The nominees for the 2012 Game Developers Choice awards have been announced. The awards, which will be held at March’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, are one (if not the) most prestigious awards ceremonies in gaming. They occur the same night and location as the Independent Games Festival (IGF) awards. Both Bethesda’s Skyrim and…
I, like so many other video game enthusiasts, am something of a Mass Effect fan. I love the stories, I love the characters. I love the music, I love the constantly improving gameplay, I love my many Shepards. I even love the lore, convoluted and prone to satire though it may be. But if there’s…
Gaming has its share of enigmatic stars, and Nick Smith, better known as Ulillillia, is certainly among them. In this trailer for the upcoming documentary The Platform Master, we get a flash-tour through Jeffrey Eugene Hoch’s film about the man himself. The trailer describes Ulillillia as “Gamer, author, game designer, math savant, artist, filmmaker, neighbor,…
The fine folks over at Adventuregamers.com have taken on one of the most herculean tasks in video-game-list-writing: They have assembled a list of not the top 10, not the top 20, but the top 100 adventure games of all time. It’s a really good list, too. The list was part of a multi-part series they…
To ring in the new year, the folks behind the Xbox Live Indie Channel has announced a few changes. The changes will allow for submission of larger games, new price points, and a new maximum number of titles per developer. From the official XNA Game Studio Team Blog: Higher maximum CCGAME size Since the start…
It’s slim pickings this week for new additions to the PlayStation store, with a full-game download of the often-overlooked but quite enjoyable Darksiders leading the way for full retail releases. Rock Band 3 gets some good-times pop rock tunes, and Rocksmith gets a whole bunch of Black Keys DLC, which I would imagine is a…
As a nice little treat, the folks at SuperGiant Games have posted a video of audio director Darren Korb and vocalist Ashley Barrett doing an impromptu performance of “Build that Wall,” the track that won so many hearts (including mine) in the studio’s lovely downloadable game Bastion In a nice bonus, Korb goes straight into…
Sherlock, the BBC’s modern-day Sherlock Holmes reimagining, is a heck of an enjoyable TV show. In addition to the solid writing, strong acting, and un-cheesy modernizing of Holmes, I’m struck by the many ways that Sherlock uses the visual language of video games to place viewers in the mind of the master deducer himself. Sherlock…
It’s been a lot of fun cataloguing and recognizing the best video game music of the year. We’ve gone from AAA blockbusters to indie games, sweeping melodies to ambient synths, heroic themes to dread-soaked atmospherics. Some of the games built music into their gameworlds, while others brought in full orchestras and still others used the…
We’ve already recognized a whole bunch of the best game soundtracks of 2011. But of course, there are only so many hours in the day—only so much time to play games, and one can only write about so many game soundtracks. Fortunately, you guys were up to the task of nominating outstanding soundtracks that didn’t…
2011 saw its share of disappointments, but it was also a year that contained a good number of nice surprises. Some were games we just didn’t see coming—they snuck up on us and grabbed us with their excellence. Others were games that we thought were going to be terrible or at best so-so, but which…
And so we come to the end of our “Best Game Music of 2011” series, where tradition dictates we crown a victor. I’m only half-serious, of course; it’s all but impossible to say what the best anything is, and that’s doubly true of something as ephemeral and subjective as music. But all the same, Jim…
Greetings, Kotaku cadets, and welcome to a mid-week open thread. It’s a down week for us, and there hasn’t been too much new news. Did you get any good games over the holidays? Did you get anyone else any good games? Are you looking forward to 2012, or dreading it? Can you believe that we…
The people who brought you such fantastic headlines as “Burrito Eaten As If Someone In The Room Wasn’t Crying” and “Brief Reprieve From Mariah Carey’s Christmas Song Comes To Resounding End” have selected their Game of The Year, and it’s not ironic at all: Bethesda’s Skyrim has edged out the competition to take top honors.…
Bastion snuck up on me—I had heard a lot of friends and fellow critics hyping it after seeing it at PAX East and GDC, but I didn’t actually play it until it was released. For the first hour or so, I wasn’t sold, but as the story snowballed and the levels stretched out, I fell…
We’re coming to the conclusion of our Best Game Music of 2011 series—there are only two games left! I’ve been having a lot of fun writing these, and thanks to Luke and Evan for their entries as well. As I’ve been doing the posts, I’ve been getting lots of notes from readers about game soundtracks…
I played a ton of games in 2011. More, probably, than any other year of my life. So when it came time to choose the best from among them, I spent a lot of time thinking back, sifting through the triumphs and the frustrations, the unexpected joys and the unfortunate disappointments. Arkham City and Portal…
Despite the fact that many folks have been playing Minecraft since the fall of 2010, I’m counting it as a 2011 game. After all, 2011 was the year that it saw a full retail release, and it was also the year that I finally sat down and really played it. It was also the year…
A couple weeks back I ran an enjoyable feature on Duncan Harris, the video game photographer behind the website DeadEndThrills. Harris takes some of the most evocative, beautiful video game screenshots I’ve ever seen, and we’ve been sharing some of his work each week here. This week has some good stuff. Let’s get into it,…
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is perhaps the most compelling argument yet for “Video Game as Concert Piece.” As a game, it is a smartly designed interlocking series of puzzles, an ever-more-complex world filled with hidden secrets and challenging combat that unfolds with a uniquely Zelda-y sense of joyous excavation. But as a concert…
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