Yannick LeJacq

The International Dota 2 Championship that kicks off later this week will be streamed on ESPN3, Valve just announced. A special pre-show event “previewing the final match” will air on ESPN2 Sunday night at 8:30 PM Pacific Time. In addition to watching on the ESPN3 streaming service proper, Valve also said the event will be…

What Those Items In Mario Kart 8 Are Really For

Mario Kart 8 is a great game. But like many great Nintendo games, there are certain things in it that seem to exist for no good reason. Or any reason, really. They’re just sort of…there. For something? Maybe? I have no idea. But man, those splashes of squid ink can really be irritating sometimes. Dorkly…

True Blood Finally Shows Why Louisiana Is Filled With Sexy Vampires

True Blood is a raunchy show about vampires and other supernatural beings. Its cast in turn contains many actors who were relatively unknown when the show first started in 2008, and are now regularly hailed as pinnacles of physical perfection. This is not hyperbole, particularly for some of the lead male actors. If you don’t…

Pretty much!

So much of Eric Northman left unresolved. So little time.

You how how they say the light that burns twice as bright only burns half as long? If only there was some Hanukkah-esque miracle that meant True Blood didn’t have to end. Sigh.

After ten years, EA is pulling the plug on The Sims 2. Today the company said that it “will no longer be providing any new content or making any additional technical updates” for the game. The good news is that if you’re still playing the 2004 installment to pass the time until The Sims 4…

Mario Kart 8 Hack Launches Luigi Into Space

This is a video of a ghost version of Luigi riding around Mario Kart 8’s Rainbow Road. But don’t worry: this doesn’t mean he’s come back to haunt us all with a new, supernatural death stare Rather, the footage above shows a ghost driver pulled from a play-through of Mario Kart 8’s revamped version of…

How I Learned Link’s ‘Real’ Name

“Link isn’t even his real name,” a friend told me recently. We were talking about Zelda, and the way people reacted to the new trailer for the next big game in the series My friend is more of a Zelda veteran than I. But still, his comment seemed heretical. This is Link we’re talking about!…

Mario Kart 8’s Yoshi, On A Yoshi Bike, In Yoshi’s Valley

What’s better than one Yoshi? Two Yoshis? What about…get ready…three Yoshis? Boom. Done. Well, sort of. Never one to shy away from bizarre self-referential humor, Nintendo made a character, a vehicle, and a racetrack modeled off its adorable green dinosaur for Mario Kart 8. While I haven’t encountered anything like it yet online, this means…

Don’t Starve’s expansion pack, Reign of the Giants, is coming to the PS4 on July 22nd, developer Klei Entertainment has announced. The new stuff will cost you $4.99, unless you’re a PlayStation Plus member. Then you get a snazzy ten percent discount at launch.

Do Nintendo Miis dream of virtual sheep? Probably. But they also dream of much more peculiar things than that in Tomodachi Life. Like an altar to an old NES accessory, for one. StreetPass Princeton got a glimpse into one of the whackier dream sequences I’ve seen come out of Nintendo’s new sim game, and the…

A Video Game That Really Gets What It Means To Come Out

“I’m bisexual,” Nicky says to his mother. “Sexually attracted to both men and women.” “You can’t be both,” his mother snaps back. “You have to pick one.” “That’s…not how it works,” Nicky responds. “At all.” His mother does not understand. As you continue to have this conversation, gliding your cursor over increasingly painful dialogue prompts,…

Watch Someone Use Mario Kart 8’s Super Horn Like A Total Jerk

People cutting their teeth online in Mario Kart 8 know this moment all too well. Say you’re racing towards the end of the track. You’re in second place. Maybe third. Things are still close, close enough that you’re not going to give up just yet. Then, this happens: Some jerk comes in with a super…

Two Of The Top Men Behind The PS4 Talk About The Future Of PlayStation

Nothing like listening to a couple of original gamers reminisce and talk shop. Andrew House and Mark Cerny, two key players who helped bring the PS4 into existence with their respective expertise, sat down for a chat about all things PlayStation recently at the industry-focused Develop conference. You can watch the whole thing in the…

I Have No Idea What’s Happening In This Shooter, But I Don’t Mind

If games like Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare and Splatoon are any indication, this generation of shooters is going to be a whacky one. Sony just fleshed out its newest entry in this emerging category of insane-looking projectile simulators with a trailer for VizionEck, a monochromatic shooter I do not understand in the slightest: Can…

448 Minutes Of Transformers Movies Contain 19 Minutes Of Robot Combat

Watching a Michael Bay Transformers movie is a serious investment. When you add up the running time of the original trilogy, it clocks in just shy of 7.5 hours. That’s practically a work day! Thank god they’re all chock full of eye-melting robot-on-robot action. Or so I thought. Then someone had to go and make…

Mazes Are Getting Pretty Highbrow

It was only two years ago that the Museum of Modern Art put its seal of approval on Pac-Man by adding the game to its permanent collection. Many saw this as a pivotal moment for video games; one of the most prestigious museums in the world was adding a little yellow blob’s maze-lurking, ghost-eating adventures…

“When you’re making fun of his suit, you’re making fun of his mom.” Far Cry 4’s Executive Producer Dan Hay gives yet another eccentric tidbit of information about Pagan Min, the game’s villain, in an interview Ubisoft just posted.

Track: 4th Chamber Artist: GZA, RZA, Ghostface Killah, Killah Priest Album: Liquid Swords Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to – and gaming to – at the moment.

The Best Way To Break Bad News Is With GIFs

Creating a video game and releasing it to the world is an incredibly complicated process. But why should I even try to explain the nuances of modern software development with last-gen mechanisms like “words” when we have these amazing things called GIFs now? As you can see in the glorious image above, Australian indie developer…