Stephen Totilo

How Do We Feel About A Portable 3D Sonic Game? Watch This.

It’s been clear at least since the Dreamcast era, if not further back, that Sonic the Hedgehog’s console games were going to be in 3D. If you wanted old-school 2D Sonic, you went to the handhelds. Well, now the next Sonic game on handhelds is 3D, too. Is this a bad thing? Maybe not! To…

$150 Version of GTA V Lets You Play Online as Niko Bellic’s Son

The surprisingly-grand Grand Theft Auto Online, which launches on October 1, will let you pick your parents as you sculpt the character you play. Would you like to be playing as the son of GTA IV‘s protagonist? You can. According to Rockstar, one of the perks of purchasing the $150 Collector’s Edition of the game…

Giant-Robot Call of Duty Still Looking Like The Coolest Call of Duty

Today’s new trailer for the upcoming and final Call of Duty: Black Ops II expansion, Apocalypse, once again shows why the world would benefit from an old World War I trench warfare planes-and-blimps-and-giant-robot Call of Duty. Just look at this GIF we pulled from it! It’s from the map pack’s latest co-op zombies mission, entitled…

‘If fighting games didn’t exist, I’d have probably gotten into Karate’

Our weekly Quick Q&A series is only ever four questions long, which should make it the perfect format for a man who came up with a minimalist fighting game that requires only two buttons. Today, that man, Adam Heart answers our four questions and poses one to you. 1. Your new fighting game, Divekick, has…

Hideo Kojima Keeps It Short And Sweet For His 50th Birthday

All-star game designer Hideo Kojima turned 50 on Saturday, so consider this a belated happy birthday to the Metal Gear mastermind and your opportunity to wish him a happy 50th. What did the man himself have to say about 50? Not a ton. He tweeted this early Monday morning in what was either a delayed…

Grand Theft Auto V: Do We Really Want to Know?

This is an article about spoilers, though there won’t be any spoilers in it. This is a piece about Grand Theft Auto V but really about what we—what you—want to know or not know. This is a piece about knowledge, about information. It’s about that seeming law of physics that guarantees that secrets can and…

Splinter Cell And One Of The Most Notorious Places in the World

I was reminded of how powerful big-budget video games can be—yet how frustratingly tame they often remain—while I was playing the new Splinter Cell. This game goes somewhere I didn’t expect. Spoilers ahead. Close the window you’re reading this in now if you don’t want to know. Keep it open if you want to know…

Whoever Is Taking Screenshots Of The Next Sonic Game Deserves a Raise

We’ve already marveled a little bit about how slick this fall’s Nintendo-exclusive Sonic: Lost World is looking. Let’s marvel some more. The Wii U version of the new game is looking sharp. Then again, pre-release screens of lots of games tend to look curiously pretty. But, hey, we can dream, right? Sonic games have been…

Great name, great concept. The game is called Flame Over. It’s a firefighting roguelike. Coming to PS Vita next year from the studio Laughing Jackal. Details at the PlayStation blog

Is Next-Gen Kinect Facial Scan As Magical As It Seems? Mixed Results.

Stand in front of the next-gen Kinect, the one that can read your heartbeat just by looking at you (it’s true; I tried it), and in theory it can scan your face. In the Xbox One game Kinect Sports: Rivals, Kinect 2.0 should be able to turn you into a video game character. But can…

How ‘Limited’ Will Smash Bros. On 3DS Actually Be?

Kotaku super-user Giant Boy Detective pauses from his weekly efforts to nominate characters for the next Smash Bros. to calm concerns that the 3DS version of the next Smash is going to have problematic limitations. He has no inside knowledge. Just some math.

Bungie Aiming Absurdly High With Destiny In New Trailer

Possibly the best-looking game of E3, the next-gen epic from the makers of Halo now also has a new trailer/developer-diary thing. In it, Bungie boasts: “This game has an activity for every mood.” Raise that bar, Bungie! Destiny is slated for release on PS4, Xbox One, PS3, and Xbox 360 next year. Note: An earlier…

If you’re a sucker for hyper-detailed trailer analysis, then take a look at the detective work being done by the folks at ArkhamOriginsVideos on the news trailer for October’s Batman: Arkham Origins game. The Dark Knight detective would be proud.

There Was an Xbox One Press Conference In Germany. Now You Can See It.

Microsoft decided not to livestream their Xbox One press conference from Germany yesterday, taking the quieter path than Sony. But today you can watch it and, if nothing else, see how much better their cameraperson was. You’ll find no sudden zooms and illogical camera angles in this half hour of Xbox One stagecraft. You will…

The Horror: If Super Mario Bros. 3 Were Made For Smartphones

There are things in the world that should never happen. Game designer Ethan Levy’s “evil” Candy Crush-ized remake of Super Mario Bros. 3 is one of them. He was just kidding when he explained how he’d re-make it. Hopefully Levy was one of three game designers who was recently challenged to create an “evil” version…

You Can Smoke Pot In GTA V, According to Ratings Board

We had a hunch it was going to be possible, and, now, the people who rate video games are letting the cat out of the dimebag. You can smoke pot in GTA V, according to the Entertainment Software Ratings Board. That same group has offered a bunch of other mild spoilers for GTA V, if…

Ubisoft Clue Hints At a Late-November Xbox One Release Date

If you’re trying to figure out when Microsoft’s next console will come out in North America, today has provided a new clue. Note that the following post is all educated guesswork and observation. This is what we know: The Xbox One will be released in November. When in November? Microsoft hasn’t said yet. We also…

Battlefield 4 Is Doing Its Best To Impre–Watch Out For That Ship!

This is what competition gets you. It gets you a development studio, DICE, trying to convince you that they are making the best military first-person shooter of the year. Today, they’ve made their latest pitch while uttering the word someone in their studio or in the EA marketing team cooks up the word—”Levolution”—in order to…

The Battlefield 4 beta will kick off in early October, EA announced today. Platform details to come.

Patrick Stewart Makes Soccer Sound Like The Best Thing Ever

Who cares about football? Not the NFL version. You know, the soccer kind? Most of the world cares. Plus: Patrick Stewart. And in this new hype trailer for FIFA 14, Stewart just might get skeptics interested as well. Well done, Captain. To contact the author of this post, write to [email protected] or find him on…