Ethan Gach

Spamming Like In Death Stranding Makes You Feel Real Good

Death Stranding’s America is dotted with thousands, possibly even millions, of player-made structures that can make the post-apocalyptic expanse less dangerous and also less lonely⁠—perhaps even welcoming. These structures have a social media-inspired system that lets you click a “like” button on them. And I am determined to favorite them all as much as possible.…

Fallout 76, One Year Later

Bethesda launched Fallout 76 one year ago today, and almost everything that could go wrong did. And yet 12 months later it’s still around, still getting updates, and full of players who remain willing to pour their best and most creative energies into trying to make it an interesting and wondrous place. It’s been a…

A Ton Of Final Fantasy Games Are Coming To Xbox Game Pass

Final Fantasy VII through XV (excluding the two MMOs) will get added to Game Pass in the coming months, Microsoft announced today during the latest episode of Inside Xbox at this year’s XO19 fan event in London. That chunk of the series includes 10 games, many of which, like Final Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy XII:…

Halo: Reach is coming to the Halo: Master Chief Collection on Xbox One and PC on December 3, Microsoft announced today. It’s the first of the collection’s games to come to PC, and the first Halo to make that journey in a very long time.

Age Of Empires II‘s Remaster Kicks Ass

Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition is a lot. It adds new campaigns, civilizations, revamped enemy AI, and 4K graphics, in case you’ve been waiting to see a flood of medieval warriors clash incomprehensibly with one another in crisp detail. Remastered and slightly reworked, one of the defining real-time strategy games of the turn of…

Google Confirms All The Stuff Stadia Won’t Have At Launch

Ahead of Stadia’s launch next week, Google’s representatives fielded questions during an AMA on Reddit about what exactly the video game streaming service will include in the beginning. The answer is, not much. The whole thread was a good reminder that much of Stadia remains as theoretical as it seemed when it was originally pitched…

Legend of Bum-bo Is A Pleasing, Puzzling, Poo-Filled Prequel To Binding Of Isaac

I’ve been staring at my computer screen for three minutes trying to decide where the piles of poo should go. If I can get four of them in a row, I can fling a pile at the rotting sack of guts bearing down on me, and temporarily block it. But no matter how I tried,…

Shovel Knight developer Yacht Club dropped some wonderful news overnight: Shovel Knight: King of Cards and Shovel Knight Showdown will both come out on December 10. The first, a bonus campaign to the original game, and the second, a multiplayer fighting game spinoff, were originally set to release last April.

Major Ghost Recon Breakpoint Update Isn’t Enough To Fix The Game

Today, Ghost Recon Breakpoint got its biggest update since launch. Besides the two new faction missions, there are a host of tweaks, some big, some small, touching on almost every aspect of the game. They might not turn Breakpoint into a game you need to play, but they are slowly turning it into the sort…

Xbox One Is Getting A Shuffle Button To Let You Go Through Your Backlog At Random

A new “Surprise Me” button will be added to the Xbox One’s game library, Microsoft announced yesterday on Twitter. Rolling out first for players in the Xbox One insider testing program, the “Surprise Me” button will allow the indecisive player to select a game randomly from their library to play. The button doesn’t automatically launch…

Competitive Madden Returns This Weekend Starring Two-Time Champ

Pro Madden kicks off the first major tournament of its 2020 season this weekend with the Madden 20 Classic in Arlington Texas where all eyes will be on Michael “Skimbo” Skimbo to see if the existing champ can win his third straight title. Skimbo has been a powerhouse at the Classic for the last two…

Fallout 76’s Raid Missions Feel Like Chores

In gaming parlance, the phrase “raid” implies some grand story, an epic boss fight, and the promise of great rewards at the end. Bethesda has called Fallout 76’s latest addition to the game a raid, but it lacks those things. Instead, it takes the base game’s worst quests and repackages them the most grindy, punishing…

Remedy Entertainment says it’s looking into how to improve Control’s performance on console but that it will take time. The studio also says that an on/off toggle for Motion Blur and Film Grain will be coming in the next update, along with improvements to the map display. 

Woman Says Oculus Rift Cofounder Put His Hand Up Her Skirt During VR Demo

Earlier this week, Autumn Taylor, marketing director at the virtual reality game studio Owlchemy Labs, said that Oculus cofounder Michael Antonov groped her during a VR demo in 2016. At first, Taylor described the incident without revealing the person’s identity. “They showed me VR demos, but put their hands up my skirt while they did…

Turn-based survival game Overland finally has a release date and it’s not that far off, arriving on PC, Xbox One, PS4, and Switch on September 19. In Overland you travel across a post-apocalyptic landscape Oregon Trail-style in-between getting in tactical fights. We’ll find out soon if it’s as good as it sounds. 

I Feel Gross Just Watching NBA 2K20’s Loot Box Trailer

NBA 2K20 is supposed to be a game primarily about playing basketball, but you wouldn’t know that from the game’s latest trailer, which makes the game look like something you might see in a casino. Released on Monday, the “MyTeam” trailer for NBA 2K20 shows off all the ways you can recruit better players and…

I Didn’t Grow Up In The 80s, But This New Game Makes Me Feel Like I Did

There was a time, I’m told, when arcades were everywhere and kids spent long summer nights pissing away whatever money they had just to lose over and over again in games like Sinistar and Out Run. I missed that period of time by a decade, but that hasn’t stopped me from pining for it, like…

Apocalyptic ice age simulator Frostpunk got its first expansion today adding a new map for the game’s endless mode called The Rifts. The game is also getting a few more updates later this year, including a new scenario and a handful of other endless mode maps. 

Tips For Playing Control

Control takes you on a fascinating journey through a monstrous office building full of occult horrors. It also holds a lot back, preferring to show rather than tell. As a result, there’s some information that can be really useful to know but that the game doesn’t explain well, or at all. Whether you’re just getting…

Sony Is Still Trying To Stop People From Hacking The Vita, For Some Reason [Corrected]

Correction: 8/28/2019, 1:30 p.m. ET: After the publication of this story, the Vita hacker in question now says that the h-encore² hack in fact still works with the 3.72 Vita firmware. Kotaku apologizes the error. The original story is below. Less than a day after a new exploit for jailbreaking the Vita was discovered, Sony…