Ms. Pac-Man, Unplugged and Out on the Street

Slate music critic Jody Rosen snapped this picture of arcade and gambling cabinets lined up outside a flooded Red Hook warehouse In the aftermath of last week’s storm.

Some Halo 4 Players Facing Launch Day Server Woes

It’s November 6, and the long-anticipated, well-received Halo 4 is here. For some players, though, it seems the wait to get their shooting on will be a little longer. Players at Halo Waypoint are reporting a variety of server issues. The studio has acknowledged the server issues on twitter and their forums, saying, “We hear…

FarmVille Mistletoe Lane Chapter 1 Goals: Everything You Need to Know

As part of Zynga‘s incredibly early Christmas celebration in FarmVille, players that are willing to shell out the 35 Farm Cash for early access to Mistletoe Lane are greeted with weeks of exclusive content that won’t be available to those that wait for free access to release later this month. For instance, as soon as…

Robot Chicken’s Team Fortress 2 Skit Gives Me Mixed Emotions

On the one hand, I’m extremely excited to see an Adult Swim/Valve mix that doesn’t just involve a sign-up sheet and a hat. The claymation is also a nice touch. But this feels more like Adult Swim saying, “Hey, here’s a thing that sorta looks like a thing that you play online sometimes,” rather than…

Paper Mario: Sticker Star: The Kotaku Review

Have you ever played a video game that you had trouble describing as either “good” or “bad”? Have you ever played something so simultaneously delightful yet frustrating that for every smile it put on your face, it made you want to ram a fist through the wall? Have you ever thought “holy crap, this is…

This Rollercoaster Ride of a Physics Game Could Use a Better Name

Last week Ubisoft’s RedLynx studio released a fun and challenging rollercoaster-based psychics puzzler for iOS. You might have missed it, as the app icon is a cartoon cat and the game is called Nutty Fluffies I initially passed over the game myself. I couldn’t imagine a world in which a game with that moniker would…

Sir, You Are Being Hunted’s Fancy-Pants Robots Will Hunt You Down in Extremely Creepy Fashion

It’s the way that they move. Sure, the background music filled with tense strings creates some anxiety in the first gameplay glimpse of Big Robot’s Sir, You Are Being Hunted. And the low visibility in tall grass adds to the tension, too. But something about the movement of the game’s automaton antagonists chills me to…

The Grinns Tale Launches, Charming the Pants Off of Everybody

Nexon’s free-to-play social RPG The Grinns Tale, which I crowed about a few weeks back, officially launches today. Here’s the opening movie. Yes, a social game with an elaborate opening movie. It’s also got some interesting stats. What stats, you ask? These stats, direct from Nexon: Here Are Some Fun Stats From the Beta Times…

Assassin’s Creed III Recreates Another Key Moment of American History: Ben Franklin Doling Out Sex Advice.

In 1745, all-time-great American Ben Franklin wrote a letter to his friend advising him that if his friend was still going to “persist in thinking of a commerce with the sex inevitable” after getting married, this friend should get a mistress—an old mistress. It’s a hell of a letter And, for some reason, Franklin’s “wisdom”…

This Is The Best New Feature In Halo 4‘s Multiplayer

Ok, perhaps it’s more accurate to say it’s the most “juvenile” new feature in Halo 4, the first-person shooter developed (for the first time in the franchise) by 343 Industries. We already knew that the infamous “victory crouch” would return in the latest Halo title, but perhaps we didn’t expect it to be quite like…

Grand Gaming Experiment Curiosity Launches, Players Tap Out Dirty Words

Curiosity, the first experimental game from Peter Molyneux’s 22 Cans, is an iOS app that invites the entire world to tap away at a gigantic multilayered cube, revealing its secrets pixel-by-pixel. A “life-changing” secret awaits the single player that makes it to the center. Right now it says “Fuckers” on the side of it. No…

The Assassin’s Creed Anthology Collects Altair, Ezio and Connor’s Games All in One Big Package

Amazon France has outed a mega-bundle that offers every console game made for Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed fanchise. According to Polygon and Eurogamer, the Assassin’s Creed Anthology will include last week’s Assassin’s Creed III along with Assassin’s Creed, Assassin’s Creed 2, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations The listing touts a piece of € 150,…

FreeSkate Xtreme Uses Your iPhone Camera to Keep Track of Your Head

If the location of your head is something you’re never quite certain of, then you’ll probably want to spend $.99 on VisionHacker Studios’ FreeSkate Xtreme for the iPhone and iPad later this week. It uses the Apple camera to find your skull, and then uses it to skate. It’s nice to see developers starting to…

Halo 4: The Kotaku Review

I’ve never seen Halo like this before. Halo 4 is emotional, something I’ve never felt from the franchise quite like this. Sure, invested fans will protest and say that the lore is fascinating and the war struggles moving, but I can safely say I’ve never sat through a Halo campaign quite at the edge of…

Valkyria Chronicles 3 Fan-Made Translation Patch in the Works

Last week we at Kotaku East showed you how to play Valkyria Chronicles 3, even if you don’t understand Japanese, using a collection of translations and guides from across the internet. Of course, for the more patient of you—or just those who want everything translated and in one simple package—there is another option, if you’re…

This Guy Is Such a Jerk

Meet Allen. He’s a hair stylist in the latest Harvest Moon game, Harvest Moon 3DS: A New Beginning. And man, he’s such a jerk! Don’t believe me? Have a look. Like so many characters of similar ilk, he’s a jerk a first, because that makes him seem so much nicer when’s not being so damn…

Evangelion 1.11 is Way Better Than I Remember

With just under two weeks until the release of the newest Evangelion movie, Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo, we at Kotaku East are taking a look back at the previous films in the Rebuild of Evangelion series. When I talked about my history with Evangelion a week or so back, I mentioned my dislike…

In Japan, a Healthy New Pepsi Beverage Makes It Hard To Absorb Fat

Japan is getting a new kind of Pepsi. It’s a special kind. It’s so special that the name of it is, well, Pepsi Special. The drink is actually designated as a “food for specified health uses”. This means the product is regulated by the Japanese government and has its seal of approval. Pepsi Special actually…

The latest Gran Turismo 5 update makes tweaks and improved the engine sound of the Honda Weider HSV-010. More here

A Gallery of Truly Odd Erotic Game Images

Japanese erotic games (aka “eroge”) often feature cute, curvy characters in evocative settings. So when you think of these computer games, you probably don’t think of, oh, giant mecha, deadly katana, or evil villains. Japanese site Kanasoku (NSFW) assembled screenshots of various eroge that, well, don’t all look like eroge. (On Kanasoku, there are some…