Culture

Stuck Inside All Weekend? Get Drunk

This week on Snapshots, cool lighting, dangerous monsters, a wolf, explosions, a poor robot getting sliced in half and Kratos hits day 5 of staying home, so he starts drinking. Drink responsibly. Unless you are a demi-god badass. Then you can just get wasted all day. Kotaku Snapshots is a weekly look at some of…

Stunfisk Smiles When It Hurts People

Every Pokemon is interesting and worth talking about. I don’t play a ton of Pokemon, but I do enjoy the universe and I love learning more about the creatures in it. So, Here’s Another Pokemon! It’s Stunfisk! Stunfisk Details Type: Ground/Electric Average Height: 2′ 04 Average Weight: 24.3 lbs. First Added In Generation V Some…

How’s It Going: Pets Edition

Hi! Welcome back to our daily open thread. Let’s talk about our wonderful pets. My girlfriend has started working from home. She has always had retail or office jobs and working from home has been weird for her. What has helped, a lot, is having our two cats around. She pets them and kisses them…

Her One Weakness Was Gravity

Hello! This week we hear what the White House thinks about video game speedrunners, buy all the Gundam kits at the store, check out the new Sonic trailer, play some Doom to feel better and watch a superhero lose her face. Great Kotaku Content From The Past Week There is something truly satisfying about being…

In Hell, All Fonts Are The Size Of Doom Eternal‘s

Please, not like this. For some reason, I thought we were finally starting to turn a corner on tiny fonts. More and more games that launched with them were also getting patches to fix them. The Outer Worlds even got its font-size update updated But now Doom Eternal is here, and despite adding twice as…

What Are You Playing This Weekend?

The weekend is for trying to calm down, take stock, and press onward. It’s also for totally ignoring my feelings by playing video games. I’ve never played an Animal Crossing game before, but our EIC Stephen told me about the series so eloquently a few weeks ago that I’m totally sold on New Horizons. I…

The wait is finally over! Come hang out with me on Twitch while I stream Animal Crossing: New Horizons LIVE.

The Messenger Developers Raise Over $150,000 To Make Classic JRPG

The makers of the spectacular retro action platformer The Messenger have announced their next game: a gorgeous-looking turn-based role-playing game called Sea of Stars Sabotage revealed the upcoming game on Kickstarter yesterday, where it’s already broken its $90,000 funding goal. While not planned to release on consoles and PC until sometime in 2022, what the…

Poor Pay, Abuse, And Harassment: How The World’s Biggest Wizard School Lost Its Magic

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include details relating to the allegations that a Dziobak writer had engaged in sexual misconduct. Those allegations were subsequently retracted following a libel suit. We regret the omission. Cheyenne Rain had never been to wizard school. Or Poland, for that matter. But all that was about to…

How’s It Going?: Shake It Off Edition

Good morning! Welcome back to our daily open thread. This is the most human contact I’ve had in days, so I’m glad you’re here. Friday feels a little weird when I’ve been stuck at home all week. It’s the weekend—time for more…sitting at home? Still, it’ll be nice to have less reasons to look at…

Tiny Ergonomic Keyboard Gets It Done With Only 44 Keys

This is the Keyboardio Atreus. It’s an ergonomic mechanical keyboard that’s less than 10-inches wide. It only has 44 keys, but that’s all the keys it needs. It’s a beautiful piece of typing hardware. It might not look like it has enough keys, but the Atreus has all the functionality of a full-size keyboard, just…

The Origin Story Of A Very Sharp Outfit

Beth Hobbs is an artist at Creative Assembly, where she’s worked on Total Wars like Three Kingdoms and Warhammer What I love about some of this is how it gives us a look at the earliest stages of some of these designs. I appreciate a good desktop wallpaper-type image as much as anyone else, but…

The big March 24 update coming to Ghost Recon Breakpoint won’t just add a free overhaul that lets players ditch the game’s annoying tiered loot system. It will add a paid expansion (first mission is free) that, according to a new trailer, brings Splinter Cell’s Sam Fisher into the mix.

Life, And Seven-Year-Old Jurassic Park Mods, Find A Way

All the way back in 2013,a scrappy young writer by the name of Kirk Hamilton wrote about an ambitious Half-Life mod called Jurassic Life, which wanted to bring some aspects of Jurassic Park—namely the dinosaurs and firing a shotgun at them wildly—to the Source Engine. As you do with ambitious mod projects about 10 minutes…

GameStop: We Can Stay Open During Lockdowns Because We’re ‘Essential Retail’

The struggling video game retail chain GameStop told all of its stores this afternoon to stay open even in the event of state or city lockdowns to protect against the covid-19 pandemic, emphasizing that it is “essential retail” alongside groceries and pharmacies and should therefore be exempt from enforced closures. “Due to the products we…

Division 2 Players Are Struggling To Find 2 Well-Hidden Enemies [Update 2: They Have All Been Found!]

The recent Warlords of New York expansion added a whole new lower Manhattan map to The Division 2, complete with new missions, enemies, checkpoints and gear. For players willing to search and explore, there are secret hunters, elite enemies, who are hidden in the new city. While most of them have been found so far,…

Microsoft’s AI Experiments Are Creating Unbeatable Raid Bosses

Raid bosses are the toughest fights in any massively multiplayer online game, but eventually players always find ways to crack them. Now developers are looking at ways to use cloud computing to give raid bosses a way of fighting back. During one of Microsoft’s Game Stack developer livestreams yesterday, software engineer James Trott said that…

How Breath Of The Wild Helped Me Love Food Again

Playing video games is a personal experience. Sometimes it’s surprising just how personal it gets. The first time I booted up Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I was looking forward to the mind-boggling puzzles and a more fleshed-out version of the Princess Zelda character. I didn’t think that what I’d adore the most…

Ask Dr. NerdLove: How Do I Rebuild My Marriage After An Affair?

Hello, all you frightening skin machines, and welcome to Ask Dr. NerdLove, the only advice column to survive the Corrupted Blood Plague. The world may be in crisis, but love, dating and relationships are still going on, and with them come relationship troubles. So let’s distract ourselves from the world and solve the problems we…

How’s It Going?: Music Edition

Good morning! Welcome back to our daily thread, which is hopefully more comforting/less maddening than staring at your Facebook feed. With the bar under my house closed, it’s really quiet in my apartment. I’ve taken to playing some music while I sleep, mostly classical. Why does Spotify have so many classical playlists for babies? Is…