually called "Franchise Mode...

From left to right - Nora, Kat, Swann, and Autumn. Editor’s note: Although the author has not revealed major plot points, some spoilers are unavoidable. As always, be sure to play the game first if you are interested in experiencing the story for yourself. From the makers of Life is Strange , Lost Records: Bloom and Rage is a familiar experience to anyone who has played DON'T NOD’s games. There’s a slew of dialogue options to choose from and a story wrapped in tragedy and nostalgia, fused with a supernatural twist. Yesterday I finished the game, and my initial impressions are very positive, with a few constructive critiques about characterization that I'll ruminate on below. When you think of DON'T NOD, the first game to come to mind is likely Life is Strange.  If I had to compare Lost Records to it, Life is Strange had more innovative gameplay thanks to Max’s time reversal power. Lost Records , on the other hand, substitutes time reversal and powers in general for a cam...

The space 4X genre is one of my favorites (4X stands for "Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate"). As a kid I played games like Galactic Civilizations II, and later on I was always eager to jump into games like Endless Space, Distant Worlds, and StarDrive. But of them all, Stellaris is probably my favorite.  In Stellaris your goal is relatively simple: Develop your spacefaring civilization in any way you deem fit. You can stick to one star system and pour all of your resources into a hyper-advanced ecumenopolis, or you can choose to be more expansionary, sending scouts to nearby stars and colonizing outwards. You can be a warring civilization or a peaceful one, you can choose the direction of your society's research, you can prioritize certain resources over others, you can engage in diplomacy and market manipulation, and you can build spy networks to snoop on AI opponents. And there is much more beyond that.  Here I want to spin for you a tale about a playthrough I had a...

  Good morning everyone and welcome to another article! This is one I've been thinking about for a while now, and yet could never find the time to write. I'll admit, it's been some time since I've played the first two Trails of Cold Steel games (I have yet to play three and four for reasons explained below), but my impression of them is still rather clear. Conversely, I just finished playing Persona 4 Golden and finished Persona 5 a few years back, so both are fresh in my mind.  As a disclaimer, this isn't so much a critique of either series (as I very much enjoy both) so much as it is a comparison of certain aspects that stood out to me. I will also attempt to avoid spoilers as best I can. Finally, I'll organize the article into categories so that you can skip to the part you want to read. Without further ado, let's begin!  Story The Cold Steel games take place within a much larger universe dubbed "The Legend of Heroes," and are technically the si...

Donovan Mitchell would be a consistent part of this would-be Cavaliers dynasty. What if I told you that the Cleveland Cavaliers would make it to five championship appearances in six years? And what if I told you that, with all that success, they'd only come away with one title to hang their proverbial hats on? This is the story of the fictional Cleveland Cavaliers in my most recent playthrough of NBA 2K23's MyNBA mode. A team with success nearly unmatched in the annals of NBA history. Multiple MVP caliber players on the same team, an all-star starting five lineup, and a dominant regular and postseason season run that makes LeBron's efforts from 2015-2018 look quaint in comparison.  From time to time, as some readers know, I like to write about the stories I uncover while playing videogames. One of my favorite story generators is the NBA 2K series, mainly because I like basketball, but also because its franchise mode lends itself to the creation of thoroughly random but alwa...

Lengthy videogame retrospectives are the norm rather than the exception these days. Games like Skyrim now have 20 hour retrospectives that, while generally being of exceedingly high quality and enjoyable to watch, got me thinking about a controversial topic: Race in videogames.  Just how are videogame retrospectives and race are related? To me it has to do with  who  is creating these retrospectives and  how  this impacts their analysis of games. It's not controversial to say that most of the YouTubers creating these retrospectives are white men without degrees in history or related analytical disciplines. Even so, they present their conclusions with the confidence of a scholars speaking from the pulpit of an Ivy League lecture hall.  When it comes to discussing topics like race and racism, I believe they are lacking some nuance in their analysis.  A select few of these retrospective creators are so confident that they've begun weaving critic...

  Shionne (left) and Alphen (right), the game's main characters. Warning: Spoilers Ahead These days I don't have much time, so it's rare that I finish long sprawling RPGs like  Tales of Arise . But finish it I did, and so I figured I'd take the time to jot down some of the thoughts on the game. To sum up, my initial impressions were very positive. I liked the protagonist, I liked the graphics, and I found the combat to be a nice improvement over the last  Tales  game I played,  Tales of Vesperia  (admittedly I have not finished this one).  As the game wore on, I ran into several roadblocks that tend to arise (sorry) in most Japanese RPGs (or JRPG for short): the enemies got tougher, requiring some grinding. The bosses had overinflated health pools, and money and other important battle items like  Arise 's equivalent of health potions became scarce. Maybe I am less dedicated than the average gamer these days, but I felt obligated to buy the double ...

The Battle of Bloody Brook, September 18th, 1675 Editor's note: Parenthetical citations with associated page numbers are provided where necessary. In the late 1990s historians became re-interested in writing about seventeenth century New England's bloodiest conflict: King Philip's War (1675-1676). In 1999 alone, the following books were published: Jill Lepore's  The Name of War,  James D. Drake's  King Philip's War: Civil War in New England 1675-1676 , and finally, the subject of this article, Schultz and Tougias'  King Philip's War: The History and Legacy of America's Forgotten Conflict .  All of these books emphasized different aspects of the war. Lepore analyzed seventeenth and eighteenth century literature on King Philip's War to show that English colonizers wrote of it in a way that exonerated themselves of the violence they committed against Native Americans. Drake looked to the decades prior to the war, arguing that colonizers and Native p...