Stephen Totilo

It’s Cool When A Multiplayer Game Breaks A Language Barrier 

One of the great things about multiplayer games is how effectively you can communicate with people, even when you don’t speak each other’s language. You can race over sand dunes together in Journey. You can clear bounties in Destiny. Or take the moment the clip above. In that short video, you’ve got me, an American,…

How The Beautiful Space Game Astroneer Works

Astroneer is an open-world game about exploring some of the coolest-looking low-polygon planets you’ve ever seen. It turned heads at PAX East in Boston, where we spoke to the game’s ex-AAA developers at System Era and secured some direct feed footage. Enjoy what may be the best-looking gaming footage you see today. The video shows…

Dead Star’s Escape Mode Let Us Relive The Best Episode Of Battlestar Galactica

You can invade people’s games in the Souls games, Dying Light, and Watch Dogs, but, until last week, Mike Fahey and I had never done an invasion quite like the Battlestar Galactica-inspired one we did in Dead Star With the help of the game’s developers at Armature, we dove into the Escape Run mode in…

Supergiant’s Audacious New Game Pyre Is Sort Of A Mystical Sports RPG

After making two terrific action RPGs, the people behind Bastion and Transistor are throwing a curveball with their new game Pyre. Now they’re making a party-based RPG in which the battles play out like three-on-three sports competitions. You’ll see how that works in the video above, as Supergiant developer Greg Kasavin walks us through a…

They Are The Worst Video Games Of All Time

As spotted at PAX East in Boston. These guys said they just did the E.T. outfit at New York Comic-Con but decided to double the awfulness for this show.

That’s A Lot Of League of Legends Cosplay

A horde of cosplayers took the stage at the League of Legends theater at PAX East in Boston today. Most were dressed as characters from Riot’s mega-hit. Can you name them all? Here are a few more group shots: And some close-ups. Note that not everyone on stay was dressed as someone from League All…

Star Fox Zero: The Kotaku Review

Even if you can get used to the awkward controls, Star Fox Zero is merely mediocre. It’s as disappointing a major Nintendo console release as there’s been in some time. You’re Fox McCloud himself, once again the pilot of your very own Arwing fighter, flying or, on rare occasions, driving a tank, through missions in…

What A Fan Learned About Game Development By Making His Own Star Wars Games

The X-Wing fighters in some of amateur game developer Michael Real’s 14 Star Wars video games fly a little funny. The waddling AT-ST walkers occasionally leap up into the sky as if yanked by an invisible string. The TIE Fighters look like abstract art. Sometimes the stormtroopers march backwards. You haven’t heard of Michael Real…

Star Fox Guard: The Kotaku Review

It’s barely related to the Star Fox series and has mostly been ignored in the year of hype leading to the release of its big brother Star Fox Zero, but the new oddball Star Fox Guard tower defense game from Nintendo and Platinum is well worth your attention. I might be biased, though. I think…

Insomniac also has some non-VR games this year. Song of the Deep, the studio’s GameStop-published underwater Metroidvania about a girl piloting a submarine to rescue her dad, now has a release date: July 12 for PS4, Xbox One and PC.

Insomniac Now ‘True Believers’ In VR, Releasing Three Oculus Games In 2016

A first-person magic dueling game. A third-person, Altered Beast-style brawler. An Antarctic horror adventure. The developers at Insomniac Games, one of the most reliable console studios of the past decade, plan to release a trio of virtual reality games this year, all published by Oculus Rift and exclusive to the PC platform. “We’re very much…

Battleborn Beta Impressions: It’s Alright

A name similar to Battlefront, Battlecry and even Bloodborne hasn’t helped next month’s Battleborn stand out. Descriptions of the game place it in an overflowing stew of team shooters and MOBA-influenced games. This week, at last, there’s an open beta which allows us to at least judge the game on its pre-release merits. And the…

It’s 2016 And I’m Starting World Of Warcraft

Before this weekend, I hadn’t played World of Warcraft since a Saturday afternoon in late 2005. That was the only day of my life I spent playing one of history’s most successful video games. A WoW-free decade later and with an archaeological curiosity, I’m giving it a fresh try. I’ve merely put my toe in…

The Gamble To Make A Video Game About Infiltrating A 1970s Cult

“You’re sort of buying a lottery ticket,” the game developer Richard Rouse recently told me while explaining the mindset of trying to make an indie game after spending many years doing big budget stuff for Microsoft, Ubisoft and others. “It might be really successful,” he said. “I certainly hope it is. But you shouldn’t go…

A Sign Of The Times

The option to disable copyrighted music in a major video game would have been unthinkable or at least seemed irrelevant years ago. Now it’s in a major Xbox One release like Quantum Break, as seen here. This will likely become increasingly common as game makers want gamers to be able to stream without fear of…

Hidden Gem Hand of Fate Gets A Sequel Early Next Year

The 2015 hybrid card game and action role-playing game Hand of Fate was surprisingly good, if a bit rough-edged. It built a following, sold some 400,000 copies on PC and console, added 1.5 million more through a free Xbox Games with Gold promotion and was successful enough that it’s getting a slicker sequel that was…

Quantum Break: The Kotaku Review

A new console generation starts, and you wait for something special. The launch games are okay, but they are really just shinier versions of last-gen releases. Eventually, though, you play a game that hadn’t been done before, couldn’t have been done before. For this generation, for me, that game is Quantum Break, which is imperfect…

Finally, A Great Trailer For A Virtual Reality Game

It is notoriously difficult to convey what a virtual reality video game looks and feels like to people who aren’t wearing virtual reality goggles. This trailer for Vive launch game Fantastic Contraption, however, nearly nails it. The mixed-reality video from indie trailer maker Kert Gartner inserts live-action footage of a person playing the gizmo-building VR…

Destiny Is Getting A Bunch Of Cool New Gear In April

Bungie just showed off some really nice-looking new armor sets and some other little additions coming next month to Destiny, a sci-fi shooter video game whose biggest fan picked the wrong week to go on vacation. The star of Bungie’s sneak-peek livestream was the new Desolate armor. It was teased last week and is modeled…

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