Culture

Our Video Game Predictions For 2020

What will 2020 bring to the world of video games? Here at Kotaku Splitscreen, we have answers. Well… we have guesses. Same thing, right? On this week’s episode of the show, we talk about some of the games we’re playing (Control! Resident Evil 2! The Witcher 3!) and some of the movies we’ve been watching…

I Finally Queued Up With A Stranger In Borderlands 3 And I Wish I’d Done It Sooner

I’ve been stuck on Borderlands 3’s Katagawa Ball boss for weeks, but yesterday I finally beat it in the best way possible, thanks to the help of a random stranger. Vengeance, it turns out, is a dish best served with company. Katagawa Ball, a giant robotic orb reminiscent of a Dungeons & Dragons Beholder, has…

Pokémon Sword and Shield Expansions Add Over 200 Existing Pokémon

Unlike previous games in the series, Pokémon Sword and Shield won’t be getting a new version of the game a year later with an extra adjective. Instead, Pokémon Sword Expansion Pass and Shield Expansion Pass, DLC for Pokémon Sword and Shield, will allow you to play new stories in Galar using the save data—and pocket…

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team Remake Coming To Switch In March

2006 Pokémon roguelikes for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team Blue and Red, are getting a snazzy makeover for the Nintendo Switch. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX arrives on Switch March 6, with a demo available later today. One of the best entries in Spike Chunsoft’s longrunning Mystery…

Track: Under Control | Artist: The Strokes | Album: Room on Fire

The Origins Of Aloy

Louis van Baarle is a character artist from the Netherlands who has worked on stuff like Horizon Zero Dawn You can see more of Lois’ stuff at her personal site, Patreon and ArtStation page

Nintendo’s President Explains Its Reluctance To Fund Smash Bros. Tournament Prizes

During a recent interview with Japanese business journal Nikkei, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa was asked a variety of questions concerning the publisher’s future, one of which concerned Nintendo’s support for Super Smash Bros. competitions, in particular its reluctance to support Smash tournaments with prize money. “Esports, in which players compete on stage for prize money…

People Love To Pee Outside Conan O’Brien’s House In Death Stranding

Hideo Kojima never met a celebrity he didn’t want to include in Death Stranding. As such, his latest game contains all sorts of celebrity cameos. Talk show host Conan O’Brien makes one such appearance, as a prepper slash cosplayer. For reasons that are not entirely clear, players have covered his house in pee. If you…

Twitch Streamers Raise Hundreds Of Thousands Of Dollars To Fight Australian Bushfires

Australia is on fire. Thousands of homes have been destroyed, countless people have been displaced, and 24 people have died. More than 15.6 million acres of land have burned. All this, and Australian summer is only just beginning. With the government failing to act against the blisteringly obvious effects of climate change, some streamers are…

Hard Games Haven’t Gotten Easier, But They Did Get Nicer

In an earlier era of video game design, the most lucrative way to extract money from customers was to pulverize them into atomic dust and make them insert a quarter to reassemble themselves back into a humanoid shape. Hard games never stopped coming out. What has changed about them, especially in recent years, is in…

How An Overwatch Skin Left Some Of D.Va’s Biggest Fans Feeling Betrayed

Overwatch hero D.va has been considered a symbol of empowerment by a lot of feminists in the Korean Overwatch community, representing how women could be lauded for their talent instead of their looks. Long before Mei graced protest memes for Hong Kong, a group called FAMERZ, then called National D.va Association, attended rallies and protests…

Annual Steam Release Numbers Used To Climb Every Year, But In 2019, They Held Steady

I’m fairly certain that I haven’t played 8,400 games in my entire life, but that’s the number of new releases that rolled up their sleeves and threw down for Steam users’ time and money last year. That is, obviously, a lot. But it’s not that much more than the number of games released on Steam…

Fallout 76 Camp Tortures Players With Math

If you thought Fallout 76 couldn’t get any more nihilistic, there’s now a campsite that burns players alive if they don’t solve math problems fast enough. It’s the latest creation from Fallout 76 player Korindabar, one of the game’s most notorious builders. Korindabar is responsible for a number of “trap” campsites that lure in unsuspecting…

The Sexiness Of Control

When I guide Jesse Faden through the Federal Bureau of Control, I summon a slab of concrete the size of a small desk, hovering it effortlessly over my right shoulder as I shoot, dodge, fly. I feel the crackle of the energy she can unleash on every object around her. The weighty rock yields to…

Track: Let Me Go | Artist: YONLAPA | Album: Let Me Go (single)

Games Artist Releasing His Own Comic About Space Robots

Ben Mauro is one of the best artists working in entertainment today, and we’ve featured his work on Fine Art a bunch of times. We’re doing it again tonight because he’s releasing a graphic novel called HUXLEY, about “two scavengers who find an ancient robot and get swept up on an adventure that could change…

Modern Warfare Players Glitching Under The Floors Are Becoming A Major Problem

Players of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s large-scale “Ground War” mode have discovered several ways to get underneath the floors or inside the walls of the game’s maps, letting them kill other players with impunity before raining down nukes. Before this influx of cheaters, the 32-versus-32 Battlefield-style mode was once a great place to level…

Pour One Out For A Lucasarts Millennium Falcon Simulator

Just in case you haven’t suffered enough anguish over the years/decades at the demise of quality LucasArts Star Wars games, let’s look back at a pitch for a game that sounded too good to be true, and so was promptly never made. Before we go any further, let’s be very clear: This was an idea,…

Destiny 2’s New Exotic Mission Is Worth Doing Just To Hear Shaxx Sing

Destiny 2’s weekly update today brings with it a new exotic quest that’s short, easy to complete, and ends with one of the best character moments the game has ever had. Devil’s Run is a sidearm that shoots lasers and has one of the shortest questlines I’ve ever come across in the game. All you…

Alienware Is Definitely Not Ripping Off The Nintendo Switch

This week at CES in Las Vegas, Alienware showed off its ConceptUFO, a portable PC gaming system with detachable controllers that can be played handheld, in tabletop mode, or connected to a television. It is not a Nintendo Switch. For one, the Switch is a real product you can buy, and ConceptUFO is just a…