Portal 2 comes in near the top of a lot of critics’ “Best of 2011” lists—it was a joyously brainy, well-written and brilliantly designed puzzle game. I have a soft spot for it partly because it inspired me to break out my dominoes and write the most fun game review I’ve ever written. But I…
I’m a world-class nerd. But that doesn’t mean I understand the nuts and bolts of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an internet censorship bill on which the House Judiciary Commitee held hearings today. (You can watch the hearings live here.) Worryingly, I’m not alone: As the Washington Post reports, members of the Judiciary Committee…
Thanks to the global game-delivery company Pando Networks, who sent over this infographic breaking down their user growth over the past three years. Game downloads have been increasing a some very intense rates around the globe, with a 1025% increase in Europe and a 595% growth in Latin America since 2009. The infographic also notes…
Greetings Kotaku-eers, and welcome to a mid-week open thread. I hope you have had a good week, and are not too stressed about upcoming holiday travel. Just remember: they’re only in-laws. They can’t legally kill you. Here are some conversation-starters and other random bits and bobs from the internet: An excellent ’80’s Dating Montage –…
Sucker Punch made a very interesting, very good choice in choosing to set their follow up to inFamous in a fictional recreation of post-disaster New Orleans. The first game had a lot going for it—I’ve always thought it was underrated—but, its setting was not one of them. Our own Evan Narcisse has described inFamous as…
For most people, high school sucked. The endless questioning and self-doubt, the lack of control over your own schedule, dealing with the impossible mysteries of the opposite sex while navigating the often treacherous shoals of what amounted to a four year, walled-in social experiment. Yeah, high school sucked. It’s that very suckage that makes high…
This week on the PlayStation store, the pickings are slimmer for new games than they’ve been, but there is still some fun stuff to be found. Alice: Madness Returns arrives as a downloadable game, with a full-game trial for PlayStation Plus users. Rocksmith owners will have a chance to download some killer Megadeth tracks, which…
WildChords, a new guitar training app from Ovelin, is truly a remarkable little thing. It presents a charming, well-put-together guitar trainer that is both simpler and more effective at teaching the guitar than pricy music games like the not-so-fun Rocksmith and the fun-but-complicated Rock Band 3 This is a music game with a story—the basic…
If you’ve ever slammed a Mountain Dew or similar citrus-flavored soda during a marathon gaming session, you may want to step back and re-evaluate what you’re putting into your body. A new feature published at iwatchnews.org reveals the history and potential health risks of brominated vegetable oil, otherwise known as BVO, a banned-in-Europe emulsifier that…
Today, Exquisite Films emailed us to let us know that they’ve announced the full cast for Tomb Raider XXX, their upcoming porn parody of the Tomb Raider franchise. We already knew that Chanel Preston was slated to play Lara Croft herself—and given the look of her (safe-for-work) publicity photos, she’s actually a pretty great match…
We often talk about video game developers use music (in fact, just tonight we started listing the best music of 2011!), but it can be fun to look at how musicians incorporate video games into their work, as well. Synth-pop musician Or Zubalsky has created a very cool new album that is designed to be…
I figured I’d like the L.A. Noire soundtrack before I even heard it—here we had noir-style detective game set in the late 1940s, and so you just knew it was going to feature a bunch of great jazz. Rockstar is known for the licensed soundtracks of the Grand Theft Auto games, but with Bully and…
We’ve seen our share of Humble Indie Bundles over the past year or two—independent developers who gather under the “Humble” brand and release a bunch of their games priced at whatever people want to pay. The latest one, Humble Bundle #4, might be the best one yet—for any price you want, you can get Super…
I liked jazz growing up, but some of the intricacies of a tune’s “pocket” were lost on me. I was young then, and foolish, and I hadn’t yet heard Meshell Ndegeocello (whose official website no longer refers to her as Me’Shell Ndegéocello). But then I finally discovered her, and in so doing discovered what groove…
I swear I’m gonna murder Toad. I hate everything about him—his stupid smurfy hat, his dumb little smile, his goofy, perky body language. I despise his goddam Marge Simpson voice, and the way he yells “Rabo!” But most of all, I hate the way the little fucker keeps nailing me with blue shells in Mario…
I haven’t yet been able to track down a copy of the new Game of Thrones board game, let alone carve out four to eight hours to sit down and play through a game. But from the sound of things, that might be for the best. Not because it’s bad, but because it requires so…
This one’s a bit of a stretch… but then, what am I talking about? It’s never a stretch when it comes to Valve. People are already parsing the video that the company showed at last weekend’s Spike Video Game Awards show, in which the Portal 2 character Wheatley put in a humorous, short plea to…
On Monday’s episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, shouty correspondent Aasif Mandvi took on free-to-play iOS games like GameView’s Tapfish In the game, which is entirely free to download, players maintain an aquarium full of virtual fish. There’s a catch, of course—at some point your fish will probably die, and if you’d like,…
Most photographers ply their trade by capturing snapshots of reality and preserving them on film. Through careful framing, posing, and a bit of luck, they seek to distill the essence of foreign lands, exotic vistas, war zones, and even distant planets. But what about the places we visit in video games? Games contain striking panoramas,…
Courtesy of the fine folks at Reddit, we’ve got a video of YouTube user (and pianist) live4divin, who performs a jazz reharmonization of Jeremy Soule’s main theme from Skyrim. For non-musicos, reharmonization is when you take an established melody (say, “All The Things You Are“) and write new chords to go underneath it. It can…
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