Joshua Rivera

The Nintendo Switch Lite Is Getting A Lovely Pokémon Sword and Shield Edition

If you’re able to hold off a few weeks on buying the new Nintendo Switch Lite when it releases September 20, you’ll have the chance to get a pretty slick version of Nintendo’s latest Switch: the Pokémon Sword and Shield-themed Zacian and Zamazenta edition. As you can see, it’s an elegant light gray with cyan…

Classic Video Game Cutscenes Look Better In HD (Sometimes)

Last week, YouTube user ClassiCinematics completed a month-long amateur remaster of all the cutscenes in Westwood Studios’ classic real-time strategy game Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 and its expansion, Yuri’s Revenge. Uploading their work alongside the original cutscenes for comparison, ClassiCinematics offers yet another way to look at and appreciate older games, and how…

I Can’t Stop Being A Reckless Moron In Fire Emblem: Awakening

I have spent most of the last week feeling incredibly hyped for Fire Emblem: Three Houses, one of a handful of games I’m most excited to play this summer. Whenever I’m feeling pumped for a new game, one thing I tend to do is go back and play or replay old games in the same…

What We Loved About Spider-Man: Far From Home

Spider-Man: Far From Home is the second movie following the newest Peter Parker, played by Tom Holland. The film follows Parker as he tries to ditch his secret life and enjoy a vacation with his classmates abroad. It’s also the first movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe set after Avengers: Endgame, giving us a peek…

I Love When Video Game Music Is So Good I Forget To Actually Play The Game

One of my favorite games of the last several years is Facepalm Games’ The Swapper.I like it for a lot of reasons: it’s got this beautiful stop-motion clay art style, an immediately compelling hook in the titular Swapper, a gun that lets you clone yourself and zap your consciousness between those clones, and a disconcerting…

Stop Calling Games ‘Metroidvania’

Let’s talk about one of my least favorite words in the video game lexicon: metroidvania. A portmanteau combining the video game titles Metroid and Castlevania, it takes two made-up video game titles that are pretty cool and evocative on their own and inelegantly mashes them into something worse. And now, that word is one we…

Days Gone Gets A Tough But Satisfying Horde Mode

Over the weekend, Days Gone delivered the first of its 12 promised free challenges released weekly for the summer. First up: a horde challenge called “Surrounded” that puts players in the middle of a small run-down town, surrounds them with Freakers, and challenges them to survive for as long as they can. It’s hard as…

How To Find Bloodstained‘s Cool Secret Area

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a pitch-perfect throwback to the Castlevania games produced by veteran designer Koji Igarashi. As far as tributes go, it’s spot-on, resurrecting the ghost of Symphony of the Night and its successors—and if you know where to look, you’ll find a whole zone dedicated to an homage even older Castlevania…

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night: The Kotaku Review

Genre is mostly bullshit. It’s useful for discussion and for imagining where a certain game exists on the continuum of innovation and progress. These discussions are important, and for them, we need genre. But genre doesn’t do a lot for games, especially once they start to borrow from each other, forcing us to come up…

Sony Announces Live-Action Final Fantasy XIV TV Series

Today, Sony Pictures Television and production company Hivemind Entertainment (the company behind Netflix’s forthcoming adaptation of The Witcher and Amazon’s The Expanse) announced a partnership with Square Enix to develop a live-action Final Fantasy TV series based on the online role-playing game Final Fantasy XIV. The live-action television series will tell an original story set…

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Players Are Creating Custom Quests To Level Up By Doing Nothing

Earlier this month, Ubisoft released a free new Story Creator mode for players of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. It’s a simple tool that lets you stitch together your own original quests in Odyssey using a limited set of options and assets. Yet even in its rudimentary state, you can still add experience and monetary rewards to…

Bloodstained Made Me Fight The Disembodied Head Of My Dog

In Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, you play as a woman who must traverse a labyrinthine castle full of monsters and possessed paintings. That is to be expected: as the spiritual successor to the Castlevania series of games, it faithfully recreates many of that series’ tropes, which include monsters and possessed paintings. That’s normal. Then…

Rare Replay is coming to Xbox Game Pass. Subscribers will be able to download the 30-game collection when it arrives June 20, alongside Resident Evil: Revelations.

Bloodstained Is Goth Fun In An All-Too-Familiar Package

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a very good solution to a problem we haven’t really had for years: a dearth of side-scrolling exploration games with role-playing bells and whistles. The long-gestating, Kickstarted return of celebrated developer and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night mastermind Koji Igarashi, Bloodstained, does fans of haunted cathedrals and combat whips…

Why I Left Breath of the Wild Unfinished

Some time before I actually finished The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I stopped playing. It wasn’t because I got carried away by other games, and it wasn’t because I was tired of it. I just stopped. New Zelda games are rare things that only come once or twice a console generation, and…

The Perfect Squad Size Is 3 People

If you were paying attention to this week’s E3 announcements and also care about co-operative games, you might have noticed something: There are a lot of three-player co-op games.Rainbow Six Quarantine, the new Escape mode for Gears 5, even Battletoads. To this I say: It’s about damn time. Three people is the perfect squad size,…

Look At This Extremely Nice Video Game Latrine

While playing State of Decay 2‘s new Heartland expansion—a game I find interesting, even if I don’t particularly enjoy it—I noticed something during one of several trips to my local frenemies the Wilkersons in the northern region of Trumbull Valley. It’s a latrine. An extremely considered, well-designed latrine. Just look at it! It’s hard to…

State of Decay 2: Heartland Gives Me What I Wanted And It Still Isn’t Enough

I really wanted to like State of Decay 2, last year’s zombie survival game about fending off the undead and also building a community of survivors. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to connect with it the way I wanted to, and I could never connect with the community I was working so hard to form. I…

The New York Times Has A New Puzzle Game For You To Obsess Over

It’s E3 week, which means it’s time to check in on the latest games from all the hottest game development studios, like the New York Times. That’s not a joke—the New York Times has stepped up its game development efforts in order to support its wildly popular crossword puzzle. Two new games have come from…

The Internet Reacts To Zelda’s New Haircut

All it took was two minutes and one surprise trailer for Nintendo to turn a sleepy E3 to an explosive bonanza—but that’s what happens when you announce a sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, perhaps the most beloved game in recent memory. The trailer cryptically hinted at something extremely dark and…