This Week In The Business: The Xbox One Unleashed

QUOTE | “This change will be enough to push the Xbox One installed base higher than PS4 in the U.S. and Canada in 2015.” – IDC analyst Lewis Ward, commenting on Microsoft’s decision to release a Kinect-less Xbox One for $399 Elsewhere in the business of video games this past week … QUOTE | “We…

Graduation Cap For A Gamer

Graduation cap decorated to reflect real life RPG skills. The comments are funny: CharlesIndigo: they nerfed it not too long ago, it doesn’t add credibility anymore. KHDTX13: The mission payouts aren’t even worth it. vertigo1083: And it will all mean shit in the next expansion. You are now looking at Screenburn, a Kotaku blog dedicated…

Global Warming Could Give Us A Future Straight Out Of A Video Game

Earth has seen much better days, and science says it’s largely humanity’s fault. This week, the antarctic ice sheet’s eventual collapse was declared “unstoppable” by research teams. How might we survive unprecedented rises in sea level? No one’s sure, but games like BioShock and Brink may have the right idea. Scientists are estimating a 10…

Porting a game from PS3 to PS4 is no simple task. Sure, one might imagine that you just bump up the resolution and put it on a new disc, but…no. As The Last of Us creative director Neil Druckmann puts it in this new EDGE feature, “We expected it to be Hell, and it was…

Sesame Street Says Take Off Your Oculus Rift And Go Outside

In this video from Mashable, the Sesame Street crew, along with Zachary Levi sing about the wonders of putting down your technology and going outdoors on a sunny day. Maybe they just haven’t bought into our all virtual reality future. Here are the lyrics, and the clip with Grover and the Oculus is at 1:31.…

Your New Game Console Is Eating More Energy Than Ever

Even if you’re not actively using your consoles, they’re still using electricity—and the amount of energy consoles consume has increased from last generation consoles. The Natural Resources Defense Council finds that on a yearly basis, new consoles cost America $1 billion in electricity bills—and that most of that energy is consumed when the consoles are…

Report: Halos 1-4 Coming To Xbox One This Year In HD

We may not be getting Halo 5 until 2015, but the games’ developers were careful to say that the Halo “journey” will continue this year some way or another. According to a new report at Engadget, that’s because this fall, the Xbox One will get remastered versions of the first four main Halo games. Citing…

In NYC? Free Saturday night around 6-8:30pm? Kotaku will be co-hosting a talk about the future of games with our friends at Gizmodo as part of Giz’s big Home of the Future event. Details here. Register to attend at this link. See you there?

Nobody Knows What These Mysterious YouTube Videos Are

Thousands and thousands of videos, uploaded nearly every day. Each one is the same, structure-wise: 10 slides of shapes, shown over 11 seconds, over various random tones. Nobody has a clue what the videos are supposed to be, much less who is uploading them or why. Just today, the channel has uploaded over a dozen…

Apple Won’t Allow Masturbation Game On App Store

HappyPlayTime, a game that aims to teach women how to masturbate, was recently rejected from the app store according to the developers. “The reason given was that ‘the concept was not something that Apple wants to go forward with,'” Tina Gong, designer behind the project, wrote on a blog post. “I knew I was taking…