Stephen Totilo

Meet The Gaming Guy Who Is Now Running All Of Xbox

“I look at gaming as a first-class citizen inside this company,” the new head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, just told me on the phone on this the day it was announced that he’s taking over all things Xbox at Microsoft. “And that’s how [Microsoft CEO] Satya [Nadella] has shared it with me.” Ten months since…

Eight Indie Games Coming To Xbox One That I’m Excited About

There are few experiences I cherish more as a games reporter than walking into a room full of new, unfinished video games, each one of them ready for me to play. It makes it so easy to be excited about the future of gaming. Every time. I don’t tell you this to gloat, but instead…

Valve’s Top VR Expert Jumps To Oculus

Valve’s Michael Abrash, who was just giving a talk about the wonders of virtual reality at the company’s Steam Dev Days in January and has seemingly led the company’s VR research, has taken a job as chief scientist at red-hot VR company Oculus. In announcing his move, Abrash also explained why Facebook’s controversial $2 billion…

A Very Excited Man Tells Us All About Batman: Arkham Knight

For 30 minutes last week, a man by the name of Dax Ginn, told a room full of reporters how awesome this fall’s Batman game is going to be. The PC/PS4/Xbox One game sure does look good already, even if the frame-rate still chugs here and there at this stage of development. But today, we…

Sony’s Working Hard To Make PS4 VR That’s Cool And Won’t Make You Sick

A couple of days ago, I felt like I was standing in a shark tank. Some time before that, Sony’s head of PlayStation game development, Shuhei Yoshida, fed a dinosaur and the company’s top PlayStation researcher, Richard Marks, stood next to the Mars rover—all in virtual reality, of course. With any luck, you will eventually…

​The Prophet of Virtual Reality

Palmer Luckey, the the man behind Oculus virtual reality goggles, is shockingly young. He may be responsible for one of the current hottest things in tech, but he’s just 21. And he says the kind of things people that age say when they’re bold enough to dream out loud. “If we can have perfect VR—if…

We’re Sending a Cartoonist To Cover Game Developers Conference 2014

We’ve got some reporters on the scene at this week’s big Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, but we’re also trying something new: we’ve got a cartoonist covering the show for us. Writer/artist Elizabeth Simins will be hanging out at GDC all week, filing comic strips each day to chronicle her adventures at the show.…

Introducing Two New Kotaku Subsites, For Admirers Of Cool Stuff

I’ve got two new Kotaku offshoots to tell you about today, two new subsites for people who enjoy to look at the spectacular. First, take a look at cosplay.kotaku.com, a new cosplay-centric blog helmed by tireless Kotaku staffer Luke Plunkett. Luke has somehow found time to spin off his weekly “fancy pants” cosplay round-ups into…

Yoshi’s New Island: The Kotaku Review

Yoshi’s New Island is a perfectly pleasant video game that I have a hard time recommending. It’s technically a new game, though there isn’t much novelty in this purportedly-new Island. Sure, the 3DS sidescroller has all-new levels, but the game feels less like a sequel and more like a remix and an inferior rehash of…

Coming Soon…Kotaku UK!

If you live in the U.K., you’re about to get your very own version of Kotaku. The good people at Future Publishing are partnering with our team at Gawker Media to launch Kotaku UK. World domination continues! The new site will launch in a few weeks and will be helmed by longtime British games reporter…

Grand Theft Auto Bosses Make Another Rare, Welcome Appearance

“As far as I know, this is the first time BAFTA have given an award to 900 people.” That was Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser on Wednesday night at the British Academy Games Awards, in a fine speech as he accepted what amounted to a lifetime achievement award for Rockstar Games. The folks at Rockstar typically…

The War Video Game That We Need May Finally Be On Its Way

Video games about war are always about the people with guns or tanks or planes. They’re about the people who put on a uniform and fight or the people who order them to do so. They can be interesting, but they’re usually a whitewash. At last, someone is making a game about war’s victims: regular…

The Witcher 3 Delayed Until February, 2015

You’re going to have to wait a bit before playing the hotly-anticipated role-playing game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Once planned for a late 2014 release on PC, PS4 and Xbox One, it’ll now be out in February of next year. The game simply wasn’t going to be good enough if it came out this…

My First 23 Deaths In Dark Souls II

Death is my teacher in Dark Souls II. Every time I get killed in this game, I get better at it. I have video proof of this. What I don’t have, I’m sorry to say, is video of my first three deaths in development studio From Software’s devilish new game. I do have the next…

Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy: The Kotaku Review

One. Five. Two. Four. Six. That is not a string of numbers that need to be deciphered in a puzzle in a Professor Layton game. It is the order in which I’ve played the games in the Layton series that has concluded—for now—with the newest and possible best of the bunch. From Professor Layton and…

A Candid Talk With Mark Cerny, Who Designed The PS4, Among Other Things

In the 80s, he made arcade games for Atari. In the 10s, he led the team that made the PlayStation 4. Mark Cerny is old enough to have seen it all in the young medium of video games. For half an hour last month, we talked about a lot of it in a conversation that…

And now for something a little different…. You may notice that Kotaku looks a little different today and hopefully you’ll be enjoying some performance improvements. We’re switching to a somewhat slicker layout that has been designed to load the page faster and give you a smoother experience while navigating through the site. Along with our…

Sunday Comics: Batman 5X

Welcome to Kotaku‘s Sunday Comics, your weekly roundup of the best webcomics. The images enlarge if you click on the magnifying glass icon. Nerf NOW!! by Josué Pereira. Published March 4. Read more of Nerf NOW!! Awkward Zombie by Katie Tiedrich. Published March 3. Read more of Awkward Zombie Penny Arcade by Jerry Holkins and…

The Disappointment Of Video Game Guns

Back in mid-2012, for four minutes and six seconds, I thought the coolest big-budget video game I’d seen in years didn’t have guns. I was wrong. I don’t mind guns in games. I mean, I don’t want them in my Zeldas or my Donkey Kongs, but guns can be fun in plenty of others: from…

This Is Not the Lego: The Hobbit Trailer You Were Expecting

Go ahead and guess how this trailer for the PS4/PS3/WiiU/XboxOne/Xbox360/PC/Vita/3DS Spring 2014 game is going to play out. You’ll probably guess wrong. Well-played Lego marketing people. Hopefully this game can be good despite being the third major Lego game since October. The last two, Lego Marvel Superheroes and The Lego Movie Videogame were terrific. To…