The timer ticks down toward zero. We tear across the Boneyard, one of Halo: Reach’s best multiplayer maps, my good friend Rus driving with me sitting shotgun. I’m clutching the blue flag in hands that would be sweating if they were real. We shed our red teammates like skin; they race past us going the other direction on foot and in alien vehicles, crashing to pieces against the blue players that pursue us. They fall, re-spawn, hurtle past, and fall again. All the while the timer ticks down.

Minecraft is a lot of different things to a lot of different people; a place to build a word processor, recreate Westeros or trap incredible monsters. For many players it's simply about survival, which means making sure you have shelter at night, forging armor and weapons with which you can fend off attackers, and somehow finding food to keep your hunger meter full. It's that last one that presented a problem for me when I picked the game up again recently.

As much as I love it, Destiny is riddled with flaws, many of which Bungie doesn't seem all that interested in addressing. Most of them—like how you still lose ammo when you die—are things players can't do anything about. But the game's lack of matchmaking for its most challenging missions—one of its most glaring problems, depending who you ask—has proved to be something players can address and, by working together, fix.

Some hours into Dragon Age: Inquisition, long after I'd made it out of the Hinterlands, I realized something that really surprised me. My character had taken on a life of his own, and it turns out he's gay.

Dark Souls II's three expansions are a wonderful culmination of everything From Software has learned about making Souls games. And they should be considered essential playing for anyone who enjoyed the series so far.

"I'll try to give you something a little bit more than I said before: we're focused on the characters we announced today." Marvel's Peter Phillips, the company's head of digital entertainment, is humoring me.

Pokémon may seem like a simple game to outsiders, but fans know how complex it can really get. With the release of Pokémon X and Pokémon Y, there are now a total of 718 pocket monsters to choose from. Each one can learn dozens of different attacks, and their strengths and weaknesses can vary greatly.

Pokémon X and Pokémon Y are the friendliest Pokémon games ever, both to new players and to jaded old-guard types like myself. The series has never been easier, and at the same there are more options than ever before. But there's one tiny change in the new Pokémon games that has the hardcore competitive community of players dancing for joy—and it's something average players may never know or care about.

Every girl I date seriously must eventually pass a trial. It happens at a certain point in every relationship I have; by then she basically knows what she's getting with me, including my tendency to get weirdly obsessed with things. The bands Titus Andronicus and Belle & Sebastian, for one thing, or Game of Thrones. I'm tattooed with 16-bit Mario, a Dark Souls bonfire, and my dog Ricky. Etc. But if she hasn't picked up on that part of my personality, she'll see me in full when I show her my stronghold in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

I've been playing Jetpack Joyride for what seems like a long time, but the other day I encountered something so strange and different that it set my mind spinning.

In the future, there may not be any more single-player games—but that doesn't mean what we seem to think it does every time some big publisher opens its big mouth and tells us that single-player games are dead. Epic, story-driven campaigns aren't going away; it's just that new forms of multiplayer are evolving in tandem with those experiences, rather than in opposition to them.

The developers behind the Assassin's Creed series have always been proud of how much effort they put into maintaining a thin veil of historical accuracy. That's most evident in the settings, from Revolution-era Boston to the Holy Land during the Crusades, where that veneer of accuracy goes much deeper. But it's there in the plot, as well, despite the presence of deific holograms and a secret order of superhero Assassins.

The closest I had come to playing a Civ game by the time Sid Meier and co. deigned to bestow Civ V upon the world was starting a game of The Sims once.

Maybe it's because Little Inferno doesn't present the side of Armageddon that we're used to seeing in games, but you might not even pick up on its apocalyptic storyline. Yet as I burned prize after prize in my Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace, a thought tugged at the back of my mind: why am I doing this?

Black Isle was one of the great game studios of its era, but the visionary company that existed in the 90s and early oughts is no more, and its revival is something else entirely—something that seems more sketchy every day.

Antwand Pearman is a father. As we spoke on the phone this afternoon, his kids chattered in the background. He kept apologizing, but I told him I didn't mind. When Adam Lanza murdered 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn. last week, Pearman, CEO of GamerFitNation, was understandably affected.