Nathan Grayson

Crappy Games Keep Trying To Steal PUBG‘s Name On Steam

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds? That’s old hat. These days, I’m all about, um, *checks list* PlayerUnkn1wn: Friendly Fire, PlayerUnkn4wn: Zombie, and Battle Pixel’s Survival Over the past few months, a handful of games with names suspiciously similar to PUBG have made it onto Steam, seemingly undeterred by silly things like Valve’s strenuous approval process (lol) or trademark…

Portal Gets Its Own Bridge Building Game

Portal has gone all over the place, from the darkest depths of Aperture Science to outer space, briefly. Next stop: the open road. Or some bridges, anyway. Because why not? I guess? Bridge Constructor: Portal is a collaboration between Bridge Constructor developer ClockStone Software and Valve. In it, you’ll solve puzzles that involve trucks crossing abyssal…

Superhot is getting a standalone expansion. Titled Superhot: Mind Control Delete, it puts a procedurally generated roguelike twist on the original’s time-defying antics. It’s coming to Steam Early Access in two days, but the devs warn that it’ll be “extremely early,” with the full version nearly a year out.

Stealth RPG Seven Tries To Mash Up Thief And Diablo, But It Doesn’t Work

I’ve had my eye on Seven: The Days Long Gone since the moment I heard the words “isometric open-world stealth RPG from ex-Witcher developers.” It sounded like a game made just for me. Unfortunately, while Seven has a cool setting and some fun ideas, the glue that holds it all together is sloppily applied. Seven…

Battlegrounds Player Nails Perfect Crossbow Shot On Moving Car

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds player pappabrun crossbow-ed their way into the community’s dreams and an enemy’s car today with an absolutely preposterous shot. Seriously, I cannot even comprehend how they lined up that trajectory in a split second. One for the crossbow history books, right there. Here’s the full clip:

EA UFC 3‘s Beta Has Brutal Striking, But Falls Apart On The Ground

Playing as UFC interim lightweight champion Tony Ferguson, I walk down Conor McGregor and chop away at his resolve (and face) with a blender of punches and elbows. He tries to move off the fence, but ends up walking right into a cracking blow. He’s practically out on his feet. Then I knock him unconscious…

Overwatch Gets Separate Currency For League Skins

The moment Blizzard announced team-specific Overwatch skins as part of its effort to make the game more watchable, it was pretty much inevitable that they’d become available to the game’s skin-starved general populace as well. You won’t be unlocking them the normal way, though. In a video released today, OWL commissioner Nate Nanzer explained that…

Track: Blame Paradise | Artist: The Dear Hunter | Album: All Is As All Should Be Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

DayZ’s developers say that the massively influential survival game is finally leaving early access “next year.” That’ll also mean a console version sometime next year, if all goes according to plan. Personally, I’m expecting it to add a battle royale mode shortly after, which, in DayZ time, means the year 2020.

I Love It When Games Let Me Collect Souvenirs

It was back when I was playing World of Warcraft in high school that I first realized I had a problem. My bags were always full, laden with old gear and miscellaneous baubles I just couldn’t bear to part with, even if that just meant putting them in storage for a bit. A random stone…

This clip of streamer Last_Grey_Wolf singing “I Will Always Love You” while bombs drop in PUBG is haunting. I’ve watched it, like, five times now. Granted, he goes on to survive and ends up making it into the top five before dying, but it’s still a cool moment. Thanks to reader Christian Sowa for sending…

Battlegrounds‘ New Kill Cam Needs Some Work

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, the kill-or-be-killed game where you often come away with only the vaguest notion of how you died, is finally getting a kill cam. That’s good news! PUBG, though, is a colossal cauldron of explosive strangeness, and the new kill cam is having trouble keeping up. The kill cam is live alongside a host…

What Happened When The Guy Who Remixes Overwatch‘s Jeff Kaplan Met Jeff Kaplan

When Dinoflask first started making comedy videos of Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan, he never could’ve imagined he’d one day be surprising the man himself to celebrate his 15th anniversary at Blizzard. Heck, he could barely believe it right before it happened. “I was like, ‘it’s definitely a scam,’” Dinoflask said of the moment he got…

Battlegrounds Cheat Makers Are Advertising Their Hacks In-Game

The era of the door-to-door salesman might be over, but purveyors of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds cheats are happy to bring their wares directly to you for a personal demonstration. Which occasionally involves owning the crap out of you. Players selling PUBG cheats and hacks have popped up in the game itself in recent months, demonstrating their…

Quiz: Which Dysfunctional Video Game Family Are You A Part Of?

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, a holiday many celebrate with the people they love, hate to love, or just hate, colloquially known in some circles as “family.” In that spirit, it’s time to find out which dysfunctional video game family you’re most likely to be a part of.

PUBG‘s Second Big Tournament Shows It Still Needs Work As An Esport

Over the weekend, 20 top PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds teams faced off at Intel Extreme Masters in Oakland, California. From inside a series of what we might call PlayerUnknown’s BattleCubicles, squads squabbled over a $200,000 prize pool. When the smoke cleared, a team that didn’t even get invited took top honors, besting big-name teams, without even winning…

Valve Changes Steam Reviews To Stop Bots From Manipulating Pages

Valve has admitted that Steam reviews have a bot-brigading problem, and now it’s finally decided to do something about it. As part of an effort that’s already included anti-review-bomb charts, Valve has taken aim at yet another pernicious element of Steam reviews: vote manipulation. In short, it’s possible to rate reviews as “helpful” or not,…

The Asshole Goose Game Is Fun To Play

Don’t worry, everyone: the goose game is good. So far, anyway. I got a chance to play a demo of Untitled Goose Game, a game about a goose that is also an asshole (are those terms redundant?), at Double Fine’s Day of the Devs event in San Francisco earlier this month. I came in worried…

Track: Walking In My Shoes | Artist: The Fever 333 | Album: Walking In My Shoes (Single) Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

Psychological horror game SOMA is coming to Xbox One on Dec 1 with a new mode that removes the monsters. The idea behind “safe mode” is to let players experience “the atmosphere and story of SOMA free of harm.” Last year, a Steam user released a mod for the PC version that did the same…