Stephen Totilo

“I want to go out there and prove that there is beauty to be found here.” Published by our friends at Kotaku UK, here’s an account of what it’s like to have your hometown immortalized in RPG Maker as a “grotty drug-infested cesspit.”

Hey, It’s Spider-Man Swinging Through Grand Theft Auto IV

Until Grand Theft Auto V comes out for PC (soon!) and starts getting modded, we’re going to have to be satisfied with GTA IV mods. That means no West Coast Avengers dashing through San Andreas just yet. Nope. For now, we’ve got Spider-Man swinging through Rockstar’s New York. This mod comes to us via GTA…

The Legend Of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds: The Miiverse Reveiw

Putting us out of business, one Miiverse post at a time… A good find by Alex Price and the quality people behind the Bad Miiverse Post Twitter. We love you, and we love the Miiverse. (A Link Between Worlds isn’t half-bad, either!) To contact the author of this post, write to [email protected] or find him…

Wii U Review Update: 20 Months Later

If you don’t have a Wii U, it’s time to get one. This is our Kotaku review update for the Wii U, the gaming console with a screen in its controller that we’ve been telling you since November 2012 is not yet a must-have. It finally is. It is because the Wii U finally has…

The Diversity Question

“How long is your game?” That used to be the tough one. That used to be the question a video game creator could hardly give an answer to without birthing a scandal. I see all these questions about diversity in gaming these days, about women in Assassin’s Creed or gay marriage in a Nintendo game.…

Nintendo’s Big New Multiplayer Shooter Is Very…Nintendo

“We didn’t make this game with the idea that we wanted to make a simplified shooter or a dumbed-down shooter or anything like that,” Tsubasa Sakaguchi, a developer at Nintendo recently told me. I wasn’t expecting to be having this conversation. I wasn’t expecting to ever be talking to Nintendo about an online-focused multiplayer shooter…

How to make soccer more appealing in the U.S.? ESPN’s Keith Olbermann has seven suggestions. The last one? Appeal to kids who love soccer video games. “Baseball doesn’t even have the right video game,” he says. And soccer does. OK? Jump to 5:50 in the video here for more.

My Current PS4 Obsession: Resogun‘s New Survival Mode

I did not expect to be playing Resogun in the summer of 2014. I thought I was done with it. I was wrong. The new $5 Resogun Heroes expansion for the PS4 launch game has a great new mode with it, a mode that has taken over my gaming life. Watch the video above for…

We were so intrigued by the World War I adventure game Valiant Hearts that we reviewed it twice. Sort of. Luke reviewed it for us last week. Stephen (that’s me!) just reviewed it for The New York Times. Read the latter review here if you didn’t already pick up the paper.

Shigeru Miyamoto, We Have An Answer To Your Question

Mr. Miyamoto, you recently asked me to ask Kotaku‘s readers to say which games they’d like you to make for the Wii U. Your question was extremely popular and I got a lot of replies—more than 3,000. And a lot of them involved a particular word: Metroid It’s not quite that simple, though. There were…

Assassin’s Creed Unity Is Bringing Back The Series’ Greatest Experiment

Here we go again. Another Assassin’s Creed that I’m excited about. Why this one? Well, oddly enough, because the game seems like a successor to the under-appreciated Assassin’s Creed Revelations. Do you want your Assassin’s Creed to feel like a giant chemistry set again? A big, historical opportunity to tinker with vast crowds and see…

Miyamoto Ponders Nintendo Making Games That Run On Handheld And Console

Could you imagine Nintendo making games that play on both their console and their handheld? Nintendo’s top game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, can. He told me he sees that as a challenge but also an “area of opportunity.” We talked about this kind of thing during the tail end of our very fruitful conversation at E3…

What Nintendo’s Top Game Creators Think Of Minecraft

I’ve been beating this drum for a while: it makes no sense to me that Minecraft is on every game-playing platform you can think of other than Nintendo’s 3DS and Wii U. Finally, I was able to ask Nintendo’s top game designers about this. In Los Angeles last week, I was sitting across from Shigeru…

Shigeru Miyamoto Has A Question For All Of You

The man who made Mario and Zelda needs you to tell him something, Kotaku As I was concluding my interview with him at E3 last week, I asked if he had anything else he’d like Kotaku readers to know. Oh, he did. But he also wanted to know something that only you can answer. Here’s…

Shigeru Miyamoto: ‘We’ve Had Tough Times Before’

The Wii U has struggled since it was launched in late 2012. That might be bad news for Nintendo bean-counters but it might be good news for Nintendo fans, especially if this month’s big E3 show is anything to go by. Despite the gaming press and fans seeming to be agog over PlayStations and Xboxes,…

An Early Access Program For Xbox or PlayStation? Maybe.

As popular as Steam’s Early Access program is for PC games, you’d think one of the big consoles might have a plan of their own to let gamers regularly pay for and play games before they’re finished. They don’t, but from what two top people at Sony and Microsoft told me, they’re at least thinking…

EA Has a Good Plan To Make Their Games Better

EA is going to do some obvious things—and some unusual things—to make games that work better and that you’ll like more, the company’s CEO, Andrew Wilson, recently explained to me during an interview in L.A. If there’s a recurring theme, it could be summed up in a word: “early.” Or, maybe, “earlier.” First up, they’re…

Shigeru Miyamoto Hears This Left-Handed Gamer’s Pain

Nintendo’s top game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, is going to talk to his development teams about making Nintendo’s games a little more left-hander-friendly. It’s not a huge issue, but it’s one I’d been meaning to ask him about. Most Nintendo games play fine for lefties, but the company’s systems, particularly the Wii U and 3DS, sometimes…

Missing PS4 Features Still Coming, Sony Says

Way back in February of 2013, Sony indicated that the PS4 gamers would be able to put their console in sleep mode while playing a game and briskly return to it later. They also said that gamers could enlist a friend to take over a game via the Internet from another PS4. The PS4 currently…

Nintendo’s Plan To Work With YouTubers Sounds Ambitious

After initially tolerating YouTubers who ran their own ads on Nintendo-related videos and then cracking down on the practice, Nintendo recently promised to implement some sort of revenue-sharing program. What had sounded like a plan to split ad money on Let’s Plays suddenly sounds like something grander. “Think of it as an affiliate program where…