In recent weeks, my fellow Review columnist Kameron Dunbar has published two pieces that succinctly and cogently identified instances in which Oberlin campus publications — namely, the Review and The Grape — have failed to assemble editorial staffs that reflect our community’s diversity and, as a result, have published pieces that fall short of the standards of rigorous inquiry and commitment to social justice that our community holds itself to. As a former Review opinions editor who is studying abroad this semester, I certainly understand the intensity of working for a campus publication. It can be a relatively thankless, if personally fulfilling job — the hours are long and come in addition to normal acade...

I’d seen notably glowing reviews for Undertale on a number of websites, but I entered the game worried I’d be the next victim of over-hype. Instead, I left having found what might be my new favorite video game. Undertale, a game created almost single-handedly by Toby Fox and released this fall, offers an outstanding and unique experience. It’s a role-playing game styled after games like Final Fantasy for SNES and the cult classic Earthbound. You play a child who’s fallen into the mysterious Underground, a world full of both friendly and dangerous monsters. The opening text crawl explains some history of the universe, but it’s your character’s progress that tells you the entire story. I wish I could...

Hotline Miami is a game about killing everyone in sight. Sure, there is more to this game: It boasts a unique art style, an incredible soundtrack and tight controls. All of these elements are solid on their own, but developer Dennaton Games brings them together in Hotline Miami for a single purpose: to make the act of killing enjoyable. Whether or not that sounds agreeable to you will dictate whether you will believe Hotline Miami deserves veneration or outright hatred. However, most gamers will find it worthy of praise on the level of pure enjoyability. Released way back in 2012 — but recently put on sale in celebration of the release of its sequel — Hotline Miami is a top-down, fast-paced, bombastic shooter that ...

Even though I was seated comfortably in a mostly empty theater for a late-night showing of Black Mass, there was little the silver screen could do to keep James Bulger’s steely blue eyes from piercing me straight to my core. The Boston crime drama, directed by Scott Cooper, puts its eggs in two baskets, using James “Whitey” Bulger (Johnny Depp), the infamous kingpin of the Winter Hill gang, and John Connolly ( Joel Edgerton), the FBI agent with whom Bulger formed an alliance, as points of ingress to a true story of desperation, manipulation and corruption. In the film’s slow unraveling of the poignant, yet subtle, threads that led to the rise and fall of one of Boston’s greatest criminals, Cooper finds pl...