Cecilia D'Anastasio

Sci-fi adventure Echo’s first gameplay trailer is on YouTube today and it looks so dope. In the game, a girl named En explores a legendary, ancient palace that, according to developer Ultra Ultra, “has a mind of its own.”

Ever, Jane Will Bring Jane Austen’s Wit To An MMORPG

Talking—and talking well—is the weapon of choice in the MMO Ever, Jane. In its open beta, the Jane Austen-themed game, not to be released for another year, brought me back to a time when graphics, game mechanics and avatar customization were secondary to how well virtual-world residents could write. Ever, Jane, in its raw state,…

PewDiePie’s New Game Is About Becoming More Famous Than PewDiePie

YouTube celebrity PewDiePie is releasing his second game, PewDiePie’s Tuber Simulator, in the vein of other YouTube simulators, which are often in part inspired by YouTube celebrities like PewDiePie. Help—we’re getting sucked into a vortex. In a tweet yesterday, PewDiePie announced his Tuber Simulator, a free-to-play mobile game that he saysis “different from other similar…

Snapchat’s First Multi-Level Game Stars Serena Williams’ Outfits

Today, Snapchat is featuring its first multi-level video game, a retro tennis title based on Serena Williams’ 22 major tennis victories, each with its own level. And, for an 8-bit Gatorade-sponsored ad buried beneath ESPN’s Snapchat Discover stories (baseball player Carlos Gomez running into a wall and a stack of kids sliding down a hill…

Anime director Hideaki Anno, of Evangelion fame, is producing his studio’s first TV anime series: “The Dragon Dentist.” Crunchyroll reported today that, in February 2017, Studio Khara will spin the 2014 short into two 45-minute episodes. It’s a well-wrought short with excellent world-building and character design, so I can’t wait to see how Khara will…

Thousands Are Poorly Explaining Their Furry Personae On Twitter

Curious about the latest trend? You’ve come to the right place. In the last hour, over 200 furries have tweeted with the hashtag #poorlyexplainyourfursona. Since midnight last night, when the furry hashtag was trending, there have been over 2,000 instances of #poorlyexplainyourfursona on Twitter. A “fursona” is a portmanteau of the words “furry” and “persona.”…

A Puppet Show That Is Also An Anime

Thunderbolt Fantasy is an anime made out of glove puppets. A regular Kotaku reader told me that, and I was like, excuse me? Released early July, Thunderbolt Fantasy is testing the public’s definition of “anime.” Puppeteers inhabiting anime-styled, classic Taiwanese hoteigeki dolls play out sword fights, love scenes and light banter on camera (with a…

Pokémon Go Spawn Rates In One Convenient Fan Chart

One of Pokémon Go’s many, many mysteries is Pokémon spawn rates. What’s the chance that a Bulbasaur will appear in yonder bushes? How often will I encounter Mr. Mime? (Spoiler: .0031% of the time). This morning, Pokémon Go Hub published a Pokémon Go spawn rate chart using over 100 million data points from Poké Radar’s…

Watch Us Play A VR Game About Musical Cheeseburgers

Rarely do I find a virtual reality game worth the hype, but Playthings, released yesterday, literally takes the cake. I mean literally—there is a lot of cake. Playthings is a tropical island “music playground” for the HTC Vive. In it, players’ instruments are a feast of cheeseburgers, cupcakes, gummy bears and hot dogs, floating around…

Riot Games Co-Founder And League Of Legends Team Owner Clash Over Cash [UPDATE]

League of Legends earned publisher Riot Games $1.6 billion in revenue last year, but a public debate between community leaders is shedding light on how the game’s competitive players are financially vulnerable. Arguing over who deserves blame, Riot Games’ co-founder and a prominent League of Legends team owner are duking it out on public forums…

Sci-Fi Romance Adventure Alone With You Just Feels Lonely

My optimism about Alone With You, released yesterday, glided on high-soaring generic expectations set by recent retro-styled adventures like Read Only Memories and VA-11 HALL-A: excellent interactive fiction with minimal gameplay. With knockouts like those, under-appreciated genres draw in wider audiences, as I was drawn to “sci-fi romance adventure” Alone With You. Unfortunately, throughout the…

Roadhog Vs. Roadhog Is The Most Savage Overwatch Match-Up

Who’s the ultimate Roadhog? Whose death hook is quicker to clamp, a surer vice of animal ferocity? In a tug-of-war of barbed hooks and scrap metal dominance, I’ve decided that it’s me, and not that other Roadhog on the enemy team. It is definitely not that Roadhog. I am in fact emoting on his discarded…

Another DDoS Attack Takes Out Blizzard’s Servers [UPDATE]

Update—10:40 a.m.: With grace, felicity and no pity for this post’s short-lived relevance, Blizzard resolved their server issues ten minutes post-publication. Read below for background on today’s now-fixed DDoS attack against Battle.net. A DDoS attack this morning crippled Blizzard’s Battle.net servers, according to Blizzard’s official Twitter account. Overwatch, Hearthstone, World of Warcraft and other Blizzard…

Twitch Will Highlight Disabled Gamers This Week

Right now, I’m watching speedrunner HalfCoordinated blast through Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight on “Insane difficulty” using just one hand. HalfCoordinated has hemiparesis, so the whole right half of his body is severely weak, a disability that hasn’t stopped him from speedruning Momodora: RUtM in under 25 minutes. Today, HalfCoordinated is on the front page…

The Super Smash Sisters Are Encouraging Badass Women To Compete At Smash

Toeing the line between camaraderie and fierce competition is near-impossible, especially in fighting games communities, but the Super Smash Sisters have mastered it, with bite. Smash Sisters isn’t a club as much as an ongoing event, a series of Super Smash Brothers Melee and Smash 4 crew battles across the country. The goal is to…

Touchingly, Blizzard dedicated today’s new Bastion-centric Overwatch short to Yvain Gnarbo, a Blizzard animator who died in a motorcycle accident last June.

Black Cosplayers Talk About Self-Doubt

Shannon I., 23, didn’t want to leave her Baltimore hotel room. For months, she had been looking forward to Otakon, Baltimore’s annual anime convention, and especially to cosplaying Takumi from Fire Emblem Fates. Trimmed in fur, embellished with red string and topped with a white wig, Shannon’s cosplay was impeccable. She had been striving for…

Blizzard Tries To Humanize Bastion With New Overwatch Video

The animated Overwatch short nobody but Bastion players wanted, “The Last Bastion,” just premiered at Gamescom. According to Overwatch Project Director Ben Dai, Bastion,“an artificial intelligence programmed to do one thing, and one thing only—to fight—comes face-to-face with a choice to alter his destiny” in the short. That’s right, one thing: posting up in a…

Serious D&D Player Chugs Wine Underwater To Settle Rules Dispute

Game Masters can be nit-picky sticklers with wands up their butts. It’s a respectable mode for navigating the endless charts and dice rolls and idiosyncratic mechanics of tabletop RPGs. Seriously, I respect you, stickler GMs. Without you, I wouldn’t know the difficulty class for reaching across the table and grabbing a Cheeto. Is that a…

Five Great Books About Video Game Culture

Probably my favorite hobby next to playing video games is reading about people who love and design them. And I’m not talking licensed-by-Nintendo glory stories about CEOs overcoming their mistrust of Crash Bandicoot to make millions—I’m talking books about the rest of us, lovers on MMORPGs, struggling indie devs, self-hating gaming addicts, virtuous guild leaders,…