Nothing lasts forever. Neither you nor I, and especially not video games. Despite the promise of digital immortality, recent games have suffered the slings and arrows of content being retired, servers getting sunsetted, and entire storefronts falling away into the sea. Oh, and who could forget the tragic death of Mario, who this year’s Oscar…
Most of us will probably never play every game we own right now, let alone all the others we’ll buy or download in the future. In that sense, backlogs are like the universe: infinitely expanding and confounding to physicists. Sometimes you just have to make peace—or force yourself to make peace—with the fact that certain…
Colors mean different things to different people, but very specific colors mean the exact same thing to everybody who plays video games. You know the ones: gray, green, blue, purple, and gold. You covet the latter and revile the former. Loot is a universal language at this point, but it wasn’t always. On this week’s…
Memes. These days, they’re everywhere. They are the pillars upon which internet culture—and by extension, pop culture—stands. But once upon a time, memes dwelled in the internet’s dankest sewers, traded in the darkness by geeks, nerds, and outcasts. On this week’s Splitscreen podcast, we examine how video games helped propel memes into the mainstream consciousness—and…
Once upon a time, Shigeru Miyamoto famously said, “A delayed game is eventually good. A bad game is bad forever.” It’s a statement that felt like it would never fall out of fashion, until it did. Modern games are never finished. Bad games become good. Good games become bad. Games of all stripes add social…
There are snacks, and then there are snacks for gamers. Through chalky chemical combinations of dubious repute, they will somehow make you aim better in Fortnite. How did we reach the point where snacks for a hobby that takes place primarily on the couch are basically workout supplements? On this week’s food-focused episode of Splitscreen,…
Video games are expensive. They have been expensive for a very long time, and they keep getting more expensive. To an extent, it makes sense: Game developers need to eat! But after a certain point, it gets excessive. Loot boxes, gacha, and now NFTs are signs of that excess. On this week’s Splitscreen, we talk…
Somehow, horrifyingly, it has been nearly a full year since most of us went into lockdown to wait out covid-19. And while there is a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of a slowly, confusingly distributed vaccine, we’re still in the thick of it. On this week’s episode of the Splitscreen…
Survival is a term you hear a lot in video games, but what does it actually mean? For some, it’s all about crafting and base building. Or eating and sleeping. Or razing other people’s bases in the cold, cruel night. For others, it might mean a totally different genre—like survival-horror—or, curveball, The Sims. It’s a…
Somehow, miraculously, video game movies and TV shows are suddenly good. The Witcher is fun, Sonic inhaled box office money like so many chili dogs last year, and star-studded renditions of Borderlands and The Last of Us are on the way. Also, the new Mortal Kombat movie looks dumb as hell in the best possible…
In real life, if you encounter a large being hell-bent on beating the crap out of you, you call them “an asshole” or “a fully grown polar bear, but in my backyard, like in those nightmares I have.” In a video game, you call them “a boss.” That’s weird! Plenty of people want to fight…
It’s February, and love is in the air. But so are airborne particles that transmit a global pandemic, so real-world romance isn’t an option for a lot of people. Fortunately, uh, online games still exist, at least? And where there’s a will to flirt with complete strangers, there’s a way. On this week’s episode of…
GameStop is dead, long live GameStop. The embattled chain might be improbably back in the headlines, but that doesn’t seem to have convinced game-shoppers to game-stop avoiding GameStop. So what happens to GameStop now? On this week’s episode of Kotaku’s Splitscreen podcast, we discuss that pressing matter, as well as GameStop’s history as a bonafide…
History is the study of literally everything that has ever happened, and by that measure, it is objectively the most interesting of all fields. It’s also just totally, categorically wrong, like, 90 percent of the time. Case in point: You’ve probably heard that E.T. for the Atari 2600 was so bad that it crashed the…
This week, America had a normal one. Nothing major or out of the ordinary happened, and no disgraced proto-fascist insurrectionists with mouths wetter than a slip and slide left the highest office in the country. And yet, for some reason, we decided to center this week’s Splitscreen podcast on presidents. To kick off the episode,…
For the most part, the internet is a screaming void where nobody can agree on anything—not even what to scream about. But there is one unspoken rule that a remarkably large number of people hold sacred: no spoilers. Is that for the best, though, or is it limiting our ability to talk about games (and…
A new year is here, and surprise! It’s already extremely bad—just like the last one. But maybe better things lie ahead. Or, you know, at the very least, we might get ambushed by some cool video games in addition to all the bad news bears that will inevitably emerge from the shadows to batter us…
In games as in life, slipping and sliding on ice patches while torrents of snow transform your eyelashes into crystalline daggers can be frustrating, to say the least. And yet, ice and snow levels are a time-honored trope in video games. On this week’s episode of Kotaku’s Splitscreen podcast, we try to figure out why…
‘Tis the season to feel mildly embittered at basically all times. I speak, of course, of awards season, during which countless games take home trophies and plaques (or pictures of trophies and plaques), but not the ones you want to win. What, really, is the point, though? On this week’s episode of the Splitscreen podcast,…
Cyberpunk 2077 has dicks. Cyberpunk 2077 has vagina (singular). Already, you might be getting the impression that these things were not created equal. It’s a strange imbalance, especially given the way other characters in the game end up perceiving you regardless of your choice. On this week’s episode of Splitscreen, we bring on a special…
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