Ark: Survival Evolved Added Poop To Avoid Putting In A Suicide Key

In Ark: Survival Evolved, your character just kinda poops sometimes. It’s a little alarming at first, in the same way that I imagine pooping for the first time in real life is. The origin of that funny mechanic? Grimly serious. Turns out, Studio Wildcard co-founder Susan Stieglitz came up with it in order to get…

Shaq And A-Rod Bought Into A League Of Legends Team

Apparently unwilling to let Rick Fox have League of Legends all to himself, Shaquille O’Neal and the Yankees’ A-Rod just announced that they are getting into the esports business by investing in the squarely middle-of-the-road LoL and Counter-Strike organization NRG. In a statement to The Daily Dot, NRG chairman Andy Miller said that Shaq “has…

It’s Hard To Get Valve To Talk About Whether They Still Make Games

Recently at GDC I got to try out Valve’s new collection of VR game vignettes, The Lab. It was cool. It was also… another set of scattered ideas. It’s been years since Valve released a big game. The Lab is Valve’s Vive launch title, and it strings a series of VR minigames together with an…

An Indie Game With Some Very Cool Scene Transitions

I found this game Anamorphine at a Microsoft press event on Tuesday during GDC. It’s trippy, pretty, and it’s got some very cool scene transitions. We all know how much I love cool scene transitions The part I played had me walking through abstract dreamscapes that reflected the emotional fallout from my character’s relationship with…

What Destiny’s Menus Could Have Looked Like

Destiny has a hell of a user interface. It’s nice to look at, but like many things in Destiny it’s also nice to use. Just like any part of any finished video game, it went through a lot of rough drafts to get to where it is now. Yesterday at the Game Developers Conference in…

Blogging For Final Fantasy XV Sounds Really Tough

Today on the Square Enix blog, Final Fantasy XV community manager Taji tells the story of his adventures to write an article on the Internet, which is something we here at Kotaku are intimately familiar with. As Taji explains, he was sneaking around the FFXV office when he found an interesting-looking creature on one of…

Man Makes Up For Never Collecting A Charizard Pokémon Card As A Kid

Back in the good old days, everybody knew that Charizard was the only Pokémon card that really mattered. The unspoken understanding among Pokémon fans was that if you didn’t have a holographic Charizard, your card collection was shit. Sorry, it’s true! Not everyone was lucky enough to actually have a holographic Charizard, however. In the…

Here’s your first look at gameplay footage from Star Wars Battlefront’s upcoming Outer Rim expansion, including a cute nod to Han and Greedo’s preference for shooting each other first.

Mortal Kombat Characters Are Getting Drunk for St. Patrick’s Day

Today, Bo Rai Cho isn’t the only drunken master in Earthrealm. Everybody in Mortal Kombat X will be throwing back green beers and feeling a little bit luckier this March 17th. The new Watch Out Leprechauns premier tower went up earlier this week, bundling together eight matches where players will have to contend with modifiers…

The Year In StarCraft II

With StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void out the door, what’s next for Blizzard’s seminal RTS franchise? What else is coming this year? LET’S FIND OUT. On this week’s episode of our podcast, Kotaku Splitscreen, I’m joined by StarCraft II lead producer Tim Morten, who tells us about his history in the games industry and…

Dark Souls Fan Editing Full-Length Movies Telling Each Game’s Confusing Story

It’s tough enough to follow what’s happening in Dark Souls that Bandai Namco ran a contest asking people to help explain it. But if you’re looking for something in-depth, MoonlightButterfly on YouTube has you covered. I sorta know what happened in Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Dark Souls II, and Bloodborne, even if the story isn’t…

Damn, People Who Sell DayZ Cheats Make A Lot of Money

Services that sell game-breaking cheats are no secret; many multiplayer games, from Counter-Strike to GTA V, have their share of dishonest players. And, as it turns out, the people providing these cheats are rolling in the dough. As reported by PCGamesN, DayZ developer Eugen Harton had a GDC presentation yesterday that touched on Bohemia Interactive’s…

The Games That Inspired The Year’s Best Game Developers

We asked one question to the winning game developers at last night’s Game Developers Choice and Independent Games Festival awards: “What is the one game that inspired you to go into the creation of video games?” Here’s what they said: Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes (Steel Crate Games), IGF Winner for Excellence In Design “StarCraft.…

Angered Game Developer Sues Critic Jim Sterling For $10 Million

If game critic and video-maker Jim Sterling has a nemesis, it’s game developer Digital Homicide. That name might not sound familiar, as they’re a small studio that has released a couple of games on Steam. But they may soon enter notoriety after this month’s unprecedented actions. On March 16, Digital Homicide formally filed a lawsuit…

Surprise! Doom Is Still An Incredible Game

I have a confession to make: my introduction to shooters began with Halo and Half-Life 2, and because of this, I only recently tried my hand at Doom, id Software’s 1993 shooter. Because Doom was so old, I figured it had nothing to teach me. This piece originally appeared on March 27, 2015. Surely other…

How I Felt After An Entire Day Of VR

On Monday I ran an endurance gauntlet of VR demos: 10 games, 30 minutes each, one after the other. This article originally appeared on Kotaku UK. It was a showcase of all the Oculus Rift’s launch games, many of which I really liked. But it also brought up a question I’ve had for a while…

One-Punch Man‘s Hard Training Scene Recreated Shot-By-Shot

Airy Fidelity and his friends remade one of the most memorable scenes of One-Punch Man in real life: Saitama’s motivational speech about his strict workout methods. 100 push ups, 100 sit ups, 100 squats every day! And in this case, some clever usage of budget props, too. To contact the author of this post, write…

It’s Friggin’ Hard to Beat Undertale’s Final Boss in Minecraft

Hey, have you finished Undertale? If you haven’t, there’s massive spoilers within. But if you have, get ready for an extremely cool Minecraft build: a playable version of Undertale’s final boss fight. Created by redditor TheAfroOfDoom and submitted to r/undertale, the project is basically Undertale’s Photoshop Flowey fight, complete with (most of) the original visuals,…