Dwarf Fortress: The Kotaku Review

Dwarf Fortress is a brilliant game, but it will make you work to find that out. It’s a game that loves its complicated world and the adventures it offers players, even when the odds of winning are slim. It rewards you for putting yourself in a sticky situation—a goblin siege, a forgotten beast with deadly…

Nintendo Answer Questions About Its Plans For China

In the past, Nintendo released its consoles through a subsidiary called iQue. Even Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa recently admitted that they “cannot say these releases were a great success.” In a recent Q&A for investors, Furukawa was asked about Nintendo’s plans for China. Why all the China questions? Because the Switch is finally going on…

Paper Craft Makes For Impressive Yu-Gi-Oh Fan Art

Twitter user Yto makes incredible Yu-Gi-Oh fan art by cutting up paper. Just look! It’s glorious. Check it out for yourself. This Black Rose Dragon was made from paper purchased from Daiso for a couple bucks. Below is how Yto did it. Yto’s other Yu-Gi-Oh fan art, which involves cutting up cards and creating miniature…

Found Something. Tambuli, Cebu, Philippines. By Martin Tan. 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! 

Ah, If Only These Nintendo Games Were Real

It’s that time of year again! Time for indie Japanese games store Meteor to hold their annual Famicase exhibition, which asks artists from all over the world to create cartridge art for NES/Famicom games that don’t actually exist. These are all available to check out in-person if you’re nearby (the store is in Tokyo), but…

There Were Plans For A Metroid Cartoon, With Samus As A Man

An estate sale for a former DIC Animation City employee has turned up promo art for four old Nintendo cartoons (like the Mario and Zelda ones) that never actually made it into production, including California Games, Castlevania and a very different take on Metroid There’s nothing else to go on other than the art itself,…

Melee’s Intro Remade Using Smash Ultimate’s Video Editor

The new video editor in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is good for many things, but none more so than using it to recreate the entirety of Melee’s intro sequence from the GameCube. This was done by Sass TwoFiveThree, and is an absolute work of art. “My goal was to recreate (in some sense) every shot…

Shakedown: Hawaii Offers A Breezy 16-Bit Farewell To The Vita

There are hundreds of missions in Shakedown: Hawaii, each one of them a bite-sized mashup of arcade violence and dark humor that takes aim at late capitalism. None of the missions overstay their welcome, but also, they don’t culminate into anything more rewarding than the experience of just driving around the game’s bright, lurid streets…

Speedrunner Shows Off What A ‘Perfect’ Ocarina of Time Run Looks Like

Most players take at least a few days to complete The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, especially if they’re collecting everything. Speedrunners do it in a few hours, using tricks and glitches to rush through the game. Every game has its limits, though: a peak of what’s possible for a human to perform. The…

Game of Thrones Is Starting To Make Less And Less Sense

Why is everyone on Game of Thrones making so many bad decisions all the time? Are the showrunners just sick of it? And why will nobody pet Ghost? This week on Kotaku Splitscreen, we discuss. We spoil the episode in its entirety, and also talk about differences between the show and the books. However, we…

Mordhau, As Told By Steam Reviews

Games with good swordplay are rare. Multiplayer games with good swordplay are rarer still, like Excalibur of Arthurian legend. It’s no wonder, then, that Mordhau has cut through the clutter and laid siege to the Steam charts. Steam users are digging the heck out of it. Kotaku’s Ethan Gach described Mordhau as a game that’s…

Many PlayStation Credit Card Users Aren’t Getting Their Promised Rewards

The Capital One Playstation credit card looks like a great deal. After making your first purchase on the card, you get a $50 gift card to the Playstation store, and from then on, every time you make a purchase with the card, you’ll get up to five times the credit card points in return (you…

The Perfect Starter Video-Capture Box

AVerMedia’s Live Gamer Mini is a small, black box. Plug its USB cable into your PC. Run an HDMI cable from your game console to its HDMI in, then another HDMI from its HDMI out to your TV and monitor. Load the software and boom: You’re recording 1080p, 60-frames-per-second game footage. There are external capture…

Japanese Ambassador To Sweden Sees Pikachu As His Son

While I’ve been gearing up for the Detective Pikachu movie, I’ve noticed how many other people around me, and all over the world, are also excited and expressing their own lifelong relationship to Pokémon. Even Japanese government officials are in love with Pikachu, like the Japanese ambassador to Sweden, who made the most adorable tweet…