Warhammer Online, due for a shutdown in mid-December, has gone free-to-play as a “parting gift” to those who had an account in good standing as of Thursday. “We will be adding new NPCs to the game in order to power up your characters,” Mythic promises.

It Took One Year to Make This Criminally Insane LEGO Arkham Asylum

Not only did Thorsten Bonsch spend a year of his spare time constructing a gloriously macabre LEGO rendering of Arkham Asylum, he also released an 82-page, step-by-step making-of book that you can download for yourself. Let’s be clear though, these are detailed instructions along with a description of the architectural inspirations for the facility—a 115.5…

The Week in Games: A Duty to Perform

Call of Duty: Ghosts is a longstanding first-Tuesday-in-November tradition, scaring off nearly every other big release that has a bunch of marketing behind it. But there are a few others of note, including a Castlevania collection and State of Decay on PC. Here’s the week in video games. Tuesday, Nov. 5 Call of Duty: Ghosts…

A Live-Action Look Back at Dead Island‘s Original Trailer

Remember that haunting first trailer that Dead Island released two years ago? The reverse-time, slow-motion reveal of a zombie child thrown to her death by her father, and the tragedy preceding it all? That thing won an award at Cannes.* Now someone’s gone and shot it in live action. Directed by BJ McConnell, with visual…

Call of Duty‘s original working title was “Medal of Honor Killer,” reports GameSpot. Mission accomplished, I’d say.

Kotaku ‘Shop Contest: One Big-Ass Xbox

Oh man, look at this Xbox One! Man, I don’t think my entertainment center’s gonna hold that sucker when it comes out next month. That is huuuuuuge! Let’s ‘Shop it up. What, you need more instruction from me? Hell, a bunch of people already got started when Jason Schreier spied this image last week. We’ll…

Warcraft Artist Dominates Halloween Contest With Game of Thrones Getup

Everyone, meet René Koiter. Halloween may have been three days ago, but we just caught a glimpse of his virtuoso rendering of Khal Drogo from Game of Thrones, which totally blew the curve for Blizzard’s Halloween costume contest. It’s not just the body paint, the leather bracers or the twin sickle blades. Half of the…

Sunday Comics: Look But Don’t Touch

Welcome to Kotaku‘s Sunday Comics, your weekly roundup of the best webcomics. The images enlarge if you click on the magnifying glass icon. Double XP by M.S. Corley and Josh Crandall. Published Oct. 28. Read more of Double XP Awkward Zombie by Katie Tiedrich. Published Oct. 28. Read more of Awkward Zombie Penny Arcade by…

Next-Gen Games Will Fill Our New Consoles’ Hard Drives In No Time

The PlayStation 4’s internal hard drive is 500GB, and if you buy and start playing just two of its launch day first-person shooters this month, you may already be using more than a 10th of the drive. Welcome to a somewhat different era of console gaming. Above you’ll the see part of the back of…

News Station Thinks “The Cake Is A Lie” Joke Is Proof of the Paranormal

For anyone that’s played Portal, ‘the cake is a lie’ very well may be an old, tired joke. But that doesn’t mean everyone knows where the joke comes from, judging from some this footage of a recent Oklahoma newscast. The clip above is of KJRH’s coverage of Sooner Paranormal of Oklahoma, a group dedicated to…

Kotaku ‘Shop Contest: Rosemary’s Babies: The Winners

With a face only a mother could love—or a psychopath—My Little Baby 3D adorably spit up on the 3DS last week. We gave you several blood-curdling screenshots and asked you to do your worst. Happily, you kept the really gruesome stuff to a bare minimum. There are 17 finalists inside, including overall No. 1 Docherty!…

Cuba Actually Had Arcades. Today They Were All Shut Down.

Cuba has formally cracked down on its nascent arcade businesses, specifically forbidding their operation after they had opened and operated in a gray area uncovered by the law there for the past three years. Arcades and movie theaters are banned—”immediately”—Cuba’s government said on Saturday, according to the CBC. These establishments are not among the 200…

Charity Gaming Marathon Site Taken Down by Hackers [Update: It’s Back]

Earlier in the day, Extra Life, an annual fund raiser held by Sarcastic Gamer was down for more than an hour because of a DDoS attack, organizers said. The site returned around 5:15 p.m. Extra Life benefits the Children’s Miracle Network, and has been held annually since 2008, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars since…

Twitch.tv announced streaming support for Minecraft on PC and Mac, at Minecon 2013, being held this weekend in Florida. This means Minecraft players will be able to stream to the service directly from the game itself. The feature will be live “soon,” says Twitch.

Megan Fox Stars in the Latest Call of Duty: Ghosts Live-Action Trailer

You’re gonna live ’til you die in Call of Duty: Ghosts which, for millions on Tuesday, will be about 16 seconds after spawning. A bombed-out, bro’d out Vegas stars alongside Megan Fox (Bad Boys II, as “Stars-and-Stripes Bikini Kid Dancing Under Waterfall”) in the live-action launch trailer Activision just pushed out for its megabazillion-dollar franchise.…

Meet the Specialists of Call of Duty‘s Extinction Mode

Extinction, the horde mode replacing (or so it seems) zombies for Call of Duty: Ghosts will feature four classes specific to the mode, according to this post yesterday afternoon from the game’s developer. The classes are rather meat-and-potatoes: Weapon Specialist, Tank, Engineer and Medic. The first two are your offensive classes, the second two are…

Peggle 2 will be out “a few weeks later in December” and not on the day Xbox One launches (Nov. 22), PopCap said. An earlier listing by Microsoft called it a launch-day title. The game is a timed exclusive to Xbox One.

This Week in the Business: ‘The Wrong Product for Consumers’

What’s happened in the business of video games this past week … QUOTE | “We think the Wii U is the wrong product for consumers.”—Analyst Michael Pachter, on why he thinks it’s unlikely Nintendo will sell 8.5 million Wii Us between now and March 30 to meet its projections STAT | $236.2 million—Amount of money…