For a million reasons, much of it out of anyone’s control, the initial crop of games that launches with any brand new console is bound to have some duds. Normally, those unfortunate failures don’t warrant a sequel, and second chances are exceedingly rare. Knack is the exception.

Final Fantasy XV was in development for 10 years. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people across six different game development studios helped created it. Yet its camera — a fundamental part of the way players interact with the game’s world — is severely flawed. The weight on the game’s metaphorical shoulders was enormous — not just for the future of Final Fantasy as a game series, but possibly for the entire future of game consoles in Japan, according to game director Hajime Tabata. And it delivered on its enormous promise in many ways. How is it possible that a game into which so much was invested can have such a seemingly simplistic flaw?

Ancient map-making required mastery over the disciplines of mathematics and astronomy, the means and courage to venture into dangerous uncharted territories, inhuman patience, artistry and attention to detail, and the ability to perch on the cutting edge of every new technological advancement your culture’s most talented minds could muster. David Hodgson’s job is arguably more difficult — and certainly more tedious.

Legion’s second episode, “Chapter 2,” presented one fantastic foil for our hero David Haller: Jeremie Harris’s character Ptonomy, who appeared in the premiere but wasn’t properly introduced until now.

If you’ve suffered through enough mediocre X-Men movies to feel a general fatigue for any live action incarnations of Professor X and his lovable gang — comics fan or not — Legion is capable of changing your mind.

There are two main things to know about Absolver: it's visually gorgeous, and its combat will ask more of you than most other games would dare. It’s not just a brutally specific set of controls like the Dark Souls series, or an impressive array of stance-specific combos like in Ubisoft’s upcoming For Honor (with which Absolver shares a small amount of spiritual DNA, as members of developer Sloclap work previously at Ubisoft); it’s that Absolver lets players customize their fighting styles to a degree of detail rarely, if ever, seen in video games.

Most of the time when video games tackle the subject of cults it’s to give heavily armed players more robe-wearing demon-worshippers to fire rockets at. Richard Rouse III’s The Church in the Darkness takes a different approach.

What Remains of Edith Finch is the exact type of game that gets derided as a “walking simulator.” That's silly. For one thing, the label carries negative connotations, implying that a video game in which all you do is walk around and experience something is inherently bad. That flawed line of thinking does nothing but limit the kinds of games we get to play.

Westworld’s finale was a near-perfect end point to a fantastic season of sci-fi television, not to mention a tantalizing platform from which Season 2 will launch.

In Westworld’s ninth episode, Ford tells Bernard that you can’t rely on humans. But it’s Westworld’s hosts who’ve proved the most unreliable as narrators throughout the season.

There were no big twists on Westworld this week — fitting, given the enormity of last week’s reveal that Bernard has been a host all along. Instead, “Trace Decay” focused on the hosts’ ongoing struggles with identity, consciousness and memory.

There you have it. With the reveal in Westworld episode 7, “Trompe L'Oeil," that Bernard is in fact a host, the show has answered one of the most popular fan theories out there with a resounding “yes.”

The Last Guardian is among those rarest of games — the ones that are in development for years and years (a decade in this case) and still actually come out. Now the long-awaited third title from game design auteur Fumito Ueda is scheduled to arrive Dec. 6, with no further delays. Speaking in a hotel meeting room in Santa Monica, Calif., Ueda seemed simultaneously reserved and excited to get the game out there.

It was bound to happen eventually. Westworld went almost six full episodes without killing anyone off, which, in a post-Game of Thrones TV world, is more or less unheard of. But at the end of “The Adversary,” a rare episode with zero Dolores, William or Logan, the meddling Elsie may have bitten the bullet at the hands of an unknown attacker.

Welcome to Pariah, where the rules of Westworld go flying out the swinging saloon doors — even the most crucial doctrine, the “Samaritan reflex,” which dictates that hosts can’t truly harm guests. As Logan and William become embroiled in the narratives of the high-level outlaw town, they learn through hard knocks that they aren’t as invulnerable in Westworld as they thought.

The Man in Black has remained one of Westworld’s most mysterious characters. What’s his end goal? Is he just an agent of chaos, or a really dedicated player hunting the game’s final level? Or is there something more? Episode 4, “Dissonance Theory,” provided some pretty big hints.

The timelines in Westworld are often unclear. How long do guests stay in the park? How often are the hosts reset? How many times has Teddy been shot, or Dolores been assaulted, or Maeve recited her speech about the voice in her head? It’s never clear — by design, of course. That’s part of the show’s mystique.

Westworld's premiere established the rules of the game, the machinations of the designers and the loops of the hosts. Episode 2 introduced viewers to the guests’ perspective.

Another major character died tonight on Game of Thrones, but is "dead" really dead in the world of Westeros?

Game of Thrones season 5 hasn't been the show's strongest — one might argue it's been the worst by far — but at least Episode 7, "The Gift," had a couple of fun scenes.