Track: Numbers On The Boards | Artist: Pusha T | Album: My Name Is My Name Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to – and gaming to – at the moment.

‘Gaming Is A Disease’

Got this message from my friend Jeremy this week. He’s a music critic at Pitchfork. But as you can tell from our text-versations, he cares a lot about games too: …maybe a little bit too much, now that I think about it…

One Backpack, Two Super Mario Levels

When you play video games as an adult, you have a lot of moments when you find yourself wishing you could be a kid again. Like this morning, when I came across a reversible Super Mario-themed backpack I would have worn until the straps fell off and my teacher asked me: “Shouldn’t you have graduated…

Total Cost of Publishing One Indie Game Last week Sixty Second Shooter developer Jamie Fristrom released the total cost for publishing on the Xbox One at $5,143. That figure may be daunting to some, but it’s also close to the absolute minimum to publish on a console. I spoke with Tyrone Rodriguez, a developer working…

A Game Where You Play As The Killer Kid From Horror Movies

You know the ever-looming embodiment of tiny evil that scary movies trot out for cheap scares? Lucius II will let you play as one. Expect blood. Lots of blood. I really wanted to like the originalLucius more than I did. It had a killer concept (itsy bitsy horror movie murder machine, played with almost Hitman-style…

The Worst In Video Game Marketing

Before we ever get to play most video games, we see ads for them. Usually they’ll get us excited about the next chapter in a favorite franchise, or even a brand new one. But sometimes they take things too far. We’ve seen loads of ads that are meaningless or, worse, in bad taste. Ill-advised. Offensive,…

Your Chances of Winning a Hearthstone Match if You Go First Who goes first in turn-based games has always been a point of contention, but Ars Technica crunched the numbers for professional Hearthstone matches. Their full analysis is pretty interesting overall, but they found that the first player won 110 out of 219 recorded matches.…

It’s Raining Cars, Hallelujah

Road Redemption, the Kickstarted spiritual successor to damn near legendary motorcycle racer Road Rash, has a mode where cars just continuously rain from the sky while you’re driving. Seriously. Truth be told, I’d sort of been steering clear of this one after its first footage looked a bit bland and uninspired, but this is the…

How EA Access Will Work, According To EA

Last week, Electronic Arts announced a new online gaming service called EA Access for the Xbox One. It sounded like a promising deal to many gamers: a Netflix-style subscription service that would give people access to a library of EA games for $5 a month, or $30 a year. But many important questions remained unanswered.…

Deals: Humble Heads to Japan, Xillia 2 Collector’s Edition, Destiny LE

Humble visits Japan in this week’s Weekly with Ys, Pixeljunk Shooter, and more. [ Humble Weekly Bundle Japan Edition] Tales of Xillia 2’s Collector’s Edition, which features plushies and watches and figures and DLC, is back in stock and up for preorder. [Xillia 2 CE] Sleeping Dogs, a great example of what open world games…

The 2013 Survey That Foretold The Future Of Assassin’s Creed

Late last year, Assassin’s Creed publisher Ubisoft sent a survey to me and other players of their long-running top franchise. They were asking for our reactions to Assassin’s Creed IV and oh, uh, just wondering what we might want to see in future games. Well. They weren’t really just wondering. I wrote about the survey…