Culture

Remnant: From The Ashes, As Told By Steam Reviews

A week after its release, Remnant: From The Ashes remains at the top of the Steam charts. It’s safe to say that its core conceit—what if Dark Souls, but guns—is resonating with people. Is the game living up to lofty, gothy expectations? For the most part, so far, so good. Kotaku’s Heather Alexandra found herself…

Sony Is Still Trying To Stop People From Hacking The Vita, For Some Reason [Corrected]

Correction: 8/28/2019, 1:30 p.m. ET: After the publication of this story, the Vita hacker in question now says that the h-encore² hack in fact still works with the 3.72 Vita firmware. Kotaku apologizes the error. The original story is below. Less than a day after a new exploit for jailbreaking the Vita was discovered, Sony…

Finding An Old Game Boy Advance Feels Like Slipping Into A Storybook

Not too long ago, I got a box from my folks with a bunch of stuff I had been keeping in their attic. I live in New York, where boxes are generally bad news: They’re full of stuff, and when you take stuff out of a box, you have to find a place to put…

The Best And Funniest Moments Of SonicFox’s 72-Hour Charity Stream

Legendary fighting game competitor Dominique “SonicFox” McLean spent last weekend raising over $20,000 for charity during a marathon livestream that featured copious amounts of Mortal Kombat and Injustice gameplay, surprise guest appearances, musical performances, and one major change to the young player’s facial hair. SonicFox has long been open about his identity, which could be…

Fan Creates Hilarious, Dead-On Tweets By Fire Emblem: Three Houses Characters

One thing Fire Emblem: Three Houses does well is endear you to its memorable characters. After spending almost a hundred hours with the teens at Garreg Mach, I’m somehow still eager to see more of these characters’ hilarious interactions. It wasn’t a huge surprise when one fan took their huge personalities through the next logical…

Control Proves That An Office Building Is The Perfect Setting For A Metroid-Like

Control, a Metroid Prime-like game that takes place inside an impossibly vast US federal government building, is out today. As someone who has been paying the IRS back taxes for a decade, it feels like a game that was made to terrify exactly me. It is also one of the best games I’ve played this…

The developers of Cuphead have made the game’s excellent soundtrack available for purchase as sheet music. It’s very cool to see they’ve made separate arrangements for high school jazz band, high school concert band, professionals, and barbershop quartets

A Collection Of Beautiful, Hand-Drawn Maps For Video Games And RPGs

We’ve got a very cool feature for tonight’s Fine Art: the work of Francesca Baerald, an Italian artist who has drawn gorgeous fantasy maps for companies like Square Enix, Fantasy Flight, Games Workshop and Dark Horse. You can see more of Francesca’s stuff at herpersonal site and ArtStation page

Our Favorite Cosplay From Anime Expo 2019, North America’s Biggest Anime Con

Anime Expo, held every year in Los Angeles (at the same venue E3 is at), is the biggest anime show in North America, having run for 27 years and attracting over 110,000 people through the gates in 2019. That means there was a lot of fantastic cosplay on show, much of it captured by Mineralblu…

Over A Million People Are Watching World of Warcraft Classic On Twitch

After two years of anticipation, WoW Classic is finally live. Top streamers from every corner of Twitch are streaming it right now, resulting in an audience of over one million concurrent viewers—and some seriously congested starter areas. As of this writing, the slavering horde of Horde (and Alliance) fans topped out at 1.1 million people.…

Before Destiny 2: Shadowkeep, Here’s What You Need To Know About Eris Morn

When Destiny launched in 2014, it wasn’t really a place you went for rich, interesting characters. Sure, they were around, but it would take some time before they’d be fleshed out. Commander Zavala, Ikora Rey, and of course, Cayde-6 are all much more memorable now than they were five years ago. That’s not just because…

Ion Fury Developer Backtracks, Says It Won’t Remove Gay Joke Because Of ‘Censorship’

Upon its release, Ion Fury seemed like a bullet-proof success. The Duke Nukem and Shadow Warrior-inspired retro shooter launched earlier this month to rave reviews, with many praising its bloody, chunky blend of old and new. But, shortly after, players discovered homophobic content in the game, and some began to circulate screenshots of transphobic and…

Five Awesome Sims YouTubers To Watch

Playing The Sims can be a huge time sink—if you’re at all particular about building houses or the way your Sims look, you can spend at least an hour setting things up before you actually let the simulation begin. And that’s before you even get to things like Legacy Challenges, which are supposed to run…

Dungeons & Deceptions: The First D&D Players Push Back On The Legend Of Gary Gygax

Everybody calls Rob Kuntz last, he says. Those who want to know about the history of Dungeons & Dragons start with co-creator Gary Gygax’s kids, one of Gygax’s biographers, or D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast. As they’re wrapping things up, they might get around to dialing up Kuntz, a 63-year-old game designer. And once…

My Co-op Gaming Night Turned To A Couple Sad Hours Of Downloading Updates

Recently, a close friend of mine returned after having been out of town for a little while—like way out of town, where time zones made real-time communication out of the question, even though we live in The Future. To celebrate his return to my time zone, we decided to play some games together online and…

Track: Daily Battles | Artist: Thom Yorke & Flea | Album: Motherless Brooklyn OST

Kanada Myojin Shrine (Kanda Matsuri Procession). Tokyo, Japan. By Jimmy Ho | Instagram | Official Site JPGs is a photo peek into wherever gamers might find interesting. If you’re a photographer and have images you want to share, drop us a line!

Jawbones And Swords, Man, That’s What I Do

Andrew Mar is an artist and illustrator who has worked for companies like Wizards of the Coast and Bethesda. You can see more of Andrew’s stuff at his personal site and ArtStation page. He’s also got a hardcover art book coming out which has already passed its Kickstarter funding goal, and you can get that…

Sega’s Logo Is A Different Color In Japan

File this under “things I had not even noticed let alone thought to ask”. Over the weekend, Japanese developer Yuichiro Kitao (I am Setsuna, Crystar) pondered on Twitter why some Sega games had different coloured logos than others. While this could have just been some idle observation, turns out he was onto something: Sega of…

The Week In Games: Off The Chain!

It’s almost September, and you know what that means. It’s time to ride the cybernetic battle cat of your dreams into the alien frey. Huzzah! PlatinumGames’ newest Nintendo exclusive is finally here, and it looks like it might actually live up to the hype. I still don’t really understand what the game is about, but…