Culture

Kotaku ‘Shop Contest: Autumn Game Harvest, Winners!

Everything’s falling, from the leaves to the President’s approval ratings, and even Assassins! If you live in the Northeast, autumn hit hard this week. Monday it was shorts and a t-shirt in the most humid 80s I can remember for the end of summer. By Friday I was closing windows and raking leaves after temps…

Speedrunner Speculates About The Best Possible Super Mario Bros. 3 Time Humans Can Achieve 

Kirua recently broke the world record for glitching through to the end of the game and now believes the best possible time is only a few seconds away. Two years ago, the speedrunner set a personal best time for completing the game at just under four minutes. Earlier this week, he came in at 3:05.633.…

Track: E=MC2 | Artist: Big Audio Dynamite | Album: This Is Big Audio Dynamite Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

This Week In The Business: Parley About Piracy

QUOTE | “In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements. That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect.” – A European Commission report finds no proof…

Track: Live Outside | Artist: Enter Shikari | Album: The Spark Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

The Original Fallout Is Free On Steam

If you didn’t take your first trip to The Wasteland until Fallout 3 or Fallout: New Vegas and want to see where it all began, now’s your chance. For the next slightly-more-than 24 hours, the original Fallout is free to download and keep forever on Steam. It’s pretty hard and kinda wonky and very weird,…

What Are You Playing This Weekend?

The weekend is for picking up that clean laundry on the floor because you can’t step over it forever, or at least that’s what your mom would say. Also, video games. Last night, after a shamefully long time away, I hopped back into The Witcher 3. I have forgotten all the buttons. When I left…

Track: King of Rock | Artist: RUN-DMC | Album: King of Rock Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 Players Are Finding All Kinds Of Ways To Break The Game

In games as in life, you can’t solve all your problems with violence. In Divinity: Original Sin 2, however, you can always teleport a boss from across the map to fight a different boss, thereby solving your problems with somebody else’s violence. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that Divinity: Original Sin 2…

Beach McCree Cosplay Is Here To Save Lives

If you still can’t decide whether McCree’s Summer Games beach skin is hot or not, cosplayer Leon Chiro is here to help. Chiro, who does everything from stunt work to acrobatics, was recently in the Caribbean dressed in the Overwatch cowboy’s weirdest outfit. If you’re wondering why the trees are all blowing backwards while the…

Gun Fits Perfectly

Today on Highlight reel we have near misses, trapped guns, confused NPCs and much more! Watch the video then talk about your favorite highlight in the comments below. Be sure to check out, like, and share the original videos via the links below. Subscribe to Kotaku on YouTube for more! Catch up on all the…

My Eight Biggest Steam Pet Peeves

Steam is perhaps the most monolithic gaming platform, the PC’s biggest show in town by a long shot. It’s also a multi-layered mess of systems and ideas, a Frankenstein UI (FrankenstUIn) assembled from limbs whose purposes are dimly remembered at best. It annoys the piss out of me sometimes, is what I’m saying. Valve’s one-stop…

Track: Turn It Up | Artist: Blur | Album: Modern Life Is Rubbish  Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

Track: Cutthroat (Lena Willikens Remix) | Artist: S U R V I V E | Album: RR7387 Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

Battlegrounds Players Are Staging Massive ‘Death Races’

Why walk (and get shot) when you can drive (and get shot)? It’s a question both asked and answered by a group of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds players who’ve started staging huge vehicular death races around the island. StoneMountain64 posted a video compilation of death racing antics, and they’re wild. The basic setup is as follows: squads…

Track: Minor Swing | Artist: Django Reinhardt | Album: (Live Performance – 1937) Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

Be Nice If A Star Wars Game Looked Like This

BIGO is an artist from Brazil working in both video games and books. I love this Star Wars stuff. It looks like the best iOS game Disney never bothered to make. An XCOM-y adventure game that looked like this would change the world. You can see more of BIGO’s art at their ArtStationand Behancepages. To…

Half-Life NPCs Can Smell Corpses

Hate to break it to you, but Half-Life really stinks. In an enlightening video, MarphitimusBlackimus digs deep into the original Half-Life’s code and discovers that characters don’t just remark on smells randomly or because of scripted events; there’s actually a whole AI system for it. In short, there are three scent categories: meat, carcass, and…

Valve Pulls Nearly 200 Spam Games From Steam

Valve has removed games from Steam before, but never this many, especially not all at once. Today, Valve yanked 173 games from the Steam store, all of which were tied to Silent Echo Studios, a company that’s become notorious among Steam users for publishing heaps of cheaply made games, typically by slapping together assets from…

Circle Of The Moon Is Secretly The Best Castlevania Game

The original Castlevania released 31 years ago on the Famicom in Japan. It launched a franchise that dominated games for decades. But there’s one game in the series that’s woefully underappreciated, the Game Boy Advance’s Circle of the Moon Released in 2001 as a flagship title for the Game Boy Advance, Circle of the Moon…