Tekken Tag Tournament 2 Must Scrub a Mention of Allah from the Floor of Its ‘Saudi Arabia’ Stage

The “Saudi Arabia” stage of Tekken Tag Tournament 2 features some Arabic script on the floor. The Arabic script is the name of Allah. This is an incredibly bad thing, because just showing someone the soles of your feet in Middle Eastern culture is considered rude. Walking all over a representation of something communicates severe…

Note to Xbox Live: This Is Chong, Not Cheech.

Reader Edfire77 sends this in. In the TV & Movies section of Xbox Live, one of the tiles points to movies celebrating Hispanic culture. Great. But this stoner is Tommy Chong, not Cheech Marin. Chong’s dad was a Chinese immigrant, his mom was of Scottish-Irish and French descent, and they all lived in Canada, which…

Zynga’s Bringing Farmville to Online Gambling

Shortly after firing about 150 people, Zynga has even better news for investors. It’s getting into a sure-thing moneymaker, online gambling. Gamasutra said on Thursday that Zynga saw a decent bump in its stock price after revealing plans long hinted at. They’re getting into a partnership with Bwin.Party Digital Entertainment, an Austrian online gaming operator.…

What Works Better: DRM? Or Just Being Nice to Pirates?

Earlier this week, Hotline Miami released and very quickly became the indie flavor of the minute. Then the story emerged that the game’s maker went into the forums at The Pirate Bay, home of, well, pirates, and provided technical support to people who were, technically, stealing the game. Naturally, Jonatan Soderstrom reaped some goodwill for…

The Xbox 360’s Smartglass app released on Android earlier today. It’s out on Windows 8, too, but no word yet on iOS.

Valve’s taking signups for Steam’s Linux beta. Nice timing, considering the “catastrophe” that just released.

Pass Fail: One Man’s Quest to Get His Medal of Honor Download Code [UPDATE]

We’re not EA customer service, but sometimes shedding a little light on silly stuff like this can help get results. More importantly, the news appears to be that some copies of Medal of Honor: Warfighter have gone out with cards that don’t have proper download codes printed on them. Those codes, as this card says,…

If You’re Getting the Basic-Size Wii U, You May Buy a Digital Copy of Tekken Tag Tournament 2 and Download Half of It [UPDATE]

Unless you’re planning on adding an external hard drive to your Wii U—either model—it would make almost zero sense to get the downloadable version of Tekken Tag Tournament 2, and that’s even if a North American digital release gets the discount that the Japanese eShop is going to offer. Tekken Tag Tournament 2 clocks in…

This Week in the Business: ‘The Single Player Mechanic is a Gimmick’

What’s happened in the business of video games this past week … QUOTE | “The single player mechanic is a gimmick.”—Jonas Antonsson, Gogogic CEO, talking about why games are moving toward a sort of multiplayer singularity QUOTE | “PlayStation Plus is a nice weapon in our arsenal.”—Sony executive John Koller talking about the impact of…

The Moneysaver: War on the Cheap

Now that we’ve slogged through the release of Medal of Honor: Warfighter it’s on to the next front—Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, which is on the way in about two weeks. Savings on both games’ PC versions highlight this week’s Moneysaver, jammed full of more than 70 bargains and sales. Be sure also to…

The Best of Kotaku, This Week

Welcome to the Best of Kotaku, where I round up all of this week’s best content. This week’s best image is a “digital” graffiti found in Bologna, Italy, by Andrea Vannini. Thanks to Copiously Geeky for the find. Moving on to our Best Of content this week, we kick things off as usual with a…

Last Night’s Jeopardy Contestants Sure Did Not Know Much About Video Games

I’ll take, “Things I don’t know the first thing about” for a thousand, Alex. On Friday’s Jeopardy, the Final Jeopardy written question was: “The villains in this game were inspired by the swine flu epidemic scare.” The three contestants’ guesses were… not close to the actual right answer. You can see it go down in…

Video Game Experiment Teaches Angry Kids Not to Rage Against the Machine

There’s a new insane study of children and video games out there, and it makes me grateful the Wii died without that ridiculous Vitality Sensor ever coming to market. Let’s say you’re playing a video game, a space shooter (can’t tell if this is top-down or side-scrolling). Your job is to shoot down enemy spacecraft…

Drunk Jeff Goldblum Wants To Tell You About PayPal

You have likely already seen Drunk Jeff Goldblum enthusing about things. The internet, pizza, and more. This latest video, in which he slurredly marvels at the ubiquity of PayPal, might be my favorite. (Part of that may have something to do with the fact that I see the actual full-speed version of this ad approximately…

Minor Console Aggravation: Those Darn PS3 Installations

Download a game on the Xbox 360 or the Wii and you’re good to go. You can play it. Download a game on the PS3 and you just might have to then tell the PS3 to install it. You have to manually install any game that you have downloaded in the background. This is strange,…

Backhanded Box Quotes: Medal of Honor Gets a 10

Welcome back to “Backhanded Box Quotes,” a collection of measured, thoughtful criticism from the user reviews of Metacritic and elsewhere. What are you dressing up as for Halloween? I’m going as Medal of Honor: Warfighter‘s Metacritic score. No, make that Sexy Metacritic Score for Medal of Honor. Because the real one is ugly enough to…

38 Studios’ Sell-Off So Far Amounts to an $830,000 Drop in the Bucket

This auctioning of assets belonging to 38 Studios, the makers of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, brought in a combined $830,000, reports Joystiq. Sounds … good? Well, according to the Associated Press, that will barely dent the $100 million taxpayers may eat in Rhode Island, which guaranteed the loan for which someone gave themselves this award…

Gizmonauts Already Has a Limited-Edition Robot

Only a few days old and already I’m desperately trying to breed a beast before the end of Gizmonauts‘ Halloween spooktacular. OCD and me.

A Whole Bunch Of Square Enix Games Are On Sale This Weekend

Sleeping Dogs! Kingdom Hearts! Dead Island! Lots of neat Square Enix games are on sale this weekend, so head over there if you think something will strike your fancy. Particularly hilarious: the PC remake of Final Fantasy VII is on sale for $6.99. Instead of $11.99. Final Fantasy VII!

Eight Reviewers Go To War Against Medal of Honor: Warfighter

Medal of Honor: Warfighter was supposed to be the big military shooter of the fall. Or at least, of the fall until that other big military shooter comes out in a few weeks. Comparisons between Medal of Honor: Warfighter and its competitors, Call of Duty and Battlefield, have proven inevitable—and Warfighter does not fare well…