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Zynga Knows How to Throw a Party
I’m currently at Zynga HQ in San Francisco, where they’re having a mondo press event called “Zynga Unleahed.” I’ve never been to Zynga HQ before and… well man, this place is intense. It’s the size of a mini-mall, with all sorts of kiosks lining the main hall. Pets are always welcome at Zynga (hence the…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 26, 2012 -
Zynga’s New Take On The Sims Launches Tomorrow on Facebook
Zynga has had a lot of success creating various types of what they refer to as “The Ville Genre.” CastleVille, CityVille, FrontierVille, and the monster that started it all, FarmVille Well, that’s only partially true. FarmVille may have been the first Ville game to become widely popular, but the first was actually YoVille, a Sims-like…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 26, 2012 -
The Mario Theme Music, as Performed by Diablo III
I’m a big fan of the fantastic sound design of Diablo III. I’m also a big fan of Koji Kondo’s original theme for Super Mario Bros. So as you can imagine, I got a kick out of this remix by YouTuber Tyler73123, who puts the sounds of Diablo III behind the music from Mario. Okay…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 26, 2012 -
Tekken Head Unleashes Twitter Tirade
Oftentimes, when classic games are re-released, there can be fan discontent about the quality of the porting job. If too many things are changed, fans are upset. This can be particularly dicy with voice-acting, given that many older games used outdated technology to record and compress audio, and many of the voice actors that worked…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 26, 2012 -
ReviewsSpec Ops: The Line: The Kotaku Review
Spec Ops: The Line takes place beneath a sea of sand, deep within the Arabian Desert. In the game’s fiction, the once-opulent city of Dubai lays in ruins, stripped and wrecked by the wrath of nature. (And I mean: The hubris of this place! Maybe Dubai kind of had it coming.) This evocative, provocative setting…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 26, 2012 -
Never Change, Aaron Sorkin. Oh, It Turns Out You Haven’t! Cool.
Hello Kotaku, and welcome to a new week of open threads. It’s beautiful in North America, but apparently quite cold in Australia where Mr. Plunkett lives. If you’re somewhere warm, I hope you’ve been getting outside. Perhaps you have heard all the buzz around master writer (and West Wing, Sports Night, and Studio 60 creator)…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 25, 2012 -
This Mod Lets You Drive a Car Around Skyrim
The province of Skyrim is big. Really, really big. So big that horses might not be fast enough to cover the amount of ground that you need to cover. Fortunately, Skyrim Nexus mod-maker zdzichorowerzysta (nice handle, buddy!) has made the helpfully titled “Car Mod”, which replaces horses in the game with cars. There’s a real…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 25, 2012 -
What Are You Hoping to Get Out of Mass Effect 3‘s Extended Ending?
In all the hullabaloo that was raised over Mass Effect 3‘s now famously controversial ending, I sometimes felt like I had lost track of what everyone actually wanted. Some people want closure, others want to see the results of all of their decisions. Others want to understand whether the endings broke the fiction of Mass…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 25, 2012 -
deadmau5’s New Video Expertly Channels Limbo
Did you ever wonder what would have happened if the boy from Limbo had reunited with his sister? And say, gone on a safari in Africa? The new video for deadmau5’s “The Veldt” takes some serious inspiration from Playdead’s 2010 Xbox hit, showing two little Limbo-style silhouetted kids going on a magical, mysterious adventure through…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 25, 2012 -
Save The World 20 Seconds at a Time, Mostly By Kicking Things In The Crotch
If you’ve ever thought that point-and-click games are too slow-paced, McPixel just might be the game for you. Rather than put you into a lengthy series of linear puzzles like most point-and-click games, McPixel throws you into absurd situations and gives you 20 seconds to solve them… or they explode. The game has a wonderful…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 25, 2012 -
This Teleporting Stealth Adventure Hardly Looks Like a ‘Student Game’
Teleportation is one of the cooler powers available to video game characters—as we learned from EA’s Warp, zooming through walls (and into scientists) can be a satisfying, empowering thing to do. Blink, a student-made game by a team of USC and Gnomon students, looks to explore stealth via teleportation in a 3D, Portal-like setting. Looks…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 25, 2012 -
Did Journey Blow Its Ending?
ThatGameCompany’s Journey was an immaculately constructed game; one that felt like it didn’t have an ounce of fat on it. From beginning to end, not a single experience was repeated. But how about that ending? (If you’ve yet to finish Journey, read no further.) From freezing ice to soaring mountaintops in seconds. But was it…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 25, 2012 -
I Wonder If They’ll Ever Get Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Right
Hi there Kotaku! It’s 10:30 on Thursday, and so it must be time for the open thread. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I wasn’t alone—I think pretty much every kid went through a Turtles phase. Thing is, I wasn’t into the cartoon or the live-action movies. (I…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 21, 2012 -
The Case for Video Games as Music
If you’re a regular Kotaku Melodic reader, you’re no stranger to the idea that despite many developers’ cinematic aspirations, video games have more in common with music than they do with film. It’s an idea that I’ve been pushing at Kotaku for a while now, starting with my first article as a Kotaku columnist last…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 21, 2012 -
The Band That Made the Scott Pilgrim Movie Like 300% Better
It’s not like Edgar Wright’s cinematic adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s excellent Scott Pilgrim books wasn’t good on its own. But there was a moment for me in this film when it went from “Okay, this is fun” to “Holy shit, this is awesome,” and it happened because of a band, and because of a…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 21, 2012 -
Check Out This Unbelievable Performance of the Mario Theme on Wineglasses. Wineglasses.
This one has been out in the ether for a little while now, but somehow I hadn’t seen it. Which means that I hadn’t lived, because damn. Thankfully, Journey composer Austin Wintory linked to a similar video of another person performing the Harry Potter theme (equally impressive, so I’ll embed it below), and I went…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 21, 2012 -
Welcome to the New Kotaku Melodic!
If you’ve been following along this week, you may have noticed that we’ve trimmed up our programming blocks throughout the week. And so, Kotaku Melodic is down to a svelte 1 hour, which has a few benefits, chief of which means that we’ll be more focused, with less filler and higher standards for what gets…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 21, 2012 -
Watch This Guy Beat Diablo III‘s First Boss In Less Than a Second
It’s one thing to beat Diablo III‘s Skeleton King boss. It’s quite another thing to beat Diablo III‘s Skeleton King boss on Inferno, the game’s highest difficulty setting. And it’s quite another thing to defeat Diablo III‘s Skeleton King boss on Inferno… in less than a frickin’ second Behold, the greatest hits of Athene, a…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 21, 2012
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