Chris Kohler

Vs. Super Mario Bros. Is The Meanest Trick Nintendo Ever Played

Super Mario Bros. is available on the Switch! Well, a long-forgotten version of it, anyway, that’s probably not the one you were expecting. While Nintendo hasn’t yet begun to add its classic console games to Switch, we’re getting something else instead: Nintendo’s classic arcade games, courtesy the Arcade Archives series by the publisher Hamster. This…

The Year In Old Games, 2017

This year was a pretty damn good one for new video games. It was also great for old ones! The flip side of video games’ ever-advancing technological virtuosity is that older games tend to go out of print very quickly. Sure, you can wade into the world of emulators and Raspberries Pi, but it’s nice…

Wii U Games, Ranked By Probability Of Switch Ports

After Zelda, Mario Kart, Pokken, and now Bayonetta, which Wii U games will end up on Nintendo Switch next? Here are the most (and least) likely suspects. Nintendo hasn’t been shy about porting its Wii U games to Switch, and for good reason: Wii U had a few excellent games, but it was also the…

The Puzzle Of A Lifetime

The first time I played Gorogoa, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I’d heard about Gorogoa for years, but never tried it. Maybe it was because, even though multiple people tried to tell me about it, the game defies linguistic description: A wordless, hand-drawn puzzle game in which people, objects, and places move across…

The State Of The 3DS In 2017

The state of the Nintendo 3DS in 2017 is “still alive,” which often raises the question: When’s Nintendo going to kill this thing? While it fell far short of the dizzying heights achieved by the Nintendo DS, the 3DS had a pretty nice lifecycle. We had some good times, didn’t we? But it’s 2017, and…

In case you just can’t get enough of Trico, Sony is releasing a PlayStation VR The Last Guardian “demo,” for free, on December 12. Sony says you’ll be able to “solve puzzles and see Trico up close.”

Hey, Nintendo Didn’t Delay Any Games This Year

When Nintendo unveiled its lineup of launch-year games for Switch back in January, most people had the same thought: Which of these is gonna get delayed? I mean, delaying games is what Nintendo does. So who could have suspected it would actually release everything this year? Nintendo’s 2017 sounded typically ambitious. Although Switch’s launch day…

‘Fuck The Oscars’: Watch A Way Out Director’s Rant At The Game Awards

Josef Fares, director of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and the upcoming A Way Out, delivered a spirited, invigorated, profanity-powered speech at The Game Awards this evening, covering his real and true feelings on the Oscars and loot boxes. I can’t do it justice. Just watch and enjoy. “The Oscars should fuck themselves up;…

Bayonetta 3 Announced, Is Switch Exclusive

Nintendo said at The Game Awards that Platinum Games is developing Bayonetta 3 exclusively for the Switch. It showed a brief pre-rendered trailer (above), and also said that Bayonettas 1 and 2 are coming to Switch in February. Platinum’s stylish action game series, directed by Hideki Kamiya, made waves with its unforgettable main character and…

New Zelda DLC Lets You Ride A Motorcycle, Is Out Tonight

The story DLC for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, titled “The Champions’ Ballad,” will be available tonight for Switch and Wii U, Nintendo said at The Game Awards. Here’s the trailer: Besides adding new story sequences that go further into the story of the four Champions from Breath of the Wild, the…

Gorogoa finally has a release date: December 14. The hand-illustrated, wordless, mind-bending puzzle game made waves when it was first shown off way back in 2012. Five years later, it’s (almost) here.

Peach Amiibo Lets You Cheat Like Hell At Super Mario Odyssey

I’m kind of blown away by how much the Peach Amiibo breaks Super Mario Odyssey Like most of Nintendo’s Switch games, Super Mario Odyssey lets you use your stash of Amiibo™ brand interactive gaming figurines in a variety of ways. A souped-up Roomba named Uncle Amiibo will let you tap figures to find hidden Moons,…

Taro Yoko’s producer at Square Enix says he wants the Nier director to make a Final Fantasy He let this brilliant idea fly during a recent interview with Wow Japan, saying he would want the game to feature a “similar strangeness” to Yoko’s other games. “I’m hoping for a big budget if I do work…

Why Remakes, Like Shadow of the Colossus, Are Awesome

After spending a little bit of time with the PlayStation 4 version of Shadow of the Colossus, I have to say that I’m really into the idea of game remakes. Yesterday, following its Paris Game Week announcements, Sony held a small event in San Francisco for those of us not lucky enough to be visiting…

More people “primarily” play the Switch in undocked mode than on the TV, Nintendo said in a presentation today. 30% of players use handheld or kickstand mode more than 80% of the time, 18% play on the TV 80% of the time, and the other 52% are true switch-hitters. What kind of Switch player are…

Super Mario Odyssey: The Kotaku Review

For Mario, 3D used to mean freedom. In 1996, Super Mario 64 broke Nintendo’s mascot from the shackles of having to run in a straight line, letting the player choose their own path. But for quite some time now—no matter how 3D the graphics may have been—Mario’s adventures have reverted back to running on a…

Sega Genesis Flashback HD: The Kotaku Review

Let’s get the comparison we have to make out of the way: No, the Genesis Flashback isn’t as amazing as the SNES Classic. But it’s still pretty good, if you like the games. While Nintendo is setting the world on fire with its 90s nostalgia trip, let’s say your 16-bit desires are more unconventional. Perhaps…

JRPG manuals, 1989 vs. 2017. (Left: Wanderers From Ys for PC-88; right: I Am Setsuna, for Switch.)

Breath of the Wild‘s Biggest Design Secret: Lots Of Triangles

Running through the Hyrule of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you come across breathtaking sights one after the other: Massive fortresses, dizzyingly high towers, vast open plains. But according to the open-world game’s designers, the two most salient features of Hyrule were triangles and rectangles. The annual Computer Entertainment Developers Conference is…

Sega Genesis Flashback has a new release date of November 10. Early reviews universally panned the $80 HDMI classic console, but its manufacturer said the units were faulty and bumped back the release. The final units will replace 10 of the weird shovelware games like Hangman with 8-bit Sega B-sides like Psycho Fox and Kenseiden