Half-Life NPCs Can Smell Corpses

Hate to break it to you, but Half-Life really stinks. In an enlightening video, MarphitimusBlackimus digs deep into the original Half-Life’s code and discovers that characters don’t just remark on smells randomly or because of scripted events; there’s actually a whole AI system for it. In short, there are three scent categories: meat, carcass, and…

We’re starting up our playthrough of Deadly Premonition live now on Twitch. You’ll come and join the chat, won’t you Zach?

Striking Voice Actors Didn’t Get Everything They Wanted, But It Was A Start

After a year of striking, countless career sacrifices and some thorny negotiating, the video game voice actors of the Screen Actors Guild‐American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) finally came to a tentative agreementwith the 11 struck game game companies last night. Without some big demands met, it’s easy to consider the tentative agreement…

The Rarest Stuff We Found In Akihabara’s Game Shops

You can blow a lot of money in Akihabara, the Tokyo district that houses the world’s densest cluster of nerd-related storefronts. And if you have far more cash than sense, you can throw it down on some of these very rare and highly desired vintage games and related items. Here’s a look at the highest…

Atlus Files Copyright Strike Against PS3 Emulator That Advertised Persona 5

Atlus has filed a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown against the creators of the Playstation 3 emulator RPCS3, previously noted for running Persona 5. With the emulator, the game would be playable on PC, which doesn’t officially run the game. RPCS3 is an open source Playstation 3 emulator capable of smoothly emulating numerous games. Atlus…

Valve Pulls Nearly 200 Spam Games From Steam

Valve has removed games from Steam before, but never this many, especially not all at once. Today, Valve yanked 173 games from the Steam store, all of which were tied to Silent Echo Studios, a company that’s become notorious among Steam users for publishing heaps of cheaply made games, typically by slapping together assets from…

Player-Created Cemetery Honors Fallen EVE Online Friends

Not everything in EVE Online is dedicated to death, destruction and betrayal. A few landmarks are dedicated to calm, quiet reflection. There’s the boneyard of B-R5BR, where permanent wrecks of destroyed Titans drift through space, placed there by CCP Games to commemorate the largest video game battle in history. And the EVE Gate, an enormous…

Zelda: The Wand Of Gamelon: The Kotaku Review

In 1993, Nintendo made the inexplicable decision to license The Legend of Zelda to Phillips Media, creators of the CD-i. Among the resulting games is Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon. It’s known as one of the worst games ever made. Replaying it 24 years later reveals a game with interesting ideas marred by atrocious execution.…

Silent Hill Will Always Help Me Remember A Remarkable Friend

My friend Kit Reed died on Sunday. She was a prolific, award-winning writer of speculative fiction. Her cluttered yellow house is now empty. I will no longer stop by for tea or make dumplings in her kitchen for Thanksgiving. Kit insisted on no memorials, finding even the prospect of friends meeting for a drink after…

Fortnite‘s Battle Royale Is A Delight (And A Whole Lot Like Battlegrounds)

The prospect of besting 99 other gamers through sheer resourcefulness and daredevilry is why the battle royale genre has become so compelling to millions of gamers. Survival shooter Battlegrounds now has the second all-time highest concurrent player count on Steam, and today, Fortnite, a multiplayer game about building forts and defending against zombie swarms, just…

The Best Game About Japanese School Girls Released Today

Released today for the PlayStation 4 and PC, Blue Reflection is an exploration of the relationships young women forge and the personal growth that comes from sharing experiences with friends, all in the form of a stylish magical girl role-playing game. Beats the hell of ninjas in bikinis with water guns. It’s a very strange…

EA Has Charts To Show That This Year’s Star Wars Battlefront Is An Actual Full Game

EA, a company willing to level with you about the deficiencies of last year’s sports games when it is time to sell you this year’s, is coming clean about the inadequacies of 2015’s Star Wars Battlefront. A new trailer for the game’s November sequel makes clear that, yeah, that last game was more short on…

Circle Of The Moon Is Secretly The Best Castlevania Game

The original Castlevania released 31 years ago on the Famicom in Japan. It launched a franchise that dominated games for decades. But there’s one game in the series that’s woefully underappreciated, the Game Boy Advance’s Circle of the Moon Released in 2001 as a flagship title for the Game Boy Advance, Circle of the Moon…