Ethan Gach

Players Worry Paladins‘ New Card System Inches Closer To Pay-To-Win

A new update to go live on Paladins’ public test server is already drawing a lot of criticism from some of the hero-based shooter’s most dedicated players. In addition to the normal gameplay tweaks, the OB64 patch introduces a new system for how players can use cards to customize their favorite characters and make them…

Putting Games On Mute Might Make It Harder To Play Well

From the limited findings based on a recent experiment, researchers at Brandeis University found that sounds can affect how we interpret visual cues. Participants in an experiment found it more difficult to score points in a simple game when its audio was messed with or turned off entirely. More proof that listening to podcasts while…

Meet The 19-Year-Old Who Spent Over $10,000 On Microtransactions

At the height of the controversy surrounding microtransactions in Star Wars Battlefront II, a Reddit user who goes by the name Kensgold posted an open letter to publisher EA and other developers in the video game industry. “I am 19 and addicted to gambling,” he wrote. Kensgold wasn’t talking about roulette tables or online poker.…

The Beginner’s Guide Creators’ New Game Is About Keanu Reeves Stabbing People

“Welcome player. It’s a fucking video game. Get your stats ready,” Absolutely: A True Crime Story begins. Then it asks you to boost one of your starting character’s stats like strength, dexterity, or something called J3V. None of these stats matter: the browser game is just a random, nihilistic parody. But it’s funny, mostly because…

The Week In Games: Xenoblade Strikes Back 

Xeno is Greek for “foreigner,” though Xenoblade Chronicles 2 hardly seems like a stranger at this point. A cult classic in the PS1 era with Xenogears, a lackluster trilogy of vague prequels with the PS2’s Xenosaga, and then a series stumbling toward renewed JRPG greatness across three different Nintendo platforms in the modern era. Clearly…

Speedrunner Gets $1,000 Donation While Playing Ocarina Of Time Thanks To Sheer Luck 

Speedrunner Cheese was attempting a 100% run of The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time when the unthinkable happened. A Twitch viewer in the chat dropped a cool grand on the streamer to celebrate some bizarre random number generation. 100% speedruns require players to do just about everything there is to do in a…

Noctis Whacks People With His Sword In Latest Dissidia Final Fantasy Gameplay 

Tekken 7 isn’t the only fighting game Noctis is headed to these days. He’ll also be gracing Dissidia Final Fantasy with his presence. Square Enix showed off the young prince’s moves in a two year anniversary stream for the game earlier today. The game is currently out in arcades in Japan, but will also be…

Guy Wins Mobile Game Tournament, Has Nothing To Say

Tomato, the Shanghai finalist for Summoners War, went on to become its first world champion after a full day of harrowing matches against other elite players. When asked if he had anything to say to fans in the audience and online, he said “No.” The $61,000 prize pool World Arena Championship took place on Saturday…

While there are a lot of great custom designs for the Switch popping up every week, the Funtastic N64-inspired ones are my new favorite. Nintendo started releasing translucent colored variants for the N64 back in 1999 with the release of Donkey Kong 64. What console mods currently have you excited?

Sunday Comics: That’s No Turkey

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 November 25. Read more of Nerf NOW!! Awkward Zombie by Katie Tiedrich. Published November 20. Read more…

The Black Friday Backlog Of Shame  

I bought XCOM: Enemy Unknown five years ago and still haven’t touched it. It was Black Friday 2012 and there were deals. Lots of them. The one that hooked me was from Amazon though. The online retailer was offering a number of games that had come out that year at $25 a piece with free…

Track: Old Friends | Artist: Simon & Garfunkel | Album: Bookends Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

If Dark Souls Was Animated To Look Like Cuphead 

Dying would look a lot cuter. The mashup was created by the YouTube channel 64 Bits and shows just how limitless the possibilities are for Cuphead DLC. It turns out anthropomorphic cups aren’t the only thing that look cooler when animated. “We just love Cuphead (and Dark Souls!) So we animated you this mashup!” the…

Breath Of The Wild‘s Horses Do The Darndest Things 

It’s been a good year for games. Trying to arrive at a shortlist for the best ones to come out in 2017 is going be tough. But every time I think I’ve finally started to cool on The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild, it finds a new way to warm my heart.…

The Weekend In Esports: European Counter-Strike And Hadocon VIII

It’s a relatively quiet weekend in competitive gaming given the American holiday and the general winding down of the year over all. As a result, Europe takes center stage with the conclusion of the Blast Pro Series and WESG 2017 qualifiers. Below you’ll find where and when you can catch all the weekend’s biggest events…

Witcher 3 Development Is Over, But One Of Its Designers Is Still Making Mods

In the two and a half years since it was released, The Witcher 3 has received hundreds of mods from enthusiastic fans. Some were silly, others were deadly serious, but the latest is a litany of unofficial improvements done as a side project by one of the game’s original developers. Andrzej Kwiatkowski, a Senior Gameplay…

The Electronic Musician Inspired By Anime And Dragon Age

It turns out if you want to get the LA-based musician Will Wiesenfeld, stage name Baths, talking about video games, you should ask him about Diablo 2. In video game circles he’s known for the theme song for this summer’s Dream Daddy, as well as the understated trailer music for Hyper Light Drifter’s stunningly successful…

Gwent’s single-player campaign has been delayed until 2018. CD Projekt Red announced the news, breaking millions of hearts the world over. “Thronebreaker,” the card game’s 15 hour story mode was supposed to hit in December. Gwent’s also still in beta, because that’s what you do with games in 2017.

This Parody Of Battle Royale Games Looks Really Fun

A bunch of white dudes sit in an office, all of them wearing black suits and white collared shirts. Everyone sits in the same lime green swivel chairs. For a video game, Last Man Sitting sounds really boring. Add shotguns and ragdoll physics, though, and you have a recipe for the only battle royale game…

Narita Boy just released its first gameplay trailer. The 80s cyberpunk beat’em up is infused with nostalgia for old tech and according to this latest footage at least, pretty violent. Wespoke with the developer when the project was Kickstarted earlier this year, which originally aimed for a release in late 2018.