Culture

A New Rocket League Game Is Coming To Phones

Rocket League Sideswipe is a new 2D mobile version of car soccer sim Rocket League coming to iOS and Android later this year, developer Psyonix announced today. Sideswipe matches will be two minutes long and feature 1v1 and 2v2 modes to accommodate people playing on mobile (the original game’s matches are five minutes and allow…

Hitman 3 Is Getting DLC Based On The Seven Deadly Sins

Next week, Hitman 3 will receive downloadable content based on the seven deadly sins, developer IO Interactive announced in a blog post today. Just don’t expect it to be quite like the DLC from Hitman 2 Among all of the levels in the recent Hitman trilogy, two of the strongest were paid expansions for Hitman…

Secret Little Haven Is 10 Minutes Of Weapons-Grade Vaporwave Nostalgia

Welcome to Morning Music, Kotaku’s ongoing hangout for folks who love video games and the cool-ass sounds they make. Today we’ll take a trip back to 1999 by way of 2018 with a breezy 10 minutes of refreshingly chill cyber-vibes. Victoria Dominowski’s Secret Little Haven (Bandcamp / longplay / VGMdb / Itch.io) is a unique…

Australian Government Official’s Anime Figures, Joker Statue Declared A “Psychological Hazard”

An Australian government official’s display of pop culture, comics and anime figurines in their office has been declared a ‘psychological hazard’, according to a statement from the Comcare government agency. The bizarre intersection of public servant and waifu figurines entered the national consciousness last year. Around 20 figurines were reportedly displayed in the office of…

1000s Of Steam Games Now Let You Play With People Who Don’t Even Have Steam Accounts

An update to Steam released earlier this week has, tucked away in its changelog, a very cool piece of news: if you’re playing a game that supports Remote Play Together, you can now invite anyone to play with you, even if they don’t have a Steam account. This won’t work for all Steam games, only…

Incredible Yakuza: Like A Dragon Cosplay Is Punching Me In The Face

The last time we saw Enyendabbling in Yakuza cosplay, it was as a solitary star of the gangster saga. This time, he’s back, and just like Ichiban in Like a Dragon, he’s brought some friends. This is most of the main crew (sorry Eri!) of Sega’s latest crime/wholesome adventure, with Enyen as Kasuga, Mr. G…

Epic Games Store Is Draining Some Laptop Batteries

My annoyances with Epic’s store are generally limited to Fortnite pop-ups and forgetting I even had games installed there, but then I play games on a big desktop PC. If you’re using a laptop, you might want to keep an eye on the store, and in particular what it’s doing to your battery. Some testing…

Blizzard Isn’t Making Any More Skins For Overwatch League MVPs

After this year, the Overwatch League will no longer create special skins to honor the League’s MVP. Earlier today, the Overwatch League announced the release of two special Overwatch skins celebrating the San Francisco Shock’s second championship win and Byung-sun “Fleta” Kim earning 2020’s MVP award. But tucked into the announcement on the Overwatch League…

Livestream Of Boulder Mass Shooting Raises Questions About What YouTube And Twitch Should Allow

Yesterday, a shooter opened fire at the King Soopers store in Boulder, Colorado and killed 10 people. Not long after the attack, a streamer, Dean Schiller, arrived on the scene and broadcast to an audience that topped out at nearly 30,000 concurrent viewers. The resulting video has been viewed over 650,000 times. Despite the visible…

GameStop’s Most Popular Earnings Call Ever Is A Bust

After weeks of record-breaking days on Wall Street thanks to a meme stock frenzy engineered by Reddit, people were hoping for some answers from GameStop’s executives during today’s call with investors. They got none. Today’s earnings call—the first since GameStop stock skyrocketed to the obscene value of over $400 a share earlier this year because…

Watch Dogs: Legion Will Be Free To Play This Weekend

Watch Dogs: Legion, Ubisoft’s open-world hacker game, will be free-to-play on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC starting March 25, the developer announced today in a blog post. The trial will allow you full access to the game’s open world. While you can complete Legion’s critical path in less than 20 hours—plenty for one marathon of a…

Liliana Vess, Noted Magic: The Gathering Girlboss, Now Teaches Kids At Strixhaven

As the Kaldheim cycle comes to a close, Wizards of the Coast has started to tease cards from Strixhaven, Magic: The Gathering’s forthcoming magical academy-themed set. I don’t pay too much attention to card teases, preferring—somewhat unwisely—to go into a new set completely unaware of what might turn up and picking cards in the moment.…

Serious Sam 2 Gets Massive Update 15 Years After Release

Croatian studio Croteam has partnered with independent developer Nathan “DwK” Brown to release a huge update to Serious Sam 2 today, more than a few years removed from the first-person shooter’s late 2005 launch. “It’s been five billion years since the last proper update for Serious Sam 2,” Croteam explained on Steam. “In the meantime, we…

Magic: Legends Open Beta Is Go

Cryptic Studios’ free-to-play Magic: The Gathering-meets-Diablo action card-playing game has launched into open beta via Arc Games and the Epic Games Store, giving players all over the world the chance to play the game Kotaku’s Ash Parrish said several nice things about. Magic: Legends is colorful spells versus hordes of creatures, with that signature Magic…

Amazon Doubles Down On Trying To Make Games With New Studio Led By Ex-Rainbow Six Siege Developers

Amazon is opening a new game studio in Montreal led by former Rainbow Six Siege developers to work on a new multiplayer game, the company announced today. The new studio, which joins the company’s existing ones across Seattle, Orange County, and San Diego, will be led by Ubisoft veterans Luc Bouchard, Xavier Marquis, Alexandre Remy,…

Modded GameCube Keyboard Is The Controller Of My Dreams

In 2002 Nintendo released a ridiculous-looking GameCube controller with a keyboard embedded in it so that Phantasy Star Online players could type to their friends. In 2021 someone’s modded it into an equally impractical but much prettier custom keyboard that I wish I could use to type all of my shitposts. “Y’all thought the gamecube…

Report: Upgraded Switch Will Use New Nvidia Chip To Upscale To 4K

Outputting native 4K graphics is hard. Upscaling to 4K is a little easier. According to a Bloomberg report posted early this morning, Nintendo’s long-rumored upgraded Nintendo Switch will leverage a new Nvidia system-on-a-chip to upscale its docked graphics to 4K. The current Nintendo Switch model is powered by a Nvidia Tegra X1+ system-on-a-chip (SoC). An…

Track: Train Radio | Artist: Pterodactyl Squad 

Report: Microsoft Wants To Buy Discord For “Over $10 Billion”

Bloomberg is reporting that Microsoft is one of several companies “in talks” to purchase chat and community platform Discord, for a price said to be in excess of $10 billion. The report says Microsoft is “in the running”, but that talks are continuing and no deal has yet been made. It’s not clear who those…

Half-Life & BioShock Come Together In A Very Strange Mod

Return to Rapture is a “campaign” made for Half-Life: Alyx that takes Valve’s star and drops her into the completely unrelated first-person world of 2007’s BioShock There’s a “plot” to explain this—basically, the Combine have found Rapture—but in essence you’ll be using the same controls and VR stuff you did in Alyx, against the same…