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Play With Toys Past Bedtime in Wind-Up Robots
The appeal of Wind-Up Robots is rather simply understood, for kids young and old who have played with toys and personified their actions. In this sweet-hearted tower-defense title for iOS and the Kindle Fire, by Soma Games, the toy box supplies a force of earnest, mechanical friends who guard a sleeping boy against the midnight…
By Owen Good -
Video Gaming’s List of Who’s Who and Where They Stand on SOPA
Much credit to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, for maintaining this registry of members of the Entertainment Software Association and their on-the-record positions regarding the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill almost universally despised by rank-and-file gamers. Why is this important? The ESA, the industry’s principal lobbying arm in the United States, backs SOPA, meaning it…
By Owen Good -
Nintendo Doesn’t Let WiiWare Self-Publishers Reveal Sales Figures
The independent publisher Icon Games Entertainment, a week ago, looked back on 2011 and counted up how many copies it had sold of games such as Bashi Blocks (pictured above) and Arcade Air Hockey. Icon’s Richard Hill-Whittall found that he’d sold 255,763 copies of games in all, a pleasant surprise given he figured they’d only…
By Owen Good -
Electronic Arts Loses Fight for SSX Domain Name
Electronic Arts has lost its bid to win the domain “ssx.com” from a holdings firm that bought it up in October. While the holdings firm parked the domain and briefly served ads leading to the game—an action that EA used as the basis for its complaint-an arbitration panel didn’t see that as enough evidence of…
By Owen Good -
That Jawa Looks Stoned
That Jawa Looks Stoned | Guinness’ latest record it just made up is “Largest Entertainment Voice-Over Project Ever” and, guess what, Star Wars: The Old Republic is its holder. Beats “Most Banthas Stuffed into a Phone Booth.” Gotham City Impostors‘ January Release Date Was Some Kind of Joke With the console beta test for Monolith’s…
By Owen Good -
Indie Says Atari’s on Warpath Against iPhone Apps with ‘Even a Passing Resemblance’ to Their Old Games
Vector Tanks was around for at least three years on the iTunes App Store and looked a lot like Battlezone the whole time. It isn’t there anymore. Atari recently sent legal papers over to the game’s developer, Black Powder Media, which now warns other indie developers that “anything that has even a passing resemblance to…
By Owen Good -
Courtroom Setback in Epic Fight ‘Tis a Flesh Wound, Says Silicon Knights
Much has been made of a recent ruling adverse to Silicon Knights in its long-running lawsuit with Epic Games, the Gears of War maker whose Unreal Engine was to have been the guts of 2008 flop Too Human. Basically, a judge tossed out an expert witness for Silicon Knights; he was going to give his…
By Owen Good -
Fund GildenTide and Help Develop a Steampunk Street Fighter
Circular Geometry Studios loved the gameplay of the Street Fighter Alpha Series, and seeks to develop in a space where indie games don’t get much attention: the fighting genre. “After seeing that a small group like the developers of the video game Skullgirls can indeed create a fighting game, we gathered talented people who wanted…
By Owen Good -
Historic Register Adds Landfill Where Atari Dumped the Worst Console Game Ever
Alamogordo, New Mexico. Fifty miles southeast of Roswell, the most famous UFO site in the nation. Also the scene of the most infamous landfill in video game history. Here, Atari buried thousands of cartridges of E.T. a game that, combined with an awful Pac-Man port was blamed for the collapse of North American console gaming…
By Owen Good -
NFL Blitz Returns to Set Up Us Da Bomb
A long-forgotten truth of NFL Blitz revealed itself to me as I looked to salt away my first victory: You don’t salt away any victories in NFL Blitz. You want a time-consuming play? Unload a deep pass route, like the fondly remembered “Da Bomb.” I’ve become such a slave to clock management, not just in…
By Owen Good -
Happy New Year, from ‘Black Ops Guy’ and Starbuck
The gentleman who dressed up as the box of Call of Duty: Black Ops at this year’s Fan Expo in Toronto was one of our favorite cosplayers of 2011. He starred in one of Kotaku‘s best ‘Shop Contests and is currently featured in the all-star revue going on now. He sends everyone here best wishes…
By Owen Good -
Kotaku‘s Most-Read Stories of 2011
In two hours, the year 2011 will have run its course. To video games, it was a year of scandal, of disappointment, of surprise and of achievement. Traveling to all parts of the globe, with staff writers on three continents, serving an audience of more than 3 million unique visitors each month, Kotaku chronicled the…
By Owen Good -
A Virtual Season Ends with Plenty of Unfinished Business
Looking back on the list of video games I finished in 2011, it’s an embarrassingly thin roster. It may be my least productive year ever, in terms of what I finished, what I was expected to play, and what I spent most of my time doing. It’s not a resume that really speaks of a…
By Owen Good -
This Is the Last Time You Will Talk Amongst Yourselves in 2011
Today’s the last day of 2011, which means it’s the last day of the month and the last day you will see that goddamn righteous chicken in our TAYpic. I’ll be sad to see him go. Many thanks to SkyWizard: The True Creator for the final TAYpic of 2011. As the evening winds down, feel…
By Owen Good -
Culture
Sunday Comics: Friendship is Modding
Welcome to your Sunday read of the week’s best in web comics. Make sure to click on the expand button in the bottom right to enlarge each comic. Awkward Zombie by Katie Tiedrich published Dec. 26.—Read more of Awkward Zombie Nerf NOW!! by Josué Pereira published Dec. 29.—Read more of Nerf NOW!! Penny Arcade by…
By Owen Good -
Epic Mickey 2 Rumors Now Peg It for Fall 2012 Release
An online newsletter from Disney has again confirmed long-circulating rumors about Epic Mickey 2, and says the game will release on PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii in Fall 2012, reports the site StitchKingdom.com. The original Epic Mickey, released in 2010, was a Wii-only title. Epic Mickey 2 will feature cooperative multiplayer play, according to the…
By Owen Good -
Year-End All-Star Extravaganza
Smash Mountain. Ricky Lee Kalichun. Mr. Shady Shades. A power adapter that looks like Mr. T. And so many more. It was an epic year for the Kotaku ‘Shop Contest, thanks to your creativity and drive. Our 50 contests this year featured tons of callbacks to earlier hits, and so now we’re going to bring…
By Owen Good -
The Most Pirated PC, Xbox 360 and Wii Games of 2011
This week, TorrentFreak reported on the 50 most searched terms on torrent sites, giving indications as to what may have been the most pirated things of 2011. Not a single video game title was among them. Well, now TorrentFreak has listed its top 5 most pirated games of the year, across three platforms. PC, Wii…
By Owen Good -
The Politics of Just Dance: Winners
As we mentioned earlier, some things are getting moved around and pushed up to today because of the holiday weekend. So let’s go ahead and get in the last ‘Shop Contest roundup of 2011. It’s the story of President Obama and a man he met recently at the Best Buy. A man who looks like…
By Owen Good -
Endurance Run Fails a Third Time in Q*Bert Record Bid
If George Leutz hasn’t gone completely Ahab already, I’d advise him to let go of the Q*Bert world record. His latest assault on the mark, whose 33 million score is believed to require more than 70 hours of nonstop gameplay, ended in exhaustion after 57 hours, 40 minutes on a single quarter at the joystick.…
By Owen Good
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