A moment to appreciate the excellent music of Assassin’s Creed IV: Freedom Cry. I liked the soundtrack for AC IV: Black Flag just fine, but I really like Olivier Deriviere’s work on Freedom Cry, which blends orchestral arrangements with traditional Haitian folk songs for a distinctive, evocative flavor.

The Console Wars Aren’t Just Real, They’re Personal

The Console Wars™ can often seem pretty dumb when you’re looking at them from within the sane circle of your home outward onto the dregs of Internet forums. What should be intelligent discussions turn into nasty rivalries and insult-throwing with fans vehemently and blindly defending big corporations. It’s all pretty silly, actually. But fan loyalty…

​Artist Turns The Hobbit Book Into Paper Sculpture Of Smaug

Books are art, you know? Sometimes literally. This paper-sculpture is the work of Danish artist Victoria, known on DeviantART as FarTooManyIdeas. She crafted it before the most recent Hobbit movie came out, “after watching the trailer many many times.” I’ve heard of words that “jump off the page” before, but this is taking it to…

Attention, new fans of bizarre fighting game Nidhogg, you might enjoy this brief, bizarre interview we did with the game’s creators nearly three years ago.

Soul Fjord, the Ouya exclusive by Portal creator Kim Swift and her team at Airtight Games (Quantum Conundrum), will be out on January 28. It’s free-to-play (with in-app purchases, of course, because nothing is ever really free).

Comic Book from Writers of Hitman: Absolution Isn’t What You’d Expect

People love the Hitman games for the meticulous ways you can take out a target. Wear an outrageous outfit, slide in between the shadows and NPCs and perform an assassination with meticulous stealth. Yeaaah, there’s none of that in the new comic from two dudes who worked on the last game featuring Agent 47. It’s…

Telltale Games says that the next episode of The Wolf Among Us will be out during the first week of February. After a thread on their own forums and on Reddit blew up with outrage over the lack of news as to when episode 2 would be coming out, the developer announced that “It’s been…

If PlayStation All-Stars Had Every Good PlayStation Character…

…It’d probably look like this fan art, drawn by talented Kotaku reader Max and his brother Leonardo. Lots of old PlayStation characters to spot in there. BONUS FUN FAN ART—also by Max and Leonardo, here’s Breaking Bad, Mario Kart style:

A Game That Captures The Majesty of Space

Space, as a general rule, is a quiet place. And space travel is by all accounts a very lonely profession. Few games capture that sense of desolation. RymdResa, however, does. In the video above, I walk through the very moody indie title RymdResa, currently in beta on iPad and on Steam Greenlight (here). It’s a…

The Creator Of Final Fantasy Tactics Wants To Make Another One

Yasumi Matsuno is asking for $600,000 to make a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy Tactics, and if that sentence doesn’t make you giddy, you haven’t played Final Fantasy Tactics. For those of us who have played the legendary strategy-RPG… Pause. Breathe in. This is actually happening. Matsuno, the creator of Vagrant Story, Tactics Ogre, and…

​Fake Demon Baby Terrorizes New Yorkers

Babies: They do the darndest things! Especially when they’re the animatronic spawn of fake Satan. If you see an unattended baby stroller on a busy city street, you probably walk up to make sure everything’s okay. And then… well, if you’re lucky, you just may be attacked by a screaming, vomiting, remote-controlled demon baby. Likethe…

EA Says It Took Over Six Months To Make SimCity Work Offline

In the wake of yesterday’s news that SimCity will be getting an offline version, EA has come out with a blog post explaining just how they made it happen—and how much effort that took. “The original creative vision for SimCity was to make a game where every action had an effect on other cities in…

The Banner Saga, Astro A50, PSN 14 for ’14 Sale, G400s [Deals]

Pre-order The Banner Saga, which releases tomorrow, for $15 and get The Insane Viking DLC for free. Use code GFDJAN25. [Gamefly] Update: Unfortunately Gamefly’s $5 off deal on The Banner Saga expired moments before our post went live, but you can still hit it with the code for 25% off. Once the Playstation Store updates…

It Took Three Months To Find An Assassin’s Creed IV Easter Egg

In November, Assassin’s Creed IV writer Darby McDevitt put out a challenge on Twitter: Three months later, someone’s finally done it. YouTuber Kosappi Uni found the hidden message buried in the sound files of Ubisoft’s pirate game, and posted it in a video (embedded above). It’s strange, and meta, and kind of funny, especially if…

The Rarest Video Game In The World

On a warm evening earlier this month outside a cafe in Buenos Aires, Colin Northway took a sip of his drink and told me about the rarest video game in the world. He was making the game, he told me, and he was excited about it. He didn’t call it the rarest game on the…

Broken Age Aborts Early Access Launch for Season Pass Approach

Broken Age, the crowdfunded adventure from Double Fine launching today to its backers, won’t be offered on Steam Early Access. It will, however, release under a “Season Pass” model that gives buyers both of two planned episodes. “Early Access” releases generally carry the impression the game still is in progress or is incomplete. Double Fine…

Here’s the latest from Kotaku‘s official reader-written blog, Talk Amongst Yourselves: Legend of Zelda Weapons Would Make Call of Duty, Uncharted and Other Games a Lot Better • Awesome Food from a Tiny Island You May Not Even Know About • Another Delay Announced for Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball 3 TAY Classic—TAY Open…

If Google Was A Guy He’d Probably Be Really Annoyed

College Humor wonders, “What if Google was a guy?” And by that, it means, an actual person who took your queries, rooted through a filing cabinet, and handed you what you were looking for. It’d mean that guy would have to put up with a lot of this, probably. Looks like a rather crummy job.…

Now That’s An Impressive Boss Monster, Guild Wars 2

The living story that ran through 2013 in Guild Wars 2 escalates in 2014, as the arch-villain Scarlet Briar unleashes a massive mechanical monstrosity on the unsuspecting denizens of Tyria. Meet the Twisted Marionette. Unimpressed? Perhaps some perspective will help. Those little colorful specks on the ground are players. They’re going to have to team…