Music Features

Underrated Video Game Soundtracks That Deserve More Love

While the sounds of "Zelda" and "Halo" remain iconic, these scores never truly got the love they deserved

From its clunky arcade origins to the expansive orchestral arrangements that now characterize your favorite games, video game music has evolved into its own genre.

Sure, the 8-bit click-clack of Super Mario Bros. brings back pangs of nostalgia, but the terrible MIDI muck of Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood and the lethargic horns of PSone's Resident Evil show the tragedy that transpires when the process is rushed. It takes a lot of effort and patience to curate a meaningful score.

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Most kids today will never experience the rush of rummaging through a bargain bin at the local video game store and stumbling across a hidden gem.

Now that digital sales outpace physical ones and brick-and-mortar shops struggle to keep afloat, this practice is a lost art.

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CULTURE

The 10 Greatest PSP Games Ever

The PSP came out 16 years ago...

PSP

An underrated gem of a handheld console, the PSP was ahead of its time.

Released in 2005, the PlayStation Portable was exactly as advertised: a technical marvel that could allow you to bring some of the best PS2 games of all time with you wherever you went. It remains to be seen why the PSP never truly took off the way it should have.

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Culture Feature

11 of the Weirdest Commercials of All Time

Most commercials only want your money. These want your sanity.

In the world of advertising, grabbing the viewer's attention is key.

Sure, you could just list off the benefits of whatever you're selling in a straightforward manner, but is that going to leave an impression?

You want your audience to take notice. You want to keep them thinking about your ad for days and weeks afterward — to infect their brains with a little consumerist parasite that reminds them to cough up their money in pursuit of a false sense of fulfillment. So anything you can do to make your ad stand out from the crowd is a good thing, right?

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Culture Feature

How the Video Game Industry Still Fails to Market to Girls

"Why don't more women play video games?" You're asking the wrong question. Instead, ask: "Why aren't video games marketed towards more females?"

Christmas morning, 1994: I woke up with the sort of excitement most 6-year-old girls do.

But I wasn't excited to find gender-stereotypical presents such as Barbie dolls. I wanted the Sega Genesis video game system. I didn't get it...but my brother did.

I was crushed, but not surprised. My brother and I shared an equal love for playing video games; but the conundrum was that I was a girl—and in the early '90s, people weren't accustomed to video games being a girl's thing.

Skip forward 26 years later, and as a mother of two girls, I've realized that not much has changed.

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Marvel/ Square Enix/ Verizon

There's such a thing as good video game downloadable content (DLC).

Sure, it's exceedingly rare, but The Witcher 3 and Ghost of Tsushima prove that DLC can actually be used to vastly expand upon a game instead of just milking players for cash. But those are the exception. From essential story content to entire characters locked behind paywalls at launch, bad DLC is the rule, and unfortunately, it's a race to the bottom. Here are the worst of the worst:

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