Stephen Totilo

Leak Shows Off Rogue, This Year’s Last-Gen Assassin’s Creed [UPDATE]

The second forthcoming 2014 Assassin’s Creed game, formerly discussed under the codename Assassin’s Creed Comet, appears to be called Assassin’s Creed: Rogue and feature the return of sailing gameplay and a protagonist with possible Templar loyalties, according to a leaked trailer. UPDATE (11:18am): And Ubisoft has confirmed Rogue this morning through a Game Informer cover…

Much Debate At Kotaku Today…

…about whether videos like these are 1) played out or 2) sometimes hoaxes/pranks. Some staffers were impressed. Others, not so much.

​What We’d Love To Get From You…

Kotaku has been going strong since 2004 thanks to many of you. You send us great tips. You recommend interesting articles. We can’t only count on homegrown success, so we’re forever interested in collaborating with you. To that end, here’s what we’d love to get from you: News tips! Kotaku writers check the inbox for…

Quite the company description! From a press release… About Other Ocean: Other Ocean has been making games for a long time now; some of us made Game Boy games! We recently shipped NBA Rush, a game where basketball stars defend the Earth by slam-dunking on Martian UFOs. We also made a first-person shooter (Duty Calls)…

“Video games and movies are finally starting to steal the right things from each other,” according to the writer of an interesting new essay inDissolve that covers the likes of L.A. Noire, Snowpiercer, The Last of Us and Edge of Tomorrow.

Call Of Duty Bummer: They Opted Not To Have Teleportation Grenades

The new Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, futuristic-looking as it is, will not have teleportation grenades. So it was reported in a VentureBeat profileof CoD:AW studio Sledgehammer Games. Too unrealistic. Here’s VentureBeat talking to Sledgehammer’s Michael Condrey about where they draw the line between CoD-suitable and CoD-nope: Condrey said that the team also had to…

New pre-rendered Assassin’s Creed Unity trailer shows our hero, the assassin Arno, rescuing a woman who seems to be wearing a Templar cross (the same lady we initially thought was an assassin. Whoops!). The game’s designers hinted at the end of this making-of video that Unity will address the schism between Assassins and Templars and…

Nine years old today and still a brilliant game. Import it. Play it on your DS or 3DS. So good.

Video Game Lets You Drive From Miami To L.A. In 40 Minutes, Seamlessly

We’ve seen games that let you run from one end of a huge, real city to another. But Ubisoft’s The Crew promises an altogether more impressive spectacle: one smooth drive from Miami Beach to the beaches of Los Angeles. Take a look. The footage above was captured and uploaded by YouTube user Birds AT (and…

I really liked Clone Wars, but this? The art style is bugging me. It’s too… simple? I can’t put my finger on it. I’m interested in a series set in this era, but I’m not feeling the character designs or the overall look.

Why Do You Play Video Games?

And, for good measure, why do you care to read about video games on the Internet? Please answer below. Your answers just might help shape the future of Kotaku! Thanks. To contact the author of this post, write to [email protected] or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo. Top image via Wikipedia, by Evan Amos

Why am I excited about Real Puck Physics? I think it’s because I love the fact that game developers have to figure out things like how to make a puck move around realistically and that they can always do it better. But it’s just a hype video for an EA Sports video game that I’ll…

There Appears To Be A Female Assassin In The Newest AC: Unity Video [Update: Alt Theory: She’s A Templar?]

We can’t tell who she is, and it’s unlikely that she’s playable. But it nevertheless looks like Assassin’s Creed: Unity, like earlier games in the series, will have female assassins. No comment from Ubisoft. The lady appears briefly at around the 7:24 mark of a new making-of video posted today by gaming site IGN Unity,…

Yesterday, everyone was doing it. All seven of my online friends were playing the same game. Me? I had Lego: The Hobbit sidequests to take care of.

Sony will be staging a live reading and musical performance of The Last Of Us in Santa Monica on Monday, July 28 at 10pm ET. The performance will feature the game’s voice actors and is overseen by the game’s creative director, Neil Druckmann. Livestreamed on PSN/Twitch/YouTube. More details at the PlayStation blog

Gmail Thinks JJ Abrams Is Trying To Scam Me?

Huh. Episode VII as giant phishing scam. I hadn’t considered that!

John Romero Tweeted that he visited Id Software today. He’s in Dallas for Quakecon. No word on what he was doing at the studio he co-founded, but hopefully they’re letting him play some of the new Doom. Romero co-created the original Doom and Quake before leaving id in 1996.

Hey, New York City! The Come Out And Play festival is this weekend. Lots of physical games to run around and play through Sunday, including PacManhattan tonight and Full Contact Catan tomorrow. Details here

Big-Time Doom Fans React To Yesterday’s Doom Reveal

We didn’t see the new Doom that was shown exclusively to Quakecon attendees in Dallas this week. You probably didn’t either. But all the people in a video shot by the folks at the unofficial Quakecon Forums did. They just saw it minutes before this video was recorded, and they were pumped. Skip to 50…

Yep, Swatting Is Still The Dumbest ‘Prank’ Around

Jerks continue to waste everyone’s time—and risk people’s lives—by getting the cops to raid the homes of unsuspecting, innocent gamers. We and other outlets have covered “swatting” incidents. Now Phoenix, Arizona station 12 News is on the case, too. We sometimes laugh at how the local news gets gaming stories wrong, but 12 News does…