I spoke at GDC 2019 and gave a short talk at the Animation Microtalks alongside talented animators from studios like Blizzard and BioWare. Our talks, including my own on the beauty of idle animations, are now live and free to see on YouTube. Give it a watch!

This YouTuber Heard You Like Minecraft, So He Put Some More Minecraft Inside Your Minecraft

Streamer, programmer, and speedrunner SethBling is always cooking up fascinating new gaming feats: a machine learning Mario Kart AI, an SNES cartridge that runs mods, an Atari emulator that runs inside Minecraft. His latest creation is a 2D version of Minecraft that runs inside a Minecraft chest. SethBling showed how it works in a video…

The Intro To Judgment, The Yakuza Team’s Latest Game, Is Perfect For Its Detective Soap Opera Vibe

Judgment, out tomorrow for Playstation 4, is the latest game from the makers of Yakuza, and it thrusts players into the shoes of a stylish private detective trying to solve a violent murder. One of Judgment’s greatest strengths is how much it leans into its television influences in order to craft a mood worthy of…

Samurai Shodown Is Slow And Deliberate In The Best Way Possible

Samurai Shodown, which arrives for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One tomorrow, is the series’ first original outing in eleven years. Although it’s unnumbered, this release represents the seventh mainline installment of the storied fighting franchise, bringing its unique brand of methodical swordplay to a generation already overrun with sequels, reboots, and resurrections. My biggest question…

How The Website That Lets You Create Frankenstein Pokémon Came To Be

Though Pokémon fusions have had a recent resurgence on websites like Tumblr, people have spliced Pokémon together for a while now. That’s how Alex Onsager, the man behind the Pokemon Fusion website, initially got the idea: by watching others fuse Pokémon ‘by hand.’ But one day he thought to himself, what if I build something…

Gears 5 Developer Says It’s Riskier Than The Last One

Microsoft’s head of all things Gears of War, Rod Fergusson, says his team is playing it less safe with September’s Gears 5 after feedback that the series’ last installment didn’t go far enough. “We felt like we had to prove ourselves,” he said of the team’s previous effort on 2016’s Gears of War 4. It…

Outer Wilds Is One Of The Best Games I’ve Ever Played

If you put me in a room with ten executives and asked me to pitch Outer Wilds, here is what I would say: “It’s got the exploration of a Metroid game and the structure of Majora’s Mask crossed with the interstellar wonder of No Man’s Sky and the narrative framework of Return of the Obra…

Week In Games: Let’s Go Make Another Mario

Perhaps the best-known game coming out this week is Super Mario Maker 2, a sequel much anticipated by many of us here at Kotaku, not to mention Mario fans everywhere. But that’s not the only cool game on the docket this week. There’s a Switch port of the original Devil May Cry, plus the 2019…

In The Pokémon Anime, Get Ready For Ash’s Crushing Defeat

In the Pokémon Sun & Moon anime, the Alola League is getting underway. There is rampant speculation that this time, Ash is going to win. But don’t get your hopes up. It’s Ash after all. As teased in the most recent episode, the Alola League champ gets to battle the Masked Royal: The theory is…

Clouds, A Cathedral And A Cone. Edinburgh, Scotland. By Nathan Seyler. 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!

Evangelion Dreams

Huang Fan is a freelance artist and illustrator who has worked on things like the Rampage movie and Blur’s Destiny 2 animation. You can see more of his stuff at his ArtStation page

A Ruthless Game Where You’re Beyoncé’s Assistant, Which You Play On Twitter

Twitter is hell, but even amidst the worst impulses and examples of human communication there is hope. Like this choose-your-own-adventure game made by Green Chyna which might be the best use of the social media network I’ve ever seen. The premise is that you’re Beyoncé’s assistant for a single day, and have one goal: not…

Streamer Raises Almost $1 Million For Charity In Just Four Hours

GuardianCon, which began a few years back as a small Destiny con and has since grown into an all-weekend show held in July in Orlando, also runs a week-long charity stream. Which has just raised over $3 million for a children’s hospital in Memphis. As Forbes report, the stream operated in four-hour blocks, with streamers,…