Naruto and .hack// game studio CyberConnect2 is working on three original titles

A Gallery of Hamburger Horrors

The service you get at McDonald’s in Japan is world class. The staff is polite and prompt, and there’s still a focus on presentation. So it’s a shame that McDonald’s just screwed things up. In Japan, McDonald’s is mucking things up with a special promotion. Called “Enjoy! 60 Second Service”, the concept is that if…

It’s A Monitor That Sits on Your Desk. And Your Lap.

Small-time peripheral company GeChic feel that there’s a place in the market for a portable monitor. A slimmer version of your desktop monitor that can run on battery power. After using one for a week I’m not so sure, even if their hearts are in the right place. With an official title of “On-Lap 2501M”,…

Wonderful Lord of the Rings Art That Goes On And On

Chinese artist Jian Guo is a very talented man, and a massive Lord of the Rings fan. The gorgeous images you’re about to see are testament to this. The Hobbit piece up top is a highlight (and a timely one at that), but there are pictures from other Tolkien works here as well. You can…

Fantastic Grand Theft Auto V Art Brightens Up Your Monday Morning

Over the weekend, Rockstar collected every piece of promotional art so far made available for Grand Theft Auto V, cleaned them up, made sure each had a nice big background behind them then then scaled them to wallpaper size. Some feature the game’s main protagonists, some don’t. Some give us a good look at locations…

Get a Good Look At Nvidia’s New Gaming Handheld

PC hardware company Nvidia dropped quite the CES bombshell tonight, revealing a quirky new gaming handheld that doubles as an Android device as well as a means of streaming your PC games to a portable 720p display. To go with the information from Project Shield’s announcement, here’s a gallery of images giving you a good…

StarCraft’s Kerrigan Is The Queen Of Blades Cosplay

The standout piece of cosplay this week is the StarCraft Ghost photo you see above, by Jessica Dru. If you think it looks just like Kerrigan does on StarCraft II, that’s because Jessica actually got her hands on the official Kerrigan costume Blizzard used to promote the game. Some might call that cheating, but I…

Oh Yeah, Nvidia Also Officially Outs the World’s Fastest Mobile Processor

So there I was, prepping a post on Nvidia’s Tegra 4 processor, the successor to the Tegra 3 with six times the graphics processing power and all sorts of nifty advancements that really seem boring now compared to the Shield portable gaming device The Tegra 4 features 72 GeForce GPU cores—at least ten times the…

Nvidia, Out Of Nowhere, Announces A New Gaming Handheld

Nvidia just surprised a whole bunch of people by announcing, of all things, a dedicated gaming handheld during the company’s CES press conference. Based on the new Tegra 4 mobile chip, also announced at the show, it’s code-named Nvidia Shield. There are 5-10 hours of battery life, and it’s based on a clamshell design, sort…

Someone Is Re-Building The Entire Planet In Minecraft

Using a program called Worldpainter, a builder by the name of lentebriesje is trying to recreate all of planet Earth in Minecraft. At a 1:1500 scale. That is a lot of blocks. His Earth is based off this very large, very fancy 3D map of the planet, and while it doesn’t include anything man-made, it…

The World’s Newest Console Is Already Being Used For Street Fighter, Mario 64

If you were unexcited by the fact the new Ouya console runs Android games, remember: if it runs Android, it can run emulated games working on the platform. And as anyone with an Android phone can tell you, that’s a lot of games. Users on the Ouya Boards who are already in possession of one…

Dishonored’s Probably Not Right For LEGO, But Here’s Dishonored LEGO Anyway

Something tells me the chances of us seeing officially licensed Dishonored LEGO are slim. Rats, murder, prostitutes… I don’t think it’s quite LEGO’s thing. But hey, where LEGO misses an opportunity, custom builders are always there to come through with the goods. Nathan Proudlove built this Dishonored “Tall Boy” walker, a unit in the game…

Report: Valve’s Steam PC Getting 2013 Reveal, Runs On Linux

According to a report on German IT site Golem, Valve engineer Ben Krasnow told an audience at the recent EHSM 2012 conference in Berlin that the company’s long-awaited “Steam Box” custom PC/console/thing will indeed be running on Linux, and will be revealed in full at either GDC or E3 later this year. Meaning the PC…

USB 3.0 Is Going To Double Speeds

USB data transfer is about to get a hell of a lot faster. The USB Promoter Group is rolling out SuperSpeed USB, a supplement to USB 3.0 due out later this year that should surge your speeds two-fold. SuperSpeed USB is supposed to give you 10 Gbps USB data rate, which is the same as…

The Walking Dead Guys Would Love To Do A Halo, Half-Life Series

Fresh off their success with The Walking Dead series, as well as experience with half a dozen other properties that belong to someone else, developers Telltale have told Red Bull (the website of… the drink) what their dream projects are. And they’re about the same as anyone else’s dream projects. “Coming from LucasArts we always…

Rest In Peace, PlayStation 2 (2000-2012)

Having stopped shipping in Japan last year, The Guardian has confirmed with Sony that PlayStation 2 production has now ceased worldwide. Let that sink in for a second. There are no more PlayStation 2 consoles being made. Anywhere. Once the new consoles already on shelves are gone, that’s it. While it’s almost 13 years old,…

The Speakys—Your Games of the Year—Have Been Named, Now Pick the Best

The votes are in, and you have spoken. The second annual Speakys, the Kotaku community-voted awards organized by GiantBoyDetective, have named their individual category winners. From here, the category winners will be faced off in a vote to determine the Speakys’ overall game of the year. Remember, tomorrow Kotaku will be conferring its Game of…

Did Sports Video Games Really Get Any Better in 2012?

Earlier this week, Metacritic bemoaned 2012 as a year of poorer review scores for video games than the one preceding it. Fewer titles surpassed the all-important 90—which practically guarantees job security to those who developed or greenlit the project—than in 2011. Interestingly, the three console platforms’ average review scores all improved slightly. This isn’t proof…

The Week in Games: A Long Winter’s Nap

The Week in Games is back but, as is expected in January, we don’t have much to share. The western release of Anarchy Reigns is the lone console title. It doesn’t look like things pick up again until next week, when DmC: Devil May Cry arrives. Monday • Sesame Street TV – Season 2 (360…

1993: The Birth of DLC

There’s a past-is-prologue quality to a lot what wwwtxt curates and sends out over its Twitter feed, exemplified by this nugget published on Friday. wwwtxt is not a bot. It’s Daniel Rehn, an artist and “media archaeologist,” who culls discussions before 1995, the beginning of the commercial Internet as we know it. The sources include…