One Piece Characters Look Very, Very Familiar

What do Michael Jackson, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Ghandi all have in common? They apparently look like One Piece characters, that’s what. Created by Twitter user @Sato3rd, the image below has been making its way around cyberspace recently. It shows One Piece characters and the real world individuals they either look like or seem inspired by.…

Game of Thrones Finally Gets Its Lightsaber Battle

It’s funny, last week, watching the swordfight that takes place in the episode, I was thinking of Star Wars, because the slow (yet heavy and deliberate) way the combatants were moving reminded me of the battles between Luke and Vader in Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Guess I wasn’t the only one.…

There is an Elder Scrolls universe mod for Crusader Kings II. Oh my. It’s in its early stages, but you can get it here

Man Arrested, Accused Of Threatening To Shoot Up His School Via…MMO

18 year-old Thomas Frongillo from Oxford, England, has been arrested and charged with “threatening to commit a crime and threatening a bombing or hijacking” after being accused of leaving hostile messages in an online game run by Jagex, the publishers of Runescape. While the game in question is not disclosed in a report on The…

Someone’s Got A NES (Sort Of) Working Inside Counter-Strike

What you’re seeing in the video above is the Sourcemod Entertainment System (SMES), a server plugin for Counter-Strike that lets you start up a video game and play another video game inside that video game. According to creator skwumpy, it works like this: you can pick up a cartridge in the game world, insert it…

Brace Yourselves For More BioShock Infinite Cosplay

There are a select few games (or series) that you see saturate the cosplay community. Final Fantasy is one. Zelda another. And Assassin’s Creed. You can now add BioShock Infinite to the list. Or at least cosplay for Elizabeth, as it seems people’s love for the character – combined with the fact her costume isn’t…

The Sweetest Thing You’ll See Today Is A 90-Year-Old Grandmother Losing It Using The Oculus Rift

Here’s what happens when the 90-year-old grandmother of Imagimind’s Paul Rivot has an Oculus Rift headset strapped to her head. To be fair, that’s about how I’d react using the thing, and I’m up to my eyeballs in video games every day. Lord only knows how many receptors she had left unfried after this. My…

Designing The Dresses For BioShock Infinite’s Elizabeth (And The Lutece Twins)

Claire Hummel worked as an artist on the recently-released BioShock Infinite, where she helped define the outfit of one of the game’s two biggest stars, Elizabeth. With a goal of having something that both looked like it came from 1912 and was also “age-appropriate”, the image above – and the first few below – show…

Amazing Optical Illusion, Using A Single GIF, Takes You On A Journey To BioShock’s Rapture

OK, so given the nature of this trick, you could use it for anything. Pictures of whales. Or Sealab. But the post in question used it for the first BioShock, and that’s about the best use I can think of. Reddit user supergalacticcaptain posted it over the weekend, with simple instructions: you stare at the…

The DRM-Free Version Of Shadowrun Returns Sounds Kinda Lame

UPDATE: As of December 2013, the DRM-free version is now public and available to all. Games simply not being completed isn’t the only hazard people face when pledging money to Kickstarter campaigns. Other problems can arise, like pledges being made during a pitch running into licensing agreements made with Microsoft. When Harebrained first asked for…

What An Assassin’s Creed Fighting Game Could Look Like

Benoit Perreault is a UI designer at Eidos Montreal. Before that, though, he worked at Ubisoft, where in his spare time – as in, this wasn’t an actual Ubisoft project – he cooked up this concept for an Assassin’s Creed fighting game. Envisaged as a downloadable arcade title, and uncovered by NeoGAF user Mama Robotnik,…

Here’s Gears of War‘s Top Designer Going Bald for a Good Cause

I may be bald, but Cliff Bleszinski is both unemployed and bald. But I wouldn’t worry about the former lead designer of the Gears of War series. He’s been doing alright for himself since leaving Epic Games, and this weekend he pulled in enough dough—$15,000, the highest contributor in this fundraiser—to make good on a…

College Athletes are More Than a Number, and Everyone Knows It

For many sports fans, a number is as identifiable as a name. Growing up far away from a professional team, those numbers didn’t really imprint on me until I covered football for four years at college. Ever since, I remember uniform numerals not with a name, but as a name. No. 85? Carl Reeves, one…

A 20-minute chunk of gameplay from The Elder Scrolls Online MMO leaked overnight, and was quickly taken down from YouTube on ZeniMax Media’s orders. PCGamer, however, has the clip if you want to see it. Early verdicts are not good.

The Week in Games: No Injustice, No Peace

DC Comics’ story-driven fighter from NetherRealm Studios hits shelves on Tuesday, dominating a week lacking any other major first-run PC or console release. Dishonored‘s Knife of Dunwall extension arrives for all three platforms, too. Monday • ArcaniA: Game of the Year Edition (PS3) Tuesday • Injustice: Gods Among Us (360, PS3, Wii U) • Shin…

Concerned Lawmaker Proposes Banning Video Games That Do Not Exist

Following Massachusetts’ successful crackdown on Time Crisis and Lethal Enforcers, a New Jersey lawmaker is also looking to make the state’s beautiful and historic Turnpike safe from light-gun games no one plays anymore. Except the language of the law she has in mind has a teeny tiny problem that renders it entirely meaningless. Here it…

Kotaku Shop Contest: Le Chateau What If

Earlier this week we heard the unusual story of the French prisoner whose PS3 was banned because of its consumer-friendly onboard WiFi. Fahey was pressed for time when he ‘shopped our lead image—so pressed that I didn’t notice that what I’d given him had someone’s stupid watermark in it. So by crowdsourcing this to the…

Bring on Sandman with a Mega Man Sleep Hoodie and Mega Buster Pillow

Capcom is now taking preorders for this Mega Man sleep set (yet only through its Japan site, for now) that will run about $60 once it arrives in the summer. It’s a brilliant idea, and I expect to see a ton of these running around Comic-Con. What might also be a good idea is to…

Sunday Comics: Fighting Fire with Fire

Welcome to Kotaku‘s Sunday Comics, your weekly roundup of the best features, chosen by our readership. The features enlarge if you click on the magnifying glass icon in the lower right corner of each image Brawl In The Family by Matthew Taranto. Published March 29. Read more of Brawl In The Family Penny Arcade by…

Kotaku ‘Shop Contest: The Bad Guys: The Winners

Is Electronic Arts the worst company in America? It is once its secret leaders and evil plans are laid bare by the Kotaku ‘Shop Contest. This week’s finalists send a dozen strongly worded messages to corporate America, led by overall No. 1 arniejolt, the first-ever three-time finalist in a single week. Editor’s Note: Wiegraf, you…