Hello and welcome to another week at Kotaku! We’re off to a rip-roaring start, with a bunch of big pending game releases and other holiday-related news. I bet that a bunch of you already finished Arkham City (though if you actually survive the New Game+, my hat is off to you), and maybe you’re sitting…
After a week of downtime, I’m picking up our friend Mike McWhertor’s stewardship of our weekly look at the new ways that games are offending the world’s sensibilities. Or at least, offending the sensibilities of the fine folks at the Electronic Software Rating Board, aka the ESRB This week was a bit thin, given that…
No word yet in Netflix’s ongoing quest to change things up and, possibly, add video game rentals to their offered services. First the company announced that it was splitting in two, moving its disc-based rental service to a new company called Qwikster before reversing course and killing the whole idea This may or may not…
Plenty of folks have been talking about how Batman: Arkham City handled (or mishandled) the character of Catwoman, but fewer have addressed the character of Harley Quinn. In a thoughtful post on his personal blog, Girl Parts author John M. Cusick looks at her character, identity, and the possible reasons she acts the way she…
A couple of weeks ago, I attended GDC Online in Austin. I was covering the event, but I was also there as a speaker, giving a microtalk as part of a six-critic panel on great game storytelling. Joining me were N’Gai Croal (Hit Detection), Leigh Alexander (Gamasutra), John Davidson (CBS Interactive/Gamespot), and Ben Fritz (the…
Over the summer, Kotaku did a fair amount of war correspondence. This particular war wasn’t happening in Iraq or Afganistan, but rather in Paris. It was an ongoing Post-It War between game developer Ubisoft and its neighbors, the French bank BNP. It started with small characters in office windows, then quickly spiraled out of control,…
Klei Entertainment’s upcoming Shank 2 brings a new brand of extreme slice-em-up to the stage with its co-op gameplay. We’ve already seen some of it in action off-screen, and it certainly looks like a lot of team-stabbin’. Klei sent along a grip of new screenshots from both the single-player and teh co-op. I thought I’d…
And so ends another week at Kotaku, full of news and opinions, goofy pictures and Pandas, snacks and snark and some genuine human emotion. Welcome to the weekend, readers, to the days of freedom and Arkham City-ing that will abound. Did you read Totilo’s review? I hope you did. Now it’s time to talk about…
This week, Eidos released the first downloadable content for their acclaimed role-playing game Deus Ex: Human Revolution, titled The Missing Link. We’re all looking forward to some more Deus Ex, but is The Missing Link worthy of the brand? It’s time to ask our guts what they think. Kirk Hamilton, who has written more about…
In our still-young Snacktaku series, we have been focusing mostly on new snacks. The exotic, the colorful, the strange and the bizarrely delicious. But for my first Snacktaku, I felt like before I venture into the new, I should first discuss the classic snack that is nearest and dearest to my heart: Milk Duds. I…
Dark Souls is a phenomenally difficult, often frustrating game. I’m sure that many of the people who have played it have given up at some point, unable to deal with the constant punishment the game puts players through. And when they did so, they probably just paused, looked down at their controller, said “Fuck this…
In addition to the announcement that Diablo III would be free for all World of Warcraft subscribers with an annual pass, Blizzard showed off a cinematic from the game, titled “The Black Soulstone.” In it, the character Leah (voiced by FemShep herself, Jennifer Hale), narrates, reading through her uncle’s books, trying to figure out what…
Greetings, open threaders. As we roll into the evening (or night on the East coast, or morning across the ocean), here is our daily open thread, in which we can talk, type, rant and rave about anything at all, or nothing in particular. For a conversation-starter today, I’m going to write a poem. It’s about…
The last augmented reality game I played was Face Raiders on the 3DS, a game which turned the face of those playing the game into flying enemies which players could then shoot out of the sky. The new iOS AR game SkinVaders turns that idea on its head (geddit?) by using facial recognition software and…
Good gravy does Batman: Arkham City have some fine voice-acting. Almost every character in the game, from the biggest crime bosses to the littlest thugs, is played by an actor who delivers his or her lines with gusto and energy. It goes such a long way towards making Arkham City feel vital and believable, and…
First wireless controls, then motion controls, then motion-tracking like the Xbox Kinect… sooner or later, someone’s going to come up with a computer (and therefore a video game) that can be controlled entirely with our minds Well, turns out it may be “sooner”—a research scientist at the New York research lab the Wadsworth Center has…
After we ran our “Yes” Gut Check for Ace Combat: Assault Horizon, I noticed a lot of skepticism about the game. Is it really any good? It seems weird, and cold, and soulless. Well, I’ve been playing off and on all week, and I’d just like to say that I personally am of a mind…
Greetings once more, Kotaku readers. We’ve had a fun day here, talking about all sorts of video game stuff, from the contentious to the non-contentious. And now it’s time to talk about other things. Good things! Bad things! All of the things. So kick back, relax, put on some smooth saxophone music, and dive into…
Last week, I attended the Game Developers’ Conference Online in Austin. I was there to give a talk about game storytelling, but I stayed for the entire event, and caught a good number of talks, workshops, and keynotes. On Monday, Gamasutra (who helps put on GDC each year) ran a fun collection of quotes from…
I’ve seen some cool business cards in my time—I remember that at my first GDC, I practically had a Patrick Bateman-style existential crisis over how inferior my own cards were at the time. But Sim City and Spore creator Will Wright’s got us all beat—he puts his personal information on actual printed money. Sure, it’s…
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