Kotaku East

Watch E.X. Troopers in All its Alien Bug-Stomping Glory

E.X. Troopers is a spin-off title to Capcom’s Lost Planet series—though it may not seem like it at first glance. Unlike the realistic graphical style of the main series of games, E.X. Troopers is presented entirely in a manga-esque style. The game’s cutscenes even come complete with panel frames and written onomatopoeic sound effects. The…

Does Call of Duty Camo Work in… Tokyo? Let’s Find Out.

You know in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, when Lt. Price and Cpt. MacMillan wear those “ghillie suits“? The camo outfits look like they’re wearing grass and foliage. Those come in handy while sneaking about the Russian wilderness. They’re less handy when in urban jungle known as Tokyo. Or are they? Japanese site Rocket…

Internet Defends Man Accused of Reading Porn in Public. Things Get Ugly.

“This guy is like totally reading a dirty magazine on the train,” the high school student’s tweet read. Accompanying the tweet was a photo a man, his legs pressed close as he read a magazine. The tweet, and the visible photo of his face set off a flurry of comments online in Japan. This man…

When Tekken Lets Its (Plastic) Hair Down

The latest entry in Kotobukiya’s bishoujo line of cute figures is Emili “Lili” de Rochefort. She joins Julia Chang, Alisa Bosconovich, among others in the bishoujo line. The figurine will be out next April in Japan. If this is your thing, there’s more in the above gallery. TEKKEN美少女 リリ (フィギュア) [Hobby Search] Kotaku East is…

PlayStation exec Shuhei Yoshida is busy playing with his new Wii U. If you have any words of advice, here’s his Twitter

What Headphones Anime Characters Are Wearing

Female characters wearing large headphones is a trope in Japanese anime. The headphones make the characters’ heads look smaller, thus, by anime standards, appear “cuter”. Tropes aside, the headphones are often based on real products. But which ones? In the past few years, on anime sites, music sites, and anime music sites, audiophiles and casual…

Sword Art Online Exists, So They’re Making an Adult Video of It

In Japan, there are tons of adult movies based on video games and anime. A good way to judge the popularity of a game or a cartoon is to see if it’s inspiring blue movie adaptations. Is new anime Sword Art Online popular in Japan? Well, as porn star Hibiki Otsuki has revealed, she is…

Macross 30 Looks to Be The Macross Game We’ve Been Waiting For

This year has been a great year to be a Macross fan. To celebrate the franchise’s 30th Anniversary, there has been a new movie, concerts, a TV documentary, and the release of the anime classic Macross: Do You Remember Love? on Blu-ray. Yet, the best may be yet to come in the form of the…

Maybe You, Too, Can Get a Job Smelling Farts

Perhaps you don’t have a job. Or maybe you want a new challenge, but you don’t know what you want to do with your life. If you are under 45 years old, you don’t drink, you don’t smoke, you don’t use perfume, and you don’t have nasal problems, there’s a career waiting for you in…

I Watched the Persona 4 Anime Without Ever Playing The Game

There’s a point in every gamer’s life as they get older when they realize that with work and everything else going on in their lives, they just don’t really have time to play every game they want to anymore—no matter how good it is reported to be. And after spending over four years constantly “planning…

Your Homework? Machine Guns.

College is hard! There are all those books to read. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to mix the workload up. Like, with some assault rifles? These images reportedly show a popular class at Nanjing University of Science and Technology in China. The students are studying machine guns and taking them apart to see how they work.…

This Might Be the Last Cosplay You’d Expect from Japan

When you think of Japan and cosplay, you probably imagine ladies dressed in skimpy anime outfits or dudes in Gundam gear. And you’d probably be right! That type of cosplay is prevalent, sure, but it’s not the only game in town—especially with more and more Japanese players totally digging Call of Duty Recently on Japanese…

How Iron Man Inspired One Man To Create His Own Armor

In a small two story 76 square meter loft located 30 minutes from the northern edge of Beijing just outside the fifth ring road, 27-year-old Wang Xiao Kang sits at his work desk looking at blueprints. Towering right over the slightly hunched Wang on a bookshelf as he reads his laptop screen is a 7…

Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII Makes Players Manage Time

Lighting Returns, the upcoming Final Fantasy XIII title, uses a time mechanic. In the game, the world has only 13 days left before it ends. In a recent interview with 4Gamer, game designer Motomu Toriyama went into slightly more detail about the game’s time mechanic. As mentioned above, the time limit in-game is 13 days.…

Little Girl Learns about Trolls, Thanks to the 3DS

There are strange people out there! They’re filled with malice and evil thoughts. And some of them even have 3DS handhelds. Considering how neither the 3DS nor StreetPass are exactly new, it’s somewhat odd that Yomiuri Shimbun, one of Japan’s biggest newspapers, would run a story on StreetPass trauma, but it did anyway after one…

Hitler in a Mini-Skirt and Stalin in Hot Pants. Infamous Dictators as Anime Ladies.

Some of the most infamous dictators of the 20th century have now been turned into cute anime characters with not so cute accompanying biographies. The book is Nyotai ka!! Sekai no Dokusaisha Retsuden (にょたいか！！世界の独裁者列伝 or loosely, “In Female Form?! Biographies of World Dictators”), and it features illustrations by various artists, such as Nishieda and Takeshi…

This PS Vita Might Rip Out Your Spine

PS Vita game Soul Sacrifice, which lets you rip out your spine and wield Excalibur, finally has a release date in Japan: March 7. But that’s not all. The game is also getting a special bundle, complete with a special Soul Sacrifice emblazoned Vita. Priced at ¥29,980, the bundle comes with an original Soul Sacrifice…

I Had No Idea Japanese Melons Could Be So Damn Terrifying

There are local characters in Japan called “yura kyara” (“weak” or “laid back” characters). They often promote local businesses or produce. And being Japanese characters, they’re generally cute. So to promote Yubari melons, which are generally seen as being “cute” as well as often expensive, you’d think the yura kyara would be cute. You’d be…

This Desktop Design for Gaming Addicts Would “Ruin” Humanity

Sometimes you settle in for some PC gaming or web surfing. And you just don’t get up. You can feel your bum go numb and the chair meld into your skin. Surely, you know the feeling. If so, maybe the above internet-produced desktop design would appeal to you. And if it appealed to enough people,…

Want to use your PlayStation 2 controller to play Wii or Wii U games? There’s a peripheral for that