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…

Major League Baseball 2K13: The Kotaku Review

Major League Baseball 2K13 is an offensively recycled product and an embarrassment to sports video games. In my five years as Kotaku‘s sports writer, I’ve spent a good deal of time in comments defending the genre, and those who make its games, from the worn-out slur that annual sports titles are nothing but reskinned roster…

The Moneysaver: Call of Duty on the Cheap

Kotaku’s twice weekly roundup of the best discounts, combinations, offers and incentives in video gaming is brought to you by Dealzon Downloadables GameFly expired their 20% off coupon for last Tuesday’s release SimCity and the upcoming June 25 release of Company of Heroes 2. Thankfully, it still applies to March of the Eagles ($15.99), and…

It Would Take ‘Significant Engineering’ to Make SimCity an Offline Game

Later this afternoon, Lucy Bradshaw, the general manager of SimCity maker Maxis, is going to take over the studio’s official account to answer questions from gamers who, four days after the game’s release, are still unable to play the thing they purchased. She’s already given a preview answer to the question most of them likely…

The Best Of Kotaku, This Week

Welcome to the Best of Kotaku, where I round up all of this week’s best content. I’m back from vacation (with a slight tan and a cold) and ready to unleash this pretty, wooden Atari 2600 at you. It’s currently running for $1.2k on ebay. Or, if that’s too much for you, you can always…

‘That Was Dumb’: EA Says They’ll Give A Free PC Game To Anyone Who Bought SimCity

Anyone who bought SimCity will get a free video game, publisher EA said tonight. Apologizing for the crippling server issues that have rendered the new simulation game near-unplayable for the past week, Maxis boss Lucy Bradshaw wrote in a blog post that anyone with a copy of SimCity activated before March 18 will get a…

Hope Nobody Ever Tries To Wake You Up Like This

Sure, pranks are things jerks often do—but sometimes, things can get genuinely mean. And there’s really no other way to describe this supercut of cruel wake up pranks, where people find the most awful ways to get people to rise from their slumber. Despite how mean the video often is (if not dangerous, and arguably…

Gearbox Teases Burly New Borderlands 2 Playable Character

At South By Southwest in Austin, Gearbox debuted a teaser trailer that hints at the addition of a new character to Borderlands 2. The character isn’t fully shown, but looks to be some sort of melee-focused badass. The video above comes via Polygon, who are on the ground at SXSW. “A new vault hunter is…

Wow, Someone Basically Invented Mass Effect’s Medi-Gel

Without medi-gels—the life-saving healing salves in Mass Effect—our Commander Shepards would be toast. Out in the real world, though, we can’t just apply medi-gel to our injuries: it doesn’t exist. Or well, it didn’t, not like this. Not until recently. According to Mother Nature Network, Joe Landolina, a college student at NYU, has invented something…

Tomb Raider‘s PC Version Is Good, Despite A Few Stray Hairs

After about seven hours with Tomb Raider, I’m on board with Evan’s endorsement. It’s a very good game, and a strong example of the whole “game that’s like a movie” thing that Uncharted laid out a few years back. But what of the PC version? I’ve been putting it through its paces, and can happily…