Kirk Hamilton

​Notch Says He’s Canceled Oculus Rift Minecraft Because Of Facebook

The people at Oculus VR are doubtless pretty psyched that Facebook just bought their company for $2 billion. Some game developers, not so much. Among the displeased is Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson, who tweeted that in light of the Facebook acquisition, he’s cancelled a deal he and his company Mojang were working on to…

​A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Game That Prints Your Story For You

Reading a choose-your-own-adventure book is pretty fun, but it can be hard to retrace your story. Any attempt to place your chapters back-to-back would require ripping pages out of the book, and that’s certainly no fun. But what if you could have a CYOA print out your story as you went, leaving you with a…

Kids Don’t Need Fancy Toys To Have Fun—Just Junk

It’s only natural that we should want to protect our kids; they seem so small and helpless, so vulnerable to the dangers of the world. But actually being a kid means constantly negotiating danger and, usually, coming through just fine. A recent article at The Atlantic takes a look at a type of playground that’s…

It’s Fez time, PlayStation Owners. The indie hit Fez is out today for PS3, PS4 and Vita. Buy one copy and you’ll get all of ’em. All I can say is that I am pretty psyched to play this game on Vita.

​President Jimmy Carter Really Did See A UFO, Technically

President Jimmy Carter has talked about his 1969 encounter with an unidentified flying object several times over the years. He’s never really been of the opinion that what he saw was an alien spacecraft, but maintains that he doesn’t quite know what it was, either. On the latest episode of The Brian Lehrer Show, Carter…

The game is called Escape Goat 2. That’s probably all you need to know, right? Here’s the launch trailer for MagicalTimeBean’s Metroid-ish platformer, out now on Steam, GoG and the Humble store. Looks fun!

​Infamous: Second Son‘s Protesters Are Terrible At Protesting

It can’t be easy, being an innocent civilian in the world of Infamous: Second Son. The government has put your city on lockdown, everyone’s suspected of terrorism, and a guy with superpowers just blew up your car. It’s enough to make you want to take to the streets and protest. That’s just what a group…

Interested in writing about games? Last week a bunch of game critics attended the first-ever Critical Proximity mini-conference in San Francisco. I gave a talk; my topic was “Writing games criticism for a mainstream audience.” You can read a text version here. The conference ran last Sunday, March 16, in San Francisco. It was in…

​The Xbox One’s Media Remote Is Surprisingly Great

The Xbox One wasn’t supposed to need a remote control. That was the whole point, right? With its high-tech Kinect camera, we could just talk to it and tell it what to do. Remote controls were a thing of the past, a finally bygone relic of the 20th century! Except, well, not really. A few…

It’s Like Zelda, But Your Sword Can Reprogram The Entire Game

These days most people know the basics of the top-down action adventure game. You know, “the Zelda-like.” Character with a sword, walking through dungeons, solving puzzles and fighting monsters, opening chests. Time to introduce a major twist, no? Enter Hack n’ Slash, a new game from Double Fine and one of the most creative and…

​If Robin Hood Starred In Metal Gear

He robs from the rich and gives to the poor; he also navigates high-tech compounds and dodges robot enemies like Solid Snake. That’s the setup of Volume, the in-development stealth game from Thomas Was Alone-creator Mike Bithell. I caught up with Bithell at GDC earlier this week and he gave me a demo of an…

​We Tried Sony’s PS4 Virtual Reality Headset. We Like It.

Yesterday, Sony entered the virtual reality fray by announcing Project Morpheus, a new virtual reality initiative aimed at making a VR headset for the PS4. Today at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Stephen Totilo and I swung by Sony’s booth to check it out. In a private meeting with Sony’s Anton Mikhailov and…

The New Oculus Rift Is Very Cool, And You Can Get One This Year

Ask anyone in video games what new piece of tech has them most excited about the future, and there’s a good chance they’ll bring up the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. Good news: Later this year, developers (and the rest of us) will be able to own the latest, greatest version. And it really is…

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes: The Kotaku Review

“How can I best describe Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes?” I asked myself. “Ah, yes. I’ll describe it as a small plate at an expensive restaurant.” So, okay, let’s do that: You’re at one of those restaurants where they serve gourmet food in very small portions. You’ve been given your entree—a intricate thing that…

Remember To Play Titanfall With Style, Folks

There’s nothing quite like the moment in Titanfall when you finally call down your giant mech, sprint across the battlefield, and leap into the cockpit. It’s robot fightin’ time! Lately I’ve gotten a bit obsessed with style, specifically with trying to climb into my titan in the coolest way possible. So far, I’d say the…

Nice, Card Hunter is getting a tablet version. Blue Manchu’s terrific tactics RPG/deck-building game Card Hunter always seemed suited to tablet devices, and now, it’s finally happening. The tablet version will be a free-to-play app, similar to the browser-based original. The release date is still TBD.

​This Is The Latest Steam Controller

Valve just sent us this image, a more clear depiction of the latest Steam Controller prototype that they detailed back in January Likely in the interest of backward compatibility, this latest prototype has eight clear buttons on the front, which will doubtless make it easier for the controller to support Xbox 360-style XInput controls. It’ll…

Oh hi there, Little Sisters. Thanks for the nightmares. This screenshot, along with several other nice ones from BioShock Infinite‘s Burial at Sea add-on, spotted over at Dead End Thrills

Thanks, buddy! This Titanfall clip I captured the other night shows what happens when an enemy pilot gets on my auto-titan’s bad side.

Joel Green, The Child Who Inspired That Dragon, Cancer, Has Passed Away

Joel Green, the young boy whose battle with terminal cancer inspired Josh Larson’s intensely personal game, That Dragon, Cancer, has succumbed to his illness. He was five years old. In a blog post late last night, Green’s mother Amy wrote that he had been taken to Children’s Hospital in San Francisco after his health had…