Gifts for Gamers: Ideas for Real Players

Oblivion starts with you sitting in a dungeon cell without the faintest idea why. Then the Emperor himself walks straight through your cell, fleein...

There is one moment in the Mario games when the music suddenly rattles off at double speed with no warning at all. For a few seconds the whole scre...

A hundred coins and the counter flips over into an extra life. Hardly any game has made collecting loose change as satisfying as Super Mario, and a...

The Mandalorian has barely settled into the cockpit before his small passenger reaches for the silver ball on the control lever and calmly unscrews...

Some video game landscapes sit so firmly in your head that you could still sketch them decades later: pixelated hills, a chequered floor, palm tree...

A desk is basically a straight line: the start on the left with the first coffee, the finish on the right with the end of the working day, and in b...

In these games a single golden ring is your entire life insurance: take a hit while you still have one and you get straight back up, with the rings...

There is that one moment in a battle when your opponent sends out their last Pokémon and the thing does nothing but grin. Gengar has had that routi...

In 1980 a new cabinet suddenly stood in the arcades, with a yellow circle of endless appetite racing through a maze while four colourful ghosts cha...

Mario has rammed his head into those yellow cubes from below countless times, always trusting that a coin, a mushroom or something even better woul...

Nobody forgets their first night in Minecraft. The sun goes down, somewhere a zombie groans, spider eyes glow in the bushes, and then that quiet hi...

Mine sand, set down a furnace, add coal and wait. At the end glass blocks tumble out and the dirt hut finally gets windows. Anyone who has ever bui...

Above the Strip of New Vegas stands a tower where nobody has won a game in two hundred years: the Lucky 38 sits there dark and locked while the neo...

There is that one moment in Fallout: you climb into the power armor, the hatch shuts behind you with a heavy hiss, your whole field of view turns i...

In Fallout: New Vegas you do not just collect bottle caps, you collect rumours. One of them refuses to die: gather enough Sunset Sarsaparilla caps ...

Muichiro Tokito usually looks like his thoughts wandered off two rooms ago. He stares at clouds, forgets halfway through a sentence what he was tal...

One wheel, one big eye and a mouth with no pause button: Claptrap is the robot nobody in Borderlands ever ordered and everybody drags along regardl...

The lid of a laptop is the coat of arms of our age: whatever is stuck on it says more about the owner than any profile picture ever could. Spot a s...

When Final Fantasy IX arrived, it felt like a small rebellion: away from motorbikes and skyscrapers, back to clanking suits of armour, a black mage...

If you've ever played the very first Sonic the Hedgehog, you know that little moment of triumph at the end of every zone: you race past a signpost ...

In the Mushroom Kingdom, one question has been at the heart of everything for decades: who will rescue Princess Peach from Bowser's clutches this t...

In Minecraft, one single thing separates the casual digger from the true pro: the diamond pickaxe. Once it's finally in your inventory, you knock y...

There's that one moment in Minecraft no player ever forgets: you're calmly building your house, you hear a faint hiss and then it goes boom. The Cr...

Hardly any sound is burned as deeply into gamers' memory as the satisfying “bloop” of Mario hopping into a green pipe. For decades, these Warp Pipe...

Anyone who's ever picked Squirtle in a Pokémon game knows: that's the choice of calm, cool minds. The little turtle Pokémon soaks its opponents, du...