Stephen Totilo

A Game About Getting To Mars Without Resorting To Cannibalism

Not at all a spoiler: I don’t get to Mars in my most recent playthrough of Tharsis, the extremely difficult and very fun dice-based strategy game coming to PC and PS4 on Tuesday. This is not a spoiler, because getting to Mars is very hard. Players will fail. A lot. Count on it. In the…

I Started These 138 Video Games In 2015, ‘Finished’ 24

For the 10th year in a row (!), I’ve tallied the games I played in the past 12 months and have counted the ones I’ve “finished.” It’s clear that it’s time for some changes. I started this practice in late 2006, a year in which I played 102 games including the likes of The Legend…

Looks like no one can keep Hideo Kojima from the next big gaming awards show. The newly-independent Metal Gear mastermind is slated to be inducted to the AIAS Hall of Fame at the DICE Awards on February 18. No word on livestreaming yet. Presenting will be Kojima’s old Silent Hills partner Guillermo Del Toro.

The Best Video Game Dogs of 2015

Top dogs, 2015! As selected by the Kotaku staff… Pompidou (Life is Strange) Desmond (Assassin’s Creed Syndicate) Dinki-Di (Mad Max) The Black Dog (The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone ) Lesser Dog/Greater Dog (Undertale) Dogmeat (Fallout 4) D-Dog (Metal Gear Solid V) Congratulations to all the winners. And here’s hoping 2016 brings us more great…

The 100 Most Popular Kotaku Stories Of 2015

In 2015, you liked reading about Fallout 4 and The Witcher 3. You liked lists of top games. You mourned the passing of gaming icons. You craved scoops and post-release coverage (phew!), and you enjoyed getting excited about the Final Fantasy VII remake. You also liked reading about sex. Hey, nothing bad about that! What…

The Gamers Of the Year, 2015

If games are a truly interactive medium, then it stands to reason that the people who play them have an unusual amount of influence on this creative form; more than they do on others. With that, we present, for the fourth year running, Kotaku’s Gamers of The Year. ZeRo, The Smash Bros. Champ There were…

2015’s Best In-Game Map? Assassin’s Creed Syndicate 

Let us praise a thing that matters a lot in video games: the quality of an in-game map. Zooming in, let us heap praise upon 2015’s most magnificent in-game map, the one that appeared in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. The video above is all the proof you need. This map is great. Shall we count the…

PlayStation Network Is Having Trouble Creating New Accounts Today

People trying to create new PlayStation Network accounts this Christmas are running into a significant digital roadblock which is keeping people from effectively using their new PlayStation 4s. Sony is currently failing to immediately send verification e-mails to new users, hobbling new users’ efforts to create online accounts and sub-accounts that can access the PlayStation…

As things slow down a bit moving toward the holidays, enjoy a nice slow pan through the upcoming puzzle game The Witness, coming to PS4 and PC on January 26. The game is nearly finished

The latest episode of the Super Gaming Quiz Alpha Turbo podcast had a special guest—me! I joined hosts and TAY veterans Ben Bertoli and Steve Bowling to try to answer 10 questions about Assassin’s Creed. I did my best. Get it on iTunes or Soundcloud

Black Ops III‘s First Map Pack Skipping PS3, Xbox 360

Awakening, the first $15 map pack for Call of Duty: Black Ops III, will be out for PS4 on February 2 and will come out for Xbox One at a later date. It won’t be coming to PS3 and Xbox 360 at all. It’s got four maps (one in a water park!) and the first…

What We Thought About Star Wars: The Force Awakens

We recently took a break from our usual back-and-forths about video games to chat about the new Star Wars movie: what we liked, what didn’t make sense, what we think will happen next. Join us, if you will. Warning: this one’s full of spoilers. Don’t read it unless you’ve already seen the movie (or don’t…

The Good, New Assassin’s Creed Expansion’s Unexpectedly Bold Depiction Of Prostitution

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate’s new Jack The Ripper expansion is a compelling if rough-edged remix of the base game that cleverly works in one of history’s most famous killers. It pulls off another trick, too, going to extraordinary lengths to engender empathy for a group of people who don’t get much of it in video games:…

My Five Favorite Kotaku Stories From Last Week

As the year winds down, we ran our annual round-up of best surprises and biggest disappointments. Disappointments got the better traffic yet again! Both posts were among my favorites of the week, as were these five: From Japan, With Changes: The Endless Debate Over Video Game ‘Censorship’ – “‘Outside of Japan—and especially right now—you have…

New Trailer Shows A Little More Kingdom Hearts III

Square Enix has just put a new Kingdom Hearts trailer that showcases the series’ upcoming 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue release and ends with a couple of minutes’ worth of Kingdom Hearts III gameplay. Nothing ground-breaking, and III still seems to be a long ways off, but this is better than nothing, right? Jump to 3:38…

Of The Eight Trailers Before Star Wars, The Slowest One Got The Best Reaction

People in the movie theater where I saw Star Wars The Force Awakens on Thursday night started grumbling by the time the fifth or sixth trailer rolled out. Each green preview screen was another delay. But the eighth trailer won us over. First we had this: Then, if I’m remembering the order correctly, this: Then…

Our pals at io9 have made a list of their 20 favorite comics and graphic novels of the year. We’re working on our own list as well. Stay tuned!

Good Morning. Here’s The PS4’s Dynamic Bacon Theme.

Yours for just $3, the new dynamic bacon theme for the PS4. I paid for this just so I could listen to this sizzling absurdity. The good people at Leviathan Games also just re-released the classic PS3 theme “Corn Love” for PS4. And they’re teasing a sequel! Oh, the wonderful world of PlayStation themes. The…

My Five Favorite Kotaku Stories From Last Week

It’s not just the Christmas season that seems to start earlier each year. The year-in-review season is on its way to a November launch, too. We hold out as long as possible, to give the full 12 months our consideration, but we did spend part of last week assessing the states of the PS4, Xbox…