• Kotaku East

  Your Homework? Machine Guns.

  College is hard! There are all those books to read. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to mix the workload up. Like, with some assault rifles? These images reportedly show a popular class at Nanjing University of Science and Technology in China. The students are studying machine guns and taking them apart to see how they work.…

  By Brian Ashcraft Published December 3, 2012
• Kotaku East

  This Might Be the Last Cosplay You’d Expect from Japan

  When you think of Japan and cosplay, you probably imagine ladies dressed in skimpy anime outfits or dudes in Gundam gear. And you’d probably be right! That type of cosplay is prevalent, sure, but it’s not the only game in town—especially with more and more Japanese players totally digging Call of Duty Recently on Japanese…

  By Brian Ashcraft Published December 3, 2012
• Kotaku East

  How Iron Man Inspired One Man To Create His Own Armor

  In a small two story 76 square meter loft located 30 minutes from the northern edge of Beijing just outside the fifth ring road, 27-year-old Wang Xiao Kang sits at his work desk looking at blueprints. Towering right over the slightly hunched Wang on a bookshelf as he reads his laptop screen is a 7…

  By Eric Jou Published December 3, 2012
• Kotaku East

  Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII Makes Players Manage Time

  Lighting Returns, the upcoming Final Fantasy XIII title, uses a time mechanic. In the game, the world has only 13 days left before it ends. In a recent interview with 4Gamer, game designer Motomu Toriyama went into slightly more detail about the game’s time mechanic. As mentioned above, the time limit in-game is 13 days.…

  By Brian Ashcraft Published December 3, 2012
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  Cloud and Boy Might Seem Familiar, But It’s Still Great Fun

  I don’t get to play a lot of Windows Phone games, mostly because I don’t own a Windows Phone and because there aren’t enough of them to warrant buying a Windows Phone. However, during last month’s game developers conference, I got to play a Windows Phone exclusive game developed by a student team from Taiwan.…

  By Eric Jou Published December 3, 2012
• Kotaku East

  Little Girl Learns about Trolls, Thanks to the 3DS

  There are strange people out there! They’re filled with malice and evil thoughts. And some of them even have 3DS handhelds. Considering how neither the 3DS nor StreetPass are exactly new, it’s somewhat odd that Yomiuri Shimbun, one of Japan’s biggest newspapers, would run a story on StreetPass trauma, but it did anyway after one…

  By Brian Ashcraft Published December 3, 2012
• Kotaku East

  Hitler in a Mini-Skirt and Stalin in Hot Pants. Infamous Dictators as Anime Ladies.

  Some of the most infamous dictators of the 20th century have now been turned into cute anime characters with not so cute accompanying biographies. The book is Nyotai ka!! Sekai no Dokusaisha Retsuden (にょたいか！！世界の独裁者列伝 or loosely, “In Female Form?! Biographies of World Dictators”), and it features illustrations by various artists, such as Nishieda and Takeshi…

  By Brian Ashcraft Published December 3, 2012
• Kotaku East

  This PS Vita Might Rip Out Your Spine

  PS Vita game Soul Sacrifice, which lets you rip out your spine and wield Excalibur, finally has a release date in Japan: March 7. But that’s not all. The game is also getting a special bundle, complete with a special Soul Sacrifice emblazoned Vita. Priced at ¥29,980, the bundle comes with an original Soul Sacrifice…

  By Brian Ashcraft Published December 3, 2012
• Uncategorized

  Crazy Pokémon Fan Breaks Up Sports Game

  Sports games are no strangers to fans running on the field. Sometimes those individuals are drunk. Sometimes they’re just naked—or naked and drunk. Rarely, if ever, are they wearing a Pikachu backpack and truly awful jeans. As pointed out by Yahoo and ESPN, a fan with questionable fashion sense raced on the field early in…

  By Brian Ashcraft Published December 3, 2012
• Uncategorized

  The World’s Most Expensive LEGO Brick Costs $14,000

  That’s for a single brick, mind you. Not a set. Just a single 4×2 brick. That brick is made from 14-carat gold, though, and between 1979-81 was given out to employees who had worked at the LEGO company for 25 years. So it’s not only made out of gold, it’s incredibly rare too, and is…

