The holiday season is always chaotic and a mix of emotion for me as I am sure it is for many others. It’s the time where you either love to see your family or you pretend to, and you give them gifts accordingly. Looking back on it, as a child the holidays represented more than gifts and giving, it represented the one time of year where my sister and I bonded and understood each other and a large part of the reason for this is because of video games. Growing up my sister and I both loved playing video games. She had an original Game Boy with Super Mario, Tetris and Kirby. It was one of her most prized possessions and she loved it, secretly I did too. I would have to wait until she was gone to sneak into her room and play it or if I was lucky, she would let me play it when she was home. She was pretty good at sharing when she wanted to and we both had a good time playing, that is when we weren’t fighting. My sister and I were almost always at odds. We bickered and fought...

It was recently reported that Blizzard is planning on releasing an HD version of Starcraft . Starcraft is a widely successful real time strategy game that was released in 1998 and helped make Blizzard a house hold name in the game industry. Its success spawned the sequel, Starcraft 2 in 2010. Similarly, Nintendo released an HD remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the 3DS , and Microsoft gave the go ahead for the entire Halo series to be updated and released for the Xbox One . But why do game studios decide to re-release games from the past, instead of creating new games? One reason is that not all game sequels will be met with the same praise that their predecessors were. The Resident Evil franchise is regarded as one of the best in horror. Resident Evil 4 was nearly universally praised by reviewers and gamers alike but Resident Evil 5 and 6 were panned. They provide an example of how hard it can be for long running franchises to create fresh ideas that con...