Mike Fahey

Some Bullet Hell Shooters are Too Hard. Some are Too Easy. This One is Just Right.

I want to be an amazing shoot-em up player, effortlessly weaving between endless streams of multicolored bullets, beams of light from my spaceship/airplane/magical girl painting enemies with glorious destruction. If only I were that coordinated. Sunny Tam’s Danmaku Unlimited 2 for iOS does not magically transform me into a proficient bullet hell shooter pro, but…

Become Dishonored‘s Deadliest Assassin in Next Month’s The Knife of Dunwall

I’ve played through the beginning of Arkane Studio’s Dishonored at least a half-dozen times, each time dreading the moment the killers make their move. Launching worldwide on April 16, Dishonored‘s second helping of downloadable content puts the assassin’s dagger in players’ hands. Can The Knife of Dunwall be redeemed? It’s chilling, seeing Corvo and the…

Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Storm 3: The Kotaku Review

After nearly a decade of playing Naruto video games, that annoying little jerk of a ninja unleashes his most powerful move yet — making me cry. God I hate him. The creation of manga artist Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto began as a one-shot comic strip and grew into one of the best-selling manga series of all-time.…

My Favorite Way to Play Darkstalkers Resurrection is the Least Practical Way

This week Capcom unleashes Darkstalkers Resurrection on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, bringing fans of the monster-fueled fighting game series both Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge and Darkstalkers 3, updated with online multiplayer, YouTube replay sharing, and a bevy of options to enhance your viewing pleasure. Let me show you my favorite. It looks a…

This is Obviously a Heavily-Modded PC Version Skyrim Statue

Now available for preorder from the fine folks at Gaming Heads, this $299.99 statue of Skyrim‘s champion would not be possible without the PC modding community. You just don’t get this sort of visual fidelity with today’s game consoles. Now I’m not saying a great statue couldn’t have been based on the unmodded PC or…

Journey to Hell is Just as Unpleasant as It Sounds

Gritty heroes fight demons from hell with guns in a brownish world spiraling out of control — if Journey to Hell‘s story sounds clichéd, that’s because it’s supposed to be. It says so right in the iTunes listing. “Cliché-packed Journey to Hell” the developers call it, an apt description if I’ve ever read one. Journey…

An Ingenious Mod Turns Doom 2 into Twisted Metal

Why do we bother putting out new games when there’s so much life left in the old ones? Zandronum forum member mr fiat takes the classic Doom 2 multiplayer deathmatch and replaces the marines with cars, complete with dashboards. I want to play this right now. If I had the time, I could download the…

Marshmallow Peeps: The Snacktaku Review

I believe it was the bard Rayvon, performing in the poet Shaggy’s seminal work, who said “Closer than my Peeps you are to me, baby.” While this writer still hopes to provoke a resurgence of popularity for that classic piece, future generations will condemn “Angel” for that single, unfortunate line. Nothing can be closer than…

Behold Studios’ fantastic table-top RPG simulator Knights of Pen and Paper is free today on iOS. (Thanks, Saulo!)

Nikola Tesla’s Finest Creation Gets His Own Mobile Game

Created by Brian Clevinger’s Nikola Tesla in 1923, Atomic Robo is a robotic member of a think-tank of Action Scientists, probing the shadowy outskirts of science. In Second Fiction’s Atomic Robo: Violent Science, now available for iOS and coming soon to Windows 8 and Android, he does that too, only gamier. Atomic Robo is the…

From LittleBigPlanet Roots Springs the Freshest Puzzle Game on iTunes

I play dozens of mobile games a week, at least 24 percent of which are puzzle games. From block-matching to word games; physics puzzlers to good old Tetris clones—I’ve played them all. The last thing I expected to see in last week’s crop of new games was a puzzler unlike anything I’d played before. If…

Not One Server Problem or Disconnect in This Week in Gaming Apps

Want to know what it’s like to be unfamous Kotaku mobile editor Michael Fahey for a week? Play around 30 gaming apps across three platforms while attempting to connect to SimCity in order to write a review of a game that you assure everyone will think is pretty good once they can connect to it.…

Funcom’s Three MMO Worlds Are In His Hands. What Will He Do?

Just a few short years ago, Funcom’s Joel Bylos was in charge of level 20 through 40 of Age of Conan, a massively multiplayer online game that was, at launch, widely criticized for a lack of quality content past level 20. Now he’s the creative director in charge of Age of Conan, Anarchy Online and…

In a Week of Big-Name Runner Games, This Indie is On Fire

It’s been a huge week for mobile running games. There’s a new Temple Run that’s tied to Disney’s Oz: The Great and Powerful. Mini Ninjas went for a jog, Sonic the Hedgehog busted out time-tested moves, and the Monday Night Combat folks launched the Outland Games. All of these running games based on popular properties,…

KingsRoad is the Closest You Can Come to Playing Diablo on Facebook

Launched just this week, Rumble Entertainment’s KingsRoad is about as far from a traditional Facebook game as you can get. It’s a Diablo-style action role-playing game with all the bells and whistles — including multiplayer — and it’s servers are running just fine. The people of Alderstone have lost their king, and a mysterious evil…

Our First Look at Shadowrun Returns in Action Shows $1.8 Million Well-Spent

Last year Jordan Weisman’s Harebrained Schemes raised $1,895,772 via Kickstarter to create the ultimate game based on the magic-meets-technology pen-and-paper role-playing game, Shadowrun. Today we get our first look at Shadowrun Returns gameplay, and so far it’s everything I wanted it to be. This should completely wash the bad taste of that first-person shooter from…

This Week’s Android Charts: A Vector of Change

Vector‘s appearance as one of two new games in this week’s Android chart has got me thinking about switching things up. There’s just not enough variety in the traditional week-to-week top games rankings, so starting next week I’ll be tracking top new games instead. It’ll be a little more work — I’ll have to reference…

Because more Rayman is always a good thing, Rayman Jungle Run is now available for Windows 8 and RT for $2.99.

Sega Wants to Know If We Want This Virtual Idol Rhythm Game in the West. Yes, Please.

We’ve covered Sega’s Hatsune Miku-powered rhythm game Project Diva – F for the PlayStation Vita and PS3 quite a lot here at Kotaku, but all of that coverage has been from afar, courtesy of the kindly Kotaku East crew. Now Sega’s wondering if North America and Europe wouldn’t mind a closer look. All you have…

Finally an Original Mobile Game That Plays to Sonic the Hedgehog‘s Greatest Strength

When Sega’s Hardlight Studio released Sonic Jump last year, I shook my head. Jumping is not the ability Sonic the Hedgehog is known for. This week Hardlight has released endless runner Sonic Dash on iOS. That’s more like it. How do you make a good 3D Sonic the Hedgehog game? You take a bad one…