Snacktaku Judges Lay’s ‘Flavor Swap’ Potato Chips

Eight flavors enter, four flavors leave. The latest in Lay’s interactive marketing is the Flavor Swap, pitting tried and true potato chip flavors against newcomers across four categories—BBQ, spice, cheese and heat. Let’s do this. The stakes are high in the Flavor Swap event, with four classic flavors on the line. Should they hold up,…

WWE Star Daniel Bryan Says He Is Retiring

WWE wrestler Daniel Bryan, considered one of the best of his generation for his dynamic hard-hitting style, just announced on Twitter that he is retiring from wrestling for medical reasons. With pro wrestling, anything could be a storyline, but there’s reason to think it’s true. We recently chronicled the concussion issues he’s facing, his desire…

Firewatch: The Kotaku Review

Firewatch is a very lonely video game that’s all about people. Set in 1989, you play as Henry, aka Hank, a guy who has had a pretty shitty time of things lately, and who decides that a Summer job in a Wyoming national park is just the thing he needs to take his mind off…

Let’s See If You Could Be an Undercover Superspy

Okay, breathe. You’ve been trained for this. All you need to do is answer the questions about your cover identity correctly and your captured colleague doesn’t get subjected to all manner of inhuman torture. Uh, how old is your pretend brother again? Riffing gently off the James Bond mythos, Q is a Twine game based…

Someone Created A Working Calculator In Mario Maker

OK, I know that someone built a cell phone in Minecraft not that long ago, but Mario Maker isn’t the most expansive toolset, and yet someone’s built a god damn math machine. Dubbed The Cluttered-Chaos Calculator—705C-0000-01B3-FE78—Mario Maker creator Giant strung together a Rube Goldberg-style device that, on the surface, looks like complete madness. What’s happening…

Lady Gaga Looked Like A Pokémon At The Super Bowl

Who wore it better last night, Blaziken, or Lady Gaga? Lady Gaga sang the Super Bowl national anthem yesterday, and throughout the performance, she had a pretty distinctive get-up and hairdo. Hilariously, people thought Lady Gaga resembled all sorts of geeky and nerdy things, not just Pokémon. Let’s take a closer look and judge the…

Inside The Longest Overtime In Pro Counter-Strike History

On the face of it, you wouldn’t pick DenDD vs. PixelFire to be a classic Counter-Strike match. They’re minor professional teams, far below the level of the Fnatics or Na’Vis of the world. But last weekend, they ended up making history: the first map of their best-of-three went into triple, then quadruple, and finally quintuple…

Unravel: The Kotaku Review

Unravel, which stars a little red knitted character called Yarny, is unusually personal. It is an intimate game, tied to a certain place and time, and it very obviously means something to the people who made it. This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK Yarny is based on an actual doll that creative director Martin…

Marvel’s Latest Avengers Game Is Such A Shame

Marvel put together an awesome re-imagining of Avengers heroes and villains as college students. They recruited top notch voice talent like Alison Brie, Colton Haynes and John Cena. All that design work and talent for a glorified Simpson: Tapped Out clone. Look at this key art. I would watch that cartoon. I would read that…

Someone Built A Playable Space Invaders Inside Dwarf Fortress

The classic ASCII-roguelike builder sim Dwarf Fortress is notorious for being unforgiving for even the smallest mistake. If you’re not familiar with the rules, it’s tough to build even simple things and not ruin everything at the same time. Still, someone managed to make a playable version of Space Invaders in it. Even the idea…

XCOM 2 Dream Team Is Ready To Roll

XCOM 2 not only supports fan-made mods, but it’s also quite easy to modify soldiers to look like someone familiar. Here’s allmightyspaceduck’s dream team of a Doomguy-looking Master Chief, Gordon Freeman, Marcus Fenix and Duke without muscles. They should be quite powerful together, but hey, it’s XCOM, even they’re gonna miss all of their targets.

Japan Is Getting Cherry Blossom Flavored Pepsi

Of course it is. According to NicoNico News, Pepsi Sakura is launching in Japan on March 8. “Sakura” means “cherry blossoms,” and this is the latest in a long line of unusual Pepsi flavors to hit the country. NicoNico News adds that the drink is a light pink hue and smells of sweet sakura. To…

The Latest One Piece Collectible: Luffy as a Woman

I’m fairly certain nobody asked for this, but here we are: Luffy from One Piece gets turned into a lady for upcoming merch. As pointed out on 2ch, MegaHouse, which is part of Bandai Namco, recently showed an unpainted prototype of a female Luffy D. Monkey: [Image via 2ch] The enormous curves shouldn’t be a…

Damn, This Anime Gun Model Is Amazing 

In sci-fi anime Psycho Pass, authorities wield a precrime suppressor called the “Dominator.” We’ve seen a model version for sale before, but we haven’t seen one like this. This real-life version of the portable brain scanner gun can even transform like it does in the anime. According to ASCII, this one-to-one scale recreation is even…

Sticking Around Club Sega. Nishi-Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan. By John Puma. 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!

Persona 3, You’re Looking Very Real

Shigenori Soejima’s art for the Persona series is some of the best in all of video games, but like anything else it’s always fair game for some reinterpretation. This is Blair Armitage’s take on Persona 3’s wonderful Aigis/Aegis, whose quirks, rather than looking stranger in a more realistic style, actually just come off looking even…