Ethan Gach

The Real-Life Atari Secret That Inspired Ready Player One

Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Ready Player One, like the source material, is chock full of references to 80s music, movies, and video games. It also throws in a few Master Chiefs, Overwatch characters, and the Iron Giant for good measure. Usually these references are surface level and fleeting, but a few carry more weight—like the…

Hey Ubisoft, Let Far Cry 5‘s Dog Ride In The Car

Far Cry 5 has three pets you can befriend and enlist to help you fight enemy cultists. They’ll help you, and they’ll follow you anywhere. They just won’t ride with you in a car. I can forgive that for the cougar or the bear. In the case of the third animal, a dog, it’s borderline…

Players Are Obsessed With Far Cry 5‘s Shovels

Far Cry 5 has lots of weapons, ranging from throwing knives to heavy machine guns, but none have captured players’ imaginations quite like its shovels. Can you dig it? Just a few days after release, Far Cry 5 has managed to elevate the handling of a gardening tool from a chore into an Olympic sport…

Red Faction Guerrilla is getting a remaster due out sometime in the second quarter of 2018 according to THQ Nordic. The new version of the Mars-based shooter will have reworked graphics, shadows, and lighting, as well as support native 4K, so its destructible open world should look that much prettier.

Far Cry 5 NPC Talks About How Hard It Is To Make Far Cry Games

The fictional movie director of the not-real film Blood Dragon 3 is under a lot of stress in Far Cry 5. He told me so himself when I stumbled onto his movie set in the eastern part of Ubisoft’s huge new first-person shooter. If his next project is a flop he says he’ll be forced…

Here’s April’s PlayStation Plus Lineup

It’s hard to compete with last month’s PlayStation Plus offerings which somehow included both Bloodborne and Ratchet & Clank, but Mad Max is a nice, out of left field follow-up. The Kotaku review wasn’t kind, but if you’re just looking to drive around in a post-apocalyptic world and gawk at some beautiful, dusty sunsets, it’s…

Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age will be out September 4 on PS4 and PC. The game released last summer in Japan on PS4 and 3DS but the North American release will be an upgraded version including a new hard mode, camera mode, improved graphics, an overhauled UI, and dashing.

Tips For Playing Far Cry 5

Far Cry 5 is a big game with lots to do. It’s more open than its predecessors, so at any moment, you have a lot of choices about what you can do. We have some suggestions if you’re preparing make your way through Hope County, Montana. I’ve played the game for about 35 hours, and…

Far Cry 5: The Kotaku Review

I’ve spent a long time trekking across Far Cry 5’s fictional Hope County, Montana fighting the members of an apocalyptic cult led by a man called Joseph Seed, and I’m still not sure what their deal is. They drive around blasting weird Christian synth and shooting non-members on sight. It’s weird and terrifying and unsatisfyingly…

Warframe Removed A Microtransaction Because A Player Used It Too Much

In a new documentary about Warframe, the game’s developers discuss what they’ve learned about building a free-to-play multiplayer game over the years. It includes the story of how someone paying for a microtransaction 200 times helped them realize they’d accidentally created a slot machine. In the most recent episode of Danny O’Dwyer’s Noclip documentary series…

The Gwent Version Of This Witcher Boss Is Out Of Control

As a competitive card game, Gwent has a community of players that’s both completely devoted and perpetually grumpy. The latest target of that energy happens to be a card called Imlerith: Sabbath, a gold monster whose power was best demonstrated when it almost single-handedly won a recent match. Jan “SuperJJ” Janßen, a pro Hearthstone player…

Heroes of the Storm’s latest patch went live yesterday, re-balancing various heroes to increase viability. For instance, Auriel’s base damage has gone up along with better range for Resurrect and a 20% reduction in the cooldown. The changes might not be enough to save the support hero but it’s progress.

Wave Race 64 Player Spends Nine Years Shaving Less Than Two Seconds Off Record

Speedrunner Illudude has been playing Wave Race 64 since it was released in 1996 on the Nintendo 64. Yesterday, be set a new world record on the game’s Drake Lake level, breaking the 1:11 barrier he first introduced in 2010 and which speedrunners have been trapped ever since. Shaving five hundredths of a second off…

Afterparty now has a trailer giving us our first good look at the new game from the makers of Oxenfree. You play as two dead college kids who need to out drink Satan in order to return to earth and walk among the living. Afterparty’s due out sometime in 2019.

One Of The NES’s Weirdest Controllers Gets A Modern Update 

Remember the NES Max? It was a weird boomerang-shaped controller from 1988 that was, like so many things, ahead of its time. Decades later, a retro modder has given the peripheral a more modern feel—specifically, the feel of an Xbox One analog stick. Modder Nick Neitzel recently shared his creation on Reddit and YouTube, which…

Ark: Survival Evolved is coming to Switch this fall. According to Studio Wildcard, the Switch version will have the same features as on PS4 and Xbox One. No word yet on whether it will be cross-play with the PC version. Either way, you’ll soon be able to poach dinosaurs on the go.

Twitch Prime Fortnite Skins Are Getting Resold On Ebay

Fortnite: Battle Royale most’s popular streamer broke Twitch records last week when he teamed up with Drake, and the game’s audience continues to grow now that a mobile version is in beta. And thanks to the game’s Twitch Prime loot, there’s now a small black market for Fortnite skins on Ebay as well. In February,…

Rainbow Six Siege’s latest update arrived today. Currently live on PC and coming to consoles later this week, Patch Y3S1.1‘s most notable contribution is fixing the issue where equipped skins would reset after getting disconnected. The glitch making some players occasionally go invisible is also no more.

Vivendi’s Attempt At A Hostile Takeover Of Ubisoft Is Over

Ubisoft appears to have avoided the hostile takeover the company’s bosses and workers have been fearing from the conglomerate Vivendi for the past three years.The mega-publisher announced today that Vivendi will sell off all its existing shares in Ubisoft and agreed to not acquire any more for the next five years. In another twist, China’s…

A report today by The Verge details the recent history of Telltale Games leading up to last fall’s layoffs, including feelings among many of the staff that the studio was stagnating creatively and had also become a toxic work environment under the leadership of co-founder and former CEO Kevin Bruner.