Kirk Hamilton

Beyond: Two Souls Works Well As A 4.5-Hour Ellen Page Movie

The Ellen Page-starring movie/game hybrid Beyond: Two Souls was often as much fun to watch as it was to play. And now, thanks to Gamebillstudio, you can go ahead and watch the whole thing, even if you don’t own a PS3. They’ve distilled the essence of the game’s story into a two-part, 4.5-hour movie. The…

Looks Like Target Is Canceling PS4 Preorder Bundles For Delayed Games [UPDATE]

Watch Dogs and Driveclub, two high-profile games planned for release alongside the PS4 and Xbox One, have both seen fairly last-minute delays into next year. However, both of those games had been included in next-gen console preorder bundles. Two readers inform us that today, Target canceled not just their game preorder, but their console preorder…

Just What You Always Wanted, A Mountain Dew-Themed Xbox One

Do you feel that the Xbox One’s bold, clean design is just a little bit too austere? Ever wish it could be livened up by some shiny green soft-drink branding? Well then! The above photo was tweeted by the media rep for Hendrick Motorsports, who field Nascar driver Dale Earnhardt, Jr. She describes it as…

Google Is Using Minecraft To Find The Computer Geniuses Of Tomorrow

If you want to find the computer geniuses of tomorrow, you could do worse than to check out which kids are playing Minecraft. That’s what Google’s thinking, anyway, with a new Minecraft mod that adds quantum behaviors to the game. In a new Google post, the Google Quantum A.I. Lab Team says that they’ve released…

New PC Game’s Joke Achievements Are Also The Best Achievements

Video-game achievements are funny things. We want to unlock them, and we’re willing to shoot the 1,000 zombies or speed-run the 10 levels to do so. But… they’re kind of silly, ya know? It’d be nice if more games took their achievements a little less seriously. Recently, Tom Francis’ excellent stealth game Gunpoint experimented with…

Batman Games Look Best in Black and White

To this day, Batman: Arkham City remains a visually striking game. The grand, gothic feel of the comics was well-captured by art director David Hego and his team at Rocksteady. But I’ve never seen the game look quite like this These shots, captured by video-game screenshot master Duncan Harris at Dead End Thrills, go beyond…

Today’s Cool New PC Game Wants To Screw With Your Head… And It Will

Perhaps you’ve heard of The Stanley Parable? It’s this game, see. It’s a game about stories. It’s… well, it’s complicated. Maybe you’re wondering what it’s really about, why everyone is talking about it? Well. Allow me to elaborate. The Stanley Parable is a first-person storytelling game that functions as a sort of narrative puzzle. What’s…

From PC Gaming To Zelda, Readers Submit Their Last-Gen Heroes

We’ve been having fun with the first week of our month-long Last-Gen Heroes series, in which Kotaku‘s staff has been looking back at the heroes and zeroes of the past console generation. Over at TAY, readers have been having a grand old time themselves. Here’s some of what they’ve been talking about. Reader Zarnyx offers…

Try To Think Your Way Through The PS4’s First Big Puzzle Game Right Now

We’ve been talking about The Witness, the upcoming puzzle/exploration game from Braid-creator Jonathan Blow, for some time now. But for all the words we’ve spilled and the concept art we’ve shared, it can still be difficult to explain just how the game’s puzzles work Yesterday at a Sony-hosted PS4 preview event, I chatted with Blow…

The Bow and Arrow, Not The Gun, Was This Era’s Best Video-Game Weapon

These days, guns and action games go together like spoons and Nutella. And yet when it comes right down to it, there is a video game weapon that outclasses the gun in most every respect: The bow and arrow. I don’t think I’d go so far as to argue that the last generation of gaming…

Carrie Recut Makes Cinderella Freaky In The Best Way

Two young women. Two menacing mother-figures. Two sets of supernatural powers. Two fateful social gatherings. ONE HELL OF A RECIPE FOR HORROR. This brilliant bit of remixing comes to us from YouTuber Cracker76. It combines audio from a trailer for the upcoming Carrie remake with footage from Walt Disney’s 1950 classic Cinderella. It is surprisingly…

The Fallacy Of “Keep Your Politics Out Of My Video Games”

It can often feel as though some people who like video games want to have it both ways: They want games to be taken seriously and acknowledged as an exciting artistic medium, but the moment someone critiques a game’s politics they respond, as if cued by an invisible conductor: “It’s just a game! Stop taking…

Which Pokemon Did You Get, X Or Y?

If you have a pulse and own a 3DS, chances are you probably spent part of the weekend playing Pokemon X & Y. And yet before you even buy the game, you must begin to make decisions. Which one to get, X or Y? And which Pokemon to train? Time for a reader poll. And…

It’s Time For Beat The Geeks To Make A Comeback: Do you remember the early 2000s Comedy Central quiz show Beat the Geeks? A fantastic idea with untapped potential, gone before its time. We’re ready for it to make a return, or so argues David Cole over at Previously.TV. I think he’s onto something.

Thanks, Xbox 360, For Remembering That I Invert My Thumbstick

It’s human nature to want to break things down into easy-to-understand binaries: Introvert or extrovert. Gay or straight. Republican or Democrat. Autobot or Decepticon. And in video gaming, one of the greatest binaries of all is defined by how a player likes his or her right thumbstick: Regular or inverted? For those of us who…

The Best And Worst of the Last Generation of Gaming

PlayStation 3. Xbox 360. Wii. Over the past eight years, electronic boxes wearing one of those three brands came to occupy space in the entertainment centers of millions of people around the world. They were the heralds of the most innovative, occasionally uncomfortable, undeniably exciting era in video game history. That era is finally nearing…

Track: The Mother We Share | Album: The Bones of What You Believe | Artist: CHVRCHES Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to – and gaming to – at the moment.

Violent Games Should All Hire Viscera Cleanup Detail To Scrub The Gore

Now this is the kind of cross-promotion I can get behind! Devlover Digital, the publisher behind such non-nonviolent video games as Hotline Miami, has enlisted the guys behind Viscera Cleanup Detail to help them clean up after their latest game, Shadow Warrior. Players who buy Shadow Warrior will get a free custom standalone game in…

Valve has confirmed to Maximum PC that Steam Machines won’t only use Nvidia graphics cards, despite that being the only brand announced to go out with their recently-announced prototypes. Valve says Steam Machines will be commercially available with AMD, Nvidia and Intel graphics hardware.

The New Fables Game Is Cool, But Something’s Off

It’s a killer setup for a mystery: Hundreds of storybook fables have relocated to New York. One man—the Big Bad Wolf—is in charge of keeping order. And now, someone is murdering fables. That’s the premise for The Wolf Among Us, a new game based on Vertigo’s popular Fables comics. And while the game is often…