Joshua Rivera

The Ghost Recon: Breakpoint Beta Is A Debate On What A Ghost Recon Needs To Be

Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, the follow-up to 2017’s popular and controversial Ghost Recon: Wildlands, kicked off its closed beta weekend yesterday, letting players who pre-ordered the game take on two early story missions and a host of side missions that ostensibly will give players a clearer picture of what to expect when the game launches October…

Destiny‘s Warlock Outfits Are Still Way Too Corny

Let me tell you about some pants. They’re a soft sort of charcoal, not really grey, not really black, straight cut, good with sneakers or dress shoes, relaxed but not too relaxed. They’re good pants; I know this because two people complimented them on the same day. This makes me a style king, or at…

Blair Witch: The Kotaku Review

You can find an explainer for just about anything these days. Search for the title of any game, movie, or TV show in recent memory plus the word “ending” and you’ll find a video of someone explaining it. It doesn’t even have to be an ambiguous work like Bloodborne: This summer’s Spider-Man: Far From Home,…

Player Makes Duck Hunt In Mario Maker 2

They say legends never die, so it makes sense that Duck Hunt seems immortal. The NES Zapper classic has lived on, homaged in games like Halo 5 and featured in the last two Super Smash Bros. games. Now, an anonymous hero has also brought the fun of Duck Hunt to Super Mario Maker 2. The…

Final Fantasy VIII‘s Triple Triad Is Why I Love Card Games

Final Fantasy VIII Remastered is finally here, which means I can continue my long and storied history of never actually finishing Final Fantasy VIII because I am too busy playing Triple Triad. It’s a whole thing: I get a copy of Final Fantasy VIII, immediately start playing the in-game card game more than anything else,…

Tony Hawk Shares Unused Motion Capture Footage From Original Pro Skater

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is now 20 years old. It’s a milestone that means a lot to a whole lot of people—Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was a watershed moment in video games, a sports game that captured the imagination of skaters, non-skaters, and fans of Goldfinger’s “Superman” alike. In observance, Tony Hawk recently shared a…

Control’s Hidden Puppet Show Is A Horror Masterpiece

Control could be called a horror game. It’s creepy and unsettling,right down to the title cards that pop up in every new location. But Control is also a good action game, withfun, bombastic gunfights. It’s probably best to just call it a thriller—at least, until you find the first episode of Threshold Kids, an inexplicable…

Destiny 2‘s Seasons Will Work Much Differently This Year

Destiny 2 is about to get some big changes with its forthcoming Shadowkeep expansion, out October 1. Changes so big that developer Bungie has chosen to slowly tell us about them piecemeal, in lengthy blog posts from the game’s director, Luke Smith. This week, Smith publisheda postoutlining Destiny’s new approach to its seasonal structure, and…

I May Never Stop Watching YouTube Tutorials And Actually Play This Strategy Game

For the last couple months, I’ve been trying to get into Stellaris in a big way—partly because the game is one of the few 4X games to get an uncompromised console port, and partly because I think space stuff is rad. Since I’m not a PC guy, I’m still pretty new to games in the…

Wolfenstein: Youngblood just got a little less frustrating. The game’s 1.05 patch—out now for PC and coming soon to consoles—comes with a bevy of tweaks, the biggest ones affecting enemy “bullet sponginess” and adding checkpoints. Still can’t pause in co-op, obviously. (Though you now can offline, thanks to update 1.04.)

Goofy Spider-Man Glitch Turns Everyone Into Walking Piles Of Denim

In the Marvel comic books and films, Spider-Man is a superhero who was bitten by a radioactive spider that granted him the proportionate strength, speed, and agility of an arachnid. In Spider-Man, the PlayStation 4 video game, you play this man in a world gone mad, where everyone was bitten by a pair of radioactive…

Meet The Fallout 76 Player Mapping Every Item In The Game

The first time Jaret Burkett played Fallout 76, he fully expected that everyone in the game would want him dead. The moment he exited the safety of Vault 76, where every player of the online survival game begins their journey with little to defend themselves, he was attacked by robots. Barely able to take them…

Finding An Old Game Boy Advance Feels Like Slipping Into A Storybook

Not too long ago, I got a box from my folks with a bunch of stuff I had been keeping in their attic. I live in New York, where boxes are generally bad news: They’re full of stuff, and when you take stuff out of a box, you have to find a place to put…

The developers of Cuphead have made the game’s excellent soundtrack available for purchase as sheet music. It’s very cool to see they’ve made separate arrangements for high school jazz band, high school concert band, professionals, and barbershop quartets

Before Destiny 2: Shadowkeep, Here’s What You Need To Know About Eris Morn

When Destiny launched in 2014, it wasn’t really a place you went for rich, interesting characters. Sure, they were around, but it would take some time before they’d be fleshed out. Commander Zavala, Ikora Rey, and of course, Cayde-6 are all much more memorable now than they were five years ago. That’s not just because…

My Co-op Gaming Night Turned To A Couple Sad Hours Of Downloading Updates

Recently, a close friend of mine returned after having been out of town for a little while—like way out of town, where time zones made real-time communication out of the question, even though we live in The Future. To celebrate his return to my time zone, we decided to play some games together online and…

Session Is A Hardcore Skateboarding Sim With Cool, Weird Controls

“Pretty much everyone who tries the game eats shit like crazy at first,” Marc-Andre Houde told me when I met him in New York to see crea-ture studios’ forthcoming skateboarding game, Session. Maybe that’s a bad way to sell a video game, but Session is an unusual game—more a skate sim than an arcade stunt…

Gamesindustry.biz has followed up their summer investigation into console manufacturer’s sourcing of conflict minerals with information from Nintendo. The company has improved its sourcing by a disappointing 3%, reporting that 79% of said minerals come from whitelisted smelters and refiners. CORRECTION: This post originally misstated this year’s percentage increase of whitelisted sources as 2%, for…

I Get More Excited About Old Games On Switch Than New Ones

I’ve spent much of the last week staring at the Switch eShop page for the Grandia HD Collection willing myself not to buy it. For me, it is probably the most alluring recent release on the system, a collection of two classic RPGs I’ve never played, available on the most pleasant and convenient console. That’s…

Now Game Developers Have To Ask Fans Not To Harass Them Over The Epic Store

One of the easiest bits of news to miss on Monday’s Gamescom Opening Night Live show was tucked away in an ad for the Epic Games Store. A simple sizzle reel that showcased a number of games exclusive to the controversial digital PC game storefront included an upcoming indie that previously wasn’t in Epic’s roster:…