A Defense Of Mario Kart 8’s Unpopular Battle Mode

In video game years, Mario Kart 8 is already middle-aged yet remains virile. It maintains a healthy population of online racers over fourteen months past its May 2014 launch. By most accounts, the Wii U version of the seminal kart racer is the series’ high watermark, resplendent in its HD gloss and detail-rich course design,…

GTA Online Player Says Hi To 100 People, Is Murdered Almost Every Time

What happens when you try being friendly to fellow GTA Online players? Chaos, bloodshed, and rudeness, that’s what. Last month, ComedyKnife decided to perform an experiment within GTA Online. The plan was to greet 100 different GTA Online players, and to record what happens. Would they say hello back? Would they continue their GTA rampage?…

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture: The Kotaku Review

The insult of “walking simulator,” lobbed at video games whose strongest elements are exploration, discovery, and story, misses its intended target. It conjures something more like Bennett Foddy’s QWOP. Then again, we all know what the term means by now: something like Gone Home that removes the elements of puzzling and physical challenge from an…

Rez Is Still A Near-Perfect Video Game

I was perfect in a video game once. And that video game was perfected in me. See that up there? That’s the best I’ve ever been at anything in a video game ever. I don’t even remember doing it but there it is, perfect and improbable. Just like the game I did it in. Just…

Rise of the Tomb Raider Footage Has Actual Tomb Raiding

I loved the last Tomb Raider game, so I’ve been jazzed to see more from Rise of the Tomb Raider. Unfortunately, it feels like everything packed into the trailers and stage presentations involves Lara blowing dudes up or nearly falling off a cliff. The latest footage, however, is great! There was a distinct lack of…

I Went To Australia’s League Of Legends Final And I Was Very Confused

According to Steven Hassan there are many different types of cults. There are destructive cults. The kind that separate you from family and friends, brainwash you — all that strangeness you hear about on 60 minutes. Moonie-style shit. Scientology. That’s one side of the cult spectrum. This post originally appeared on Kotaku AU. Then there…

Dark Souls Player Beats The Game Using Only His Voice

By any measure, Dark Souls is a difficult game, but for whatever reason, hardcore fan bearzly always wants to make it harder. He’s beaten the game with Rock Band’s drums and guitar, as well as Donkey Konga’s bongo set. His latest feat involves putting down controllers entirely. I’m still flabbergasted by the whole thing, honestly,…

My Five Favorite Kotaku Stories From Last Week

It’s summer, the so-called slow season. Sure, there was some product-related excitement out of Gamescom, where Microsoft held an impressive press conference about upcoming Xbox stuff and where our Kotaku UK pals checked out some games. But most of that’s about the future. Happily, gaming’s present remains plenty interesting, and our team was all over…

Modders Say Rockstar Banned Them For Making An Alternative To GTA Online

Dissatisfied with the gameplay of the PC version of GTA Online, a group of modders built a service that let them host custom multiplayer variants. Now, they’re finding themselves permanently blocked from playing Grand Theft Auto V and other games published by GTA maker Rockstar. A small cohort of PC players didn’t like the online…

Unfortunately, Quantum Break Looks a Bit Rubbish

For two years, we’ve wondered what Quantum Break actually is. Having seen it, I’m now worried that Quantum Break is a bland-looking shooter interrupted with 20-minute episodes of bad television at the end of every chapter. It should be so much better. This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK The setup is that you play…

Planet Minecraft’s “Under The Sea” contest was won by BlockWorks and their amazing “Deep Sea” map, which we featured last month Meanwhile, Pandora’s Blocks’ “Xephira” nabbed 2nd place, and MysticAbsents’ “Echoes from The Deep” placed 3rd. Check out their (and the other top entries’) pages for more undersea goodness. Dayshot is an image-based feature that…

Disney Japan’s Twitter Account Screwed Up

Disneyland might be the Happiest Place on Earth™, but Disney Japan’s Twitter account is one of the most oblivious places on the internet. Take a Disney Japan tweet from yesterday: It reads, “Congrats on a trifling day” in Japanese. Under that, it read, “A very merry unbirthday to you!” Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of…

When Video Game Perspectives Are Strange

If you really think about it, the in-game camera often makes little to no sense. This isn’t true for every game (and generally, I think games have gotten way better), but Twitter user NSKEEEEE uploaded a comparison between The Evil Within’s in-game perspective and what the actual P.O.V. would look like. [via NSKEEEEE] Certainly brings…