Stephen Totilo

Class Acts

The first buzzworthy game on the Ouya, the four-player competitive archery-combat game Towerfall, will be coming to the PS4 with some 50 new levels. It’ll be called Towerfall Ascension. More details here

Good News About Our Once-Broken PS4…

Our malfunctioning PS4, the one I mentioned in our review of Sony’s new console, has been fixed. It turns out that the fix was an easy one. We can now give you a clear run-through of what went wrong and what to look out for in what, at this point, seems like a fluke. Note:…

The simplest things about a new console can catch your eye—or, in this case, hide from it. The PS4, as you’ll see in this video, has the most inconspicuous power button we’ve ever seen on a console. Bonus: the disc drive in action!

Yes, The PS4 Can Stand Vertically–Without Help

You keep asking, so we’re going to answer. The PS4, like the fat PS3 and Xbox 360 before it can stand without a stand. Worried that it’s too skinny? Don’t be. Check the video above. You’ll also see how Sony’s optional $15 adds a little more stability. Disclosure: I’m the kind of daredevil who currently…

Thank you, Sony!

We love when we can use the same wires from one gaming generation to the next. Sony wasn’t the first to do this. Let’s hope they’re not the last. To contact the author of this post, write to [email protected] or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo.

Study The PS4’s Social Network Settings Before Putting It Online

To get the most out of the PlayStation 4, you should connect the system online and enmesh yourself in the console’s social network—maybe hook it into Facebook, too. How much of yourself can you share? How much can you keep private? Let me show you. Upon booting up the console and applying a day-one patch,…

The PlayStation 4: The Kotaku Review

How good is the PlayStation 4? Ask me in five years. Ask me after Naughty Dog’s next couple of games, after I figure out whether God of War is headed in the right direction, after I learn whether it has become unfathomable to play a console game without livestreaming it. You know what? Ask me…

Knack: The Kotaku Review

Next gen visuals. Old-fashioned gameplay. The PlayStation 4 action-adventure Knack looks better than most video games you’ve played, but there’s a good chance you’ve played a game like Knack before. It’s not that I want to knock Knack. It’s a launch game. Launch games seldom offer more than what Knack offers. You get a game…

If we can interrupt the fun stuff for a moment… The Philippines was wracked by a devastating hurricane this past weekend with more than 10,000 people feared dead. If you’d like to help relief efforts, here’s a list of places you can donate to. To our readers in the Philippines, our thoughts are with you.

How Mandatory Game Installations Will Work On PS4

Call it installation or call it caching, but the bottom line is that you will have to save large chunks of PlayStation 4 games to the system’s hard drive. It’s not an option. It’s mandatory on Sony’s next-gen system. Today, at a stylish waterfront hotel in New York City that’s been taken over by Sony…

Target Admits Error, Shipped ‘Small Number’ Of Xbox Ones Early

An undisclosed number of lucky gamers have received Xbox One consoles already, nearly two weeks before the system’s official Nov. 22 launch, due to a “systems error” at the retailer Target, a rep for the company confirmed to Kotaku today. This follows a dizzying past 24 hours during which one person tried to sell their…

Impressions of the New Zelda, Five Hours In

The new Zelda does not feel like a game to skip, I’m happy to report after having played the game for five hours. Even if you’ve grown tired of Zelda games. I’ll spoil nothing about The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, but will share some important findings (!) with you about the November…

The Xbox One Dashboard Is Definitely a Next-Gen Improvement

Two weeks before launch, the Xbox One dashboard is clean, runs swiftly and does some cool new things gamers will like. It wasn’t perfect, but I was looking at something that Microsoft says is roughly 85% ready. It wasn’t quite what we’ll be able to use at launch, but it’s close. I got the demo…

Adam Orth Just Had One Of The Best Years Of His Life

It sounds impossible, and it might sound crazy to you. Adam Orth, Internet Enemy #1 this past spring—the Deal With It, always-online ex-Microsoft guy—is sizing up the past several months of pain and hurt and sounds like a man reborn. “It was a good year for me,” he says. “It was dark, in the beginning,”…

From Poverty to PlayStation…One Game Dev’s Climb Toward Success

Shawn Allen is a restless game developer. And a hungry one. Growing up on welfare will do that to you. But growing up on welfare isn’t enough to hold Shawn Allen back. In fact, soon, you might finally play one of his games. Allen is 30 and when I ran into him several months ago…

Late Notch. On November 7, Markus Persson, the man behind Minecraft, will do something few indie developers have had a chance to do: go on a late night talk show. Notch will be on Craig Ferguson’s Late Late Show, which airs on CBS from 12:37AM-1:37AM. Congrats!

PS4 Launch Game Looks Phenomenal In Slow Motion

This is the PlayStation 4, folks, flexing its muscles. The game you’re seeing is called Resogun. It’s an arcade shooter coming out on launch day (November 15) for the PS4. It’s not just meant to be a game. It’s meant to be a showpiece. The game comes from the Finnish studio Housemarque which previously made…

If You Think About It This Way, Call of Duty Is Quite a Bargain

Call of Duty, like so many other games, is a better value over time. The more you play it, the less expensive its $60 price tag seems to have been. How cheap? Well, even if you buy all the map packs and play just two hours a week, the cost goes down to a dollar…

‘Offline Play Enabled’ Is Now a Back-of-the-Box Feature

Has this been a thing and we just missed it? Or is this a sign of our increasingly-online gaming future where even the back of a copy of the PS4 version of Call of Duty: Ghosts has to provide a reassurance that, hey, don’t worry, you can still play this game without an Internet connection?…