Tina Amini

6/23/2014: This Is How You Game

Welcome to your weekend! I hope it’s filled with video games, particularly games you can play with a keyboard and mouse, particularly a mouse you can put on your squishy pug. Just like Calumon‘s brother. In other news, it’s the weekend. So head over to Kotaku Selects for a roundup of all our best stuff…

Track: Brief Encounter | Album: Still Life | Artist: Dawn Golden Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to—and gaming to—at the moment.

Kotaku UK‘s review of Grid Autosport: “A fast but ultimately frustrating racing game that improves on its predecessor in some areas, at the cost of ostracizing anyone but the most devoted of driving game fans.”

Why Mortal Kombat X Is So Gory

If you, like me, were in the front few rows of Sony’s E3 press conference when they showed off Mortal Kombat X on stage, you would also have been deafened by the loud cheers of excited gamers. They were oohing and aahing at decapitations and exposed organs and lost limbs. This isn’t new for a…

Before It Was Revealed, No Man’s Sky Had Some Skeptics

During the first year of No Man’s Sky‘s development, not even half of the Hello Games studio knew what a team of their four developers were working on. I spoke to Sean Murray, managing director and Hello Games founder, in an interview at E3 in Los Angeles two weeks ago when he told me this…

Best of Kotaku, The Week of June 16

E3 as an event might be over, but it’s not over in our hearts, because we keep writing about all the things we saw at the show. You can go read those things, and other good things from us, over at Kotaku Selects. Or you can stare at this image by Pictures in Boxes and…

The Next Seven Shooters I’m Excited About

Just another bland, brown shooter, right? I’ve always been a fan of shooters—and it’s not like they’re unsung heroes by any means—but there’s this misconception out there that they’re all the same carbon copies of one another. The misconception reasons that all shooters are boring military shooters with the same characters and roughly the same…

What No Man’s Sky Is

“What does sci-fi mean to you?” I was asking Sean Murray, the managing director and founder of Hello Games, this question. He’s one of a small team of developers working on the game that had everyone buzzing at E3 this year. “That’s a really good question,” Murray said to me during an interview in a…

How A Seemingly Impossible Game Is Possible

× If there’s one comment louder than all the praise that No Man’s Sky has been getting, it’s got to be something along the lines of, “Wow, how is that even possible?” Questions like that confuse Sean Murray and David Ream, managing director/founder and creative director of No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games, respectively. For…

How Tales From The Borderlands Works

When it got announced at VGX at the end of last year, I don’t think a lot of people knew what to expect. So it’s a Borderlands game? Kind of? But in the style of the guys behind the emotionally-crippling The Walking Dead? Kind of? Despite being a fan of both games and developers, and…

Watch Me Take Down Two Bosses In Destiny

It’s hard to get much done in Destiny as a lowly level eight, but that’s what friends are for. Bungie’s soon-to-be-released next shooter is, after all, all about interacting in a shared world. I spent somewhere under 10 hours playing through Destiny‘s alpha build, exploring Russia, playing a few steps through the main storyline, listening…

How The Alien In Alien: Isolation Works

The best kind of horror game doesn’t need any guns. It doesn’t need to scare you with difficult enemy encounters and shock value. Sometimes, silence is scarier than all of that. That’s a lot of what Alien: Isolation is about. Creeping through dark hallways of a mostly-abandoned space station called Sevostopol, you have to try…

​Five Things BioWare Wants You To Know About The Next Dragon Age

If I had to explain what BioWare’s RPG, Dragon Age, is all about, I’d easily cram it all into one word: relationships. But that’s my personal experience, and I’m not developing Dragon Age: Inquisition, so I couldn’t tell you what the next Dragon Age will be all about. BioWare’s executive producer, Mark Darrah, however, can.…

Pictures of People Taking Pictures of Things At E3 2014

Every year, when the weather finally starts to get warmer, we try to share our experiences from video gaming’s biggest conference: the Electronic Entertainment Expo. But instead of snapping pictures of the latest PlayStation 4 (there’s a white one now) or posting vines of the crazy lines for the Oculus Rift, I thought I’d show…

5 Minutes Of (Mostly) Stealth In Alien: Isolation

Alien: Isolation isn’t like the more modern Alien experiences we’ve seen recently. This one is far more focused on the solitary hunter, and giving you a real challenge to stealthily fight through. Listen to Chris and I discuss what that’s like over a little more than 5 minutes of fresh new gameplay. I’ll have a…

Everything We Know About the Halo Master Chief Collection

News of the Halo: Master Chief Collection already leaked a few weeks ago, but Microsoft and developer 343 Industries officially announced its existence today. It’ll be out on November 11 this year, in tandem with Halo 2‘s 10-year anniversary, and it’ll come with access to the beta for Halo 5: Guardians One Disc In a…

The Best of Kotaku, The Week of June 2

It’s finally here. E3 2014 is upon us, and I am currently in LA trying to soak up some sun before I have to soak up some convention center AC. In the meantime, feel free to peruse Kotaku Selects for our best non-E3, but maybe pre-E3 articles. And may the Year of Luigi continue on…

HBO Go Is Finally Coming To Xbox One

Rejoice! We can now watch all of Game of Thrones on our Xbox Ones. Provided you have an HBO Go subscription and an Xbox Live account, of course. But this is still awesome news, and something I’ve personally been waiting on. The Xbox team announced the news today, including a host of other awesome entertainment…

​I Drove Batman: Arkham Knight‘s Batmobile

And I liked it. The Batmobile is basically an extension of Batman’s repertoire of gadgets. In fact, even though Batman is of course a combat specialist, developer Rocksteady’s excitable Dax Ginn explained that the Batmobile is part of Batman’s primary toolset. The Batmobile operates in two modes. On a chase, pursuit mode is most appropriate.…

​The Explanation Behind Sonic’s New Look

About three weeks ago in a hotel in Los Angeles, I got to play four levels of the upcoming Sonic Boom. It felt like good family fun: fairly easy combat, some trickier platforming, and a little bit of that iconic Sonic speedrunning through rings. You can watch Game Front’s footage of what I played on…