Hideo Kojima on Why Solid Snake Is Called Solid Snake

Metal Gear’s creator took to Twitter to talk about the conceptual origins behind the name of series protagonist Solid Snake. Over eight tweets. It… makes sense if you think about it, really. Have a look: Did you get that? Solid for battle-hardened, Snake for stealthy. Only a snake can beat a snake, so Solid Snake’s…

Kerbal Space Program to Introduce NASA-Backed Asteroid-Wrangling DLC

Yes, soon you’ll be able to do in Kerbal Space Program whatNASA wants to do in real life. Of course, in this case, it won’t take decades of careful research. And it will probably involve a lot more explosions. KSP developer Squad and NASA are collaborating on a mission-slash-content pack called Asteroid Redirect Mission, named…

Are you in Japan? Do you like indie games? What about cool music? BitSummit kicks off in Kyoto later this week, with the first public day on Saturday. Click here for more info.

Track: We Move Lightly | Album: Lumiere | Artist: Dustin O’Halloran Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to – and gaming to – at the moment.

Princess Peach Is Ready To Kick Ass And Take Names

When Alexia Jean Grey cosplays as Princess Peach, she doesn’t go for puffy dresses and a smile. She channels Peach: Warrior Princess. Inspired by Peach’s performances in the Smash Bros. series, the outfit is made almost entirely out of worbla, a thermoplastic from the future. The pics here were taken by Travis Photography; there are…

A Shooter Where You Don’t Shoot, You Program

Glitchspace might look like the Mirror’s Edge expansion, and appear to show you running around holding a gun, but this is a game about puzzles. And programming. You spend the game running around a cyberspace environment, looking for glitches. When you find a puzzle, you don’t just slide a block; the game’s developers have built…

A New DirectX Is Coming

I hope you didn’t get too comfortable with DirectX 11, because DirectX 12 is right around the corner. Microsoft has released a teaser image, showing that more info will be revealed at GDC (on March 20). That gives you just under two weeks to get the fear, paranoia and Windows 8 jokes out of your…

Timesplitters Custom Action Figure

Sergeant Cortezfrom Timesplitters custom action figure.

In Which I Overreact To The Homeworld Remake Box Art

Look, I was happy enough that Gearbox was just going to be re-releasing Homeworld so that modern operating systems (and widescreen monitors) could actually play them properly. But that’s not what they’re doing. No, they’ve gotten carried away. In a good way. Instead of simply putting in some HD textures and optimising the code, Relic’s…

A Vita game I can’t stop playing: If you’ve got a Vita, check out Surge Deluxe, a highly enjoyable (and addictive) electro-charged tile-matching game from Futurlab. At a certain point it clicks, and you’ll be hooked. Futurlab’s next game will be Velocity 2X for Vita and PS4.

How To Get The Best Deals At GameStop: Dumpster Dive

Ever wonder what happens to your games and gear after you trade them in to Gamestop? Some games, obviously, get put back on the shelves—the hope is to resell them. But not everything gets resold. A fascinating report by IGN details the hidden world of dumpster diving—it turns out that Gamestop sometimes throws away games…

Killstreaks: Tell Us How You Really Feel

Ah, the killstreak. A single idea that changed the face of multiplayer shooters. All these years later, has its time finally come? Is it time for the world to leave the killstreak behind? The killstreak is a multiplayer game feature popularized by Call of Duty, but these days the concept turns up in other games…

Glitches Turn Surgery Into A Massacre

Surgery means dealing with blood, guts and sharp instruments. Playing a game means dealing with bugs and wonky physics. So it shouldn’t be surprising to hear that a surgery game might feature some bloody nightmare fuel whenever things go wrong. The glitches above come from the iPad version of Surgeon Simulator,the silly simulation game where…

A Game of Pac-Man That’s Also A Mesmerizing Symphony

It’s always lovely when the cultural iconography of gaming fuses with other forms of art to become something new, wonderful and different. Six Pacmen is one such work of art. Six Pacmen is an interactive performance piece by Tacit Group and an adaptation of a piano composition named Six Pianos by famed minimalist composer Steve…