The Saturday Stream Attempts To Play Smite (All Done)

Having spent last weekend at the Smite World Championships here in Atlanta, I am now a certified expert in all things related to Hi-Rez Studios’ third-person action MOBA, with the possible exception of playing it. There’s something about attending a live event that makes a person brave. During the quieter moments of the competition I…

Don’t play video games for three days straight or you could die. That’s what happened to a 32-year-old Taiwanese man, found slumped in his chair dead following a three day gaming bender at an internet cafe in Kaohsiung city, as reported by Yahoo News. This is the second such death in Taiwan this year, and…

Parks And Recreation‘s Absurd Board Game Could Become A $500 Reality

Created by Ben Wyatt in a season six episode of Parks and Recreation, the Cones of Dunshire has come to represent everything wonderful and horrible about overly-complicated fantasy board games. Now Mayfair Games is Kickstarting a full version — but it’s not cheap. Having dabbled in tabletop role-playing game design in my youth (there’s a…

This Week In The Business: Missing Out On Mobile

QUOTE | “It’s outright embarrassing how totally unrepresented many of the industry’s biggest players are in the mobile arena.” – Jeferson Valadares, Bandai Namco’s head of mobile, talking about how traditional game publishers need to get busy making mobile games Elsewhere in the business of video games this past week … QUOTE | “It’s when…

A Dark Theory About The Origin Of Minecraft‘s World

Have you ever stared up into Minecraft‘s night sky? I mean, like, really taken a good, hard look into the frigid cosmos? You might notice that something’s amiss. It’s kinda empty, and the moon is always opposite the sun, and… this world doesn’t work like ours, does it? Here’s a shockingly bleak theory on why…

Wanna know how long it’d take to beat every game in your Steam library? There’s a calculator app for that. Just go there and either sign in or, if your profile is public, enter your Steam ID. I’m looking at 2842 continuous hours, or 118 days, 10 hours, and 12 minutes. How about you? The…

What Are You Playing This Month?

With all the excitement of new years eve, I completely forgot to post a “What are you playing?” article at the start of January. This injustice shall not stand! Here we are, in the early days of a new year. There haven’t been any big new games in a while, which makes it a good…

Worth Reading: Nerdy NFL Players, Race, And Much More

Kotaku publishes lots of stories, but we are not, as it turns out, the entire Internet. It’s easy to miss some of the wonderful criticism, commentary, and observations about games and games culture that’s put online every week. No more! Every Friday afternoon, I’ll be your guide. It feels good to be back. This was…

All the Ways The New Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie Made No Sense

Last year’s TMNT movie had so many problems with it. Like hundreds of them, according to Cinema Sins. Many of them involve Skype. Loads of people went to see the Michael Bay-produced reboot of the TMNT film franchise last year. Judging by the sheer amount of stuff that does not compute in Cinema Sins’ 22-minute…

Sony Offers Refunds To Fans Angry About Zombie Game Microtransactions

SOE’s DayZ-ish zombie MMO, H1Z1, just launched on Steam Early Access. That means it is, on no uncertain terms, unfinished. However, even fans with that knowledge were surprised to discover a microtransaction airdrop that affects gameplay. They felt like they’d been misled. The real money microtransaction, an airdrop players can buy and call in, has…

Street Fighter Mod Lets You Kick Ass As Commander Shepard

Who knew that Mass Effect would work so well as a fighting game? Here’s a mod highlighted by PC Best Mods that shows Femshep duking it out with Tali, because video games are amazing and weird. The Shepard has the moveset available to Street Fighter’s Poison, and Tali is technically Cammy, but still! You can…

Pro Smash Players Figured Out How To Reduce Character Lag

I got a message from a Smash Bros. player recently that made a bold promise: he’d figured out how to reduce every character’s lag time in the game. That’s a tall order, so I was skeptical. But then other players started to think he might be on to something. And that’s when things got really…

Everyone’s gonna have to wait a few more months for Harmonix to bring back Amplitude, as the studio announced today its Kickstarter-funded revival is moving from March to “summer.”

The one and only GB “DocSeuss” Burford wants to know which fascinating game level he should analyze for Kotaku next. He’s looked closely at classic levels from Half-Life, Mirror’s Edge, Modern Warfare, Dishonored, The Witcher, and Halo. Please recommend specific levels that you want him to break down. Thanks!

This weekend, a different kind of gaming marathon will be happening. Spawn4Good will be assembling people to play video games for as long as they can to raise awareness about police brutality, as well as pulling together money for surviving family members of those killed by the use of excessive force. You can get more…