Your Chance To See A Portal Gun Show

Synthetic Picturehaus, who floored us last year with their Portal short film Lab Ratt, are back with another instalment in the adventures of Doug “Ratman” Ratmann, a cult figure in the Portal universe. Aperture: Shadows [YouTube]

EA Didn’t Force Things Onto BioWare Games, Says Co-Founder

Given the publisher’s track record in buying studios then seeing them fail, there’s an understandable assumption that it’s always EA’s fault when a formerly successful studio falls on hard times. And hey, in many cases, maybe it is. But in the case of BioWare, the RPG powerhouse bought by EA in 2007 and which has…

The Oculus Rift Might Be The Future Of Video Games. Here’s What Its Insides Look Like.

Against all the odds, the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset could emerge in the coming months to be the most exciting new peripheral in video games. And that’s even when you get bad flashbacks to the early 90s and VR’s prior failings. Those curious to see just what makes the headgear tick, well, here you…

The Very Best Art From The Mass Effect Series

Regular readers of my concept art feature here on Kotaku would know that, yeah, over the years I’ve shown my fair share of work from the Mass Effect trilogy. The guys at BioWare (and, in some cases, beyond) did amazing work building the series, and that began at the ground level, with the design of…

Tiny Team Fortress Guns Mean Certain Death For This Pepsi Can

They say good things come in small packages, but that’s assuming this amazing little Team Fortress 2 sentry gun even comes in a package. It’s a custom job, so it may just come bubble-wrapped! Either way, it’s the work of the supremely-talented Psychobob, a whiz with the 3D printer whose work we’ve featured here before…

The Most Ridiculously Over-Sized Screenshot I Have Ever Seen

Here’s how a screenshot normally gets from a publisher to a website like this. They’re either hosted on a press site or sent via email. Sometimes, if a company is crazy/lazy, they’ll only send the versions that print magazines can use, meaning we’ve got a little resizing to do to get it to a size…

I’m Sorry, Miranda, My Shepard Just Doesn’t Love You Anymore

Mass Effect is about a lot of things. Shooting. Flying. Driving. Talking. Space magic. It’s also a series about relationships. Life, love, loss and all the wonderful – and terrible – emotions that go along with them. I love romance in video games. It fascinates me. Developers are able to implement the acts of shooting,…

Rayman’s Wii U Delay Might Have Been Worth It After All

When Rayman Legends’ Wii U release was delayed by months so 360 and PS3 editions could be put together, owners of Nintendo’s console were pissed. Maybe this will ease the pain. In an interview with Britain’s Official Nintendo Magazine, Ubisoft’s Senior Game Manager Michael Micholic, said “Trust me, the things we are adding aren’t minor.…

What are the 100 greatest TV episodes of all time? Funny you should ask! IMDB users have ranked them according to their own hive-mind preference, and Pajiba has pulled out the list of the top 25, along with some helpful gifs and images. While my own top 25 is pretty different, a lot of these…

The Countless Characters of Mass Effect

The Mass Effect franchise has introduced a huge amount of characters; an incredibly diverse cast of aliens, humans and synthetics who served to make our adventure in the Mass Effect universe memorable, who made us laugh, made us cry, who amazed us, scared us and sometimes even made us think. So let’s talk about them!…

Mass Effect’s Hilarious, Unintended Subtitles

This article was originally published on June 6, 2012. We’re bumping it up for Mass Effect week Like almost every other game, Mass Effect 3 has official subtitles. But that’s not what we’re looking at today. No, what you’re about to see is what happens when people record themselves playing Mass Effect 3, upload videos…

Have you ever considered the political situation in the Mario universe? Over at the Slate Quora blogs, Domhnall O’Huigin dives into the question, concluding that the universe is in a “ever-ending condition of war within and war without, fraught and constantly changing as one faction or another vies for control.” Yeah, it’s intense.Read the rest…

As Video Games Changed, So Too Did Mass Effect

Close your eyes and think back to it: It’s fall of 2007. That’s quite a while ago. Take your current age and subtract five. That’s about how old you were. That’s how long ago Mass Effect game out. Think about the game itself. How simple it was, how innocent! An Xbox 360 exclusive, released near…

IGN‘s got a video of the first fifteen minutes ofFar Cry 3: Blood Dragon. It looks very goofy, decidedly retro, and like a lot of fun.

The Next Xbox May Have An “HDMI In” Port. So?

A new source e-mails me several days ago. The source has access to a development kit for the next Xbox 360—the codenamed Durango. Accurately describes the look of the new controller, but mentions something he’s confused about. The Durango he’s seen doesn’t just send a signal out through an HDMI port (that’s normal). It has…

Microsoft’s Adam Orth, The “Always-On” Tweeter, No Longer With The Company

According to a report on Game Informer, Adam Orth, the Microsoft creative director who last week upset some folks with his comments about always-online technology, is no longer with the company. A source close to Orth tells Kotaku that Orth resigned from the company and was not fired. Respondingto a Kotaku report that claimed the…

City of Heroes’ Studio Fought to the Bitter End to Save the MMO, Designer Says

Gamasutra‘s postmortem of City of Heroes and Paragon Studios says the MMO’s development staff did everything it could to keep the game running—including trying to buy it from publisher NCSoft—and that plans for one final update were shot down right before the game was closed on Dec. 1. Matt Miller, the former lead designer of…

Go check out Manic Pixel Dream Girl, a wonderful comic miniseries by Elizabeth Simins about growing up as a girl who likes video games. Part three just went up yesterday, and there’s still one more part to go.

Defiance MMO Log One: A Little Better Every Time I Play

Last week I posted less-than-favorable launch day impressions of Trion Worlds’ Defiance, the massively multiplayer shooter tie-in to SyFy’s upcoming original series. I bemoaned the lack of PC options, criticized the silly vehicle physics and worried over its lack of general chat functionality. A week later those issues are still present, yet I’ve been playing…

Is it worth it to run two graphics cards in one gaming PC? Our friends at Lifehacker have some answers. (Short version: it depends, but they generally recommend one great card over having two lesser ones.)