Kate Cox

Denis Dyack Claims Used Games Will Destroy Gaming

Secondhand games have been the bread and butter of retail chain GameStop for years, and the target of publishers’ ire for just as long. Many consumers prefer not to pay the new retail price (a hefty $60, for most titles) for every game they play, and the system of selling and purchasing pre-owned discs works…

The Aerodyne is a Minimal, Modern Take on Art Deco Design

Jeffrey Stephenson specializes in making sleek, minimalist, art-deco and mid-century inspired PCs. His website features a solid decade’s worth of custom wooden mods, spanning the range from full-fledged furniture to cigar box. The Aerodyne is his most recent project, completed this January. The sleek, compact retro PC is made of mahogany and aluminum. Stephenson’s gallery…

Aerodyne Gallery

Gaming Provocateur Aiming to Raise $1 Million for Humanitarian Aid

Athene is quite a character, for a player. He rose to a certain kind of internet fame thanks to World of Warcraft, declaring himself the World’s Best Paladin. After leaving WoW, he moved on to Starcraft II and in recent months, he’s taken to League of Legends He’s provocative and potty-mouthed (the video above contains…

The Average Xbox User Is Online For 84 Hours Per Month, Gaming For About Half Of It

The Xbox 360 is perhaps the country’s most beloved current generation gaming console, with millions of units sitting in millions of living rooms entertaining millions of gamers. But for all that the 360 is the platform of choice for players to devour blockbuster and indie game titles alike, its biggest draw may be for watching…

The Mystery of The Hunger Games Facebook Game

The Hunger Games opened last Friday to sold-out theaters nationwide. Bringing in over $150 million in ticket sales, it claims the third-best opening weekend in terms of revenue in the history of blockbuster cinema. Where there’s a movie, there’s a game tie-in. For The Hunger Games, audiences were promised two. One is iOS side-scroller The…

A Hundred Ways to Look at Gaming’s Most Iconic Character

The thing about legendary icons is, in a sense they serve as a cipher. A character who’s been around for 25 or 30 years is going to to be reimagined and reinterpreted nearly as many times as there are fans to see him. So it goes with Mario, Nintendo legend, who has been featured in…

Jazz, Teddy Roosevelt, and Jumping Off the Edge: What Makes BioShock Infinite Tick

Game designer Ken Levine was here in Washington, DC last week for the Art of Video Games festivities at the Smithsonian American Art Museum last week, and I had a chance to sit down with him and discuss Irrational’s big upcoming project, BioShock Infinite We’ve heard about some of the game’s bosses and about how…

Why Gamers Love to Fail

We play games to win. To complete challenges, to finish stories, to overcome obstacles. Games are goals and we need to meet them… right? Or do we, really? Might we play, instead, to feel the thrill of failure? Perhaps getting our butts kicked regularly motivates us more than we think. And yet, surely there must…

Ubisoft Hopes Value Can Make DRM “Go Away” In The Future

DRM protection in games is often controversial, but Ubisoft’s PC games have a record of shipping with restrictive, always-on activation that strikes a particular sore spot with gamers. In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Chris Early, VP of Digital Publishing at Ubisoft, acknowledged that including anti-piracy measures in games is a tricky balancing act that,…

Survival Horror Just Isn’t Popular Enough in America, Says Resident Evil Producer

Anyone who follows video games knows that action games are big — very big. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 shattered sales records far and wide in its first 24 hours on store shelves and raked in a billion dollars in well under three weeks. The American video game market loves shooting things, and we…

Bouncing Cows to the Rescue in Abduction! World Attack

Abduction! World Attack is not new. It’s not complicated. And it’s not super HD. But it is silly, fun, cute, and addictive, which makes a great combination. In Abduction! World Attack, you are a cow. You are a bouncy, leaping cow and you need to rescue your cow brethren from the UFO that has abducted…

How Fifteen Seconds of Music Hooked Me for Five Years

It was a crappy, gray, rainy day in January, 2005. I was in New York visiting my then-boyfriend, on my the week of break left before my final semester of grad school started back home in Boston. Although I had the luxury of a student schedule, he had to go to work, leaving me to…

Mass Effect Anime, Starring James Vega, Will be Released This Fall

BioWare has been expanding their Dragon Age and Mass Effect story universes through comics and novels for several years. Now they’re branching out into animation projects, working with FUNimation to create a pair of anime features for later this year, Dragon Age: Dawn of the Seeker and Mass Effect: Paragon Lost In this Dailymotion video…

These 860 Screenshots Tell My Mass Effect 3 Story

One of the reasons I enjoy being a PC gamer is the ease of taking screenshots. Sometimes, many screenshots. It’s a hotkey that calls to me with an allure I can’t ignore. So it came to pass that when I played through Mass Effect 3 with my Shepard, the Shepard I had played through Mass…

Ninja Gaiden 3: The Kotaku Review

I admit it: I may well be the world’s worst ninja. My sense of timing is less than exemplary, my coordination is not always great, and sometimes I just plain lose track of what’s going on. If Ninja Gaiden 3 had needed me to learn any actual skills or to provide any creative input into…

Mobile Games Get Played More On the Couch Than On the Go

Mobile games, conventional wisdom holds, are for playing on the go. The point of a mobile device is that it’s unplugged, wireless, and travels everywhere with us. For many who have transitioned to a smartphone, to leave the house without it feels almost like leaving the house naked. So surely we play mobile games everywhere…

Catholic Priest Allegedly Leaves Child Porn on Kid’s Nintendo DS

The Nintendo DS is about as kid-friendly a gaming environment as one can think of. A huge number of the games on it are appropriate for all audiences, and the clamshell console has enough durability to stand up to being dropped many times. What one does not expect, when getting a used DS, is to…

Historical Park Exhibit Finds A Lot to Learn From Video Games

Video games, as a form of art and entertainment, go back about forty years. The very earliest electronic play on computers goes back a few decades earlier, but still remains firmly in the post-war 20th century. So what use could games possibly be to someone trying to re-create 1836? A history park in Indiana, Conner…

Is Windows 8 the Biggest Threat to the Future of PC Gaming?

Stardock is now best known s the publisher of the Sins of a Solar Empire and Elemental franchises, after selling online distribution service Impulse last year. They have just released their annual customer report, talking not only about their experiences in 2011 but also looking into the crystal ball of PC gaming in 2012 and…