Culture

Twitch Buckles Down On Security After Artifact Page Gets Spammed With Memes And Porn

Earlier this week, the Twitch category for Valve’s card game Artifact made a miraculous resurgence—but not for the right reasons. A horde of slavering meme lords were laying siege to Artifact’s abandoned e-fortress, flooding the Twitch category with streams of other games, jokes, porn, and in one especially ugly moment, a recording of the Christchurch…

The Internet Reacts To Whatever That Death Stranding Trailer Was

We now know when the highly anticipated Death Stranding comes out and what it’s about (kind of), which ends some of the mystery around this absurd and fascinating-looking game. But not all of the mystery has been unraveled yet, so we can all still make jokes about it. After Kojima left Konami in 2015, people…

Ask Dr. NerdLove: Is There Any Point In Dating When The World Is On Fire?

Hello all you frightening nipplybeasts, and welcome to Ask Dr. NerdLove, the only dating advice column to help you speed run through the worst parts of dating and start the New Game Plus of your love life. This week, we’re diving into the weird corners of relationship drama, the sorts of questions you never thought…

The Division 2 Replaced A Mystery With An Anticlimax

I don’t play games for rewards. I never minded much that collecting the flags in the first Assassin’s Creed gets you nothing, didn’t mind that grabbing all the stars in Mario 64 lets you talk to Yoshi but not ride him. The journey’s the fun and whatnot. There was, however, this one mission in The…

Death Stranding Is Going To Make No Sense And That’s Just Fine

This week on Kotaku Splitscreen, how could we not dive into the delicious insanity of yesterday’s nine-minute Death Stranding trailer? First we talk about some video games we’re playing, from Dark Souls 3 to Observation, then dive into news of the week (29:00) including Death Stranding’s ridiculous new trailer (and 2019 release date!), Call of…

Track: 2045 | Artist: Man with a Mission | Album: Chasing the Horizon 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!

KFC Is Now Serving Chicken Skin In Indonesia

As far as ideas go, KFC serving bags of crisp, fried chicken skin is an excellent one. Who doesn’t love the skin? KFC is offering bags of chicken skin at six locations in Indonesia: MT Haryono, Salemba, Cideng, Kemang, Kalimalang and Kelapa Gading. One order is the equivalent of 95 cents. This isn’t a first…

Osaka Nights. Osaka, Japan. By ShuYung Wu. 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! 

Gato Roboto is a Metroidvania where you play as a cat in a mech suit. In space. However, there are locations that your mech suit—and I’m sure all the cats in mech suits out there can identify with this—is too bulky to traverse, forcing you to pop out and be a regular little kitty in…

Tough Day At The Office

Vladyslava Hladkova is a concept artist based in the UK who works in the games business. You can see more of Vladyslava’s stuff at her ArtStation page.  

The Internet Reacts To Pokémon Sleep

At a press conference in Tokyo Tuesday, the Pokémon Company announced some unexpected Pokémon-related games and services, mostly on mobile devices. Pokémon Home is a cloud service that allows players to save and transfer their monsters. Great! There’s also a new Pokémon Go peripheral called the Pokémon Go Plus+. It is pronounced “plus plus.” Sure!…

Feedback Makes Me A Better Gamer–When You’re Not An Asshole

I’ve begun to think of my weekly, local Super Smash Bros. tournament as a sort of doctor’s appointment for my ego. Regulars tell me that it’s normal to just win one or two games at these things, yet selection bias mandates that the people who attend a lot tend to be confident that they’re really,…

Under The Bridges. Porsgrunn, Norway. By Marcus Patai | Instagram 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! 

Track: Now We Sleep | Artist: Artificial Language (Ft. Michael Lessard of The Contortionist) | Album: Now We Sleep Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

Starbase is a ludicrously ambitious-sounding space MMO. Developer Frozenbyte (of Trine fame) describes it as “a hybrid voxel/vertex-based space MMO with a fully destructible and infinitely expanding universe,” which basically means ship construction in the vein of Space Engineers married to the scope of Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen. There’s even an in-game programming language. It’s…

Twitch’s Artifact Category Is Porn-Filled Anarchy

There are, as you are probably already aware, not many people playing Artifact, the digital card game that developer Valve recently decided to take back to the drawing board. Just a hundred or so people are playing it at any given moment, as of this writing. There are, however, over 10,000 people watching streamers play…

Konami Reveals Full Contra Anniversary Lineup, And It’s Pretty Great

Konami’s upcoming Contra Anniversary Collection will include the NES version of Contra, the Sega Genesis game Contra: Hard Corps, and most other 8- and 16-bit games in the classic run-and-gun series, including the Japanese and European versions of the games—some of which are quite different from what we got in the U.S. The collection still…

Dungeon Crawlers Make Me Question What I’m Doing With My Life

I’ve been staring at my 3DS a lot lately. It sits on a shelf in front of my TV, not because I use it often but because I might pick it up again sometime. I do the same thing with books, leaving them out in sight so I remember to maybe try and read them.…

Track: Gate of Living | Artist: Ringo Sheena | Album: Sandokushi Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

A Deer Friend. Nara, Japan. By Julian Rincon | Instagram 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!