Track: Halftime | Artist: Nas | Album: Illmatic Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to – and gaming to – at the moment.

The new Animal Crossing is letting you choose your skin tone People have been asking for the option for years, and Nintendo’s granting their wish with Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer. It’s a step in the right direction, albeit a long overdue one. Hopefully it’ll carry over to the next full Animal Crossing game.

We Played Star Wars: Battlefront

And then we talked to you about it live, on Periscope. Here’s an archive of that chat, in which Evan and I discuss our warm feelings towards the roughly 13-minute multiplayer round we played at E3. If you weren’t already aware, Periscope is a Twitter-owned live-streaming service that operates best in landscape mode. And if…

How The New Metroid Prime’s Co-Op Works

Nintendo only made the ancillary sports-game component of its perplexing newMetroid Prime game available to demo at E3 this week. But the developer did offer a small slice of how the four-player co-op—intended to be the meat Federation Force’s gameplay—will work in action as well. The developer showed it in action during one of its…

The next League of Legends champion is…a catfish? Riot just put out a CGI trailer about a hoarse-voiced monster named “The River King,” following an apparent leak on the game’s Chinese website. Neat! Also: great music.

Mass Effect 1 Runs Faster, Smoother on Xbox One

The first Mass Effect was a game that sometimes struggled to perform well on Microsoft’s last home console. But, it looks like BioWare’s sci-fi creation is a much better experience on the Xbox One. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that backwards compatibility will be coming to their latest home gaming machine and Mass Effect is…

It’s a tale of two season passes. 2K Games announced a second season pass for Evolve—five new characters, one new monster—while io Interactive told Videogamer its new Hitman will not have a season pass at all, as the game’s extra content is free. You can reach the author of this post at [email protected] or on…

Today’s Pokémon Anime Special Was Kind of Nuts

In Japan, an hour Pokémon special just aired on TV. It starred Pikachu. Lots of Pikachus. But mostly, even by Pokémon standards, it was bonkers. The special was called Pokémon XY: Pikachu the Movie, and was divided into several parts (more here), but set against the making of a Pikachu movie. How meta. But actually,…