Luke Plunkett

Track: Raise The Sword | Artist: Beastwars | Album: IV Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment. 

Red Dead Online Players Escape Game World, Find Beautiful Desert Paradise

Did you know it’s possible to escape the game boundary of Red Dead Online? It’s tough, but if you find just the right spot, and do just the right thing, you can squeeze outside Rockstar’s limits. And when you do, what awaits on the other side is beautiful. A gang of Australian game devs (Ian…

Judgment: The Kotaku Review

Yakuza 6 closed the book on the story of fabled gangster Kazuma Kiryu, but Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio’s relentless release schedule cannot be stopped. While we know the developer is capable of different (and brilliant) things—see Binary Domain—they’ve decided to stick with the Yakuza formula in all but name with their latest game Judgment, out…

A God Of War Fan Has Sketched Out A Sequel

God of War fan (and professional games artist) Yong Yi Lee has some ideas for a God of War sequel, and instead of writing them down in an overly-long Reddit/Tumblr post, has instead sketched it out. The gist: Kratos seems upset and is caught up in Ragnarök, and has to kill a lot of Gods.…

Overwatch vs Team Fortress 2, A Battle To The Death

Overwatch’s rivalry with Team Fortress 2 is about to be settled once and for all, not the on the battlefield, but on a battlefield in Source Filmmaker. This was made by animator The Winglet, and is truly something. I’m years past getting any of the TF2 jokes, for example, and still found the whole thing…

Look At These Star Wars Game Boxes

Limited Run Games, a company that reprints classic/cult games in new boxes so collectors can enjoy them, is bringing out two old Star Wars games this week, and their packaging is pretty much perfect. Both the original NES Star Wars game and the Game Boy adaptation will be sold, in new cartridges, but it’s those…

The Women’s World Cup Video Game Experience Is Sadly Half-Assed

The Women’s World Cup has brought together the best teams and players from across the planet, all in the name of some fantastic football (and nightmarish VAR). You might think that, with the eyes of the world upon France and the women’s game, that it would be a good time for EA to replicate what…

Evangelion Dreams

Huang Fan is a freelance artist and illustrator who has worked on things like the Rampage movie and Blur’s Destiny 2 animation. You can see more of his stuff at his ArtStation page

A Ruthless Game Where You’re Beyoncé’s Assistant, Which You Play On Twitter

Twitter is hell, but even amidst the worst impulses and examples of human communication there is hope. Like this choose-your-own-adventure game made by Green Chyna which might be the best use of the social media network I’ve ever seen. The premise is that you’re Beyoncé’s assistant for a single day, and have one goal: not…

Streamer Raises Almost $1 Million For Charity In Just Four Hours

GuardianCon, which began a few years back as a small Destiny con and has since grown into an all-weekend show held in July in Orlando, also runs a week-long charity stream. Which has just raised over $3 million for a children’s hospital in Memphis. As Forbes report, the stream operated in four-hour blocks, with streamers,…

New Total War DLC Looks Like A Horror Movie

For a while now, Creative Assembly has sold a “gore” or “blood” pack for their Total War games as DLC. It’s now Three Kingdoms’ turn, with an update called Reign Of Blood, and it is bloody I mean…pools of blood, big juicy stabbings I get, this is a game about war! But horse dismemberment and…

Metal Gear Solid Gets 4K Remaster Thanks To AI

Thanks to ERSGAN(Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks) and the work of tophergopher1, this is Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes (the GameCube version/remake) featuring full 4K visuals, with none of the upscaling having been done by human hands. Instead, machine-learning has looked at the game’s old textures and cleaned them up the best way it saw…

Gardens of Fog is a new D&D module whose adventure has been “designed to turn some stereotypes [about mental illness] on their head”, and where players will “encounter and interact with living representations of anxiety and depression”. Some of the proceeds of its sale go towards the charity Take This

StarCraft Gets An Official Cartoon Makeover

Blizzard is going to release a graphics pack for Starcraft: Remastered that transforms the game, giving it the look of Carbot Animations’ Starcrafts series This isn’t a fan mod that Blizzard simply gave its blessing to; it’s the real deal, which applies to everything from ladder matches to the campaign to mission briefings, a nice…

You Can Now Play Mass Effect 2 In First-Person

The Mass Effect games are third-person by design, but that hasn’t stopped LordEmil1 from creating a mod that lets PC gamers play the best of them—Mass Effect 2—from a first-person perspective. You can’t play the whole game like this, as combat isn’t working properly due to clipping issues, but everything else, from wandering to conversations,…

Fake Magic: The Gathering Card Names Are Fantastic

Jason Rohrer (Passage, Sleep Is Death) thought it’d be fun to train an AI to create fake Magic: The Gathering card names. It was a good hunch. To do it, he created a database of 18,978 card names, which the AI would then use to jumble all the words up and come up with new…

Fan-Made Half-Life 3 Is Coming Along Nicely

Last year, a group of Half-Life fans announced that they were going to be taking former Valve writer Marc Laidlaw’s Episode 3 synopsis and turning it into an actual game. A year later and things are looking good! The team behind Project Borealis have released this update video that shows all the work they’ve been…

Counter-Strike’s Iconic De_Dust 2, Remade In Unreal Engine 4

Counter-Strike’s most famous map has changed a bit over the years, but it’s never looked as good as it does here in this remake of part of the level by artist Wiktor Öhman. Öhman, who has worked on games like Far Cry 3, has “fond memories playing it with my friends at LAN parties in…

Japanese Man Arrested With Wario Drugs

A 27 year-old man has been arrested in Tokushima having been found with 50 MDMA/ecstacy tablets in his possession, most of them shaped like Wario. As Asahi report, it’s the third time this year the man, Satoshi Kishimoto, has been caught with narcotics, the other two being for dried cannabis and LSD. Kobe Customs told…

Elite Player Took Some Beautiful Screenshots Of His 18-Week Journey Across Space

Earlier this year, a group of Elite: Dangerous players set out on an expedition that would take them across the entire Milky Way, all 130,000 light years of it. The journey took months, and some of its most beautiful and bizarre sights have been captured by Aurum_32 in this collection of screenshots. There are shots from…