Kirk Hamilton

Helldivers Bug Erases Progress If Your PS4 Controller Dies. Seriously.

Here’s a shitty bug for ya: A fair number of players are reporting that they’ve lost all their progress in the new PlayStation game Helldivers after their controller died while they were playing. Apparently, if you’re playing the game and your controller runs out of juice, the game spawns in a level 1 character when…

What Are You Playing This March?

March! March, you apes! You wanna live forever? Yes, it’s March, which means it’s basically spring. Daylight savings is about to give us longer days, the weather is getting warmer, and there are a lot of really good new (and old) video games to play. For my part, I’m mostly playing Metroid Prime, and for…

Tour The PAX East Monster Hunter Caravan

This weekend at PAX East in Boston, convention goers can visit a Monster Hunter caravan… or at least, a pretty decent recreation. The caravan was created in partnership with iam8bit, and has some pretty great props. Stephen Totilo stopped by on his tour of the PAX show floor and snapped some pictures.; I’m still too…

​The 10 Best Things About Building A New Gaming PC

Building a gaming PC can be time-consuming and stressful. There are a thousand things that could go wrong, and any one of them could wind up costing hundreds of dollars. And yet we do it anyway. Why? Because building PCs is totally awesome. Last summer, I finished building and fine-tuning a new gaming PC. It…

​Alien: Isolation Sure Looks Less Scary In Third-Person

One of the coolest things about Alien: Isolation was how thoroughly it put players into the quaking space-boots of its protagonist Amanda Ripley. There was a button for re-focusing her eyes! Today at GDC, Creative Assembly’s Alistair Hope demonstrated an earlier version of the game that was a more traditional third-person survival horror game. Destructoid…

Up Close With Valve’s Newest Steam Controller

Today at GDC, Stephen got to mess around with Valve’s newest Steam Controller model. Check it out: Stephen also snapped this pic at Valve’s booth, which gives a couple of bullet-points about the controller: Some people are bagging on the thumbstick, but I dunno… I haven’t used this thing, but it actually looks kind of…

What’s Your Monster Hunter Weapon Of Choice?

Okay, it happened. I’m hooked on Monster Hunter. I’ve held off diving into the series for years now, but the latest game, Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate on 3DS, has got me. We just added it to our list of The Best Games for 3DS, and it earned its spot. This game is great. I’ve been…

Track: The Grid | Album: Mockroot | Artist: Tigran Hamasyan Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to – and gaming to – at the moment.

Helldivers Has Some Great Achievements

Yeah, I know, they’re called trophies on PlayStation. Achievements, trophies… whatever you want to call them, Helldivers has some of the funniest I’ve seen in a while. Take the one in the gif up top, called “Dancing Queen.” Every time I’m playing with someone new, I stop everything on the bridge and tell them to…

Elite: Dangerous is coming to Xbox One this summer, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer announced today at GDC. Unexpected!

Track: Consumite Furore | Album: Phantasmagoria Soundtrack | Artist: Mark Seibert Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to – and gaming to – at the moment.

Helldivers Is Like A Video Game Version Of Starship Troopers

Until last weekend, Helldivers was totally off my radar. Then my boss Stephen texted me on Sunday saying we should team up and play it. It was good, he said. It was like a tactical, sci-fi Diablo, he said. My interest was piqued. I fired up my PS4 and we played for a few hours,…

The Sad Story Behind A Dead PC Game That Can’t Come Back

The latest attempt to re-release the beloved PC series No One Lives Forever is dead in the water. The saddest part? It could have been rescued, if not for the apathy of big corporations. For years, it’s been impossible to buy No One Lives Forever or its sequel through popular online services like Steam, Humble,…

Show Us Your Horrible Mess Of Video Game Cables

Electronic gadgets are cool. Knotted, tangled cables are not. Yet rarely will you find the one without t’other. Maybe you’ve done a good job of hiding your cable mess. But it’s still there, slumbering in the dark, flexing slowly of its own volition, using the long weeks and months to turn in on itself until…

The Order: 1886: The Kotaku Review

Do you like movies? Do you like video games? If you answered “yes” to either of those questions, you should probably skip The Order: 1886 The PlayStation 4’s newest action game is a dull and lumbering thing. It’s a brief, drab adventure starring a group of characters who all seem to dislike their lives and…

What Books Are You Reading These Days?

Here at Kotaku, we don’t just play video games all day and night. Sometimes, we read. Sometimes we even read books! Wild, I know. I’ve read a few good books lately, and wanted to check in to see what you all have been reading. For my part, I recently finished Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, which…

​A Chronicle Of Buggy, Broken Telltale Games, 2012-2015

It is a truth universally acknowledged, but little examined, that Telltale’s games have issues. The studio rose to prominence with 2012’s Game of the Year-worthy The Walking Dead adventure game. Since then, their games, wonderful in many ways as they may be, have been accompanied by an undercurrent of fan anger. Each subsequent notch in…

Good Job With The Graffiti, Dying Light

Video games have got a graffiti problem. So much video-game graffiti is dumb, unrealistic, or hamfisted. Considering that I’ve gone out of my way to criticize games that get graffiti wrong, it seemed worth taking the time to high-five a game that gets it right. Dying Light developer Techland could’ve very easily screwed up the…

Alien: Isolation had a really cool save-game system. In a new postmortem over at Gamasutra, Creative Assembly’s Gary Napper talks about how that system came to be

Five Months In, Hardcore Destiny Players Are Hitting A Wall

A couple of weeks ago, my regular Destiny crew stopped playing. It wasn’t some big announced event, or something we had planned. Our loss of momentum started with a confluence of other, smaller occurrences. We took a few days off, then a few more. Then we weren’t playing at all. Once or twice, I’d be…