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CultureKotaku Game DiaryMy Co-op Gaming Night Turned To A Couple Sad Hours Of Downloading Updates
Recently, a close friend of mine returned after having been out of town for a little while—like way out of town, where time zones made real-time communication out of the question, even though we live in The Future. To celebrate his return to my time zone, we decided to play some games together online and…
By Joshua Rivera Published August 26, 2019 -
CultureKotaku Game DiaryRomance Of The Three Kingdoms XIII Is A Flawed, But Addictive, Entry Into The Series
The very first time I was a guest writer for Kotaku, I wrote about Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV, which was my favorite in the series. I’ve played ROTKIV too many times to count as its strategy gaming at its best. I did play many of the games after IV, but missed IX-XII. With…
By Peter Tieryas Published August 24, 2019 -
CultureKotaku Game DiaryGears of War Isn’t As Fun Without The Chainsaw Gun
I love the Lancer from Gears of War. That’s the chainsaw gun. So I’m pretty disappointed that Gears of War 4, which I’m playing now to prep for the sequel, keeps taking my Lancer away. I’ve loved the Lancer since the series’ original hero Marcus Fenix used it in the first Gears game. Within the…
By Maddy Myers Published August 23, 2019 -
CultureKotaku Game DiaryGrandia Has Reignited My Love For Role-Playing Games
When I was in my impressionable pre-teen years, I spent vast amounts of my summer tucked away in a musty little basement down the street. My closest friends would visit at their grandma’s house near me every year while school was out, and when we weren’t “ripping and running,” playing basketball with the “mannish” little…
By Natalie Degraffinried Published August 22, 2019 -
CultureKotaku Game DiaryThis Game Is Great, But I Can’t Stop Playing Its Unimportant Solitaire App
Eliza is a fascinating game about tech start-up culture and mental health. It also contains a devilish Solitaire game that I can’t stop thinking about. Eliza is a visual novel about a woman named Evelyn who works as a proxy for an app called Eliza, which is a machine-learning based therapy service. Her job is…
By Gita Jackson Published August 21, 2019 -
CultureKotaku Game DiaryMy Language-Learning App Has A Leaderboard And It’s Ruining My Life
I tried to wean myself off my mobile games by learning a new language. Now, instead of being obsessed with tapping on mobile games, I’m obsessed with my language-learning app. Damn it. I’m a fidgety person. I touch my hair a lot, pick at my nails and scratch scabs. I’ve mostly curtailed these habits with…
By Gita Jackson Published August 20, 2019 -
CultureKotaku Game DiaryPlaying PC Building Simulator On My Switch Feels Weird
I’ve been installing motherboards, CPUs, memory sticks, hard drives, power supplies, and video cards into computer cases for nearly three decades. With last week’s console release of PC Building Simulator, now I’m putting together gaming rigs on my Nintendo Switch. It’s surreal. Demoed in 2017 and released in its final form on Steam earlier this…
By Mike Fahey Published August 19, 2019 -
CultureKotaku Game DiaryChoosing Which Switch Games To Delete For Space Causes Me Deep Dread
Every time I obtain a new Switch game from Nintendo’s eShop, I worry. Will this be the one that forces me to archive or delete something else from my SD memory card in order to make room, and if so, how am I supposed to choose? When I got my Switch back in 2017, I…
By Mike Fahey Published August 16, 2019 -
CultureKotaku Game DiaryBeing Impatient In Outer Wilds Wasted More Time Than Simply Waiting
I have not beaten Outer Wilds yet. One reason I still haven’t is that I wasted hours trying to land my ship on the Black Hole Forge instead of just using the Ash Twin teleporter to get there. I thought I was saving myself time by taking this “shortcut.” I was not. Why, you might…
By Maddy Myers Published August 15, 2019 -
CultureKotaku Game DiaryI Broke My Brain Designing Randomly Generated Sims Buildings
I build a lot in The Sims, but like a lot of Simmers, I end up building the same house over and over. No matter how hard I try, they look like the houses in the neighborhood I grew up in. They’re suburban houses with two stories, vaguely Georgian architecture, two beds, and one bathroom.…
By Gita Jackson Published August 14, 2019 -
CultureKotaku Game DiaryI Helped Some Gaggling Final Fantasy XIV Newbies Best One Of the Trickiest Bosses
