Owen Good

Steam Machine Beta User Trying to Find All 300 of His Lucky Brethren

Just 300 people in the U.S. were selected to participate in the Steam Machines beta, which shipped boxes to folks beginning on Friday. They know which number they are in the beta by looking at the row of 300 ventilation holes on the top of the unit and finding the position of the single countersunk…

Sunday Comics: World of Spycraft

Welcome to Kotaku‘s Sunday Comics, your weekly roundup of the best webcomics in video gaming. The images enlarge if you click on the magnifying glass icon. Nerf NOW!! by Josué Pereira. Published Dec. 11. Read more of Nerf NOW!! Awkward Zombie by Katie Tiedrich. Published Dec. 9. Read more of Awkward Zombie Penny Arcade by…

Kotaku ‘Shop Contest: A Picture Worth $735: The Winners

Our subject this week was the guy who bought a picture of an Xbox One off eBay for $735, and it will close out 2013 as one of the year’s most-entered ‘Shop Contests. I waived the usual 20-finalist limit just to get all the good ones in—and there are 37, including overall No. 1 Docherty…

Ultra Street Fighter IV Makes a Dramatic Comeback with New Features

Ultra Street Fighter IV will get new characters and new stages when it releases next year, but it’ll also pack in a bunch of gameplay changes. This three minute trailer shows off what you can expect. Is it me, or does this Red Focus Attack thing look like a made-to-order Daigo full-parry comeback? Probably not…

EA Sports UFC Offers the First Glimpses Inside the Game

Fight Night: Round Three was a no-doubt-about-it success when it arrived a few months after the launch of the Xbox 360. With the’ Fight Night team in charge, many are looking to EA Sports UFC to deliver the same impact for the new console generation this spring. The studio released the first two in-game screenshots…

Mark Ecko’s Graffiti Game Gets a New Publisher and Goes to Steam

Oh awesome. Mark Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, remember that? Didn’t work out exactly as its namesake expected—Mr. Ecko said Atari “shit the bed” with the idea. It’s still the same game, but it has a new publisher and it’s gone up on Steam. Devolver Digital, the publisher of Hotline Miami, made the surprise…

Angry Joe, the YouTube game critic who weighed in on the wave of copyright enforcement that snagged several of his videos, has offered a followup perspective. So has another YouTuber who believes large “multi channel networks” share in the blame. We’ve added both videos to the original post.

Game Critic Says YouTube Copyright Policy Threatens His Livelihood [Update]

Three of “Angry Joe” Vargas’ 10 most-viewed videos on YouTube, and dozens of others, have been flagged by YouTube’scontroversial “content ID” system, meaning the independent games critic and personality can’t earn any advertising money from them. Last night, Angry Joe responded, very much in character. Vargas, who has 1.1 million subscribers and more than 400…

StarCraft Player Gets Pro Athlete Visa, Delays Military Service

In August, the U.S. government, for the first time ever, gave a professional gamer the kind of special visa it issues to professional athletes. It was largely thanks to lobbying by Riot Games, makers of League of Legends. Now the first visa has gone to a professional StarCraft player, and it gets him out of…

Battlefield 4 Problems Have Shareholder Law Firm Thinking Lawsuit

A law firm that appears to specialize in suing publicly traded companies suffering publicly embarassing problems has turned its attention to Electronic Arts, specifically over Battlefield 4 The “investigation” that Atlanta firm Holzer Holzer & Fistel has begun concerns whether EA “complied with federal securities laws” when the company was making statements about Battlefield 4…

Microtransactions don’t work exactly like this in NBA 2K14, but this parody video by GoodGameBro clearly communicates how ridiculous some find the practice when it intrudes on their favorite sports game. Actually, you can purchase dunks, they’re just signature animations for your created MyPlayer.

Elder Scrolls Online Arrives April 4 for PC, June for PS4, Xbox One

The Elder Scrolls Online will release on April 4 for the PC and Mac, Bethesda Softworks revealed this morning in a new trailer for the MMO set in the Elder Scrolls continuity. PS4 and Xbox One gamers will have to wait until June. “War in Cyrodiil,” is the title of the gameplay trailer, which is…

The One-Man Hobbit Band Returns to Sing the Latest Soundtrack

he next The Hobbit film premieres on Friday, and that means Peter Hollens and his a capella clones have returned to sing us a song from it. You may remember his performance of “Misty Mountain” back in January. Well, here he is with “I See Fire.” If you want to compare this to the original…

A fix that addresses a Battlefield 4 bug “accounting for a quarter of the crashes on PS4,” is now live, reports DICE, which also opened a “Top Issues Tracker” thread for all platforms, describing what in the game has been fixed, what is being fixed, and what is under investigation.

College Players Can Get a PS4 From a Bowl Game, But They Can’t Be Paid

The Military Bowl is no one’s idea of a major college football bowl game. It’s a shitty bowl, in fact, inviting five-loss teams to stage background-noise football two days after Christmas. Despite that, every player from Maryland and Marshall will receive a PlayStation 4 for showing up this year. Sports Business Journal looked at the…

Fez has sold one million copies, across all platforms, developing studio Polytron said today in a thank-you messageto everyone who bought, stole, or said they were boycotting it.

Reality Show Investors Rip Oculus Accessory, but They Have a Point

When we first saw it used in games like Minecraft and Team Fortress 2, the reaction was, more or less, “Cool!” And it is cool, to go running around in Skyrim on the Virtuix Omni. Unfortunately, it’s got to be a lot more than cool to get even $2 million in investor money. This is…

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes Will Launch March 18

Konami this morning set a March 18 launch date for Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. Additionally, the Xbox One and Xbox 360 will get an exclusive mission—staring Raiden in his Metal Gear Rising incarnation. Xbox Wire also posted an interview with series creator Hideo Kojima, including that video above. They also posted the video…

American and British Governments May Have Spied on WoW and Xbox Live

American and British spies infiltrated World of Warcraft and Second Life, using the games to monitor what they think are terrorist communications, recruit informers, and gather data on communications between players, according to classified documents uncovered by the non-profit investigative journalism organization ProPublica. Xbox Live activity also was monitored by the agencies, which include the…

All the Awkwardness of the VGX in One Video

It’s hard to put into words how cringe-inducing all the cross-talk, missed throws, tongue-tied teleprompter mishaps, and bombed jokes were at last night’s VGX. That’s where this six-minute supercut by PixelPerfect comes in handy. I’ve already said my piece about the VGX, so rewatching its lowlight reel is a little more painful than humorous to…