Weekend Listening: I (Kirk) went on the Idle Thumbs Podcast to talk about Far Cries, Halos, and Game Boats. We had fun.
Now that the first season of The Walking Dead is over, it’s natural to ask the question: Did my choices even matter? Was this all smoke and mirrors, or did I really have a say over the outcome? It’s the same sort of thing raised as any lengthy, branching video game story reaches its conclusion.…
Dead Space composer Jason Graves will be handling music for the upcoming Tomb Raider reboot. Cool! See/hear more here
It’s sort of been unofficial Lord of the Rings week here at Kotaku, hasn’t it? Guess everyone’s just excited about The Hobbit This amazing video shows a weatherman in New Zealand going into full cosplay and reading the weather… in Elvish. He’s not exactly Liv Tyler, but his accent sounds pretty good! This is some…
Music is, as I’ve written here so many times I’ve lost count, a part of the soul of any good video game. The beats and melodies that propel us forward are more than just aural decoration, they’re a vital aspect of the character and feel of a game. Last weekend, after 65 hours, countless battles,…
Life in Minecraft can be a scary thing, but also a romantic one. Build a life together, away from everything, and do your best to stay alive. But what about when that’s no longer enough? This music video for “From the Ground Up” explores those ideas in charming fashion. The video is by SlamacowCreations, and…
I generally have a save game going in the original Deus Ex at all times, picking it up a couple of times a month to peck away at the story and relive old times. I hadn’t yet downloaded the “New Vision” mod that was partially released last August, mostly because I figured if I was…
We’ve seen plenty of timelines that put video game release dates in order. And recently, we’ve begun making timelines that put video game news in chronological order. But what about the timelines inside the games? The years over which the game’s story takes place? Has anyone ever chronicled those? Now, someone has. Alex Jaffe, specifically,…
Company of Heroes 2‘s first gameplay trailer lets it snow, lets it snow, lets it snow… and rain death, too.
In honor of my (and our) recent rewatch of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I thought I’d share this oldie but goodie forum thread that wonders: How would Xenomorphs from Aliens do in Lord of the Rings? This is my favorite kind of speculation, largely because everyone in the thread is so considered and…
Yeah, I know. Skrillex game channels The Legend of Zelda. Seems like it might be bad, or at least, haphazard. But as it turns out, Skrillex Quest, a new browser game, is really pretty cool. It comes as something less of a surprise considering that it comes from Jason Oda, the same guy who brought…
As a game, Far Cry 3 shines quite brightly. As a story, it’s a little bit more of a mixed bag. It has some excellent moments, some fantastic characters, and some really funny writing. It’s also dumb when it doesn’t need to be, and misses some opportunities to tell a more interesting and subversive story.…
It warms my disease-ridden, whale-oil tainted heart to hear that the wonderful Dishonored was a financial success for its publisher Bethesda. In this age of sequels and iron-sights, games this original, smart and flat-out good don’t come around that often. As quoted by Destructoid, Bethesda PR boss Pete Hines said of the game’s success, “We’re…
Well this certainly sounds cool. Deck-building game designers Cryptozoic games are creating a new game based on Arkham City. In a cool twist, the game will cast one player as the caped crusader, and the other as all of his enemies, and they’ll duke it out for control of Arkham City. Using cards, in the…
It’s too bad that 36You’s surreal, hilarious fake boyfriend app Boyfriend Maker has been pulled from Apple’s app store. It was likely pulled because the games now-infamous “chat mode” opened up all sorts of bizarre and risqué dialogue. The game won a healthy following purely due to its strangeness, and thankfully, people who managed to…
Call of Duty games have a distinctive aural imprint. The whizzing bullets, grunting allies, ringing impacts and of course, the screams of the many men you kill. But what if the game were stripped down to only that last—what if the only things you heard in Call of Duty: Black Ops II were the combatants’…
Far Cry 3 features a varied and highly enjoyable arsenal—you’ll use all the first-person shooter staples, from silenced sniper rifles to grenade launchers to my favorite, the silent Rambo bow. But as cool as these deadly tools are, the way the game describes them all is just as cool. Right off the bat, you get…
Over Thanksgiving weekend, I rewatched The Lord of the Rings. It was partly because The Hobbit is almost upon us, and partly because I was in mourning having finished Persona 4 Golden and needed something to take my mind off missing Inaba. After taking to Twitter (as you do), I learned that I wasn’t the…
Among the many things I like about the wonderful Far Cry 3, one of the most remarkable is how polished it all is. This is an ambitious, massive game, so it’s all the more noteworthy that everything works so well. Ubisoft Montreal has nailed all the big stuff, sure—combat is punchy and fluid, guns feel…
Don’t ask me why I wound up googling this cutscene from Phantasmagoria over the weekend, but I did, and I watched it, and good lord. It’s even worse than I remembered! Go ahead and watch it. (Viewer beware: It is NSFW and also INTENSE and NASTY.) Now ask yourself: It may have made it into…
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