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Zynga Sues Former CityVille Director For Stealing Trade Secrets When He Left
Zynga filed a lawsuit Friday against Alan Patmore, former general manager of CityVille, alleging that Patmore stole trade secrets and confidential information when he left the company. As VentureBeat and others report, Patmore left Zynga on August 16 of this year. Court documents filed in the California Superior Court in San Francisco claim that immediately…
By Kate Cox -
There May Not Be a Haystack Big Enough To Break a 24-Mile Leap of Faith
Felix Baumgartner’s record-setting leap from the very edge of space, on Sunday, was dazzling. But as one post at 9gag points out, Baumgartner is far from the first man to take a leap of faith with an uncertain landing. Personally, the image makes me envision a whole team of haystack-carriers swarming over New Mexico, running…
By Kate Cox -
Drawing Pokémon Based On Their Physical Descriptions Alone Is Harder Than It Sounds
Artist Noelle Stevenson has never played a Pokémon game first-hand. She has, however, accepted the challenge of drawing several of the combative pocket monsters, based solely on physical descriptions provided to her by friends and blog readers. It turns out, accurately describing a creature that looks a lot, but not quite, like a duck wearing…
By Kate Cox -
This Is What It Looks Like When Disasters Strike In The New SimCity
There are those careful, obsessive builders (like my junior-high self) who disabled disasters, when possible, in our SimUtopias. Then there are those diabolical builders (like my high-school self) who delighted in bombarding their hapless SimHellholes with disaster after disaster. (My personal favorite was SimCity 2000‘s Monster.) So, what of disasters in the new SimCity? This…
By Kate Cox -
Call of Duty Elite Going Completely Free With Black Ops II
The Call of Duty Elite service will be completely free of charge for all players with the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops II this November, Activision announced today. Call of Duty Elite began life in 2011 with both free and paid premium subscriptions. While all Elite players have access to stat-tracking and social…
By Kate Cox -
If You’re Dressing As Mario for Halloween, You Should Make Sure You Sound Like Him Too
This is fun. ThinkGeek is selling something they call an “audio reality costume.” The gist is that, with Halloween a-coming, it’s one thing to dress like a favorite character or nerd icon… but how much better to sound like one, too? The Mega Stomp Panic clips onto one’s belt or waistband and produces sound when…
By Kate Cox -
Ellie’s Backstory To Be Revealed In The Last Of Us Prequel Comic
We saw, over the summer, that the post-apocalyptic future in The Last of Us is one where fourteen-year-old Ellie has never seen a movie, because movies have ceased to exist. But what about the rest of this young girl’s life? What transpires, in a ruined world, that ends up pairing her off with Joel and…
By Kate Cox -
The Tale of a Young Boy And His Beloved Game Boy Micro Is Too Cute To Miss
This is the most adorable gaming-related story I’ve read all week. Over at Wired, gaming parent Andy Roberston’s young son spotted a Game Boy Micro in a shop window, and more or less fell in love. In the way that kids can so brilliantly do, he became utterly convinced that the Micro—a petite variation on…
By Kate Cox -
The Drama Of Life In the UNSC Continues In This Live-Action Halo Webseries
The second episode of Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn picks up after the first, and delves farther into the trials and tribulations of Hastati Squad. The visual reminders of Battlestar Galactica do hang around, as we follow the group of young cadets adapting to the requirements of their military life. And we get a glimpse…
By Kate Cox -
New iPhone Game About Foxconn Draws Attention to Worker Suicides
In a Permanent Save State is not meant to be particularly fun. It’s a serious game, by artist Benjamin Poynter, following the imagined stories of Foxconn employees who committed suicide The conditions for workers at the Chinese factories where iPhones, iPads, and nearly all gaming consoles are made continue to stay in the headlines, with…
By Kate Cox -
Pile Of Industry Awards For Star Wars: The Old Republic a Sad Reminder of the Game That Might Have Been
The Game Developers Choice Online awards exist to give folks in the gaming industry a chance to highlight and celebrate the work of their peers in online games. This year’s award ceremony took place last night in Austin. The full list of winners includes nods to Diablo III for best audio and League of Legends…
By Kate Cox -
Watch The Awesome Things That Happened When Gordon Met Chell
We saw the poster for When Gordon Met Chell earlier this week. The short film the poster was designed for is now available for viewing. So is it a rom-com, as the poster lovely might have hinted to some? No. But this action thriller (“made on a budget of absolutely nothing,” according to its creator,…
By Kate Cox -
This Custom-Made Mass Effect Armor Is Impressively Detailed… And Impressively Expensive
There are many excellent Commander Shepard cosplayers in the world. Each and every one of them them is to be commended for the sheer amount of time and effort they put into recreating and personalizing the commander’s iconic N7 armor. And then there are people like me, who should not be allowed within twenty feet…
By Kate Cox -
This New Assassin’s Creed III Trailer Stars A Whole Arsenal Of Very Lethal Weaponry
We all know by now that Connor kills an awful lot of people (particularly British soldiers) in Assassin’s Creed III. But how does he kill them? This angry British narrator is happy to give the full list, starting with muskets and bows and moving on into melee territory from there. Kill everything? Don’t mind if…
By Kate Cox -
Watch This Explanation of Why Playing D & D Totally Makes You Better at Life
I kind of love the PBS Ideas series. It appeals both to my inner nerd (the child who watched Nova and 3-2-1 Contact incessantly many years ago) and to my current internet-based, short-on-time self. In this latest installment, host Mike Rugnetta takes a hard look at the stereotype that gamers and tabletop gamers still can’t…
By Kate Cox -
You Can Keep Making Halo Videos, You Just Can’t Make Money From Them (Except When You Can)
Fans really like making stuff based on the games they love. We feature fan-made videos, costumes, artwork, and more here at Kotaku pretty much every day. The companies that make the games that fans love, though, are not exactly always eager to see third parties profiting off of their copyrighted work. Microsoft has a lengthy…
By Kate Cox -
Unlike Its Cinematic Namesake, This Case Mod Inspired By A Classic Sci-Fi Movie Will Probably Not Try To Kill Anyone
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the science-fiction prophets of the age got the future of computers half-right. Our digital contraptions do get ever more powerful, and the world is now, in many ways, entirely run by a powerful, invisible network. But the part that science fiction got wrong was that our computers have gotten…
By Kate Cox -
World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria Log Two: Goodbye Pandas, Hello Cataclysm
Things are just not going well for me in Azeroth, I’m afraid. When my little rogue pandaren, she of the fierce daggers and the even more fierce blue streak in her hair, left the Wandering Isle, she joined the Alliance. After punching King Varian in the face and knocking him flat on his posterior—at his…
By Kate Cox -
Collectors Can Explode, Sandstorms Are Creepy, and Other Things I Learned The Hard Way In Mass Effect 3: Retaliation
When BioWare added all sorts of new challenges, modes, and enemies to Mass Effect 3‘s multiplayer mode yesterday, they also added a new stat-tracking page that tells you, among other things, how many hours of your life you have spent shooting down enemy waves. It is a number that I kind of wish I hadn’t…
By Kate Cox -
Microsoft’s New Gadget Lets You Control Any Device With A Mid-Air Gesture
Sure, the Kinect can recognize gestures your full body makes. But wouldn’t it be nice to get the finer details of hands and fingers reflected accurately on-screen? And better yet, wouldn’t it be grand not to have to stand in the exact two square feet of living room that the Kinect can pick you up…
By Kate Cox
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