  By Luke Plunkett Published December 3, 2012
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  How to Make the Wii U’s Controller Even More Like The 360’s

  The Wii U’s Pro Controller already does a great 360 pad impersonation, but just in case you wanted/needed it to be more like Microsoft’s input device, here’s a mod that shows you how to drop a pair of Xbox 360 thumbsticks inside the casing of a Wii U Pro Controller. It’s of course not going…

  By Luke Plunkett Published December 3, 2012
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  The Old-School Mutant Beat-em-up Of Your Dreams

  The supremely-talented Dave Rapoza has an original comic coming out called Skull and Shark. To advertise it, he’s whipped up a trailer (featuring the music of Lazerhawk) that turns the comic into an old-school beat-em-up. Seeing it presented like that, it would totally work as an old-school beat-em-up. Fingers crossed something like that, you know,…

  By Luke Plunkett Published December 3, 2012
• Uncategorized

  A Long, Fascinating History of Video Game Samples in Rap Songs

  Continuing on from a list they put together in October, Spin magazine has built a video showing you a whole bunch of video game samples used in hip-hop tracks. It runs in gaming’s chronological order, so while the music may be all over the place, the games at least will be in order. In case…

  By Luke Plunkett Published December 3, 2012
• Uncategorized

  Eerily Accurate BioShock Infinite Cosplayer Gets Job Appearing on Actual BioShock Infinite Stuff

  Turns out we weren’t the only ones impressed by the “lifelike” imitation Russian cosplayer Anna Moleva could do of BioShock Infinite’s Elizabeth. The game’s creators, Irrational, were too. So impressed, in fact, they offered her a job, which means she’ll be appearing on stuff like BioShock Infinite’s marketing art, TV ads (so there’s a live-action…

  By Luke Plunkett Published December 2, 2012
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  Uncategorized

  This Week’s Most Awesome Cyberpunk Game Trailer Sure Came Out of Nowhere

  I wake up on Monday morning, I check my email and Twitter, and I see some normally-calm friends freaking out over this clip for a game called STEALER, by tiny Russian indie dev Winged Doom. It’s not even a game. Well, not really. It’s just a pitch trailer, something put together for mood, to reflect…

  By Luke Plunkett Published December 2, 2012
• Uncategorized

  The Lich…Queen? Sephiroth Swimsuit Shots? It Can Only Be a Cosplay Roundup

  This week’s roundup of the best in cosplay features the two images listed in that headline. Both of them as amazing as they are unlikely. But they’re far from the only standout shots. There’s some amazing Zelda cosplay that looks like it was actually shot in a dungeon. A Warhammer 40K couple. Even some Fate/Extra!…

  By Luke Plunkett Published December 2, 2012
• Uncategorized

  How To Fix Female Comic Characters: Turn Them All Into Hawkeye

  You probably don’t even need to read comics to know that, even to this day, many big-label artists and series still put their female characters in physically impossible poses, all in the name of making them look sexy. In an attempt to fix this, artists worldwide are teaming up for a top-secret initiative. And by…

  By Luke Plunkett Published December 2, 2012
• Uncategorized

  Game Falls $28 Short Of $50,000 Kickstarter Goal

  This has got to be agonizing. DreamQuest games wasn’t looking for an insane amount of money when they put their planned game, Alpha Colony up on Kickstarter. All they wanted was $50,000 to develop the exploration, building and trading simulation for PCs and mobile devices. The detailed explanation, with screenshots, and a playable browser-based demo…

  By Owen Good Published December 2, 2012
• Culture

  Sunday Comics Needs New Strips. Give Us the Names of Some Good Prospects.

  It’s been a year since we added a new comic to our Sunday Comics lineup, and as we are down to nine features, when we usually published 10, and some others have been updating inconsistently, it’s as good a time as any to roll out the Sunday Comics Deathmatch overhaul that we last ran in…

  By Owen Good Published December 2, 2012
• Uncategorized

  Will Anyone Really Care If There’s No More Baseball on the Xbox 360?

  The first week after Thanksgiving is typically when MLB The Show‘s publicity machine rolls out the first screenshots and begins teasing upcoming details for the game, and right on schedule we got them this past week. The Show has had no serious competition for five years. Next year it won’t have any, in name or…

  By Owen Good Published December 2, 2012