Kate Cox

Playing MMORPGs Can Actually Make You Better At Your Job

Sneaking in a little World of Warcraft during business hours is probably a great way to get yourself fired from most jobs—but it seems that spending your personal time in an MMORPG may actually make you a better employee. As the Huffington Post

The Remnants of 38 Studios Will Be Up For Auction In October

The sad, sordid saga of the total collapse of 38 Studios has quieted, but the state of Rhode Island is now left holding the assets of the defunct game developer. Rhode Island, not generally needing a game development studio but definitely needing cash, will be auctioning off the assets next month. As Giant Bomb reported,…

Day Z Stand-Alone Game Will Arrive Before The End of This Year

We have known since August that the enormously popular Day Z mod to Arma II would be developed into its own stand-alone game. Today at the Eurogamer Expo, Developer Dean “Rocket” Hall confirmed that the game will be available by the end of the year, and it will be inexpensive to boot. Eurogamer reports that…

Developer Behind Creepy Alternate-Reality Adventure Games Now Making a Creepy Alternate-Reality Transmedia Game

Many years ago, the creepy alternate-reality adventure game Missing: Since January (called In Memoriam outside of the US) tried to blur the lines between its fiction and our world. In pursuing the trail of the fictional Jack Lorski and Karen Volker, players wind through real-world history and geography, as well as planted websites and stories.…

Playing Violent Video Games Actually Makes You Feel Less Pain, Researchers Find

It seems that violent games may indeed desensitize players—but in a way that can actually be helpful. Researchers at Keele University in the UK have found that playing a violent video game can give players a higher real-world tolerance for pain. The study had 40 participants playing both a violent first-person shooter and also a…

This Left 4 Dead Fan Film Is Forty Minutes of Zombie-Shooting Fun

Brothers Colin and Connor McGuire wanted a Left 4 Dead movie… so they made one. The home project took them the better part of two years, including 3000 hours of editing. The final product is about the length of an “hour” long television show, clocking in around 40 minutes, and looks at least as good…

I Would Not Ever Really Expect Space Invaders On The Ocean Floor

Artist Invader has a theme: Space Invaders. His homages to the little 8-bit enemies show up all over the world, on art and loose in wild, showing up in all manner of places where one might not ordinarily expect them. In this case, he went to the Bay of Cancun, where sculptor Jason Taylor deCaires…

This Keyboard Tries So Hard To Be Great That I Actually Feel Sorry For How Terrible It Is

The kindest thing I can say about the Imperator Pro, a gaming keyboard from Taiwanese company Genius, is that it works exactly as advertised. Keys, both standard and programmable, function as intended and do what a user would expect them to. That’s a big plus, in a keyboard. Sadly, there are also a number of…

Guild Wars 2: The Kotaku Review

The true heart and essence of Guild Wars 2 lies in its map. It took me three weeks of playing and a chat with my colleague Kirk to realize and articulate how much magic lies in that seemingly simple function. The map of Tyria isn’t just utilitarian; it’s beautiful. Even mired in the fog of…

LEGO Gandalf Actually Talks, While Moving Through Movie Landscapes, In LEGO Lord of the Rings

The upcoming LEGO Lord of the Rings video game does, indeed, look to be absolutely adorable. But the Lord of the Rings films were more sweeping and epic than they were cute and cuddly. (Certain Hobbit and Shire moments aside, of course.) Can the game re-create that same sense? The developers certainly seem to think…

Your Cable Company Wants To Try To Be Your Next Console

Despite the rather dramatic meltdown of OnLive earlier this year, “cloud gaming” remains one of the go-to buzzwords for the future of game delivery. With so many American internet service providers capping data or providing slow and/or unreliable bandwidth, a fully-streaming future has seemed likely to take a while to catch on. A recent Bloomberg…

These Lovely Fan Made Posters Are For Mass Effect Movies I’d Actually Love To See

We keep hearing rumors here and there about a Mass Effect movie in the works. As much as I love the franchise, I’m not sure I ever really want to see one. My Shepard is, well, my Shepard, and any movie starring someone of that name is unlikely to tell the story I preferred having…

The “Argul’s Tomb” DLC for Darksiders II is available today. It’s 560 MS Points on 360, or $6.99 on PS3 & PC.

This Is What It Looks Like When Steam Is Down [Update]

No, it’s not just you. It’s everyone. Steam is well and truly down. This is what it looks like when millions of players online suddenly drop to none. No matter how much you want to try the XCOM demo, it looks like you’ll just have to wait. We’ve reached out to Valve to find out…

With Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft‘s Age Is Starting To Show

This morning, I got up early and sat down to a freshly-patched World of Warcraft to play a brand-new Pandaren. I still don’t love the WoW art style—I never have, it’s just personal preference really—but even I had to admit that the vivid blue streak in my panda’s pigtails was kind of cute. And if…

A Hand-Painted Panda On A Hand That’s More Than Ready To Play Mists of Pandaria

I have known many artistic World of Warcraft fans. I have known many women who like to get their nails done. I even have several friends who fit the overlap of the two categories. This, though… this is something else. Algae Veronica is a nail art expert who also happens to be a World of…

I Finally Uncovered The Mental Map Of My Own City, Thanks To A Game

Like so very many of my neighbors, I may live more-or-less in Washington DC now, but I’m not really “from” here. I relocated from points north in 2008, for a promising relationship and a good job. (Both of which, happily, worked out well.) That’s four years now that I’ve lived here, though, and my mental…

A Borderlands 2 Reset Bug Is Making Players Less Badass

There is a rather nasty reset bug out there that seems to be hitting certain players of Borderlands 2 In Borderlands 2, players earn badass tokens for completing certain challenges. Tokens can be spent on skins and upgrades. As reproduced above by YouTube user RyogaWanderer, players affected by the bug are finding their badass totals…

World of Warcraft Developers Have “No Particular Fear” Of Windows 8

Windows 8 doesn’t officially launch until October, but the dramatic changes to the OS most gaming PCs use have already proven quite controversial. Earlier this year, Blizzard EVP of game design Rob Pardo echoed Gabe Newell’s sentiments about Windows 8. Newell had called the OS a catastrophe, and Pardo replied via Twitter that Windows 8…

All The New Things Mists of Pandaria is Adding to World of Warcraft, In One Big Trailer

Mists of Pandaria launches tonight. (Or, from an East coast point of view, very very early tomorrow morning.) It’s only the fourth expansion to World of Warcraft in nearly eight years. So what will it be adding to the game? Well, lots. Blizzard has helpfully provided this seven-minute launch look, complete with dramatic music, at…