200 People, Retro Multiplayer, No Internet. It’s Madness.

On the weekend, the Personal Computer Museum in Ontario, Canada held its annual “Game Night”, throwing open its doors and letting around 200 people in to get their hands on a ton of vintage video games, which can be played on their original hardware. Thing is, there’s a catch. There’s no internet allowed. Anywhere. If…

Jimmy Fallon’s Game Of Thrones Tribute Is Surprisingly Amazing

Say what you will about Jimmy Fallon’s tenure of the Late Night show, when his team decide to do a Game of Thrones parody, they go all out It was a rough Sunday night without a real Game of Thrones, but if we’re going to sit through ten minutes of homage, it could have been…

Building Sony Monsters, One Polygon At A Time

Bryan Wynia works as a senior character artist at Sony Computer Entertainment America, where he most recently worked on God Of War: Ascension. Prior to that, he was a character artist Naughty Dog, and contributed to the look of both Uncharted 2 and Uncharted 3. You can see more of Bryan’s work at his personal…

A Look At BioShock Infinite’s…Architecture

After playing about 3 hours into BioShock Infinite, my mind was only able to formulate one solitary question, a query that even Shakespeare couldn’t have phrased more eloquently. A question that is, in fact, worthy of its own quote block: “What. The. ****. Just. Happened.” What did I just see? How did so much content…

Even eBay Is Making The Most Of The Xbox One’s Bad PR

We’ve all had our fun with the Xbox One’s less-than-stellar reveal, but for eBay, the console’s problems are more than just a joke; they’re a way for Nintendo to make some sales. eBay Germany’s Facebook page ran the above ad over the weekend. The image is fine, but it’s the text underneath that’s getting the…

Putting The Xbox One’s Reveal In Perspective

LaserFrog’s summary here of last week’s big console reveal may well be the first time something has been so melancholy it’s made me smile. Then again, it doesn’t matter how you say “bag of farts”, that’s normally enough to get a laugh out of me. Run, Play, Think! – Xbox One Reveal Revealed [YouTube]

13 Years Later, A New Final Fantasy IX Quest Has Been Discovered

People dig up random little easter eggs and bugs in old games all the time. What they don’t often find are entire side-quests which have somehow remained hidden from view for over a decade. YouTube user GarlandTheGreat has uploaded a video showing a sidequest present in Final Fantasy IX that, until now, was pretty much…

Grand Theft Auto Meets The Simpsons

Hey. It’s artist Dan Luvisi again. Three times in one year? It’s worth it, because Grand Theft Otto – mashing the Simpsons and Vice City – is what it is. Awesome. It also reminds me of a dream game of mine, back in the day, where Rockstar and EA sat down, put Vice City and…

Yeah, Punching’s Great. But Superman Should Kick More Guys in the Nuts.

The Last Son of Krypton mostly pummels evildoers in the face. Yes, there’s the good ol’ freeze breath and heat vision attacks but those tend to feel a bit impersonal. And Superman always pulls his punches with normal human bad guys. But, what if someone pissed him off so much that he didn’t hold back?…

At The End Of The Experiment, This Portal Cosplay Will Be Baked

If you’re against the use of photoshop in cosplay photos, I can understand where you’re coming from. But then, if there was no photoshop in cosplay photos, we wouldn’t get amazing pictures like the one up top. Other highlights this week include, yes, more Final Fantasy, but also some BioShock Infinite, Doctor Who and, for…

Hope You Never Miss Out On Something Because You Played A Game Solo

Anxiety caused by the fear of missing out (FOMO) is a real thing: it’s when you worry that no matter what you’re doing at that moment, you could be doing something better somewhere else. Typically, FOMO is discussed in the context of social media, as social media feeds into the fear of missing out. We…

The Best SNES Endings

Compared to video game endings on the NES, the Super Nintendo stepped things up a bit. Thanks to the power of 16-bit, devs were able to do much more; ending cutscenes became longer and, similarly to arcade games, a lot of them showed us the best moments and characters of the game in looped sequences,…

The Last Of Us: The Series: Episode 1

Teased a few months back, the first episode of What Remains, a series based on Naughty Dog’s upcoming The Last Of Us, is now out. It’s 18 minutes long While it looks like an official tie-in, it’s actually the work of Manifest Film, a team of gaming filmakers who, when this is done, are hoping…

The Moneysaver: Baldur’s Gate, Logitech G500, Arrested Development

There’s always money in the Moneysaver. Memorial Day seems like as good an excuse as any to save money, so let’s get right to it. Amazon has the Logitech G500 Gaming Mouse for $38, an easy sell if you’re in the market for a new input device, and the BenQ Official Major League Gaming Monitor…

The Games That Make It Hardest To Say Goodbye

There haven’t been a ton of new games out lately, so maybe you’ve had time to finish one or two that had been sitting on your backburner. And maybe, if you were lucky, one of those games was good enough that you had a hard time letting go. It’s a unique and lovely thing, the…

The People Behind The Games We Play

Happy three-day weekend! Or, to those of you who don’t live in America, happy Monday! Given that it’s an Official Kotaku Holiday, we thought this might be a good time to revisit some old stories. So we’ve gone through the archives and dug up some some of our best pieces for your holiday reading pleasure.…

Sonic and Mega Man’s Enemies Team Up to Make Some F***ed-Up Robots

Knuckles Man.? Rose Woman? Shadow Man? Only two horrible minds could’ve come up with evil robot antagonists like these. Dr. Wily and Dr. Eggman’s malevolent subversion of Sonic the hedgehog’s friends gets revealed in the latest issue of the Worlds Collide crossover, an Archie Comics event pairing up Sonic and Mega for twelve issues of…

Now This Is How You Do A Mobile Beat-Em Up

No d-pad. No buttons to mash. No virtual controls whatsoever. Frantic finger-swipes are the order of the day in Combo Crew, an homage to the ancient arcade beat-em ups of our forefathers. Those ancient games of yore gave us a goal — generally rescuing a kidnapped family member or significant other — and set us…

Here’s what’s going on Talk Among Yourselves, our reader-written blog: It’s been a great long weekend for TAY with tons of well-written provocative pieces. Among them: SloopyDrew calls for revolution against a top-down, overly constricted vision of gaming’s future. GiantBoyDetective looks at more fictional video games from the insides of TV shows in his recurring…

Halo Music Video Catapults You Into The Middle Of a Spartan Firefight

This Halo insipred and -themed music video easily wins “the most Spartan costumes featured in a clip ever trophy,” as a whole division of Spartans get into an intense firefight in an odd, but awesome setting with a piano in the centre. A pretty large-scale video for William Joseph and Lindsey Stirling’s song—, must have…