Feature: The Seven-Year Silence: How Ocarina Of Time Held My Grief At Seven Years Old

In 1966, CBS debuted the now-classic television special, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. In it, all the kids in the Peanuts gang take part in typical Halloween activities, including trick-or-treating and pumpkin-carving — except for Linus. Instead, Linus is preparing for the arrival of a mythical being known as the “Great Pumpkin.” As Linus explains, “Each year, the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch that he thinks is the most sincere,” then he distributes toys to the children waiting for him. Linus spends the special writing letters to the Great Pumpkin and trying to convince others of its existence. Then he spends Halloween night in a pumpkin patch, awaiting the Great Pumpkin’s arrival. Of course, the Great Pumpkin never emerges, but Linus still vows to wait again next year. To the casual Peanuts fan, that may be all they ever know of Linus and the Great Pumpkin, but dedicated readers of the Peanuts comic strip know there’s much, much more to the story. The Great Pumpkin was first mentioned in a Peanuts comic on Oct. 26, 1959.

The '90s are back and they're actually somewhat traumatizing Calvin and Hobbes' scariest strip came out eight months before Halloween

Michael McWhertor is a New York-based journalist and editor with more than 20 years of experience covering games, industry events, technology, movies, and TV. Pokémon's gorgeous new animated series officially lands new streaming home

On Oct. 18, 1985, Nintendo released the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America alongside a limited selection of games like Super Mario Bros. and Excitebike. Within a few years, it had a library of hundreds of titles, proving that rumors of the video game industry’s death throughout the early ‘80s were greatly exaggerated. Today, many of those early games feel like antiques. They’re not nearly as memorable as they once were, with so many generations of newer software to choose from. But there are some that still deserve your attention, even now. Here are 10 NES games that are still worth playing from start to finish. Publisher: Tecmo Ninja warriors clashed in a contemporary city, and players immediately knew they wanted to spend more time with agile hero Ryu Hayabusa. The cost was steep. Ninja Gaiden is one of the most challenging games of the era, at least out of the ones a person might still care to play today. Bosses hit hard and fast. Even birds have what it takes to knock an unwitting ninja from the tenuous safety a small ledge provides. The game inspired two sequels, which proved similarly compelling.

When you pick up downloadable content for a game, generally, you’re expecting more of the same experience: a few extra hours, some new gear, perhaps a boss fight the base game didn’t have room for. What if, instead of new outfits and a handful of fetch quests, a DLC decided to crown you the new god of madness? What if it dropped you into hell to stop a president’s wedding, or handed the entire story over to a teenager narrating her own homebrew Dungeons & Dragons campaign (complete with a dragon she very clearly made up five minutes ago)? Even the wildest DLC needs a solid game to swerve away from, or the swerve doesn’t land. Every base game with excellent DLC is strong enough to stand on its own. That’s the common DNA: studios that had built something sturdy enough to trust it, confident enough to hand players a portal to hell, an alien hive-mind under a suburban cul-de-sac, or a crown that makes you ruler of an entire realm of madness — and bet that players would play anyway. For these nine DLCs, that confidence turned out to be well-placed.

The PlayStation 4 launched in North America first on Nov. 15, 2013, before coming to Japan and the rest of the world several months later. Since then, it has maintained a steady stream of game releases across numerous genres, with more titles still on the way, even six years out from the launch of PS5. It’s clearly winding down, though, as Sony focuses on plans for new hardware and a disc-less future. That makes right now the perfect time to take a look at 10 near-perfect PS4 games nobody played, while a lot of them are still available to purchase digitally or in the used games marketplace. Released: March 21, 2014 Infamous: Second Son only just barely makes this list because, after all, it is an Infamous game. The series was huge on the PS3, and deservedly so. On the PS4, it got a lot less attention. People sometimes post on social media, recalling the early games and wishing Sony didn’t end the series after Infamous 2. That’s not a slight on Infamous: Second Son. They literally don’t realize it exists. And it was a perfectly solid game that shouldn’t have marked the end of a beloved franchise. But unless you count Infamous First Light (released a few months later, on Aug.