Console gaming hasn’t really changed much since the early 1970s when Pong became the first successful home video game. Systems have gotten faster and games have gotten more advanced, but it’s pretty much the same activity now as then. Will it always be that way? Well, some companies are trying to push console gaming to the next level by changing how gamers actually play their video games: streamed over the internet....

Ever since 1979, the Star Trek movies achieved varying levels of success, both good and bad. For every bad movie (The Final Frontier), there would be also a good one (The Undiscovered Country), and Trekkies love them all in their own unique ways. Despite dips in quality, all of the Star Trek movies are worth watching for their different journeys and arcs. Here’s our take on how the different Star Trek movies rank against each other....

If you wanted to watch a particular movie or TV show and you knew it was available to stream, you still had a problem: where was it streaming? And if you found out and added that movie or TV show to your watchlist, you might lose the opportunity when it gets moved to another service. Throw upcoming movies and TV shows into the mix and you can see how things have grown annoyingly complicated in streaming land....

It kicked off a new era of TV that made way for more cinematic aesthetics, more complex characters, more intricately woven serial plotlines—and it all peaked with the modern age of streaming, which has blurred the lines between motion picture and TV series. Here are several reasons why The Rings of Power is an achievement that heralds a new age of television storytelling and why it marks a new place on the ever-evolving roadmap of on-screen experiences....

But not all body swap movies are made equal. The premise is easily squandered, either by scripts that fail to do anything unique or original with the ones who get swapped or by scripts that become bogged down by the mechanics to the detriment of their characters. Here are our picks for the best body swap movies of all time, in which characters find their consciousnesses transported into another body, leading to all kinds of interesting stories....

The early days of online multiplayer on gaming consoles were a very different story. Many people think the Dreamcast or Xbox were first to bring online multiplayer to gaming consoles, but the PlayStation 2 was right there with them as a pioneer of online gaming! It might have been seen as a more limited platform, but the PlayStation 2 had plenty of great online multiplayer games. Some of them you can still play now with a little software trickery....

Ah, yes. Doug Marcaida’s iconic catchphrase for well-crafted, combat-ready blades in Forged in Fire—a reality competition between bladesmiths and their crafted blades, both in the studio and in their home forges. Aside from the skills and determination of the bladesmiths, the show features some of the coolest weapons from throughout history and their backgrounds, which are reproduced by the contestants and put up against various tests, including the “kill test....

Human vessels and host bodies are basically the same trope, and it’s a trope that can lend a lot to an anime’s sense of worldbuilding, plot progression, and character development. When done right, it can make any series that much more interesting and engaging. Here are our picks for the best anime series that involve characters who are human vessels and host bodies for another entity. 12. Naruto + Naruto Shippuden Naruto and Kurama are basically the poster children of this trope, with the orphan boy Naruto as the host in whom the demon fox Kurama is sealed....

As a general rule, the anime genre dictates how the demons come across. For example, shonen anime tends to play demonic characters straight, while isekai anime tends to have elements that make them unique. Either way, demons can be either protagonists or antagonists. Here are our picks for the best anime series about demons and hell, featuring characters across all anime archetypes. 13. Black Clover Black Clover is an anime series produced by Studio Pierrot, adapted from Yuki Tabata’s manga of the same name....

In 2022, Funimation and Crunchyroll—the largest anime streaming service in the West—announced that they would fully merge and continue forward under the Crunchyroll brand. As of now, it’s still uncertain what this will fully mean for the Funimation brand, but even if the name eventually disappears, history will never forget the mark made by the company on the anime industry. If you’ve ever watched an English dub of any anime, there’s a good chance it passed through their studio booths....

This policy has changed somewhat in the Daniel Craig era with better-written female characters who are better served by the story, not just there to be a distraction for Bond. But there’s still room to improve. Yet even so, the franchise has seen several great examples of female characters who have challenged Bond, both physically and intellectually. Here are our picks for the best James Bond women ever. 6. Pussy Galore Pussy Galore is a terrible name....

Over the last decade, he’s shifted into a different kind of entertainment—one for the masses—and has been infusing his lovably intimidating personality into movies of all kinds. We’ll always remember him as a wrestler, but it’s possible his movie stardom will eclipse even that. Here are our picks for the best Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson movies of all time that showcase his draw as a modern actor. 7. Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (2012) Dwayne Johnson played the role of a cool stepfather in the film Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, a sequel to Journey to the Center of the Earth....

But as cowboy movies became passé, so too did the Western movie genre as a whole. They were so popular for such a long time that when Westerns fell from favor, they didn’t return for a long time. Sure, there were a few here and there—Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven being the best of the post-Western era—but overall they were outlawed. At least until the 21st century and its prevalence of genre-blending, which has increasingly brought Western movies back into view....

For producers who desperately want audiences to be drawn in, they have to have the perfect opening. If they don’t, wavering viewers will lose interest and drop off from continuing with the series. In animated television, where concepts and designs for intro sequences are limited only by imagination, we’ve seen all kinds of creative and eye-catching openings—to the point that intro sequences have evolved into an art form to themselves....

Since the late 1930s, the incredible cast of Looney Tunes characters have cheered us up and made life that much more enjoyable, not only when we watched as children but even as adults re-watching the show with our children who were experiencing it for their first time. The timeless humor found in the animated frames of Looney Tunes hasn’t aged a day in the decades since Bugs, Daffy, and co....

The possibilities are endless for those who wield the ability to shift through time, and they’re the envy of anybody who has ever said or done something they regret and wish they could take back. It’s partly why the concept makes for such compelling stories in cinema. When it comes to films, only a select few are usually able to travel through time, to years that haven’t happened yet or have happened far in the past....

The SquareSoft logo was emblazoned at the start of games like Final Fantasy III and Chrono Trigger, forever linking the company to the genre in the hearts of gamers throughout the SNES console generation. But here’s something that may come as a surprise to those of you who lived and breathed that era of JRPGs: SquareSoft was never intended to be a video game developer! Located out of Redmond, Washington, this company’s sole purpose was to localize Square titles for American audiences....

How Do Noise-Canceling Headphones Work? There are two types of noise-cancelation. Passive noise-cancelation simply blocks as much sound as possible from reaching your ear—or in the case of headphones, from mixing with whatever audio is coming out. There’s no electricity involved in passive noise-cancelation. Most of the work is done by the material of the cups (for over-the-ear headphones) and the quality of the seal (for in-ear headphones). For this reason, it’s often called noise isolation....

So you look for game deals online—and you’ll inevitably stumble across game key resellers like CDKeys, Kinguin, G2A, etc. You might even be enticed by their dirt-cheap prices, like $11 for a copy of Fallout 4 or $2 for Hyper Light Drifter. Many of the rock-bottom game prices you find on these sites are sourced by third-party resellers. Are these game keys legit? What are the risks in buying them?...

Unreliable narrators are tricky because they might be intentionally lying to deceive other characters (or viewers), or they might just be lost in themselves and trying to pick up the pieces of their stories. Either way, the unreliable narrator is one of the more useful narrative tropes in how it can shake up a story, inject mystery, and climax with unpredictable twists. Here are our favorite examples of unreliable narrators in movies and TV shows....