Culture

Chess Tournament Winner Banned, Says Opponent “Was Doing Pipi In Their Pampers”

Like a lot of other sports this year, chess has been having good times online,. Except that is for the very end of the Chess.com Pro Chess League Championships last week, when the winning team was disqualified for “unspecified fair play regulations.” As this feature on Defector reports (go subscribe!), Armenian chess grandmaster Tigran L.…

Your Dogs Won’t Die In The Red Lantern If You Don’t Want Them To

If you’ve ever watched a family pet succumb to disease or age, you know it can be an exceptionally painful moment. That’s why the developers behind upcoming dog-sledding game The Red Lantern are going to allow players to disable deaths entirely. The Red Lantern, available on Switch and the Epic Games Store on October 22,…

Pikmin 3 Deluxe is getting a demo later today on the Nintendo eShop. You’ll be able to transfer your save data to the full game, and completing the demo will also unlock an extra difficulty tier in it, too

Destiny 2 Is Getting Some Wild New Exotic Gear In Beyond Light

Bungie teased a bunch of new exotic guns and armor coming to Destiny 2 in Beyond Light next month in a new trailer today. One of them summons a floating orb that shoots bullets from an alternative timeline. One of the biggest criticisms of Destiny 2 back when it first launched was the dearth of…

PlayStation Trophies Are Getting A Refresh Before They Move Over To PS5

Sony announced it’s expanding the number of trophy levels and changing how they’re calculated ahead of the release of the PS5. Currently, PlayStation Network users have a level from one to 100 based on the total number of trophies they’ve collected while playing games on the platform. Starting later today that will change, with everyone…

Let’s All Cry Because Final Fantasy IX Is Over

Welcome to Morning Music, Kotaku’s daily hangout for folks who love video games and the cool-ass sounds they make. Today we’re going to talk about Final Fantasy IX’s ending theme, an audio sponge that sucks up 40 hours of emotion-packed Japanese RPG and squeezes it out all over every time you listen. Opening themes set…

Postcards From The Future

Amin Faramarzian is a freelance artist based in Turkey who has worked for companies like Lego, Hasbro and Pepsi. We actually featured Amin’s art back in 2014, but man, there’s so much good stuff to check out in 2020 that we’re circling back around and taking a look at pieces he’s done since. You can…

Genshin Impact Is Censoring Words Like ‘Taiwan’ And ‘Hong Kong’

The chat feature in Breath of the Wild-style gacha game Genshin Impact has been found to censor a variety of words, including references to places like Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Tibet. These details first gained prominence thanks to a video uploaded to Twitter by independent journalist Kazuma Hashimoto. The video, which Kotaku has reuploaded to…

DLSS On 240p Video Games Is Some Witchcraft

Nvidia’s DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) tech is one of the most impressive advances in recent video game history, able to take images that look fine and, through a process involving magic, make them look better. Even if you’re playing at some of the lowest settings imaginable. While most of you will be using it…

Blacktober Is A Hashtag Full Of Black Artistic Excellence

One of the first works of fiction I ever wrote was for my sister. She was a big Lord of the Rings fan and had the biggest crush on Orlando Bloom’s Legolas character, so I wrote a story starring a Black elf who fell in love with him. There were no Black people in Middle…

Watch Dogs Legion Will Include (Another) Assassin’s Creed Crossover

There’s a throughline in Ubisoft’s open-world games. You know, by now, to expect enemy outposts, tight combat, and roughly 99,000 points of interest. When you play one, you learn how to play them all. But two of Ubisoft’s biggest series have a bit more in common. Ubisoft revealed today that a member of the Assassin’s…

20 Years Ago Digimon: The Movie Premiered, And It Wasn’t Great

Two decades ago today Saban Entertainment and Fox Kids released Digimon: The Movie in theaters across the U.S. An extremely edited mash-up of three different Japanese Digimon short films, it wound up a mess of a movie with an awesome soundtrack. Let’s all get digital. In the late ‘90s, following the success of the first…

Streets Of Rage 4 Elevator Skip Turns Into Dance Party

Sometimes, you just gotta dance. And what better time to work on your moves than when skipping a huge section of Streets of Rage 4? In a recent clip, speedrunner Greenalink demonstrates a new bug that allows Streets of Rage 4 players to bypass an auto-scrolling elevator section. While there’s still a bit of downtime,…

Switch’s Monster Hunter Rise Won’t Have Voice Chat, Which Isn’t A Shocker, But Still

Monster Hunter Rise will be the first in the real-time action loot chaser series built from the ground up for the Nintendo Switch. Despite supporting four-play online co-op, however, the game won’t have any form of voice chat. Capcom confirmed the absence of that communication feature in an interview with IGN that was published earlier…

Illusion Of Gaia Speedrunners Use Spiders To Warp To Final Boss

After nearly 27 years, players have finally found SNES action-RPG classic Illusion of Gaia’s first speedrunning skip, and it revolves around using spiders to overload the game’s memory. Shared on Twitter late yesterday by speedrunner BOWIEtheHERO, the newly discovered trick has been dubbed the the Aura Barrier skip, and if executed properly will transport players…

Report: Activision Blizzard Closing French Office

Activision Blizzard will be closing its office in Versailles, France, according to Bloomberg The video game publisher’s French location, which handled press, localization, customer support, and marketing for Activision Blizzard games in Europe, employed 400 workers in 2019. The future of the office has recently been a shaky proposition, however, thanks to a massive round…

The Resident Evil Movies Are Getting Rebooted With An Adaptation Of The First Two Games

It’s time to go back to Racoon City. Again. This time in a new movie rebooting the Resident Evil series’ on-screen universe. Constantin Film, which made the existing Resident Evil movies, will work with writer-director Johannes Roberts to produce a film adaptation of the horror gaming franchise’s origin story, Deadline reported today. Maze Runner’s Kaya…

I Can’t Wait For Yakuza: Like A Dragon‘s Goofy Minigames

With singing, racing karts, playing arcade machines, practicing batting, and vocational tests to perform, it’s amazing down-and-out Yakuza scrapper Ichiban Kasuga gets anything else done in Yakuza: Like A Dragon. The game’s latest trailer demonstrates all the ways I’ll be driven to distraction come November 10. Give me fun side activities over actual game progression…

ESRB Rates Wolfenstein, Prey, And Dishonored Collections For Xbox Series X/S

The Entertainment Software Ratings Board website is a fun place to discover unannounced game compilations for next-generation hardware, like the Wolfenstein Alt History Collection and Dishonored & Prey The Arkane Collection, a pair of game bundles recently rated for the Xbox Series X/S. It looks like Bethesda, recently purchased by Microsoft for a cool $7.5…

MGS3‘s “Snake Eater” Is Good Enough To Be A Bond Theme

Welcome to Morning Music, Kotaku’s daily hangout for folks who love video games and the cool-ass sounds they make. Today, I hope you’ve got some decent upper-body strength because we’re going to climb up a very, very long ladder listening to Metal Gear Solid 3’s dramatic and campy theme, “Snake Eater.” Metal Gear Solid 3:…