Culture

Track: Evaporate | Artist: Dance Gavin Dance | Album: Artificial Selection Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

What Are You Playing This Weekend?

The weekend is for doing all those things you didn’t have time to do during E3, like sleeping, cleaning the house, and calling your family. It’s also for playing some video games instead of hearing about ones you can’t play yet. I am finally going to check out Prey’s new expansion. The Long Dark got…

Valve Adds Limits To Steam Achievements To Fight Rise Of ‘Fake Games’

Last year, Valve put limitations on Steam trading cards to stop sketchy developers from makinge a living leeching money from the user-powered trading card economy. Now it’s doing something similar with Steam achievements. In a post in Steam’s private developer-focused Steamworks group, Valve announced that achievements—like trading cards—will now be subject to a “confidence metric”…

Ask Dr. NerdLove: My Girlfriend’s Guy Friend Is Trying To Sabotage Our Relationship

Hello all you glorious Twitternet pervert herds, and welcome to Ask Dr. NerdLove, the only dating advice column to be ported to the Switch. This week, we’re air-dashing through dating dilemmas and charging your relationship’s recovery moves. What’s the polite way to handle the guy who keeps insulting your education in front of your girlfriend?…

Seeing The Resident Evil 2 Remake In Action Soothes My Skeptical Heart

When Resident Evil 2 released in 1998, it had to follow up on a game that defined a new genre of horror. Not only did it manage to improve the formula, it went on to be what many people consider the best game in the series. After a long stretch with no new information besides…

Castle Sieges Bring A New Level Of Strategy To For Honor‘s Multiplayer

For Honor is getting a free new mode on October 16 as part of the game’s Marching Fire update, and after getting a chance to try it at E3 it’s the only For Honor mode I want play. Inspired by games like Dota 2 and League of Legends, Breach is an asymmetrical siege mode with…

Every Super Mario Odyssey Transformation, Ranked

The core innovation of Super Mario Odyssey is Mario’s companion, Cappy. Cappy is a hat that can magically possess everything from non-living objects to living characters. Toss Cappy at an enemy, and the enemy will sprout a Mario moustache and a signature red hat. Mario gains full control over the creature’s movements and abilities. There…

How Yoshi’s Island Got Its Beautiful, Hand-Drawn Look

Prior to her interview at E3 this week with Splatoon 2 producer Hisashi Nogami, Kotaku’s Cecilia D’Anastasio asked me if there was anything I wanted to know. “Yeah,” I said. “Ask how Yoshi’s Island got its hand-drawn style.” Nogami, you see, was credited as a character designer on that legendary 1995 Super Nintendo game, which…

Track: I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend | Artist: The Ramones | Album: Hey Ho Let’s Go Anthology Disc 1 Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

Take-Two’s E3 Booth Has No Red Dead And Is Incredibly Chill

The Take-Two booth at E3 makes all other publishers look sweaty and sloppy. No insult to the others, really, because they’re just doing what game publishers do. They’ve got their games and their logos and their trailers and lines of people wanting to play stuff. Take Two’s got four walls of serenity. Compare that top…

The Art Of Frostpunk

Hi there. Fine Art has taken a little break this week with all the E3 madness, but now that things are quieting down it’s time to bring it back. And it’s a pleasure to be coming back with art from one of the year’s biggest surprise hits, Frostpunk It’s a game about death, drudgery and…

Podcast: Let’s Talk About Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

Did you know Nintendo just unveiled a new Smash Bros. game for Switch, and that it features every fighter in the history of the series? You say you did know that? Oh, okay. At E3 in Los Angeles, my colleague Jason Schreier sat down with Kotaku senior reporter (and Smash expert) Cecilia D’Anastasio to talk…

The Best Video Game Fashion From E3 2018

This year’s E3 looks were all about one thing: cool jackets. The game offerings at E3 this year were kind of slim. While I saw a lot of things I was excited about, it seemed like too few games are actually going to be playable soon, and many of them are hypothetical at best. The…

How Cyberpunk 2077 Quests Will Be Different From The Witcher 3

It’s hard to talk about CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 without talking about the studio’s last game, The Witcher 3. And so it came to be that a lot of our E3 interview with Cyberpunk’s quest designer involved discussion of both games. As part of Kotaku Splitscreen’s ongoing coverage of E3 2018, my colleague Jason…

My Friend Pedro Is Like A More Violent, 2D Max Payne

Before I knew anything else about it, I knew My Friend Pedro looked cool. I first came across the solo-developed indie game while going through the Screenshot Saturday hashtag on Twitter several years ago. Among all of the images of games in development shared by their makers was a masked man pirouetting through the air…

Two Long-Lost Nintendo Arcade Games Are Heading To Switch

Nintendo kicked off the final day of Treehouse Live with a huge announcement for fans of its classic games: Two arcade games that have never been officially released on home consoles are coming to Switch’s Arcade Archives: the original Donkey Kong, which is available now, and Sky Skipper, coming in July. Donkey Kong is a…

Track: Lippy Kids (Live at Blueprint Studios) | Artist: Elbow | Album: Build a Rocket Boys! Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

Taste Test For Coca-Cola Clear And More

Recently, Coca-Cola Japan released a clear Coke. But it’s not the only drink maker in the country that is going see-through. Anyone who remembers the 1980s and 90s can recall how clear—and white—drinks became en vogue. In Japan that meant, vodka, shochu and white wine. In America, clear liquor was popular, but we also got…

It Is Bayek, Of Siwa

This is Aussie cosplayer Yeliztaking on the star of Assassin’s Creed Origins, Bayek. If you’re wondering why the photos make it look like she’s in the desert, that’s because she was; they were taken in Kuwait by local photographer dawoodblog You can see more Yeliz’s cosplay at her Facebook page

A Plague Tale Is A Gross Game About Billions Of Rats

First announced at last year’s E3, A Plague Tale: Innocence is back this year to remind us all that rat fiction is super disgusting. Like, of all the terrible things that happen in The Witcher 3, the tale of a woman who can’t scream because rats have crawled down her throat was easily the most…