Nathan Grayson

Track: A Lesson In Lust | Artist: Hail The Sun | Album: Mental Knife Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

Windows Will No Longer Interrupt Your Games To Annoy You About Updates

We’ve all been there: you’re in the zone with a game—so dialed in that you can practically smell the body odor of the man you just kicked off a cliff—but then, suddenly, it’s gone. Windows has decided it’s update time, and also that you can go fuck yourself. Mercifully, that problem is now history. The…

Blizzard Is Changing Overwatch‘s Pharah, But Some Players Aren’t On Board

Time takes its toll on us all, but especially on fictional heroes who exist in constantly updating video games. Theirs is the greatest plight of all, as exemplified by Overwatch’s master of the skies, Pharah. Pharah is just fine—some might even say perfect, if they are me—but she’s about to be hit with a rocket…

XCOM 2 Getting New Story Missions, A Level Editor

More than two years since its release, XCOM 2 is still a behemoth of a strategy game, but things have been quiet out of developer Firaxis’ camp since the release of excellent expansion War of the Chosen last year. Today, the developer surprise-announced that it’s not done with XCOM 2 just yet. New additions to…

Seattle Police Launch An Anti-Swatting Program

Swatting is pretty much the shittiest prank a person can pull, if you can even call an action that might lead to someone’s death a “prank.” Somebody calls the police and accuses somebody else—often someone who’s livestreaming—of an in-progress crime so heinous that a SWAT team shows up at their door, with unpredictable consequences. Late…

Valve Removes 179 Steam Games Including Big Dick and MILF

It’s a new era for Steam—or so Valve says. So long as it’s not “illegal, or straight-up trolling,” Valve will allow any game on the service. It’s implemented new filtering tools to drive the point home and also ensure that there’s not heaping piles of porn lying around everywhere. However, in the past few weeks,…

Track: Made An America | Artist: The Fever 333 | Album: Made An America EP Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

Moving: The Kotaku Review

I recently left my apartment in northern California and drove a U-Haul full of my belongings to a new place in southern California. Although it’s a game that’s played by millions every day, I cannot recommend Moving Moving is a musty, moth-devoured sweater of half-completed game concepts and narrative threads. It is a lengthy experience…

Fortnite‘s ‘Shadow Stone’ Disabled After Players Become Invisible Forever [UPDATE]

Fortnite is a game about receding into the woods and trying to avoid humanity for the entirety of your natural lifespan. Oh wait, no, that’s just what I’m planning to do after today’s events. But Fortnite is a game where staying hidden and getting the drop on other players can be a huge advantage. You…

Streamers Have Concerns About Twitch’s New Tag System

Unless you’re doing some kind of performance art piece or are—not that I would know anything about this one—looking for an excuse to make your habit of constantly talking to yourself seem less weird, you probably want viewers when you stream. Twitch just added a new tag system that’s supposed to help facilitate that, but…

World Of Warcraft Community, Blizzard Rally To Support Modder In Need

Modding a game like World of Warcraft can earn you widespread acclaim, but it doesn’t exactly pay the bills. For all the accolades developer Adam Williams received for Deadly Boss Mods, a raid tool considered indispensable by WoW’s community, he still found himself burnt-out on raiding and too poor to pay for badly-needed dental surgery…

What We Liked (And What Bewildered Us) About Nic Cage’s New Movie, Mandy

Some movies just make sense. Mandy, starring a near-feral Nicolas Cage, is not one of them. It begins as a glacially-paced exercise in psych-horror scene-setting before abruptly transforming into a drugged-out, neon-drenched revenge flick. Gita Jackson and I sat down to try to make sense of it all. Nathan Grayson: Hey, Gita! So, we have…

Nearly 200,000 Steam users play PC games with SNES controllers. That’s the most surprising factoid from Valve’s data about controllers. Xbox 360 controllers are most used (27.2 million), while Xbox One and PS4 are nearly neck-and-neck (11.5 million and 12.2 million). The Steam controller, at 1.5 million, remains niche.

Ex-Telltale Developers Share Alternate Walking Dead Endings And Other Gags

Telltale is no more, and its smoldering remains are being sued for failing to give hundreds of employees adequate notice or compensation. There’s a faint glimmer of a silver lining, though. Ex-employees have been sharing odds and ends from their time at Telltale, and now they’ve gotten to the primo stuff: the goofs. Today, Jake…

Total War Game Gets Review Bombed On Steam Over Women Generals [Update]

Over the past 24 hours, strategy game Total War: Rome II has picked up over 350 new negative reviews, triggering Steam’s graph-based review bomb alert system. The reason? A controversy surrounding women generals that appears to be largely contrived. It began last month with a handful of Steam forum posts and reviews in which players…

Fallout 4 Modders Can’t Use New Vegas‘ Voice Acting, So They’re Making Their Own

A group of modders decided to try and remake Fallout: New Vegas inside Fallout 4, but soon, they found themselves in a pickle. Well, more like a jar of pickles. First, there was the gargantuan game they had to spruce up—a years-long undertaking that has yet to make it to the finish line. Then, the…

A Murder Mystery Where The Suspects Are Different Video Game Genres

Daniel Mullins, the creator of beloved indie horror mindfuck Pony Island, is back with more genre-bending antics. His new murder mystery game, The Hex, has a central conceit with which I became immediately enamored: all the suspects are stand-ins for different video game genres. The game takes place at a creaky old inn, which TV…

A Dedicated Fan Is Making A Game About The Overwatch League

As sports video games have shown us, sports are just games with off-the-court metagame layers attached. Also pageantry and juicy, juicy drama. Overwatch League follows this formula, making it ripe for a game in the most thrilling sports-adjacent genre of all: dating simulator. Wait, I mean management. OWL 2K18 is a work-in-progress fan game by…

‘100 Percent Uncensored’ Sex Game Now Out On Steam, But Only In Certain Regions

If you were hoping to spend your weekend not with Spider-Man or Lara Croft, but instead with the outerwear-despising anime girls of the long-awaited “100 percent uncensored” Steam visual novel Negligee: Love Stories, I’m not gonna judge. But I am gonna tell you that even though it’s now out on Steam, you still might not…

Diapers, Divorces, And Unstable Pay: Parents On Twitch Struggle To Strike A Balance

In February, aspiring streamer Mystic hit a breaking point. When her kids started going to school, she had decided to try and turn streaming on Twitch from a hobby into a career. At first, she only streamed during the day while they were away, but as time went on, she became obsessed with keeping her…