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Digital Distribution Gets Bigger Every Year, But A Third of the US Still Doesn’t Have Broadband Internet
Despite the many good reasons for digital distribution to be catching on, there are 119 million reasons why retail discs need to keep being an option. Why 119 million? That’s the number of Americans that don’t have access to broadband internet. As Ars Technica reports, the FCC has found that roughly one-third of the country…
By Kate Cox -
The Secret World Developer Lays Off “Around Half” Its Staff
Modern-day MMO The Secret World has a great deal going for it. The world is interesting, there are clear plans for regular content updates, and their new raid looks lovely. It even has a free trial now. But unfortunately, what it doesn’t have going for it is subscribers. Developer Funcom, based in Norway, had announced…
By Kate Cox -
Windows 8 Is Not Good For Gamers
For the past several days, I’ve been playing with a very nice laptop that has Windows 8 Professional installed on it. Many others, like our sibling site Gizmodo, have looked at Windows 8’s usability for professional environments, or for everyday home computing. I’ve been exploring its potential specifically for gaming, trying out play-related features both…
By Kate Cox -
Some Free-to-Play Games Work Out Just Like Shareware Used to: Badly
Gamers who are old enough to remember the PC experience before AOL brought dial-up internet access into everyone’s homes will probably also remember shareware. My family had dozens of these discs and, later, CD-ROMS over the years. Each one promised HUNDREDS! OF! GAMES! and while most were simply trashy clones of some other game, or…
By Kate Cox -
The Past is Full of Great Time Travel Games, But I Want Them In My Future
This morning, I received a link to a twenty-year-old video. It’s the first-ever preview of The Journeyman Project, as shown at Macworld in 1992. Perhaps appropriately for a game about time travel, I felt a distinct sense of journeying into the past while I watched it. What once looked so painstakingly rendered now, in the…
By Kate Cox -
PlayStation Plus Members Can Now Shoot Things Dramatically In The Dust 514 Closed Beta
For those who didn’t purchase access earlier, or get their names drawn from CCP’s hat after signing up on the web, there’s one last way to guarantee access to the Dust 514 closed beta. But it, too, will cost you some cash. From now through September 4, PlayStation Plus members can all jump in to…
By Kate Cox -
These Awesome Shoes Are What You Get When You Mix Glitter With Gaming
There have been a lot of very neat gaming shoes in the world before, but these ones are my new favorite. Not only because, as flats, they are something I could theoretically actually wear someday, but because they please my inner first-grader with their sparkles. I like shiny things, okay? Clearly, so does this Etsy…
By Kate Cox -
How Real World Morals and Video Game Choices Fit Together—Or Don’t
It’s a deceptively simple question, and yet one that manages to have no good answer: “do real world morals have a place in video games?” That’s what Erik Kain at Forbes has asked. Kain asks the question in terms of violence. We can do violence in games, he points out, without feeling the need to…
By Kate Cox -
Most Movie Tie-In Games Kind of Stink. I Hope This One Won’t.
Last week, during Gamescom, the folks behind the new Star Trek game put out a good-looking trailer and some nifty screenshots. On the heels of that trailer, IGN has an interview with Paramount Pictures’ SVP of games, Brian Miller, explaining why, in his opinion, movie tie-in games usually suck, and how Star Trek plans to…
By Kate Cox -
Wondering Just What Darksiders II Is All About? Here’s a Video Overview!
We’ve given you the review, talked about some port problems, and shown you the art. But how does Darksiders II really look? And what’s it all about? Kotaku‘s own Chris Person has created this video overview for those of us who might not have caught the franchise’s first entry. Just what is Death wandering through…
By Kate Cox -
Steam’s “Big Picture” Mode May Reshape the Big Picture of What PC Gaming Really Means
Yesterday, Valve announced that their Big Picture service will be entering a beta phase soon. The Big Picture is a version of Steam optimized for television screens and controllers. Plug your PC into your 50″ TV, and you can kick back on the sofa with a version of Steam that’s designed to be readable from…
By Kate Cox -
Watch The Fable: The Journey Team Tell A Story About Telling the Story, Then Play the Demo in September
The dev team at Lionhead Studios have shared a behind-the-scenes look at the story of their upcoming Kinect title Fable: The Journey. While early demonstrations of the game didn’t go very well, by this year’s E3 Kotaku‘s own Stephen Totilo found the demo to be a good experience If you want to try a demo…
By Kate Cox -
Darksiders II Is Just The Most Recent Game to Prove that Imitation Really Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery
I was far from the only reviewer to observe that Darksiders II very clearly draws inspiration and ideas from a number of other games that came before it. Happily, it does so well, and it does so successfully. The mechanics and concepts it brings forward from other games are nearly all good ones, and for…
By Kate Cox -
Ubisoft Launches Their Own PC Gaming Client, and Is Selling Some Games For $1 to Get You To Try It
Not one to be left behind by the likes of EA , Ubisoft officially launched their uPlay client for PC today. Like Origin, it acts not only as a storefront to Ubisoft’s games, but also as a universal launcher for them. It also ties into uPlay’s existing currency and reward features, and links a player’s…
By Kate Cox -
Wait, the Kwik-E-Mart Doesn’t Actually Belong Next to the Flanders’ House? D’oh!
I don’t tend to enjoy city-building social games. I try them, and then I end up disappointed in my inability to advance quickly and I end up walking away rather than giving them my money. Clearly, the problem with every previous game I played was that it did not star The Simpsons On the one…
By Kate Cox -
It Turns Out, This Is A Really Awesome Year to Love Gorgeous Adventure Games
I would never have expected 2012 to turn out to be such a phenomenal year to be an adventure game fan. And yet, here we are. This new one is Primordia, brought to us by Wadjet Eye Games. Those are the same folks who brought us 2011’s Gemini Rue and this summer’s fantastic Resonance Primordia…
By Kate Cox -
I Finally Tracked Down The PC That Taught Me To Love Games. It’s Uglier Than I Remembered.
This morning on Twitter, a friend linked to a site featuring early advertisements for the personal computer, circa the 1970s. With thirty or forty years of distance, the ads are, of course, dated and even funny, in a way. But one of the images featured an early Atari computer, an Atari 800 from 1980. And…
By Kate Cox -
Razer Making Non-Star Wars Version of its Fancy Star Wars Keyboard, and the LCD Panel May Actually Be Useful This Time
Not so long ago, in a galaxy that’s right here actually, there was this Star Wars-themed keyboard from Razer. It boasted not only a number of impressive features for a keyboard, but also a big ol’ tie-in to a now-troubled MMO Want the features without the branding? Razer’s got you covered. Razer announced the new…
By Kate Cox -
Geeky Cross-Stitch Is the Perfect Melding of Retro Game Art with Retro Crafting
Cross-stitch is the perfect medium for 8-bit and 16-bit fan art. Have you ever seen one of the patterns crafters use? They look like pixel art! They’re little grids of color, showing which block goes where, in what shades, to add up to a visible whole. And the craft itself is pretty retro, invoking images…
By Kate Cox -
The Team That Made GoldenEye Was All For Adding That Famous Multiplayer Last Minute—They Just Didn’t Tell Their Bosses
Fellow gamers who came of age in the late 1990s may remember that any time four or more of their friends got together in one place, a round of GoldenEye was almost certain to break out. From 1997 through at least 1999, it seemed to be almost everywhere. Even players (like yours truly) who didn’t…
By Kate Cox
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