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Curated playlist

Video games with commentaries

  • Halo: ReachHalo: Reach, a video game from the studio Bungie, took in US$200 million on its first day on sale. That set a record for the Halo franchise. Yet the game asked players to defend a planet that the series' own fiction had already declared…
  • The Walking Dead (video game)The Walking Dead, a 2012 episodic graphic adventure from Telltale Games, begins with a convicted criminal named Lee Everett in the back of a police car. On the first day of an outbreak, the car strikes a walker and crashes. Dave Fennoy…
  • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the PatriotsMetal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots reached shops on the 12th of June 2008. According to Konami, more than three million units shipped worldwide that day. Kojima Productions built the game for the PlayStation 3, and it was the sixth…
  • Portal 2Adam Foster, a Valve employee, ran a bulletin board from his own home phone line. Valve's offices were too modern to support the old protocol. The board served ASCII pictures and scraps of Aperture Science documents to curious players.…
  • Metro ExodusIn Metro Exodus, a gas filter lasts exactly one minute. When the minute ends, the player must fit a fresh one, and only if a spare is still in the pack. That ticking pressure defines the 2019 first-person shooter from 4A Games, the third…
  • Half-Life 2Half-Life 2 is a 2004 first-person shooter from Valve Corporation, and it cost 40 million US dollars to make. Development lasted five years. By 2011 it had sold 12 million copies worldwide. In November 2024, twenty years after its release,…
  • The Stanley ParableThe Stanley Parable begins with an office worker known only as employee 427. Stanley sits in a building and presses buttons whenever a screen tells him to. He never speaks, and his job is to follow instructions without asking why. Then one…
  • Portal (video game)Portal, a 2007 puzzle-platform game from Valve, begins with an artificial intelligence promising a silent woman named Chell a reward of cake. The reward is for surviving a long run of laboratory tests. Players soon learn to distrust that…
  • Team Fortress 2Team Fortress 2 drew 253,997 players at the same moment after a 2023 update, the highest count in its history. That figure is remarkable for a Valve multiplayer shooter that had already been on sale for a long time. The road to that peak…
  • Alan WakeAlan Wake is a 2010 action-adventure game from the Finnish studio Remedy Entertainment, published by Microsoft Game Studios. Its hero is a bestselling crime novelist whose wife vanishes during a vacation in Bright Falls, a small fictional…
  • Ghost of TsushimaGhost of Tsushima is a 2020 action-adventure game from Sucker Punch Productions, published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Its hero is Jin Sakai, a samurai defending Tsushima Island during the first Mongol invasion of Japan, which began…

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