Culture

A Hectic Management Sim About Sanitizing The Nightly News

In Not For Broadcast, a new left wing government comes to power, with the threat of police crackdowns looming on the horizon. My job is to make it all palatable for the masses by seamlessly packaging the changes together with celebrity scandals and mind-numbing ads. While Not For Broadcast flounders as a political parable, its…

Why Platinum Games Wants Another Shot At The Wonderful 101

Platinum Games is hoping to crowdfund The Wonderful 101 to the Nintendo Switch—and maybe even Steam and PS4. That could mean the quirky 2013 Wii U action-strategy game gets introduced to a whole new generation. It could also result in a nicer, gentler Hideki Kamiya on Twitter. Temporarily, at least! “We weren’t originally aiming to…

Ocarina Of Time Speedruns Are Now Under Ten Minutes Because Reality Is A Lie Made To Be Broken

If you were a Zelda fan in 1998, you probably took your sweet time playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Exploring the world could easily take days, and if you were like me or other unfortunate souls, you got lost in the now-infamous Water Temple. Speedrunners have whittled that wandering down over the…

Hiking Gets Even Harder In Death Stranding When The Controller Is A Treadmill

Playing Death Stranding really made me want to go hiking for real. Instead, I continued to play Death Stranding. If I only had this treadmill PS4 controller, I could have gotten the best of both worlds. YouTuber Allen Pan is an electrical engineer known for wacky science experiments and strange gadget hacks, and his latest…

New Book Celebrates The Art Of The Atari 2600 … And 7800

Bitmap Books, publisher of outstanding tomes filled with gaming history and pixel art, is gearing up for the release of the latest book in its “Visual Compendium” series.Atari 2600/7800: A Visual Compendium covers Atari’s game console history at its highest and lowest points. The Atari 2600 was the first video game console to dominate American…

Fire Emblem Heroes’ New Monthly Subscription Adds Exclusive Characters And Gameplay Perks

  Can you believe it has been three years since the launch of the mobile Fire Emblem gacha game and Nintendo’s only just now gotten around to offering a monthly subscription? Launching on February 5, the Feh Pass provides a variety of benefits to players willing to shell out an additional $9.49 a month. It…

The Week In Games: The Skeksis Are Coming

Remember not that long ago when the idea of more Dark Crystal seemed unlikely or even impossible? Now fans of this franchise have a Netflix series and soon a brand new video game, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics, which is coming to all major platforms this week. I was one of those kids…

Osaka Castle Rooftop. Osaka, Japan. By Justin Weegar. JPGs is a photo peek into wherever gamers might find interesting. If you’re a photographer and have images you want to share, drop us a line

Lil’ Treasure Walker

Jing Zhang is a freelance artist from China. You can see more of Zhang’s stuff at his ArtStation page

Nintendo Switch Hacker Busted, Also Pleads Guilty To Child Pornography Charges

21 year-old Ryan Hernandez pleaded guilty last week to charges related to the 2016 theft of “confidential Nintendo files related to its consoles and games.” When his home was raided by the FBI last year, though, they also found “more than one thousand videos and images of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct.” Hernandez was…

Track: Secret | Artist: Will.i.am | Album: Dexter’s Lab: The Hip-Hop Experiment

‘Shop Contest: Speaking Simulator

Earlier this week, Speaking Simulator was released. I’ve started to see videos and gifs of this game pop up in my Twitter timeline. It looks…odd. But the dude makes funny faces and funny faces are great for Photoshop contests so… Your challenge this week: Create some photos featuring the dude from Speaking Simulator. You can…

Sunday Comics: They Totally Suck!

Hello! It’s time for Kotaku’s Sunday Comics, your weekly roundup of the best webcomics. The images enlarge if you click on the magnifying glass icon. Corpse Run by Alex Di Stasi. Published Jan. 30. Read more of Corpse Run Awkward Zombie by Katie Tiedrich. Published Jan. 27. Read more of Awkward Zombie Clueless Hero by…

‘Shop Contest: RIP Mr. Peanut, Winners

Last weekend I gave you all the much-needed task of having some fun and enjoying the life of Mr. Peanut. He sadly died recently and I don’t expect he will return at all. Nope. Never. Our winning image this week comes from punxsutawneyphil who gives us the true Uncharted sequel we have all been wanting. I…

Get Back You Eight-Legged Freaks!

This week on Snapshots, too many creepy hands in Hellblade, getting slapped in Red Dead, cool-looking space ships in No Man’s Sky, breaking glass in Mirror’s Edge and dealing with a really big spider in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Yes, I’ve featured a lot of Star Wars photos in these first few Snapshots and…

Welcome To Hell, Garfield

Hello! This week we learn just how much money Ninja made switching to Mixer, play music using old TVs, learn more about Torchlight 3, watch a cool Cuphead fan video and see what Garfield is doing in Hell. Great Kotaku Content From The Past Week I understand WHY they aren’t making new singleplayer floors to…

Temtem, As Told By Steam Reviews

Pokémon Sword and Shield were solid and all, but there’s a new Pokémon sheriff in town. And by “in town,” I mean “on PC.” Also, it’s not called Pokémon. Temtem is, instead, a carefully crafted tribute to Game Freak and Nintendo’s monster-battling monolith. Steam users, for the most part, love it.  I’ve been dabbling in…

Sometimes Beating The Quest Is Its Own Reward (Because The Reward Sucks)

This week on Kotaku Splitscreen, Kirk Hamilton and I brought on Kotaku staff writer Ethan Gach to talk about the state of Destiny 2. Players felt let down by the reward for solving the Corridors of Time puzzle, but hey, MMOs are always more about the journey than the rewards, right? Still, it’d be nice…

One Of The Most Annoying Parts Of Death Stranding Has Been Fixed

A new patch for Death Stranding went live today that finally makes the extended animation that takes place when encountering BTs completely optional. Death Stranding is a long game made even longer by the repetition of bespoke animations. One of said animations revolved around the Odradek Terrain Scanner, the strange-looking piece of equipment that hangs…

Survey Has Players Dreaming About PlayStation 4 Remote Play On The Switch

Some players are salivating over the possibility, however unlikely, of one day being able to use their Switches to remotely play PS4 games after Sony asked about it in a recent feedback survey. The survey apparently went out in an email to PS4 owners, a screenshot of which was provided to Kotaku by Reddit user…