Culture

PlayStation Classic Plays Fine, But It’s A Bare-Bones Experience

With the PlayStation Classic’s release less than a month away, I went to PlayStation HQ this week for three hours of hands-on time with Sony’s nostalgic mini-console. It plays its selection of 32-bit classics like Final Fantasy VII and Resident Evil: Director’s Cut just fine, but the features of the device are pretty much the…

Track: One Armed Scissor | Artist: At The Drive-In | Album: Relationship Of Command Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

Skatebird is a game about a bird who skateboards. Not sure what else you were expecting, really. In it, you skate around an “expansively tiny world,” do Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater-inspired tricks, and try to cheer up your “big,” probably human friend. It’ll be out sometime next year.

Welcome To Overwatch, Ashe

Kim-Seang “Nesskain” Hong, formerly a Blizzard fan artist, is now a Blizzard artist, and has worked on the last few character reveal trailers, including the latest one, Ashe. Here you’ll see loads of the illustrations he did for the trailer, which were storyboarded by Blizzard’s Mio del Rosario. You can see more of Nesskain’s stuff…

Jeff Kaplan’s Plans To Combat Overwatch Fatigue

This year’s BlizzCon was an odd one on a lot of levels, but I was personally stricken by the number of friends and acquaintances who told me they’d taken weeks or months off from playing Overwatch. Last year and the year before, it was an obsession. Lately, though, it’s felt a little stale. Despite that…

Castlevania‘s Netflix Showrunner On Humanizing Villains And What’s Wrong (And Right) With Games

Netflix’s Castlevania is a strong adaptation and expansion on Castelvania III: Dracula’s Curse. I spoke to showrunner Adi Shankar about why certain characters were added, which Castlevania stories he thinks could also make good shows, and his thoughts on the similarities between Hollywood and the video game industry. On creating the ‘Castlevania Cinematic Universe’: Adi…

One Of My Favorite Red Dead Redemption 2 Details Exists Outside The Game

Many a critic will discuss a game’s verbs: the things you do in the game. That’s too general an approach for me. I’m here to praise Red Dead Redemption 2’s present participles. If you’ve played Red Dead Redemption 2, you may have not noticed them. You may have not noticed them because you can’t see…

Nintendo Says It Will Remove Racist Native American Animation From Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

In pre-release marketing materials for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, set to release on December 7, the character Mr. Game & Watch uses racist Native American imagery during one of his attacks. Nintendo now says it plans to remove that imagery from the game and has apologized to fans, saying the caricature doesn’t represent the company’s…

Welcome To The Age Of Indie Game Cosplay

Soundfall, a “rhythm-driven dungeon crawler that’s procedurally generated to music”, looks cool as hell. It’s also doing some interesting stuff as far as cosplay is concerned. Rather than rely on just trailers and demos, developers Drastic Games decided to get two of the most well-known cosplayers in the US, Stella Chuu and Bindi Smalls, to…

My Bloody Hero Academia

When a cosplayer is also a photographer, things can get a little creative, as we see here in this pic by Deegan Marie This cosplay image of Toga Himiko, from My Hero Academia, is a composite, meaning multiple photos have been stitched together to obtain the effect. And while we don’t normally post edited pieces,…

The Art Behind League Of Legends’ K-Pop Video 

While the main event of the weekend’s League of Legends action might have been the Worlds, the star ended up being a K-Pop video that French studio Fortiche made for Riot. While ostensibly an ad for some new skins, it was also a banger, and the end result of a massive twelve months of work.…

Blizzard Is Adding World of Warcraft References To Warcraft III: Reforged

At first glance, remastering 2002’s Warcraft III seems like a fairly straightforward task. Take the ugly bits and make them pretty. Overhaul the cutscenes. Give all the muddy terrain and building textures a 2018 makeover. Redo Arthas’ weird face. For Blizzard’s classics team, though, that’s just the beginning. Warcraft III, after all, opened the door…

The Case Of The Disappearing Nancy Drew Video Games 

On March 25, 2015, the weather in Bellevue, Washington was just warming up enough to play hacky sack, a favorite activity of the employees at the game development studio Her Interactive. That morning, they had something more pressing to think about, though: they couldn’t log into their computers. Server problems, some reasoned. They were confused,…

I Don’t Want Fortnite’s Cube Monsters To Go

For the last couple weeks, cube monsters have been rampaging through Fortnite matches (don’t call them zombies or you’ll hurt Epic Games’ feelings). But on Sunday, they, along with their namesake, disappeared from the game. It was beautiful, but I was sad. Cube monsters have been my favorite thing to happen to the game since…

Ramen Time

Max Gon is an artist at Lab Zero Games (Skullgirls) who has also worked at Riot. You can see more of Max’s art at his Twitter and ArtStation pages

It’s not Halloween, this is Corporate Cosplay, with 76ers guard Markelle Fultz getting paid by Microsoft and Bethesda to turn up to the game against the Pistons the other day looking like he’s about to line up for a midnight launch.

If You’ve Played Undertale, You Must Play Deltarune

Last week, Undertale designer Toby Fox released a free new game called Deltarune, and you may be wondering if it’s worth your time. Well, yes. Yes it is. If you enjoyed Undertale even a tiny bit, you should really go play Deltarune ASAP. It’s not clear whether Deltarune is a prequel, a sequel, or an alternate…

The Week In Games: Full Metal Tetris

It’s another week in video games! The Switch gets a lot of ports this week, the PS4 gets The Tetris Effect, and the PC will see a new Leisure Suit Larry. We have a lot of big games on the horizon too, with Fallout 76, Let’s Go Pikachu & Eevvee, and Hitman 2 leading the…

Tense Times

Soufiane Idrassi is a concept artist at Ubisoft, where he’s worked since 2015. You can see more of Idrassi’s stuff at his ArtStation page

The winter MCM London Comic Con was held at the end of October in the British capital, and Sneaky Zebra was there to capture the whole thing on film.