When the Puritans began settling down in North America during the early 17th century, they didn’t practice cosplay. Those were dark days - dark, costume-less days, filled with famine, toil, and a depressingly short supply of free candy. It would take nearly 200 years for Americans and Canadians to finally embrace Halloween as a mainstream event - and it was mostly thanks to a flood of Irish and Scottish immigrants in the late 19th century. ...

A few months back we featured the most bloodcurdling games to be unleashed this fall. We then graded each fright fest depending on what we assumed would be the scariest. The big surprise though is that half of the games featured - including FEAR 2 - either won’t be released by year’s end or - like in GhostBusters and Fatal Frame’s case - don’t even have release dates. ...

The links between novels and gaming are stronger than you think. Successful franchises spawn tie-in books dealing with the further adventures of Lara Croft or generic videogame action heroes, but often a respected author’s words can find themselves directly or indirectly rendered in gaming. Take Cormac McCarthy’s The Road for example, a post-apocalyptic journey through a near-future American wasteland that’s become required ...

You know that red line that pops up in Word, Firefox or any other program with a spell check? It's helpful, don't get us wrong, but they really should spend some time working on spell check's virtual intuition. When we typed "Firefox," just now while writing this article, the red line asked if we meant "firebox." Um no, we didn't. And that's what happens countless times every second across the world when people type in video game names - ...

BioShock's combat is possibly the most unique of any shooter you'll ever play, and what sets it apart are the plasmids - surreal and twisted takes on the usual magic spells. This diversity means that every battle can and will play out differently. In order to survive in the ravaged world of Rapture, you need to understand all of your plasmid intimately. In other words, you need our strategy guide and videos. ...

We’ve played the game and, already, we’ve felt the fear.

Yes, BioShock 2 has new guns, new powers, new tools and new multiplayer.  For the first time, you can shoot rivets or drill through enemy flesh as a Big Daddy, control turret guns from across the room with remote hacking darts, combine plasmids for electrified tornado death traps and go head-to-head with friends in a raging online Splicer War. ...