Joshua Rivera

HBO’s Watchmen Is Better At Lore Than Most Games

Watchmen, the new HBO television series that we find incredibly intriguing, has a lot in common with some of my favorite video games. There is punching and costumes, damn good music, and a thoroughly imagined world that I want to spend a lot of time in. It also pulls off one of my favorite video…

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: The Kotaku Review

Across thousands of years of existence, we as a people have come to regard war as pretty bad. Senseless violence and the loss of irreplaceable lives, usually in the service of petty men who wield the power of nations indiscriminately, is just fucking stupid. Yet it still happens, and in America, the necessity of the…

Sans From Undertale Is A Wrestler Now

Pro wrestler Kenny Omega loves anime and video games. Like most people who love both of those things, he’s also a huge fan of Undertale. During this week’s Halloween-themed All-Elite Wrestling promo, Omega, who is known for incorporating his fandom into his act, went all-in, dressing as Sans Undertale for his big entrance. As you…

Modern Warfare Demands Your Attention, But It Might Not Deserve It

It opens with a suicide bombing. You are in a van full of terrorists, nervous, silent, about to do something awful. The van arrives, and a man with a bomb strapped to his chest strides out into a crowded urban space, detonator in hand. He moves to pull the trigger, and we smash cut to…

Ubisoft Admits Ghost Recon Breakpoint Has Been A Disaster

During an earnings call Thursday, Ubisoft gave investors a brutally frank appraisal of Ghost Recon Breakpoint, its latest release and vowed to implement “significant changes to our production processes” to fix the game. In a prepared statement you can read online, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot laid out the reasons the publisher believes the open-world special…

I Deleted An Endless Service Game And I Am Finally Free, Like My Hard Drive

Earlier this week, I finally deleted Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 from my hard drive, a video game that I had spent the better part of a year lying to myself about getting into. I played several hours at launch, not really feeling it but not really hating it. I checked in every now and…

Ubisoft Delays Watch Dogs Legion, Other Games

Ahead of an earnings call this morning, Ubisoft announced that Watch Dogs Legion, Rainbow Six Quarantine, and Gods & Monsters would be delayed from their initial early 2020 windows until the next fiscal year, which runs from spring 2020 until spring 2021. According to a press release, the changes are to “allow additional development time.” The…

Command & Conquer Made Me A Strategy Cornball

On Wednesday, EA Games released the first gameplay footage of Command & Conquer: Remastered. It’s a brief 30-second clip that begins in the game’s original fuzzy resolution before transitioning to the crisp new reworked designs for modern screens. It’s bringing me back to the person I was when I first played C&C, and I’m scared…

Persona 5 Scramble: The Phantom Strikers now has a Japanese release date and a brand new trailer. The musou take on Persona drops in Japan on February 20, 2020, for PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. It also looks slick as heck, as you might expect from a Persona 5 spin-off.

Destiny 2’s Ongoing Story Has Potential, Even If The Vex Are A Little Boring

If you’ve logged on to Destiny 2 over the last couple of weeks, you might have noticed something different. The Tower, Destiny’s social space where players can collect quests from characters and store their gear, has a construction project underway. Two weeks ago, it was just scaffolding. As of this week, it’s starting to look…

A Mario Maker Remake Perfectly Captures The Moodiness Of Hollow Knight

Mario Maker isn’t all that great if you’re craving something moody. The game has proven itself to be an incredibly flexible tool for making clever video game levels that are quite unlike standard Mario designs, but it’s only got a few ways to tinker with mood or tone. That means player CerulanOak has a hell…

Monaco Brings Good Old-Fashioned Thievin’ To The Switch

I love a good heist, and I wish more video games let me pull one off. Sure, Grand Theft Auto: Online lets you plot them if you have enough friends, there’s also Payday 2, and if you squint a little bit and don’t mind all the murder, Hitman is technically a heist game, sure. We…

I Will Always Love Where A Good 2D-Style Background Takes My Imagination

Like a lot of things, it started with Street Fighter II. I was a kid, not nearly as good at the game as my extremely competitive uncles who would gather around arcades when arcades were still common. It would take a while before my little hands could pull off a hadouken every time, but I…

Manifold Garden Is A Puzzle Game About Infinity, No Big Deal

Video games are quite fond of the work of M.C. Escher—you’ll see his influence in the mundane labyrinths of Control, the disorienting symmetry of the stealth game Echo, or in the clever puzzles of games like Monument Valley and echochrome. You can now add Manifold Garden to that list. And, like those other games, it’s…

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Senators Call On Blizzard To Reverse Hearthstone Suspension

Today, United States Senators Ron Wyden and Marco Rubio signed a bi-partisan letter with support from Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mike Gallagher, and Tom Malinowski addressed to Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, over the recent suspension of professional Hearthstone player Chung “Blitzchung” Ng Wai. “We write to express our deep concern about Activision Blizzard’s decision…

Character Creation Should Take 5 Minutes, No More, No Less

I love creating a character whenever I start a new role-playing game. I also love stressing myself the hell out over it. I find the question that they often pose—How would you like to play this game?—fundamentally ridiculous. Man, I don’t know! I’ve never played this game before! I truly don’t get how anyone is…

Everyone Should Have At Least One Jackbox Party Pack

There are a few things every home should have. Potable water, non-perishable food, a smoke detector, fire extinguisher, and at least one of the many Jackbox Party Pack games. You know, for emergencies. The Jackbox Party Pack games are a semi-regular series of party game collections from the folks who made You Don’t Know Jack,…

Manifold Garden, a gorgeous mind-bending puzzle game long in the works, is finally out tomorrow. The former PS4 exclusive is now coming to Apple Arcade and the Epic Games Store on October 18.

How To Quickly Level Up Your Second (Or Third) Character In Destiny 2

Every video game has its peaks and valleys. A game like Destiny 2—one designed to be played as an ongoing hobby, indefinitely—can have some bigger ones than most. However, putting together a new character in a different class can do a lot to renew your interest in a game that you play regularly whenever you…

Baldur’s Gate And Planescape: Torment Still Tell Stories Like No Other Games Can

With today’s releases of Baldur’s Gate games and Planescape: Torment for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, some of the most influential video games of the last 20 years complete a very long journey to the kind of wide audience they’ve long existed just outside. They’re also very old games that have spawned newer,…