Hey, Pat Robertson, Is Playing a Violent Video Game a Sin?

Famous evangelical old person and all-around bigot Pat Robertson weighed-in on video game violence, despite never having played one in his life. “If you’re murdering somebody in cyberspace, in a sense you’re performing the act, you like it or not.” Robertson exclaimed on The 700 Club, comparing playing a violent game to other acts of…

Aww, When Villains Are This Cute, They Don’t Even Seem Evil

All you need to do to make someone seem less fierce is to catch them prancing around without a care in the world, like in this art by Mr. Florey. Do you recognize everyone? We’ve got cheery Cobra Commander, Beetlejuice, joyful Jason, Magneto, adorb Pennywise, Alien, lil’ Ganondorf, Voldermort, and playful Phoenix. You can buy…

EverQuest Next Could Fix Everything Wrong With MMORPGs

I’ve played every major massively multiplayer role-playing game released since 1998, yet it feels like I’ve spent the past 15 years playing the same game over and over again. That’s a problem. EverQuest Next is the solution. The original EverQuest established the basic layout that nearly ever subsequent MMORPG has followed. Players create a character…

How Do You Tell A Developer To Their Face That Their Game Sucks?

Everyone’s got an opinion on everything, but how do you confess straight to someone’s face that you dislike something they made? It can possibly be an awkward experience, but in today’s Ask Kotaku I dive in to how I deal with those situations. But let’s go through a few other questions you guys sent me…

A Great Batman Run Ends and Why Image Comics Is Kicking Ass

You don’t work at Kotaku. But if you did, you’d see a constant comics-centric conversation going back and forth between our staffers. Recommendations and raves pop up in our instant-message chats all the time and we catch up on must-read series and creators over lunch. These chats are always fun so, lucky you, we thought…

Kick-Ass Still Kicks Ass In 8-Bit

You might think that a movie like Kick-Ass would need charismatic actors and improbable wire-fu in order to be enjoyable. And yet! Written and animated by David Dutton with music by Henry Dutton, this CineFix extremely abridged 8-bit version of the film still manages to hit some emotional highs, mainly in how it makes me…

Two Astounding New EverQuest Games Are Coming. Full Details.

Just when it seemed that the future of MMOs might be a bit boring, the people behind EverQuest have decided to massively shake things up. Announced today in Las Vegas, Sony Online Entertainment is making not one but two new EverQuest games. Actually, you may be helping make one of them. The expected part of…

SOE Debuts EverQuest Next Today. Watch The Reveal Live Here.

Sony Online Entertainment announced EverQuest Next back in 2010, and then ran silent for three years. Now it’s time to show off the evolution of one of the longest-running MMO franchises on the market. You’ll want to watch this. And thanks to Twitch, you can. Enjoy the show. You can also read our report about…

If Privateer And Star Wars Had A Casual RPG Baby…

In Starborn Wanderers, you play a hotshot Jedi-esque starship pilot tasked with mining ore, running trade between solar systems, blasting pirates to ashes in turn-based battles and just generally saving humanity from extinction. I’m a little bit in love. I’m used to seeing Moscow-based developer Game Insight’s name next to hidden object games and city…

Moneysaver: Fallouts $4, Pixeljunk Monsters Deluxe, 400 Days, Humble

Come and get it if you want it, these games are all real cheap like I promised, I know that you don’t care to pay full price. These deals aren’t gonna last forever, click on through and you’ll feel much better, Moneysaver’s here for you tonight. We’ve got strong PC, Media, and Tech sections to…

Gone Home, the mysterious house-exploration game from the Fullbright Company, will be out on August 15 for PC, Mac and Linux. It’ll cost $19.99. I’ve played the first act and really liked it; you can find more at the game’s site

Watch Shaft Be A Badass And Take On Minecraft

The mob is back in town, and there’s only one hero that can get to the bottom of it. Ever wonder what would happen if you dropped John Shaft into the world of Minecraft? Why, you’d get this blaxpoitation Minecraft parody by MachinimaPrime, of course. Mineshaft is one of the many upcoming fan-created films from…

Sony’s Most WTF PlayStation Ad Yet?

Sony, the company responsible for the walkman, the PlayStation and lots of very odd ads, is trying to sell the PS Vita and PS3 in Argentina. And they are trying to do it with a most unusual tagline. The line in the ad above translates to: “When your son is playing he doesn’t ask you…

The Great Japanese Divide

As a JRPG fan, I’ve always had a hard time accepting that what Japan wants is often drastically different than what I want. So when Capcom announced this week that the next Breath of Fire—a series of traditional JRPGs revolving around a boy who can turn into a dragon—would not be a traditional RPG but…

Watch Us Play A Game That Scoffs At An Honest Day’s Work

How many games start your wizard off in his dressing gown? I’m guessing not many but this game does. The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot is a free-to-play PC game that’s basically a mixture of Diablo and Tower Defense. It has you breaking into other player’s castles, killing everything in sight and looting the place.…

Awesome Paperboy Homage Combines a Real Bike, Oculus Rift and Kinect

Remember the handlebar controllers on the Paperboy arcade machines? You really felt like you were controlling that cartoony bike on the screen, right? Well, what if you had a whole bike that you had to pedal to play an updated version of that classic game? It’d basically look like PaperDude VR. PaperDude VR—the creation of…

Here’s what’s going on Talk Among Yourselves, our reader-written blog: Dear Video Game Expert—Marsh Naylor’s column that answers your burning questions in most humorous fashion—has some sage advice about the holes you encounter in video games. Aikage wants to know what your favorite examples of breaking the fourth wall in video games. And GIantBoyDetective offers…

The 2007 Video Pitch For a CGI Zelda Movie We’ll Probably Never See [UPDATE]

ALL THAT, PLUS MORE GAMING SECRETS: The New/Old BioWare – The Forza After Forza 5 – Are we on the verge of Infinity Blade III? Following the disastrous Super Mario Bros. film, Nintendo decided against licensing out its properties to Hollywood for potential feature films, but that has not stopped people from trying to get…

Three Must-See Quake III Matches Of QuakeCon 2013

This year’s QuakeCon kicked off yesterday, not just with John Carmack’s annual marathon keynote, but with some skillful Quake III duels. In the finals of the winners’ bracket, two American gaming veterans, SK’s rapha and Evil Geniuses’ DaHanG, played a best-of-three on three different maps (dm13 never gets old!). They showed off some serious mind…

Indie Games Are Full Of Helpless Women But Critic Finds Some To Praise

Feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian has good things to say about a bunch of games in the third part of her analysis of the rampant use of “damsels in distress” in video games. She spends a lot of this one checking in on how indie games and modders handle things. Oh, but before that praise, she…