Today’s selection of articles from Kotaku‘s reader-run community: Rockmandash’s Guide to Visual Novels on the Go • Strategy Guides: A Love Letter • Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment – A Textbook Example of an HD Remaster? • TAY Explores Comics: The Tenth Prism TAY Classic—TAY Open Forum—Beginner’s Guide To TAY Follow them here.

Fan Turns Half-Life 2‘s Headcrab Into A Gun-Wielding Criminal

Here’s a short but intense Half-Life 2 fan-clip by animator Nathan Hibberd. His version of the game’s annoying little enemy steals airboats, uses machine guns and acts like a crazy cartoon character. It even scares itself when suddenly realises that it doesn’t know how to drive. To contact the author of this post, write to:…

Magician Does All His Tricks Using An iPad

Simon Pierro, a German magician, was on The Ellen Show last night. He’s famous for doing all his magic tricks on an iPad using certain apps and merging reality with virtual reality. He’s a tech wizard! If you watch the top gif a few times you might recognize how he does that particular trick. Same…

Japan’s Most Traditional Internet Cafe

There are loads of internet cafes in Japan. But it seems there’s only one that looks like a traditional Japanese inn. Welcome to Nagomi Style Cafe Located in Tokyo’s geek mecca Akihabara, this internet cafe is designed after a Kyoto inn. The Japanese word “nagomi” (和み) mean to soothe or calm. That’s exactly what this…

Poll: How Japanese Gamers Feel About the PS4

The PlayStation 4 was released in Japan nearly one year ago. So are Japanese buyers of the console happy with their purchase? Over 1,000 PS4 owners answered a customer satisfaction survey in this week’s Weekly Famitsu. Many were happy. Some were not. Here’s what was asked, what was answered, and a bit of what was…

In Final Fantasy XV, Cooking is Important

Camping is a big part of Final Fantasy XV. And what is camping, without some campfire cooking? As previously explained by director Hajime Tabata, is part of the core gameplay of FFXV, and plays a vital role in adventuring the vast open world. To recap, camping in FFXV converts exp gained through battles into levels.…

How to Beat up Pokémon in Japanese Arcades

The new Pokémon fighting game, Pokkén Tournament is hitting arcades in Japan this summer, and a new trailer is out to offer new details, including a breakdown of the controls. In the newly released trailer, some of the previously announced playable characters were shown as well as some new details were on how the game…

New Medieval Combat Game Looks Like A, Well, Blast

In case this trailer doesn’t show you within five seconds, here it is from the developers themselves: “We were primarily inspired by Rust & Chivalry in the development of this game”. But that’s OK! Because if you’re going to rip two games off and make something new out of the stolen parts, you can do…

Overpowered Bot Puts Top Smash Bros. Player In His Place

If you’ve paid any sort of attention to the competitive Super Smash Bros scene over the years, you’ve probably heard of Jason “Mew2King” Zimmerman. He’s won countless championships in every iteration of Smash and advanced the scene with discoveries about game physics and technique. Recently, he lost to a CPU. It all came of an…

The NES Was Once So Rare You Could Only Get It In Two Cities

It’s easy to forget now, given its enormous success, that the NES was once seen as a risky proposition. Coming on the heels of the great video game crash of 1983, into a market unsure if games were a fad that had already died out, the system didn’t just magically appear in stores across North…

What Books Are You Reading These Days?

Here at Kotaku, we don’t just play video games all day and night. Sometimes, we read. Sometimes we even read books! Wild, I know. I’ve read a few good books lately, and wanted to check in to see what you all have been reading. For my part, I recently finished Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, which…