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CultureKotaku Game DiaryI’m The Only Person Playing Harry Potter: Wizards Unite In My Area
The first week that Pokémon Go came out, it was all my friends wanted to do or talk about, and we weren’t the only ones. Whenever I went on a jog around my neighborhood, I’d run into people of all ages and backgrounds at every PokéStop and gym on my journey. I expected the same…
By Maddy Myers Published June 21, 2019 -
UncategorizedWhat Tetsuya Nomura Actually Said About Tifa’s Breasts In The Final Fantasy 7 Remake
This past Wednesday, like every Wednesday, summaries of the leaked Weekly Famitsu appeared online in Japanese. The magazine doesn’t go on sale until Thursday, and this week’s leaks, along with some insufficient translations, have created confusions of what exactly Tetsuya Nomura said regarding Tifa Lockhart’s body in the Final Fantasy 7 remake. As pointed out…
By Brian Ashcraft Published June 21, 2019 -
CultureE3We Went Hunting In Monster Hunter: Iceborne
Just in time for the beta this weekend, here’s a brand new video from E3 in which Tim and I play the upcoming Monster Hunter World: Iceborne expansion. We take a photo with one of the monsters that you’ll get a chance to slay in the game, lob off a couple tails, and then try…
By Paul Tamayo Published June 21, 2019 -
Kotaku EastJapanIconic Anime Characters Made Realistic And Freaky-Looking
Sazae-san is the longest-running animated TV show in the world. Debuting in 1969, the anime is iconic in its native Japan. People have grown up with the characters, and now they get to see them all real and creepy-like. This is what the characters in Sazae-san usually look like. The main character is Sazae, who…
By Brian Ashcraft Published June 21, 2019 -
OpinionImpressionsCrash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled Is A Whole Lot Of Game (With A Whole Lot Of Loading)
1999’s Crash Team Racing for the original PlayStation is a kart racing masterpiece, equal parts challenging and charming. Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled for the PlayStation 4, Switch, and Xbox One is essentially the same game with a ton of extra content, lush modern graphics, and a bonus old-school throwback—really long loading times. As Vicarious Visions…
By Mike Fahey Published June 21, 2019 -
UncategorizedNew Total War DLC Looks Like A Horror Movie
For a while now, Creative Assembly has sold a “gore” or “blood” pack for their Total War games as DLC. It’s now Three Kingdoms’ turn, with an update called Reign Of Blood, and it is bloody I mean…pools of blood, big juicy stabbings I get, this is a game about war! But horse dismemberment and…
By Luke Plunkett Published June 20, 2019 -
UncategorizedMetal Gear Solid Gets 4K Remaster Thanks To AI
Thanks to ERSGAN(Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks) and the work of tophergopher1, this is Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes (the GameCube version/remake) featuring full 4K visuals, with none of the upscaling having been done by human hands. Instead, machine-learning has looked at the game’s old textures and cleaned them up the best way it saw…
By Luke Plunkett Published June 20, 2019 -
UncategorizedAuto Chess Took Over My Life In A Single Afternoon
I had plans, darn it. Grand plans. I was going to go outside, probably. I might have picked a flower. Maybe it would’ve slipped from between my fingers, only for me to bend down and find three stray kittens, who I’d have ultimately adopted and come to love like the furry little couch-ruining aliens they…
By Nathan Grayson Published June 20, 2019 -
UncategorizedGardens of Fog is a new D&D module whose adventure has been “designed to turn some stereotypes [about mental illness] on their head”, and where players will “encounter and interact with living representations of anxiety and depression”. Some of the proceeds of its sale go towards the charity Take This
By Luke Plunkett Published June 20, 2019 -
UncategorizedStarCraft Gets An Official Cartoon Makeover
Blizzard is going to release a graphics pack for Starcraft: Remastered that transforms the game, giving it the look of Carbot Animations’ Starcrafts series This isn’t a fan mod that Blizzard simply gave its blessing to; it’s the real deal, which applies to everything from ladder matches to the campaign to mission briefings, a nice…
By Luke Plunkett Published June 20, 2019 -
UncategorizedHarry Potter: Wizards Unite Improves On What Makes Pokémon Go Great
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is the amount of game that I wanted Pokémon Go to be at launch. It’s polished, there’s lots of stuff to do, and it sometimes really makes you feel like you’re a wizard. Having been a Harry Potter fan since I was around 11 years old, I am constantly combating the…
By Gita Jackson Published June 20, 2019 -
CultureSteam Finally Adds Official LGBTQ+ Tag For Games
The process of finding games on Steam has become increasingly driven by a tag system. Mouse over, say, Sekiro on Steam’s front page, and you’ll see descriptor tags like “Souls-like,” “Difficult,” and “Action.” Click on one of those tags, and you’ll be taken to a hub page for that game category. But that’s just the…
By Nathan Grayson Published June 20, 2019 -
CultureE3‘Xbox Live Is Not A Free Speech Platform’: Xbox Boss Promises New Features To Make Online Gaming Less Hostile
You can learn a lot about a person by the values they express, and possibly something about an entire gaming platform by the blog posts the person running it writes. That’s why I was so eager at E3 last week to ask the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, why he recently wrote a 1200-word essay…
By Stephen Totilo Published June 20, 2019 -
UncategorizedOne Of EVE Online‘s Most Challenging Jobs Is Being A Space Trucker
Cocky fighter pilots, brilliant fleet tacticians, devious political overlords, and bloodthirsty pirates are all science fiction tropes associated with the players of EVE Online. While each of these types can be found traveling between the stars, all of them would be crippled without an often forgotten archetype: space truckers. The space truckers of EVE navigate…
By Lee Yancy Published June 20, 2019 -
CultureSplitscreenFinal Fantasy VII Remake, Avengers, And Other Promising (And Confusing) Games We Saw At E3
E3 2019 brought us demos and details about games we can’t wait to play, like Link’s Awakening and the Final Fantasy VII remake, but it also threw us some real head-scratchers, like that upcoming Avengers game. On this week’s episode of Kotaku Splitscreen, we ran down all the coolest and most befuddling games that we…
By Maddy Myers Published June 20, 2019 -
CultureE3Wit And Charm Are Powerful Weapons In Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2
While I was playing Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2’s demo at E3 last week, I was feeling pretty smug about bluffing my way through a problem. Then, the developer holding the controller hit the wrong button, and a fight broke out regardless. Bloodlines 2 looks like it has a wonderful breadth of experiences to offer…
By Gita Jackson Published June 20, 2019 -
OpinionImpressionsNew Fan Mode Brings The Silliness Of Prop Hunt To Fortnite
Fortnite’s latest Creative mode, Prop Hunt, pits two teams of players against each other. One team disguises themselves as objects around the level, and the other team has to discover and eliminate them. It’s a little basic, but it’s fun. Originating in the sandbox physics game Garry’s Mod, and having shown up in other games…
By Riley MacLeod Published June 20, 2019