Stephen Totilo

My Five Favorite Kotaku Stories From Last Week

What a week. Good stories. See below. Nintendo Explains Microtransactions In The Most Nintendo Way Possible – Am I allowed to start with one of mine? Yes? Not a complex post, but I’m always delighted when we can do something interesting about a game people weren’t talking about. In this case, a little 3DS crane…

KO’d Ronda Rousey Had Just Been Announced As An EA Cover Athlete

They call it the Madden Curse. Leading sports video game publisher EA puts an NFL star on the cover of its annual football franchise and then that star gets hurt or suffers some other bad fate. On Friday, EA announced Ronda Rousey as its cover athlete for its second UFC game. Whoops. The previously undefeated…

Star Wars Battlefront Impressions: Skimpy Singleplayer, Fun Multiplayer

What is Star Wars Battlefront actually made of? The heavily hyped multiplayer game from the makers got an early release for EA Access subscribers on Xbox One. I dove in on Thursday to see what the game is all about. Battlefront is, not surprisingly, a multiplayer-centric game. Everyone figured that, given that that’s pretty much…

How To Run Backwards-Compatible Xbox 360 Games On Xbox One

Xbox One consoles are now backwards compatible with some Xbox 360 games. How do you play supported Xbox 360 games on an Xbox One? What happens with disc-based games? We’ve got a short video tutorial for you. Microsoft’s console supports around 100 360 games right now, with more to come. Weirdly, the Xbox One store…

The Xbox One’s New Calendar App Is Surprisingly Useful [UPDATE]

Now here’s a thing I didn’t realize I wanted: an event calendar on my console. There’s a new(ish) Community Calendar app on the Xbox One that is good and could be great. Like so many Xbox One things, this is an app you’ll have to download, then load up from the console’s app directory. It…

Nintendo Explains Microtransactions In The Most Nintendo Way Possible

Nintendo’s “free” crane game for the 3DS requires a dollar for every five tries with the crane. Some companies would just tell you to pay and leave it at that. Not Nintendo. They’ve got a cartoon rabbit ready to explain to you why Nintendo needs to do this. All screenshots here are from the game/app/3DS-decorating…

More Games, Please Do This

Many video games give players the chance to invert the Y-axis, but too many of them force the Y-inverters among us to start the game, then pause it, then invert. Not the new Tomb Raider. Rise of the Tomb Raider gives players to invert on the same screen where we can adjust our screen brightness.…

Why We Like Yo-Kai Watch So Far

The most colorful game any of us are playing this busy video game season is Yo-kai Watch, the creature-collecting Japanese 3DS phenomenon that has finally made it way to America. What’s so good about it? I talked it through with the most youthful member of our staff: Stephen Totilo: Mike, I hadn’t realized you were…

The Society of Professional Journalists has “warily authorized” awards for games journalism, god help them. Nominate the most worthy articles and videosby Valentine’s Day 2016.

My Five Favorite Kotaku Stories From Last Week

Last week was the calm before the Fallout 4 storm, a good week to find some unexpected stories, which the team did marvelously. Here are my favorites: The Life and Creativity of A Great Bethesda Artist – An inspirational remembrance Call of Duty: Black Ops III’s Most Brutal Scene Haunts Me – A critic’s nightmare…

Why Bad Pro Wrestling Injuries Can Often Be Good News

Pro wrestling injuries suck for the wrestlers who get hurt. For everyone else, they are, weirdly, a good thing. That’s true even this week as one of the WWE’s best performers, its top champion Seth Rollins, suffered multiple knee injuries during a non-televised match in Ireland and will be shelved for the next six to…

Battleborn has been delayed from February 9 of next year to May 3, according to publisher Take Two Interactive. That’s a longer wait for the multiplayer-centric console and PC shooter from Borderlands studio Gearbox. The publisher recently delayed the next Xcom from this fall to February 2016.

Nine Minutes Of The Room 3, An Excellent New Puzzle Game That’s Best Unspoiled

The Room 3 is out today, and for people who played the previous ones, nothing more can or should be said. The Room series is one of the most fun and visually interesting puzzle series going. Each game involves unlocking really complicated boxes and furniture, which, trust me, is just the best thing. For anyone…

New Steampunk Outfits For Assassin’s Creed Syndicate Are Nearly 1GB Each To Download

Here’s a modern day video game mystery we haven’t been able to solve: Why are the download files for new Assassin’s Creed Syndicate outfits so enormous? A new free download that gives players a single Steampunk outfit for Syndicate’s twin protagonist Evie Frye is an 820MB download on Xbox One. The PS4 lists it at…

Video game character of the year? One of the creatures in Yokai Watch, the massive 3DS hit in Japan that comes to North America this Friday. Excerpt above is from a Nintendo press release, highlighting the sensation that is Snotsolong.

My Five Favorite Kotaku Stories From Last Week

This is late late late. No matter, last week boiled down to some gems, to mix-metaphors. Allow me to re-highlight them, and please don’t judge harshly that I picked one of my own. What the New Assassin’s Creed Gets Wrong (and Right), According to a Historian – Chris Suellentrop talks to a historian who shows…

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate‘s DLC Missions Range From Terrible To Great

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate’s various add-on missions, given to those who preordered the game or who bought it on a specific platform, are wildly uneven in quality. The worst were even advertised in misleading fashion. The best should make Xbox One fans temporarily jealous of PS4 owners. Let’s break this down: The Terrible We’ll get the…

What Halo 5‘s Grunts Talk About When You’re Not Shooting Them

Covenant Grunts have always said silly things in Halo games. Usually they’re chattering away during gunfights. But in their downtime? Halo 5 has answers. In one of the Halo 5 campaign’s non-combat levels, you can eavesdrop on a grunt’s conversation with an Elite. Enjoy that chatter in the clip here: There are a few other…

Nice Brawling Animations, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate

Last year I was impressed with a state of the art Assassin’s Creed kiss. This year? The latest Assassin’s Creed team has upped their game with combat animations. Enjoy some ass-kicking and some bone-crunching, folks, especially the finishing animations at the end of each of these clips: Some of the combat animations outside of the…

My Five Favorite Kotaku Stories From Last Week

Short and sweet this time, topped by one of the best investigative pieces we’ve ever run. The Messy, True Story Behind The Making Of Destiny Players Are Bending And Breaking Mario Maker, And The Results Are Amazing (Sort of related: Why The Latest Number One Mario MakerCourse Is Such Garbage) How A Game Studio Totally…