Sand, Smog, or Something Covered Japan in a Yellow Haze

This weekend, sand storms blew through Japan. Cities like Tokyo were covered in an unreal yellow haze. Every year, yellow sand from the deserts of Mongolia and northern China blow over North and South Korea as well as Japan. The sand is called “kousa” (黄砂) in Japanese and “Asian Dust” in English. The winds also…

Here’s the trailer for Gero Blaster, the upcoming iOS game from Cave Story‘s creator.

Confessions of a Female Cosplayer’s Secret Boyfriend

I have a confession to make: I am dating a cosplayer. You’ll never know exactly which one, because I am a secret boyfriend. And because I am a secret boyfriend, I can’t tell you my name or hers. This is probably an issue that most of you know nothing about because—like me—it’s a secret. Yet…

You Can Download 700 Free Marvel Comics Right Now [UPDATE: Offer postponed]

Between now and 11pm ET on Tuesday, March 12, you can download some 700 first issues from Marvel Comics for free. And… it’s legal! The ComiXology Comics app for iOS and Android is offering 700 Marvel comics as part of a Marvel promotion announced at this weekend’s SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. You could probably…

SimCity Makers Say Crashes Dramatically Reduced, No ‘All-Clear’ Yet

SimCity may have gotten more stable over the weekend as the game’s creators at Maxis have added more servers, but the game isn’t quite out of the woods yet. In a new update to the EA blog, Maxis head Lucy Bradshaw says that they’ve reduced game crashes by 92% since launch day, but that lingering…

Modders Keep MVP Baseball 2005 Alive With the World Baseball Classic

There is no game-action simulation of baseball on the PC this year, whatsoever. Management sims like Out of the Park Baseball or Sega’s MLB Manager are your only current options in a role that MLB 2K had filled—but the rush job it put in on MLB 2K13 left out that platform. At any rate, no…

Someone Put an Assassin’s Creed Screengrab In a TV Report on Syria

Ah, the dangers of Google image search. On Feb. 26, Denmark’s TV2 needed an over-the-shoulder shot for a report on the conflict in Syria, and some production assistant gave the control room a screengrab from the original Assassin’s Creed (which features Damascus prominently) Apparently it’s this one, from the game’s unofficial wiki site. That’s supposed…

The Best at Tecmo Super Bowl Settle a Claim Made by Everyone

MADISON, Wis.—Most of us are realistic about our shot. We are going to get our asses kicked, and then go to the bar. But we’re in March, we’re in a tournament, we’re all sports fans and if anybody in the 224-man field of Tecmo Madison, the largest Tecmo Super Bowl event in the nation, didn’t…

The Week in Games: God Amighty

The prequel to the God of War series arrives Tuesday, along with the long-awaited StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm and Battlefield 3‘s final DLC extension. Tuesday • God of War: Ascension (PS3) • StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm (PC DLC) • Battlefield 3: End Game (XBL, PC DLC) • Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2…

If you pick up God of War: Ascension, you can play the demo for The Last of Us early, on May 31.

Kotaku ‘Shop Contest: The Emperor Has No Pants

Though SimCity says it’s adding servers and stabilizing the situation, the game’s launch week will forever be remembered as a disasterbacle. That makes the image above of comedian Adam DeVine—a frame from this video advertisement—rather appropriate. The game was completely pantsed by its always-on DRM, and while I know a lot of you are upset…

Cool Dad Hacks Donkey Kong So His Daughter Can Play It as Pauline

This is pretty sweet. Mike Mika’s daughter is three years old, and the two of them play a lot of video games together. “She’s played as Peach in Super Mario Bros. 2 and naturally just assumed she could do the same in Donkey Kong,” he wrote. When it bummed her out to learn she couldn’t…

Sunday Comics: The Pursuit of Perfection

Welcome to your Sunday read of the week’s best in web comics. Make sure to click on the expand button in the bottom right to enlarge each comic. Penny Arcade by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik. Published March 6. Read more of Penny Arcade Awkward Zombie by Katie Tiedrich. Published March 4. Read more of…

SimCity Gets Twice As Many People In The Game, “Improves Server Response Time By 40x”

Providing a little more detail than was briefly offered yesterday in a series of Twitter exchanges, Maxis’ Lucy Bradshaw has written a blog post outlining the progress that continues to be made fixing SimCity’s back-end woes. “Maxis continues to make huge progress in addressing the lag and server-capacity issues we experienced at launch”, she wrote.…

The First Unofficial ‘Steam Box’ Will Launch This Holiday Season Starting At $1,000

Xi3’s Piston—the first unofficial Steam Box console—will launch this holiday at a starting price of $1,000, the hardware manufacturer announced today. If you preorder it before March 18, you’ll get a $100 discount. The Piston is the first PC designed specifically to play games in your living room using Steam’s Big Picture mode. Valve is…

ESPN brought in Tim Kitzrow, the boom-shakalaka announcer of NBA Jam, to call this package of college and pro dunks.

SimCity Boss on Game’s Failure: ‘This is on Maxis. We Own It.’

After fielding some 1900 questions in a 45-minute Twitter Q&A, Maxis, the maker of SimCity, directly answered about eight regarding the game, which has been inaccessible to many since it released on Tuesday. “This is on Maxis,” said Lucy Bradshaw, the studio’s boss, in response to a customer’s allegation that publisher Electronic Arts required SimCity…

Reminder: Maxis studio boss Lucy Bradshaw is now taking questions on Twitter about the SimCity fiasco.

Someone, Quick, Send UN Election Monitors to Observe the NCAA Football Cover Voting

I’ve already had my say on the cynical, abusive b.s.. of running a Twitter or Facebook campaign to get folks to vote on a cover or a character or to pretend to give them some kind of influence over a video game publishing decision. In a nutshell, it’s garbage, and its true purpose is to…

This Week in the Business: ‘We Don’t Think There Are Enough Games for Mature Players’

What’s happened in the business of video games this past week … QUOTE | “We don’t think that there are enough games for mature, adult players.”—Adam Badowski, head of CD Projekt, talking about developing Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077 and other PC games QUOTE | “Video games are not all they can be… most of them…