Just a friendly reminder! In Japan, Nintendo said its TVii streaming service hits December 8.

Sometimes, Interaction with Foreigners Is Awkward, Even in Japanese Anime

The long pauses. The nervous gestures. They’re not quite sure what to say, and thus, neither are you. Sometimes when foreigners interact with Japanese people, things can get awkward. Very, very awkward. Good thing there’s anime to remind us how awkward! Japan is around 98.5 percent Japanese. Within that, there are small groups of are…

Nintendo Is Charging People to Change TV Channels (No, Really)

With Nintendo TVii, the Kyoto-based game maker is bringing streaming video to the GamePad. Starting on December 8 in Japan, gamers can watch the pictures as they fly through the air via the comfort of the Wii U GamePad. But if you want easy channel changing, you must barf up extra cash. On December 8,…

The Walking Dead Sure Was Emotional. For Different Reasons, For Different People.

I’m still coming down from the experience that was The Walking Dead. Without getting into spoiler territory, that was… quite the ending. To help cope, I’ve been talking to other people about their experiences, many of which seem to be similar to my own. And then Kirk goes and shows me The Walking Dead Game…

The World of Game of Thrones, Now Available in a Gorgeous iOS App

Random House Publishing and Fantasy Flight Games have teamed up to release A World of Ice and Fire, a stunning guide to the people and places of Westeros. While it’s free to download, you’re only given a limited selection of content; to unlock the full range of entries, you’re going to have to pay. But…

PlayStation Home Has Become The Weirdest Place In Gaming

It feels like an age ago, and in gaming terms I guess it was. The launch of PlayStation Home, one of the cornerstones of the PS3’s launch era, was meant to usher in a new kind of online interaction. A place where the connectivity of Xbox Live could be turned into a virtual world, blurring…

24,000 Games, From 1975 to 2012, Broken Down By Genre & Platform

These two charts turned up today, reportedly from a “recently scraped database of 24,000 videogames to determine percentages of genre and platform releases since 1975”. My inner stats nerd just fainted. Charts like this can tell you a lot about games and the changing way we enjoy them, and even allowing for the fact it…

That’s No Moon…

It might not be the most extensive of Skyrim mods, but it’s certainly one of the most eye-catching. If, that is, you can bend your mind around to the fiction of the Star Wars and Elder Scrolls universes co-existing… If you want to try it out, maybe add it to your need-to-install-these-mods list, you can…

The Artistic Origins of Disney’s Video Game Love Letters

Disney’s Wreck-it-Ralph is, in some ways, the best video game movie ever made. It doesn’t do as much with the whole video games thing as it could have, but still, great movie. One of the things it did really well was parody/pay homage to famous video game series and clichés without (usually) having to directly…

Explain The Story Behind Your Stupid Gamertag

If you’re lucky, or brave, your gamertag (or other similar account name) might be, well, your name. A few of my friends are like that. Chances are, though, you picked a fake handle and went with that instead. That name might be insightful. Or clever. Or funny. Or, more likely, indecipherable and a little stupid.…

Video Game Man-Kissing Immortalised in Music Video

The video for Hot Chip’s Don’t Deny Your Heart starts out as a homage to FIFA, and the obsessive way many people play the game on the road. Then things pick up a little, and suddenly it becomes a homage to FIFA’s other key appeal: mouth kissing and loving embraces Hot Chip – Don’t Deny…

The Lord of the Rings: The Kotaku Rewatch

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I rewatched The Lord of the Rings. It was partly because The Hobbit is almost upon us, and partly because I was in mourning having finished Persona 4 Golden and needed something to take my mind off missing Inaba. After taking to Twitter (as you do), I learned that I wasn’t the…

Valve Writer Picks the Perfect Men For a Half-Life Movie

We chatted with film director Guillermo del Toro at the New York Comic-Con earlier this year, and he told us one of his dream jobs would be to make a movie with Valve. Turns out the feeling’s mutual. In an interview with New Rising Media, Valve writer Marc Laidlaw outlined three directors who, for varying…

British retailer Game may not get that this is the same exact Mass Effect 3. Via Twitter

Climbing Has Never Looked Better Than In Far Cry 3

Among the many things I like about the wonderful Far Cry 3, one of the most remarkable is how polished it all is. This is an ambitious, massive game, so it’s all the more noteworthy that everything works so well. Ubisoft Montreal has nailed all the big stuff, sure—combat is punchy and fluid, guns feel…

This Jacked-Up Video Game Murder Scene Would Never Fly Today

Don’t ask me why I wound up googling this cutscene from Phantasmagoria over the weekend, but I did, and I watched it, and good lord. It’s even worse than I remembered! Go ahead and watch it. (Viewer beware: It is NSFW and also INTENSE and NASTY.) Now ask yourself: It may have made it into…

727 People Are Playing Black Ops II Online On Wii U Now (And 35 Are Playing Madden)

659 people are playing standard multiplayer and 68 people are playing Zombies mode on Wii U. More than last week For comparison, there are 511,529 people playing standard multiplayer and 124,321 people playing Zombies mode in Black Ops II on Xbox 360. Of course, it’s not fair to directly compare a console that launched last…

How The Walking Dead Game Could Change The Way We Play

Telltale’s fantastic Walking Dead game was a surprise for several reasons. Not only did it reverse the studio’s reputation for middling-to-unsatisfactory games, it will no doubt be in the running for many a publication’s Game of the Year award. It proved that good writing and characterization can carry a video game, that the point-and-click adventure…

Something Tells Me These Wii U Auctions Aren’t Real

Call it a hunch. Call it a journalist’s instinct. There’s just something about these Wii U consoles that seems rather flimsy: Clearly people are hoping to cash in on the Wii U cardboard boom eBay

Pokéball Cosplayer Gives Birth To Pikachu And It’s Only Slightly Creepy

This is how Pikachus are born. Don’t let the pokéballs deceive you. The cosplay idea is cute. In theory. And I don’t want to be mean, but it does sort of creep me out. And I love kids! If anyone knows who is in the picture or where it’s originally from, drop a mention in…