We all love playing games with our cats. Dangling yarn in front of them, throwing balls their way, terrorizing them with a laser pointer—it isn’t fun unless our feline friends are spazzing out and chasing something around the room. But unless you count the time (or times) your cat jumped onto your lap mid-deathmatch, cats…
Why are so many games just copies of past games? Who is responsible for this state of affairs? Does the industry need more variety to survive? At the “Game Developers’ Rant” session at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Spy Party developer Chris Hecker made a call for more variety in games. The rants…
Due to the crazy busyness of the San Francisco Game Developers Conference, Kotaku Melodic will be taking this week off. We’ll be back next week with more of the best of all things pertaining to music, video games, and the many places that the two things meet. In the meantime, go ahead on back and…
The original Fallout was a gamble that paid off big-time; it set in place a tone, gameplay philosophy and fiction that is still going strong today. Fallout games are best known for their evocative, funny, dark and violent post-apocalyptic world. But it could have been another kind of game entirely. In a Fallout post-mortem at…
Deus Ex: Human Revolution was a very good game. But it had one big problem: those frustrating, out-of-place boss battles. At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Eidos Montreal’s senior game designer Francois Lapikas addressed the boss battles once and for all: The team didn’t put enough thought into them, he said, and weren’t…
In a sense, Bastion was a game about growth—over the course of the game, The Kid would bring back items and characters to the Bastion, which allowed it to grow and flourish. In a metaphorical sense, the Bastion was a sort of garden, growing over time. As it turns out, the game’s planting parallels were…
Holy crap, this tank is taking fire from all sides, I can’t see anything, I need to vent out the smoke but one of my crew members just got shot and we can’t stay still for too long or enemy soldiers will climb in and kill us, and I can’t reach the vent button, and…
Saying the word “change” in the same sentence as “Minecraft” can really set off a lot of alarms. Mojang’s open-world crafting phenomenon has been tweaked, rearranged, expanded, and adjusted many times since its rise to popularity in the fall of 2010. But with each new version number comes some grumbles and complaints—after all, the game…
Last week at Microsoft’s Spring Showcase, I and a whole bunch of other reporters got our first look at this fall’s Halo 4. The fourth proper entry in the franchise (not counting ODST and Reach) will be released this fall, and will feature longtime series star Master Chief in an all-new adventure. Halo 4 will…
“Kalisah Bint Sinan Al-Jilani, Westerlund News.” Say those words to any Mass Effect fan, and they’ll probably get a funny look on their face: A grin that’s half-silly, half-guilty. “Oh, man. I punched the crap out of that reporter.” What started as a somewhat shocking, offhand bit of violence in Mass Effect reached meme status…
There were a lot of things to love about the No One Lives Forever games. The groovy music, the fresh-feeling 60’s spy motif (Austin Powers be damned!), the fearless, funny heroine Cate Archer. But even when compared to those things, the game’s writing stands apart. The villains’ banter, in particular, stands out. In a day…
Welcome to Friday night’s Total Recall, looking back at days of gaming past.
Graphics engines have gotten quite powerful, to the point that they can render wide-open spaces, far-off worlds, and incredible alien races. But can they re-create… a meeting room? Yes, apparently. Konami and Kojima Productions have posted an “Is it live or is it memorex?”-style challenge asking people to try to tell the difference between their…
EA has warned Xbox 360 gamers that their Mass Effect 3 saved games won’t import if they’re stored in the 360’s data cloud. They’ll have to be located on or transferred from the console on which they were created.
You wanna know a really good way to piss people off? You could try telling them that 100-hour video games are a waste of time. If you do that, expect what you might call an editorial beat-down from one Jason Killingsworth. The Edge Magazine features editor has ripped into journalist Michael Thomsen for the latter’s…
You guys all know I love Rockstar’s Bully, right? I’ve written at length about how great it is, and how I wish that more games were set in high school. (As an addendum to that article, I am finally (finally!) playing Persona 3 Portable on the Vita, and I am loving the crap out of…
News of Dyad has been out there in the ether for a little while (we’ve even written about it). The in-development PS3 game combines racing and music, imagining players as a single particle flying along at warp speed. Lancing and combining with other particles causes changes in the music, triggering tones and textures. The second,…
It sure has been a banner week for drinking games here at Kotaku! Well… actually I’ve only posted one other drinking game, but still, two in one week feels somehow indulgent. You may have heard of musician/inventor/super-genius Ali Spagnola over on our sister site Gizmodo, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hear about her again.…
Welcome back to “Menu Music,” our regular Kotaku Melodic feature where we look at (and listen to) the best and worst menu music the video game world has to offer. Menu music is a very important thing—it’s the first thing we hear when we boot up the game, and it sets the tone for the…
Last week, I finally watched Moneyball. Man, that is one good movie! I genuinely wasn’t expecting to love it as much as I did. Everything about it surprised me, from Brad Pitt’s careworn, layered performance to Activision CEO Bobby Kotick’s capable performance as Oakland Athletics’ owner Stephen Schott. But one of my favorite parts of…
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