There are moments in online games when leadership and authority are thrust upon us. In group-based content, like the various boss fights in Final Fantasy XIV, knowledge is power. If you’re in a group full of helpless newbies and you know the fight’s mechanics, you’re suddenly in charge. Earlier this week, I suddenly became the…
By Heather Alexandra Published August 13, 2019 -
CultureKotaku Game DiaryEverything I Did While Waiting For The Rain To Stop In Breath Of The Wild
I recently started a new game in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild after I took my Switch to my sister’s house and my nephews deleted my save. I’d played a few hours of the game last year but never picked it up again. This time, it’s totally sucked me in, and I…
By Riley MacLeod Published August 12, 2019 -
CultureKotaku Game DiaryIt Is Surprisingly Hard To Create An Incompetent Ass-Clown In Dungeons & Dragons
The great escapist fantasy of Dungeons & Dragons is that you are not a salaryperson shoveling handfuls of gummy bears into your mouth and rolling 20-sided dice. Rather, you are a singularly important hero with a singular capacity to disarm some impending plot bomb. It’s a time-tried formula, one that basically spawned an entire industry…
By Cecilia D'Anastasio Published August 8, 2019 -
CultureKotaku Game DiaryFire Emblem: Three Houses Captures The Challenge Of Fostering Your Students’ Passions
In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, you split your time between fighting battles and teaching students at a monastery. As you teach, there are key moments where you can encourage students down different paths toward new jobs. While the mechanic mostly exists for you to grind stats and try new battle combinations, these small moments realistically…
By Heather Alexandra Published August 7, 2019 -
CultureKotaku Game DiaryI Love When A Book Feels Like A Good Role-Playing Game
Role-playing games are one of my favorite genres. They’re also the genre I came latest to. I didn’t play video games for most of my teenage years, the time when I would have lost entire weekends and nights to them. Coming to love them as an adult has been a minor tragedy, because the amount…
By Joshua Rivera Published August 6, 2019 -
CultureKotaku Game DiaryI Can’t Help Reading Every Damn Text Box In Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Fire Emblem: Three Houses has been a little bit of a slow burn for me. While I’ve been a fan of the series since Awakening, I found myself beset by choice paralysis in Three Houses when I realized that I did not even remotely feel attached to any of the three precocious rich children with…
By Natalie Degraffinried Published August 5, 2019 -
CultureKotaku Game DiaryI Couldn’t Help Snooping On A Stranger’s Fire Emblem House On The Subway
Fire Emblem: Three Houses offers the agonizing decision over which group of students you want to teach and lead in battle. It’s a tricky choice that greatly affects the story you experience and the characters at your command. But it’s also a bit of a personality test, and I’m fascinated to know what house people…
By Heather Alexandra Published August 2, 2019 -
CultureKotaku Game DiaryAn Investigation Into Whether Two Statues In The Division 2 Appear To Be Having Sex
Video games can inspire us to do strange things. For example, there I was yesterday playing The Division 2, checking whether the shadow or reflection of an obelisk in the game fell upon the statue of a naked woman in a certain sexual way. It wasn’t my idea. It was in the game. This misadventure…
By Stephen Totilo Published August 1, 2019 -
CultureKotaku Game DiaryI Didn’t Think The Surge Was For Me Until I Saw It In A Netflix Show
I had no intention of ever playing The Surge. It looked boring, overly familiar, and mostly desolate, like a dozen other third-person action games by studios I’d never really heard of in which some dude, always some dude, is on a mission to wreck shit up because that’s what’s supposed to make for a cool…
By Ethan Gach Published July 31, 2019 -
CultureKotaku Game DiaryIt’s Awkward When Madden NFL 20 Characters Avoid Saying My Player’s Name
Madden 20’s new Face of the Franchise single-player mode lets you create a custom character and give them whatever name you want. I named my custom quarterback Madden Myers, because my actual name is Maddy Myers, and that’s the type of thing that I find funny. It was great to hear the in-game NFL commentators…
By Maddy Myers Published July 30, 2019