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What Next For Dozens Of Ex-BioShock Game Creators?
Yesterday’s surprise news that Irrational Games, the studio behind the lauded BioShock series, is shutting down raised a number of questions, including what will become of the people who worked there making games. While Irrational creative director Ken Levine will forge a new, much smaller outfit dedicated to making downloadable narrative-based games, most of the…
By Stephen Totilo Published February 19, 2014 -
The Creators of Rock Band Are Making A Musical First-Person Shooter
Are you in the mood for a very different kind of multiplayer first-person shooter? How about one in which the arena you’re in morphs to the music that’s playing, where your machine gun makes music, where your grenades only blow up on the downbeats and the missiles you fire will keep stalking your enemy as…
By Stephen Totilo Published February 17, 2014 -
Titanfall Server Problems Keeping Many From Playing, Microsoft Fixing [UPDATE 2]
Some Microsoft-run beta servers for the multiplayer-only, always-online game Titanfall have been down (or not working in some way) for at least three hours and counting on this, the first day of widespread access to the beta for the much-anticipated marquee next-gen first-person shooter. This, perhaps, is what betas are for! We don’t know how…
By Stephen Totilo Published February 14, 2014 -
Rockstar keeps adding content to Grand Theft Auto Online. Today, fittingly, they’ve added a slew of Valentine’s Day content with a criminal twist. Players are getting a chance to grab new guns, cars, clothes…a lot of it themed to fit the 1929’s notorious Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. Details about the update are on Rockstar’s site.…
By Stephen Totilo Published February 14, 2014 -
Gearbox Says They’re Not Making Borderlands 3 Now, For Good Reasons
Gearbox boss and former Kotaku guest-writer Randy Pitchford knows people would like a Borderlands 3 someday. He would, too. But the time is not right for Borderlands 3. It’s so not the right time for the inevitable mega-sequel that Pitchford’s studio isn’t even making the game. He swears! In a very good interview with our…
By Stephen Totilo Published February 14, 2014 -
There’s a huge festival for indie games in New York City this weekend. It’s called IndieCade East and it begins today, running through Sunday. If you’re in the area and you want to play cool indie games, you should check it out! Three days of indie games and panels. Event details here. | Pricing.
By Stephen Totilo Published February 14, 2014 -
How About A Post-Apocalypse Zombie Game Where You’re Blind?
Some young game designers who call themselves Those Guys are trying to kickstart an idea for an unusual graphics-free game. They’re calling Apocalypse: Survive It, and the idea is that you’re in a zombie apocalypse…and are blind. Those Guys are joining us below to talk about their Kickstarter and answer any questions you might have…
By Stephen Totilo Published February 13, 2014 -
Bold Move, Nintendo
Here is the next big game for Nintendo’s Wii U displayed on my TV. Do you see something strange in this picture? Hint: look at that screen on the controller. It’s dark! No graphics! (It might actually be displaying blackness, oddly enough!) That’s right. Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze, a game for the Nintendo home…
By Stephen Totilo Published February 13, 2014 -
Last of Us Creators’ Approach To DLC Sounds Great, But Risky
DLC is still such a new thing in gaming that it’s hard to say if anyone has gotten it exactly right. Maybe BioWare? Maybe Rockstar? Maybe Bethesda? The people at Naughty Dog are taking a crack at it this week with the release of some single-player DLC for The Last of Us. They took their…
By Stephen Totilo Published February 11, 2014 -
The Best New Video Game Logo In a Long Time
The game this logo is for is multiplayer. It pits four players against one. The four are humans; the fifth is a giant monster. So they’re evenly matched. This, everyone, is a brilliant logo. (The game sounds like it’s pretty good, too.)
By Stephen Totilo Published February 11, 2014 -
Flappy Bird Creator Says He Pulled Game Because It was ‘Addictive’
Dong Nguyen, creator of the sensationally popular and excruciatingly difficult mobile game Flappy Bird, removed his game from Apple and Android marketplaces this weekend because he was distressed that people were becoming addicted to it, he told a reporter in his native Vietnam this week. “Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes…
By Stephen Totilo Published February 11, 2014 -
The Xbox One’s February Upgrades Seem Nice, But March’s Are Better
An “early March” system update for the Xbox One will bring some popular multiplayer features from the Xbox 360 with the intention of improving the multiplayer experience in advance of the launch of Respawn’s exclusive, multiplayer-only Titanfall, according to Xbox product chief Marc Whitten. Those updates will be coupled with some improved stereo headphone support.…
By Stephen Totilo Published February 11, 2014 -
Adam Orth Is Turning His Personal Disaster Into A Beautiful Game
Adam Orth, one of last year’s most notorious people on the Internet, was nervous last week as he was showing me his new creation: a beautiful, unusual game that he says was borne from his 2013 travails. “This is how I chose to, in the words of a famous philosopher, ‘deal with it,’” he self-consciously…
By Stephen Totilo Published February 10, 2014 -
The Flappy Bird Fiasco
“People prefer imperfect things,” the creator of the incredibly popular, loved, hated and now-notorious Flappy Bird, Dong Nguyen, mused over Twitter last March, long before most anyone had ever heard of him or played his game. He was stating why he thought he’d be okay launching a video game that included some bugs. “They need…
By Stephen Totilo Published February 10, 2014 -
You’ll only get tomorrow’s Xbox One firmware update if you manually choose to download accept it. But it will also enable all future console updates, including the Party-Chat-upgrade one in March, to be updated in the background if background updates are enabled, an Xbox rep told Kotaku. A good improvement! UPDATE: For clarity’s sake, I…
By Stephen Totilo Published February 10, 2014 -
We Convinced Felicia Day And Freddie Wong To Interview Each Other
Internet sensations. Gamers. Co-hosts of tonight’s D.I.C.E. video game awards. And now… Felicia Day and Freddie Wong are also Kotaku interviewers. One time only! They interviewed each other for Kotaku today. About games. About life. And just a bit about taking baths and what to do with nasty Internet comments. Up first, Freddie interviewing Felicia……
By Stephen Totilo Published February 6, 2014 -
All Of These Indie Games Are Coming To Wii U Or 3DS
The PlayStation people are always going on about indie games. The Xbox people talk them up, too. Nintendo’s been quieter about supporting indie games, but that appears to be changing. A whole bunch of indie games are coming to Wii U and 3DS, and pretty soon at that. 3DS Moon Chronicles This one is an…
By Stephen Totilo Published February 5, 2014 -
Nintendo Is Slowly Reinventing The Video Game Instruction Manual
Like the daily newspaper, the printed phone bill and personal checks, the video game instruction manual is facing extinction in our increasingly paperless world. Hold off on mourning, though. Nintendo has spent the last year or so quietly implementing a digital revival that’s been a joy to behold. If you haven’t noticed what’s been going…
By Stephen Totilo Published February 5, 2014 -
The Xbox One’s First 2014 Dashboard Update Adds Some Important Stuff
The Xbox One is about to improve in a couple of small but useful ways. The console’s first dashboard update, zapping into consoles on Tuesday, February 11, will add a controller battery-level indicator and an interface for managing system storage. The battery indicator is self-explanatory. You can see it in the screenshot above (we added…
By Stephen Totilo Published February 5, 2014
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