Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, is aware of all the Wii U skepticism. He’s certainly aware of mine and the fact that there’s a $400 PlayStation 4 bearing down on his $350 32GB Wii U this fall. Plus an Xbox. What, him worry? The storyline told throughout the halls of E3 was that…
Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s lead creator of Mario, Zelda and Donkey Kong, was recently showing me Pikmin 3, but there was something he’d just said that I had to follow up on. “I have to ask, Mr. Miyamoto, you said you have made a bad game. What was the bad game you made?” To back up…
I’d heard that Shigeru Miyamoto was really proud of his new game, Pikmin 3. Like, really, really proud. Like, guy-who-made-Donkey-Kong-and-Super-Mario-and-Zelda-thinks-this-game-is-great proud. That good, huh? “How many games have you made?” I asked Miyamoto last week at E3. We’ve been doing interviews for a decade. We can go outside the conventional chitchat and product hype if…
I came to E3 this year in search of good news about the Xbox One. By week’s end, I found a few men able to tell me some. I’d heard the bad things about the Xbox One—the inability to lend games discs to friends, the requirement for the console to check in online every 24…
Your parents come visit your house. Or the person you’re dating gets their first look at your living room and your entertainment center. They see your hot new PlayStation. Sony hopes their next console won’t suddenly bring you shame. The PS4 “was designed to be an impact product in an entertainment center,” Sony’s v.p. of…
You don’t even need to be a fan of Nintendo’s Smash Bros. series to enjoy the colorful mayhem of one of these games in action. Below, if you can take it, are 108 screenshots and art from 2014’s Wii U Super Smash Bros., with a healthy amount of images of the lady trainer from Wii…
The very first question in this r/games interview with Xbox Live director of programming Major Nelson elicits an encouraging answer, one that Microsoft should be trumpeting, not whispering. The question: After the Xbox One servers are shut down at the end of the new generation, will Xbox One games still be playable? The question is…
Every new console generation brings new anxieties that the price of gaming going up. Right now, many of the big players won’t officially say what their next-gen games will cost. Microsoft will, at least. A company spokesperson confirmed to Kotaku that Microsoft’s own first-party Xbox One games will cost $59,99, the same price top Xbox…
The upcoming 3DS Zelda game, A Link Between Worlds, shares much of the same terrain with the classic Super Nintendo game The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. But the game’s lead creator tells Kotaku that there are key map changes in this sequel. The new 3DS game is set at least a…
Nintendo’s longtime chief of all things Zelda, Eiji Aonuma says the development team on the Wii U remake of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker will not be adding content to their remake of the open-ocean 2002 GameCube classic. But you will be making some. “My main goal in making Wind Waker HD was…
Ubisoft is committed to making a new Assassin’s Creed game every year and is determined not to see the series collapse from franchise fatigue. How? “We are making sure the teams who are creating the different iterations have enough time—two years, three years, so that they can take risk and they can change the concept…
Ubisoft likes to keep the modern parts of its Assassin’s Creed games as secret as possible. But at E3, they revealed a few details for the present day part of ACIV: Black Flag. For starters, you’re the main character. You’ll be playing in the present as an employee of Abstergo Entertainment, the fictional video game…
As is tradition, show organizers wished E3 attendees farewell on this final day of E3 with a banner to tell them when to come back. Mark your calendars. Please note: the excitement always begins the day before E3, on the day of the big Microsoft, Sony, EA and Ubisoft press conferences . That’ll be June…
As I walked into Microsoft’s Xbox booth at E3 yesterday, I spotted storied game designer Peter Molyneux waltzing in, looking for Fable Anniversary. He was hunting down the Xbox 360 re-make of a game he’d led the development of on the first Xbox. He approached a kiosk running the game and took the controller. I…
Our sister site Gizmodo loves the Xbox One’s non-gaming features, but they still think that Xbox Live Gold is still “one of the biggest rip-offs in tech.” Their argument
Nintendo knows that the choice to have the company’s top-flight development studio in Texas make another Donkey Kong side-scroller was controversial—so controversial, in fact, that Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime actually addressed it in a video yesterday shortly before I asked him about it. The video stands out as one of the few original…
Some people say that the PlayStation Vita doesn’t have a lot of games. These people need to go to Sony’s E3 booth. There are a lot of PS Vita games there. Take a look at my video tour above for proof. The Vita area was probably the first time I’ve been to a part of…
We double-checked whether Sony is being cute with their DRM plans and might actually be matching Xbox One in allowing publishers to block used games—despitenot blocking used games themselves We asked: Can third-party publishers restrict used games on PS4 even if Sony won’t? A Sony PR person, who told us they’d triple-check, told us this…
You can take or leave most hype, because it is, just that, hype. We’ve heard it all before, or so I thought, until I talked to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot this week. He dialed his enthusiasm up. Way up. “Rayman Legends should be one of the best games we’ve ever done,” he told me, praising…
Ubisoft won’t release more games exclusive to the Wii U until Nintendo sells more Wii U systems, the president of the French gaming giant told Kotaku here at E3 this week. “We need more sold,” Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot said during a brief interview. “They are coming with five of their biggest brands ever. And…
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