Nice-A Buns, Mario

Today on Highlight Reel we have bodyguards, bad FIFA luck, accidental Mario snapshots and much more! Watch the video then talk about your favorite highlight in the comments below. Be sure to check out, like, and share the original videos via the links below. Subscribe to Kotaku on YouTube for more! Catch up on all…

The Asshole Goose Game Is Fun To Play

Don’t worry, everyone: the goose game is good. So far, anyway. I got a chance to play a demo of Untitled Goose Game, a game about a goose that is also an asshole (are those terms redundant?), at Double Fine’s Day of the Devs event in San Francisco earlier this month. I came in worried…

Developer Accuses Project Phoenix Director of Embezzling $1 Million From Kickstarter

Game developer Tariq Lacy has accused director Hiroaki Yura of stealing money from a Kickstarter called Project Phoenix to fund his latest game, Tiny Metal. Yura has fired back with his own allegations, accusing Lacy of sexual harassment, which Lacy denies. It’s a back-and-forth mudslinging fight and yet another piece of drama surrounding Yura’s disastrous…

Here Are Some Alternatives To Loot Boxes

Loot boxes! They’re all anyone can talk about these days. But what if we didn’t have to talk about loot boxes. What if there were other types of boxes we could talk about instead. I wish we could talk about these boxes, and the wonderful secrets they could contain. Hoot Boxes: A box full of…

Justin Wong Gets Mindfucked By Six Straight Throws

This weekend brought some of the best Street Fighter V players in North America to Boston to compete in one last Pro Tour event before Capcom Cup next month. While there wasn’t a whole lot on the line for many of the attendees, the matches still proved to be fast and furious, with one notable…

Battle Chef Brigade: The Kotaku Review

Battle Chef Brigade asks: What if you had to kill a Hydra before competing in Iron Chef? It’s a winning premise, and one that scaffolds the many-headed cooking game’s endless charms. Out today on PC and Switch, Battle Chef Brigade is one-part puzzler, one-part platformer and one-part role-playing game. Its eat-what-you-kill world revolves around Mina…

H1Z1 Dev Leaves Cheats On While Streaming In Apparent Accident

Streaming a game you’re working can be an awesome form of community outreach. Unfortunately, on a recent personal stream, one H1Z1 developer leapt into the game with some of their special powers still on. Joshua Kriegshauser is H1Z1’s technical director and often streams the battle royale game on Twitch. During a match with friends, Kriegshauser…

Strive For Power Is Like An X-Rated Stardew Valley

At first glance, Strive for Power seems unassuming enough. In this PC game, you have a mansion that’s fallen into disrepair and you have a servant, some stockpiled food, and a bit of cash. With that, you’re expected to survive. Then things get… sexy. (NSFW warning for partial cartoon nudity.) This world is peaceful, more…

Ten Years Of Rock Band, That Game Everybody Used To Play

One November 20, 2007, Harmonix, EA and MTV Games released the first Rock Band, a four-player, instrument-driven rhythm game that briefly changed the face of social multiplayer gaming. Where are your plastic instruments now? If you had told me in early 2007 that a $170 box packed with a game, guitar, drums and a mic…

Ultra Pokémon Sun and Moon Make Hunting Shiny Pokémon Way Easier

Pokémon fans know just how rare finding a “shiny” is: you can play multiple games across generations and never encounter monsters in a special coloring. Typically, you have a 1 in 4,000 chance of finding a shiny, which is pretty low. Ultra Sun and Moon change the odds by giving you another sure-fire way to…

Underneath His Cloak, The Sims 4‘s Grim Reaper is Pretty Cute

Once you get over the whole “harbinger of death thing,” The Sims’s the Grim Reaper is kinda hot. Over on the r/Sims subreddit, the simmer Corveaux said she was able to add the Grim Reaper to her family and remove his hood. The screencap she posted was of a young adult sim who was pretty…

The Best Part Of Oblivion Was The Absurd Poison Apples

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is an awkward game that feels a little bit like world full of Disney World animatronics. One piece of poison food highlighted the game’s silliness while also forcing players to get intimate with their targets. The poison apple was a very special and highly deadly item from The Elder Scrolls…

The League of Legends Free Agency Hot Stove Is Officially Ablaze

Tomorrow is the start of the free agency period for the 2018 League of Legends Championship Series, and the stove is delightfully hot. This season is kind of like the NBA or NFL offseason, with one exception: there’s blessedly no draft. Contracts expire or get bought out; whoever isn’t on a team is fair game.…

Now that the two canceled Avengers Alliance games are a distant memory, FoxNext Games and Marvel Entertainment unveil Marvel Strike Force, a squad based mobile RPG in which players battle it out with collectible heroes and villains from the comics, due out in early 2018. How long you think this one will last?

The Live-Action Fullmetal Alchemist Movie Is Actually Good

Fullmetal Alchemist is an anime I often say has everything. There’s civil war and political intrigue. There’s a well-wrought alchemy system. There’s brotherly competition and young love. There’s killer fight scenes. There’s even all seven of the deadly sins, except they’re incarnate. The Fullmetal Alchemist live-action movie was never going to have everything. It would…

Why Women Don’t Report Sexual Harassment

In March 2015, at a party at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Megan Farokhmanesh met a developer from the respected studio Naughty Dog. As they were talking, she says, he asked if she “fucked all her sources like on House of Cards.” Farokhmanesh, who had been working at Polygon since 2012, had just…

The Week In Games: River City Giving 

They are still making these games. The Kunio-kun series has been going on for over two decades now and shows no signs of slowing down. Whatever other strange projects Ark Systems gets itself involved it appears little pixel dudes beating up each other will remain constant. Rival Showdown is the latest game in the series…