Japanese Cat Cafes Are More Fashionable Than Ever 

We’re entering the next phase of cat cafes. It’s fancy. Until recently, the vast majority of cat cafes have been rather simple, no-frills operations. That’s not to say they’ve looked, I dunno, ugly, but many of them have been run out of bland-looking spaces. The aesthetic focus has been the cats and cleanliness, not the…

Please Don’t Eat This One Piece ‘Fruit’

In One Piece, Luffy eats the terrible-tasting Gomu Gomu no Mi, which makes his body all elastic. Since this replica is made of synthetic plastic and rubber, it probably tastes terrible, too, but won’t make your body all stretchy. It’ll make you sick! Instead of eating it, you are supposed to display it (or maybe,…

Watch Dark Souls III Come To Life with Chalkboard Art

A few years ago, Kotaku first reported how Japanese students were covering their classrooms’ chalkboards with incredible art. Now one of those former students is doing that for Dark Souls III Here we see a sped up clip of young artist Rena Rena, who’s now around 20, doing chalk art to promote Dark Souls III’s…

Norwegian Dudes Freeze For Counter-Strike Stunt

Take Counter-Strike. Some Norwegian YouTubers and pro-gamers. Stick them outside in the freezing snow. And then? Watch them shiver. This is a stunt for Telenor Norge, the country’s telecom giant, to show off its 4G coverage and to remind people to never go outside in Norway during the winter. Never. Thanks, Atozy for the tip!

Open Late. Tokyo, Japan. By Emiliano Ruggiero 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!

XCOM 2’s DLC Goes Full Borderlands

Given the tone of the game, when I played through XCOM 2 I customised my soldiers with “grim realism” in mind. Those who prefer to get a little silly with their cannon fodder, though, might enjoy the game’s new Anarchy’s Children DLC, which introduces new customisation options for your troops. As you might have guessed…

British Game Developer Says He Was Denied US Entry Over Iraq Visit [Update]

Indie developer Malath Abbas should be settling in for this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Instead, he’s stuck at Vancouver airport, after U.S. Customs and Border Protection blocked his entry into the country [Update: he’s since been allowed in]. Abbas, who holds a British passport, tells Kotaku that prior to leaving the UK…

Nice New Controllers, Microsoft

Microsoft has been on a roll lately with its special edition Xbox One controllers. The Elite is almost perfect, the Lunar White is gorgeous…and now there are these guys. They’re called Dusk Shadow (the blue one) and Copper Shadow (the…copper one). They’re regular controllers at a regular price, just with that nice gradient effect down…

The Art Of Shin Megami Tensei IV

Even though I love Persona, I’d never played the core Shin Megami Tensei series before 2013’s IV. That gorgeous art pushed me over the edge, though, so it’s a pleasure to be able to showcase some of it here on Fine Art tonight. The pieces here are all from Udon’s Shin Megami Tensei IV art…

Fallout 4’s Impression Of The Captain America: Civil War Trailer

Iron Man? Check. Captain America? Check. Spider-Man? Yup, he’s there too. Made by UpIsNotJump, it’s not a perfect recreation; the environments and outfits are cobbled together from those already found in Fallout 4, not brand new assets that exactly match those in the movie, but then, that just adds to the post-apocalyptic scavenger charm of…

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…