video games

The soft-spoken Italian plumber is one of the most immediately recognizable characters on the planet and has been a mainstay of gaming culture for more than 40 years. When it comes to the official Super Mario franchise games, Nintendo has done a bang-up job in making sure that every single title starring Mario is a unique, polished, and fun experience. But even so, mistakes can be made. Not every game is perfect, and some are downright better....

Improves your child’s visual-spatial skills Many video games, such as Minecraft, are set in a 3D virtual world where children are challenged to navigate and locate objects. A child that consistently plays this game develops and or improves their visual-partial skills. Visual-spatial refers to the ability to tell where an object is located in space and how far it is. This skill is essential as your child can use it for reading a map and tying shoelaces....

From titles that pioneered the genre to those that elevated the genre to new levels with innovative gameplay mechanics, the first-person experience has always been unique for its ability to put the player directly in the shoes of the protagonist. FPS games put us smack dab in the center of intense action and thrilling story, and it’s a feeling that gamers crave and cling to. Being only able to see what’s right in front of you helps stir up a kind of adrenaline rush that no other genre can match....

But most stories don’t have that transcendental quality, meaning they aren’t able to translate across the spectrum of artforms at all. Over the last two decades, video games have evolved from youthful hobby to multi-billion dollar industry, and the medium is now accepted as an artform in itself. The original stories painted in video games have piqued Hollywood’s interest, resulting in movie adaptations. And most of those movie adaptations fail utterly....

Batman’s celebrated Arkham series, which showed gamers what it felt like to become the fearsome hero, exemplifies the standard of modern video games portraying superheroic characters. And then there’s the more recent Marvel’s Spider-Man, which built upon the video games that came before it to elevate the genre and deliver a truly immersive experience behind the mask of the Web-Slinger. But for the most part, we’ve really only seen the “mainstream” superheroes in action when it comes to video games....