Ethan Gach

Detroit: Become Human will be out May 25. The PS4 exclusive has seen its fair share of controversy during development including a trailer last summer that was criticized for its portrayal of domestic abuse. We’ll see whether the Quantic Dream game avoids the pitfalls of its predecessor.

Judge Orders Teen To Stop Playing Violent Video Games [UPDATE]

Earlier this week, a student at Lake Park High School in the suburbs of Chicago was arrested for threatening to commit a school shooting on social media. At his hearing, a judge yesterday ordered the teen to forfeit his smartphone to his parents and stop playing violent video games. According to a report by the…

Nintendo Adds User Reviews, Immediately Pulls Them [UPDATE]

Late last week, Nintendo began allowing users to post reviews on the Switch’s eShop for certain games, with ratings and comments also appearing under each game’s listing on the Nintendo website. This morning, Nintendo suddenly pulled the feature, and it’s not clear why. The new feature, which was originally brought to people’s attention last Friday…

The Week In Games: Out Of The Frying Pan And Into The Breach

The long awaited follow-up to FTL: Faster Than Light arrives this week and the timing couldn’t be better. Perfectly situated in the middle of an otherwise mostly quiet release week, Subset Games’ Into the Breach comes five and a half years after the studio’s first strategy outing. There are mechs, time travel and gigantic creatures…

All Walls Must Fall Is A Time Travel Tactics Game That Feels Incomplete 

A new strategy game set in futuristic German nightclubs, All Walls Must Fall offers a thrillingly fresh take on turn-based tactics that could still use a few more tuneups. It’s Berlin and the year is 2089. In an alternate future where the Cold War has been waging for 150 years time travel is now the…

Virtus Pro Seizes Top Spot In Dota 2 Pro Circuit

After a week of upsets, ESL One Katowice ended in a one-sided rout. It was only last fall that Russia’s storied Virtus.pro side finally won its first Major. Just four months later they’ve somehow managed to continue that streak and become back-to-back ESL One winners. While the Group A finals earlier in the week saw…

Hackers Are Working To Bring Every Doom Game To Switch 

This is the open source version of Doom 3 running on a Switch. It’s only a matter of time before Doom 64 and the rest arrive. There’s a long standing mission to run the original Doom on every object humanity’s ever encountered. But with Doom 2016 arriving on Switch last fall, the first time the…

Sunday Comics: Room To Change

Welcome to Kotaku’s Sunday Comics, your weekly roundup of the best webcomics that usually occurs on Sunday except when it doesn’t. The images enlarge if you click on the magnifying glass icon. Nerf NOW!! by Josué Pereira. Published February 23. Read more of Nerf NOW!!  Awkward Zombie by Katie Tiedrich. Published February 19. Read more…

This Might Be The Worst Way To Die In Fortnite 

Grenades are not toys. Fortnite player ErenOz-01 was reminded of that fact the hard way. A clip they shared on Reddit showed them dropping into a Battle Royale match near the Wailing Woods, but wandered around for minutes without seeing anyone else. So, like all bored players packing explosives, they lazily tossed a grenade off…

Facebook Pulls VR Shooter Demo From Conservative Conference After Backlash 

Facebook announced the removal of the Bullet Train demo from its virtual reality experience booth at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) after public outcry in light of the recent mass shooting at a school in Parkland, Florida. Developed by Epic Games to help show off the Oculus headset’s VR capabilities back in 2015, Bullet Train…

The Two Friends Dominating Borderlands 2 Coop Speedrunning

A chance meeting and subsequent trip to Awesome Games Done Quick 2015 resulted in two college students forming a speedrunning duo that’s still setting world records. Speedrunners Amyrlinn and Shockwve know Borderlands 2 intimately. It would be a cliche to say they know Gearbox’s shooter better than the backs of their own hands, but they…

Little Nightmares’ last DLC, The Residence, is now out. It adds some new traps and enemies and puts you up against a boss called The Lady. Though the Inside-like horror puzzler didn’t set the world on fire, I quite liked it and it’s been nice to see Tarsier Studios continue building out its story and…

You Can Now Watch The Brief Movie Version Of Papers, Please

The brief film adaption of Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please is now out on YouTube and Steam to watch for free, in case you were hoping for something solemn and tragic to meditate on today. It runs just short of 10 minutes not including the credits and does a good job of capturing the feel and…

The Weekend In Esports: Battlegrounds Goes To Poland

The biggest names in esports are in Poland this weekend for, among other things, the biggest PUBG tournament yet held. The game originally debuted with an invitational at IEM Oakland last year and has now moved on to having a world championship tournament at this year’s Katowice event. Dota 2, CS:GO, and StarCraft II will…

Payday 2 On Switch Will Be Rough Without Voice Chat [UPDATE]

Payday 2 arrives on the Switch next week, nearly five years after its initial release on PC. A lot of questions have already been raised about how it will be missing a large chunk of the additional content that has come out since 2013, but a bigger head-scratcher remains the lack of proper voice chat.…

I Can’t Stop Playing This Action-Stealth Shooter

Deadbolt strips stealth down to the essentials and I can’t stop playing it. One hit and you’re dead in this side-scrolling shooter—not ideal for someone like me who prefers to rush through a level guns blazing over methodically planning my strategy and route ahead of time. And yet Hotline Miami-style quick restarts meant this sort…

Color Blind Players Are Concerned About Rainbow Six Siege‘s New Operator Ability 

Olivier “Lion” Flament is a French service member who’s special ability involves using a drone to survey hostile areas and detect movement. Unfortunately, the way this works involves a red aura around opponents that some players won’t be able to see. Part of Rainbow Six Siege’s Operation Chimera update arriving March 6, Lion will be…

Firewatch Inspires Teenager To Save Real Life Lookout Tower

Jack Kelley knew he wanted to play Firewatch since seeing the first pieces of artwork. After the game released in 2016, Kelley became fascinated by the real world lookout towers that inspired the game, culminating in the 14-year-old fan saving a historic lookout tower from demolition. “Campo Santo really changed my life with Firewatch,” Kelley…

Developers Paul Reiche and Fred Ford today filed a counterclaim against Stardock in U.S. District Court in Oakland claiming to be the creators and sole copyright owners for Star Control I and II. This was in response to Stardock’s December lawsuit alleging the opposite. Ars Technica has a great write-up of the topic.

Trump Says Video Game Violence Is ‘Shaping Young People’s Thoughts’

Today during a meeting on school safety at the White House, U.S. President Donald Trump suggested that violent video games are partly responsible for school shootings. His train of thought was hard to follow—as it often is—so here’s the full comment: “We have to look at the internet, because a lot of bad things are…