‘90s virtual pet horror game Tattletail, released yesterday, is a game specifically about my fear of Furbies. More specifically, it’s about how unoriginal, how generational and how predictable my fear of Furbies is. Tattletail taps the well of millennial capitalist terror that ‘90s Nickelodeon cartoons injected into our bloodstream. Your character wakes up in a…
Super Smash Bros. Melee players still compete at tournaments with the 15-year-old GameCube controller. But it’s got issues—namely, painful ergonomics and easily-degraded joysticks. So when Dustin Huffer introduced a modern controller into the Melee mix, he was shocked to hear that the huge, January, 2017 Smash tournament Genesis 4 was considering a ban. After a…
Wanderer Sabaku met me at the foot of his mansion’s grand double stairway on the Diabolos server of Final Fantasy XIV. He was nearly twice my size and towered in a purple floor-length coat. A crown sat on his blue-gray head. He welcomed me from behind a partition and led me down some winding stairs…
To write about Frog Fractions 2, I spent three hours planting seeds and chopping wood in an entirely separate fairy resource management game. Finding Frog Fractions 2 was how I learned its first rule: It’s less about the game than the “fuck it” attitude you pick up on the ride. Frog Fractions 2 is the…
Frog Fractions 2 has been unearthed. A collective called the Game Detectivesdiscovered the sequel to developer Jim Crawford’s viral, psychedelic browser game inside another Steam game after a two-year hunt. Glittermitten Grove, released on Steam mid-December, actually contains Frog Fractions 2, as I discovered while poking around in the Frog Fractions 2 Discord today. Its…
For months, YouTubers have complained that their view counts are down. New data from the third-party stat tracker SocialBlade confirms what YouTubers fear: viewership is lower “across the board.” SocialBlade crunched some numbers for Kotaku and determined that, since the first half of the year, YouTube views are now 5-7% lower. Between July and September,…
Viral rat-hunting mobile game Pokémon Go is now on the Apple Watch. Starting today, you can find rats, some of which now have Christmas hats, on your $270 wrist-bound iPhone. Fans expected Niantic to release an associated Pokémon Go app closer to September, or at least, before the end of the year. A rumorrecently spread…
Queer ice skating anime Yuri!!! on Ice closed out its first season yesterday with enough fanfare to crash streaming site Crunchyroll. Twelve episodes of triple axels, dashing costumes and raw male-on-male emotions made this cloying sports show a sensation. Some questions were answered, and more were asked—did the anime bait viewers with promises of explicit…
Tiny Tim or Little Timmy might not get their Nintendo 3DS for Christmas this year. The handheld console is facing a shortage in brick and mortar stores across the country and online. At Best Buy, GameStop and Target, the console is low-stock or unavailable in stores throughout and proximate to America’s six most populous cities.…
There’s a reason why Crabs Adjust Humidity, Humanity Hates Trump and Cards & Punishment might sound familiar. Their cards might look familiar, too—so familiar that the popular card game Cards Against Humanity has been forced to buckle down on those and several other lookalikes. Cards Against Humanity doesn’t own the rights to black and white…
If you play games, you’ve thought about which voice actor you want to narrate your daily goings-on. For me, it’s GLaDOS. She’s reciting a fruit tart recipe. For Kotaku reader Chad Oliver, it’s The Stanley Parable’s Kevan Brighting, and he’s narrating his marriage proposal. On Oliver and his now-fiancee Morgaine’s 8-year anniversary in November, Oliver…
Overwatch’s 3 vs. 3 Elimination mode, out since November, turns on its head everything we know about team composition. Heroes beloved in 6 vs. 6 Quick Play and Competitive modes, like Lucio and Torbjorn, are damn near useless in 3 vs. 3, where your priorities are a bit different. That makes composing a viable team…
Today, League of Legends publisher Riot announced an unprecedented $300 million deal with Major League Baseball spin-off streaming company BAMTech, who will handle LoL broadcasting. Among other things, BAMTech will releasea streaming app for the esport and oversee tournament streams on Twitch, the Wall Street Journal reports BAMTech, in which Disneyrecently bought a $1 billion…
Starved Studio Ghibli fans now have something new to look forward to. Yesterday, Ghibli veterans, under the auspices of Studio Ponoc, released a trailer for a fantastical, Ghibliesque movie called Mary and the Witch’s Flower, slated for Summer, 2017. Based on Mary Stewart’s The Little Broomstick, in which a girl discovers a magical broomstick in the…
Dinosaur survival game Ark: Survival Evolved is getting a VR spin-off in 2017 that looks stunning. Ark Park will be available for the Oculus, HTC Vive and PSVR.
Yesterday, YouTube Help published a video countering widespread claims by YouTubers that the platform is screwing them over. In an explainer that can only be described as 3:27 minutes of “actually,” YouTube reps claim that the streaming platform is not unsubscribing people from channels, an accusation hundreds of YouTubers have full-throatedly complained about for weeks.…
Twitch’s crusade against garbage live chats saw a victory on Monday. The streaming platform released an automated moderation feature called AutoMod that is already, some streamers say, a game-changer. AutoMod filters toxicity and slurs from Twitch chat for human moderators to sift through and judge. It automatically flags any messages that may be considered hate…
After 20 years, Studio Ghibli’s Ocean Waves will finally be distributed in North America starting December 28th, distributor GKids announced today.
Pokémon Go’s latest update isn’t what players were expecting. For weeks, fans hoped for a whole batch of 2nd generation Pokémon—bright, adorable Chikoritas or Espeons, and over 90 more little monsters. Or, at least, a few new Pokémon that players could encounter in the wild. Nope. No. Nope. Yesterday, Pokémon Go released seven new “baby”…
When it comes to fan service, we all draw our lines differently. Where are yours? We want to hear from you. Do you seek it out? Avoid it? It’s almost impossible to wrap hard moral rules around anime consumption. And we all have our own ways of dealing with it. Bakemonogatari is one of my…
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