New Mural Could Reveal Grand Theft Auto V Box Art

Looks like Rockstar is building a big ol’ Grand Theft Auto V mural in downtown Manhattan. It could hint at box art for the upcoming open world game — Rockstar built a similar mural to show off GTAIV‘s box art back in 2007, and that “RP” on the bottom left sure looks like the ESRB’s…

Chris Hecker Rants at GDC Without Saying a Word

It’s revealing that at first I didn’t get the point of this, which is Chris Hecker’s rant at Game Developers Conference 2013. So much of the nonstop big budget press conference bullshit you hear in this business all sounds alike, forcing me into a kind of weird active listening where I’m trying to decode pabulum…

Kotaku ‘Shop Contest: Table Talk

Everyone had so much fun annotating little Samael Henkel’s Arma II table yesterday that I figured it had to be good for our latest ‘Shop Contest. Look, I know it’s just a table, but this is where you guys come in. If you can make that funny, you can make anything funny. And I have…

Is It OK to Take a Free Game When the Company Selling It Makes a Mistake?

As I was packing up for some time off about 10 days ago, someone sent an email to me and others who had review copies of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14 that all of the game’s downloadable courses were already on Xbox Live, and none of them had a price. It was $67 worth of…

Sunday Comics: The Day the Music Died

Welcome to the all new, Kinja-fied version of Kotaku‘s Sunday Comics. The features will enlarge if you click on the magnifying glass icon in the lower right corner of each image. Another Videogame Webcomic by Phil Chan and Joe Dunn. Published March 29. Read more of Another Videogame Webcomic Penny Arcade by Jerry Holkins and…

The Stunning Debut Trailer For Hardware, A Game By Some Guys Who Made PC Classic Homeworld

First revealed all the way back in 2011, it’s only today that we’re getting our first (barely) moving look at Hardware, a new game from a studio made up of a number of former Relic developers, including Rob Cunningham, Homeworld’s art director. So if you think the teaser trailer above looks (and sounds) familiar, that’s…

Xbox 360 golfers, the Stick Jockey Country Club is now accepting membership applications in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14 and we’ve waived the initiation fee and credit history check. Search for “Stick Jockey” among the game’s country clubs and use the password jockey317stick to join. Please remember that Stick Jockey CC is a very exclusive…

Kotaku ‘Shop Contest: Habemas Pope Francish

So, here we go, the Kotaku ‘Shop Contest debuts under the site’s third design in the four-year history of the feature. Thanks for your patience while I was away last week; today, we round up a look at the latest leader of the Ecclesiastical Church of St. Games, Francis, the lisping, PC-gaming ragemonger who had…

Forza Horizon‘s latest batch of new cars—the Top Gear Car Pack—arrives on Tuesday. It offers six more rides for $5.

‘Warzone’ Multiplayer is on Gears of War: Judgment Disc Thanks to Stray Code

Earlier this week Gears fans figured out how to trigger Warzone—it has to be done from a private Team Deathmatch, while hitting the A and B buttons simultaneously in the match’s parameters menu. Warzone’s exclusion and mysterious reappearance led to rumors the mode was going to be included later as paid DLC, but an Epic…

Yetizen, co-host of a party featuring scantily clad dancers at the Game Developers Conference, has released a statement on the controversy. YetiZen’s CEO says the IGDA’s director approved the dancers’ costumes.

The PS2 versions of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories and Liberty City Stories arrive on PSN next week for $9.99 each.

So, It Seems Lil Wayne is Sampling Assassin’s Creed Now (not Mass Effect)

This is “Trigger Finger” from Lil Wayne’s newest album I Am Not a Human Being II, released Tuesday. But Mass Effect Assassin’s Creed fans should recognize that opening sample, before it lights up a bowl and rolls into the filth-flarn-filth lyrics (so, yes, NSFW warning if you’re listening around others over speakers.) [Update] Reader SRTMH…

A Six-Year Old is Modding Arma II, and He Made This Table

No, this isn’t particularly spectacular for a mod, much less one for ArmA II, but it is one made by a six-year-old boy, who was curious why his dad spent so much time in front of the computer. When Myke Henkel told his son he was making things for a video game, son Samael insisted…

This Week in the Business ‘There is Strong Purchase Intent for the PS4’

What’s happened in the business of video games this past week, brought to you by Steve Peterson of GamesIndustry International QUOTE | “[There is] strong purchase intent for the PS4.”—Tony Bartel, president of GameStop, talking about the interest that GameStop’s already seeing for PS4 at this early stage, as well as “disappointing” Wii U sales.…

Cliff Bleszinski Is One Of The First People In The World To Get A Pair Of Google’s Crazy Computer Glasses

Former Epic designer Cliff Bleszinski (not pictured) has been selected by an “independent panel” to be one of the first 8000 people in the world to get a pair of Google’s potentially pioneering/ridiculous wearable computers, Google Glass. In order to be selected as one of the earliest recipients of the tech, participants in a competition…

Sad You Weren’t At GDC? Me Too. Let’s Take A Virtual Tour Of All The Cool Stuff Instead.

This year’s Game Developers Conference is about to end today, leaving behind great panel discussions and announcements, and also a lot of other cool stuff that was not shown on any stream. The GDC staff already uploaded almost 1,000 photos to their official Flickr page, and we’ve selected a few exciting ones to show more…

A New Week in Gaming Apps for an All-New Kotaku

This week’s special late edition of the Week in Gaming Apps is brought to you by learning how to use an entirely new publishing system on the fly. It’s a learning experience. Oh my goodness these images are so big. Fortunately many of this week’s gaming apps were big as well. We’ve got Magicka on…

‘What We Want to Do is Scare the S–t Out of Players. So We’ll do Whatever Is Necessary To Achieve That Goal.’

This is Outlast, a first-person, combat-free horror game about investigating an asylum. It’s coming to PC (Steam) at the end of the summer by new development studio Red Barrels. We saw the game at PAX East last weekend. Supposedly one of the people who tried the game at PAX was so freaked out that he…

The Case Of The Flawed Metacritic Study

A study looking into the hidden formula that drives Metacritic made headlines this week, but Kotaku has discovered some critical errors that call it into question. Earlier this week, Full Sail University professor Adams Greenwood-Ericksen held a GDC session in San Francisco in which he shared some of his research on the effects of Metacritic,…