Batman’s Next Portable Game Has Some Castlevania, Metroid and Mega Man

The Dark Knight’s return to handheld gaming will feature multiple endings in an homage to classic old-school games of bygone eras. Set after the end of Batman: Arkham Origins:, Batman: Arkham Origins: Blackgate puts Bruce Wayne’s alter ego inside of Gotham’s max-security prison after an mysterious explosion allows inmates to take over the facility. When…

The Best Halo 4 Players in the World Are Competing This Weekend at PAX

The battle for supremacy in Halo 4 that kicked off at the Rooster Teeth Expo earlier this month and continued at Gamescom will conclude at PAX Prime this weekend. The Halo 4 Global Championship Finals began yesterday at Benaroya Hall in Seattle, and they continue today. Tomorrow’s finale will be live streamed from 4 to…

Foul Play Battles its Demons in a Crowd-Pleasing Way

A daemonologist, a chimney sweep, a stage play in Victorian England. Foul Play could have taken its inspiration from any number of sources. In fact, a music video from 1996 is largely how developer Mediatonic ended up with these themes on this type of game, a sidescrolling beat-em-up coming to Xbox Live in mid-September. “We…

Plants vs. Zombies 2 Already Beat the Original’s Lifetime Downloads

You’re in good company if you’ve been playing Plants vs. Zombies 2 for the last couple of weeks. In fact, your company is nearly 25 million strong, according to figures published yesterday by PopCap. That’s how many people have downloaded the sequel since its release earlier this month, and according to the developer that’s more…

Sony’s Latest Shot at Microsoft Comes on a T-Shirt You Can’t Get [Update: Microsoft is Amused]

Last night, Sony held an indie showcase event at Neumo’s, a Seattle music venue that epitomized underground cool. PlayStation exec Adam Boyes took the stage to re-affirm the company’s commitment to working with indies and third-party partners and announced a handful of new games. Whiles most of the games looked intriguing, it was Boyes’ t-shirt…

XCOM‘s Big Fall Expansion In Glorious, Robo-Punching Action

This November, Kotaku game-of-the-year-winner XCOM: Enemy Unknown is getting its first substantial expansion, Enemy Within. It’ll feature a bunch of new abilities, weapons, enemies, and other changes. It sounds really good With this new trailer, we can see that it looks pretty good, too. Mech soldiers, genetically enhanced soldiers, the new “Mechtoid” enemy, as well…

Report: Wii U Early Adopters Won’t Get Special Treatment From Nintendo [UPDATE]

When Nintendo dropped the price of the 3DS mere months after its release in 2011, it offered a mollifying “Ambassador Program” to early adopters of the handheld system. That program included 20 free games available to players who bought the 3DS before a certain date. Now that the Wii U’s price is dropping $50 on…

Joel And Ellie Originally Had A Puppy Companion In The Last Of Us

Like any game, The Last of Us went through a lot of changes during its development. Unlike with most games, though, fans got a taste of those changes during a PAX Prime panel yesterday called “Pitching The Last of Us.” Be warned: there are spoilers below. It turns out that the infected were almost much…

The First Trailer For Mew-Genics Is A Honky-Tonk Science Experiment

Team Meat’s Edmund McMillen emailed out the first-ever trailer for Mew-Genics in the wee hours of the morning, and while he admits it’s a bit of a tease—nope, no gameplay yet—he does hope it will convey something about the upcoming Super Meat Boy follow-up. Specifically it’s that it has something to do with cats, I…

This Week in the Business: Sympathy for the Devil

What’s happened in the business of video games this past week … QUOTE | “It’s like the Satan spawn to some people and it’s the end of the world because games are free-to-play.”—EA COO Peter Moore, talking about how F2P is just a way to get more people into gaming, and it’s growing QUOTE |…

The Best of Kotaku, The Week of August 26

In way the week has just begun, considering it’s only day two of PAX in Seattle, where Owen, Evan, Jason and I are soaking in the games, panels and cosplay. But a Saturday is a Saturday, which means it’s time to look back on our best articles over at Kotaku Selects The 3D Ryu you…

The Great McNugget Rampage Of 2010 Returns, Assumes Ultimate Form

In 2010, this video of a woman going bananas at a drive-thru – because she couldn’t buy chicken nuggets and really wanted chicken nuggets – went viral. It’s impressive footage, but sadly, no audio of the event was captured. Three years later, someone’s got around to fixing that. It’s not the actual audio. Duh. But…

Watch Me Play The New Pokémon Game

Want to see some Mega Pokémon? Watch me play some five minutes of this special Pokémon X/Y demo, made just for PAX. The game comes out on October 12 for 3DS.

I’ve Watched A Stranger’s Baby Grow Up Over YouTube. Life Is Weird.

Two years ago, “bobaepapa” uploaded a video of a baby that was super excited to see her mom, but also waaaaay too sleepy. It was an insanely cute combination—so much so that the video became viral hit. You might’ve watched it, and then never thought about this baby again. Well, I’ve kept watching—in fact, it…

Xbox vs. PAX Pox: Looks like Microsoft took Fahey’s hygiene primer yesterday to heart, bundling Xbox-branded hand sanitizer with its display models to do its part in the fight against con crud. We haven’t seen any PlayStation Purell yet.

Zelda: Wind Waker HD Gets An Adorable New Story Trailer

At PAX Prime today, the line to see Wind Waker was way longer than I thought it’d be. People do love them some hot Wind Waker action! Here’s a new trailer for the first HD Zelda, to be out next month for Wii U (and September 20 if you get a digital copy).

Oh No, Attack On Titan Shouldn’t Be Nearly This Cute

At its heart, Attack On Titan is incredibly unsettling. I mean, it’s about giant humanoids eating humans for seemingly no reason whatsoever; of course it’s unnerving. So you look at this animation by riseken—which recreates some of the early plot of Attack on Titan—and you’re just like, wow, it should be wrong to have the…

How Rocksmith 2014 Will Teach You To Play Guitar

The dream is a good one: An interactive application that can really, truly teach you to play guitar. And Rocksmith 2014, even more so than its ambitious predecessor, is aiming to do just that. In this video, the game’s makers demonstrate how the new “lessons” will function. The lessons look pretty cool, and it sounds…

Is Armillo The Feel-Good Story Of PAX 2013? It Is For Me.

Two years ago, I’m at PAX in Seattle. I’m trying to cover every indie game possible, but even I have my limits. I spot a game called Armillo, don’t pay it much mind, but a developer ropes me in. It’s a Super–Mario–Galaxy–Bomberman–Sonic kind of thing. Looks slick. I’m impressed. I post about it. Commenters like…

More Pokemon Drawn From Memory, Without Erasing

First blayzeon proved that a faulty memory could be a funny thing by showing us what the Pokemon from the first two generations look like if drawn without looking at a reference. Now they’re back with third gen Pokemon drawn from memory, and it’s just as silly as the first time we saw the project.…