Sunday Comics: Pièce de Résistance

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 Jan. 7. Read more of Penny Arcade Awkward Zombie by Katie Tiedrich. Published Jan. 9. Read more of…

Kotaku ‘Shop Contest: Balloon Snake: The Winners

I told you maggots to hold the damn file size under 2 MB, but no, one of you just had to create something so hilariously excellent above that limit that I am now forced to take extraordinary measures just to bring it to you. So now all of you must stay late in order to…

Warcraft-Playing Bodybuilding Fan Barely Misses Donkey Kong World Record

Vincent Lemay came in just 2,700 points shy of Hank Chien’s world record score for Donkey Kong, adding his name to the team of rivals for what has become arcade video gaming’s Holy Grail of high scores. On Friday, Lemay, 21, of Quebec, recorded a verified performance of 1,135,900, according to Patrick Scott Patterson, an…

EA Sports’ Dream Appliance Has Arrived: The Internet-Enabled Fridge

Seven months ago at E3, I sat down with EA Sports’ boss, Andrew Wilson, for an annual chat that always features a lot of big-picture spitballing because of where and when it takes place. I forget what question brought this up, but I’m now looking at my notebook from that day and I see the…

MLB The Show Welcomes a Notorious Pirate

Andrew McCutchen, Pittsburgh’s center fielder, is your cover star for MLB 13 The Show, following an extremely brief period in which fans voted on the honor. McCutchen prevailed by nearly 20,000 votes over New York’s C.C. Sabathia, and by more than 30,000 votes over Miguel Cabrera of Detroit, the first batter to win the Triple…

StarCraft II Says It’s Sorry With a Free Name Change for Everyone

Battle.net had hinted at plans for a name-changing service—for a fee—in StarCraft II some time ago but it never materialized. With the paid name-change option deprioritized and unlikely to happen anytime soon, Battle.net is saying sorry by giving everyone a free name-change. “The fact that we didn’t keep you updated when we deprioritized the feature…

The Speakys Have Spoken; This is Your Game of the Year

Though Speak Up on Kotaku became one with the Force back around September, the reader-voted GOTYs it spawned lived on in the second annual Speakys, which longtime reader GiantBoyDetective organized this year again. The votes have been tallied, and it’s a clean sweep for 2K Games in both chambers of Kotaku‘s congress: Borderlands 2 is…

This Week in the Business: ‘Project Shield is a Melange of Too Many Ideas and Gimmicks.’

What’s happened in the business of video games this past week … QUOTE | “Project Shield is a melange of too many ideas and gimmicks.”—Dan Pearson, GamesIndustry International journalist, talking with others about the flood of new gaming hardware being introduced and why few will likely succeed QUOTE | “It was just miserable. I don’t…

Is Resident Evil: Revelations coming to Xbox 360? This achievement list says yes. (It may be coming to PS3, too.)

Those wacky MIT kids perched Pac-Man on the Great Dome yesterday, continuing a recent trend of game-themed “hacks.”

The Moneysaver: Pre-Order in the Court!

I will never not laugh at that picture, now 4 1/2 years old, of Old Snake showing up in The People’s Court. Or, well, someone unintentionally cosplaying him, that is. Anyway, it’s preorder season for the big games of 2013’s first four months, and a discount coupon combines with some existing deals at Green Man…

The Best Of Kotaku, This Week

Welcome to the Best of Kotaku, where I round up all of this week’s best content. So, Dante really loves pizza. Who can blame him? Certainly not Let’s go gamers, where the gif above was found. (If you know an original sourcing, let us know!) Now let’s move on to reading this week’s best content,…

How a Phony Pikachu Trolled Japanese Twitter Users

Shortly after Nintendo revealed the newest Pokémon, Pocket Monsters X/Y, the above image started circulating on Twitter. “This seems to be an image of the evolved Pikachu from the new Pokémon,” the tweet read. Another image of this evolved Pikachu, which was apparently named “Kaenchu” (カエンチュ), also started making its way around the internet in…

Worried About Your Face Ending Up Online? These Glasses Could Help.

With the rise of the internet, social networking, and camera phones, there’s a good chance your mug (yes, your) is somewhere on the internet. Not everyone is cool with that. Japanese researchers have come up with a way you can protect yourself. And look like a goofball. Last December, researcher Isao Echizen at the National…

Manga Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure teamed up again with Gucci, with 70 store windows worldwide getting the Jojo treatment.

The Difference Between Japanese and American Vending Machines

In Japan, drink machines seem to be everywhere. America also has lots of vending machines. But there’s one key difference between the two. A huge difference if you drink coffee (canned coffee ain’t bad!). Image courtesy of I Love Coffee Why I Like Japanese Vending Machines [I Love Coffee via A One Year Project]

This Nerdy Explanation for Pokémon X/Y Might Blow Your Mind [Update]

At first look, the titles for the new Pokémon, Pocket Monsters X and Pocket Monsters Y, sound like its creators are out of ideas. They sound like a joke—no wonder why they were perhaps suggested as such in 2008. But dig a little deeper (way deeper!), and things get interesting What if X and Y…

Jackie Chan thinks America is “the most corrupt country in the world.” No, he didn’t say it in Jeremy Clarkson’s voice

A Game Developer’s Take on Japan: the Myths and the Reality

One well-received and much commented-on blog post I wrote many years ago covered the “stages of living in Japan”. These are the 5 stages I have witnessed, again and again, in myself and in others, and though your mileage may of course vary, they seem pretty spot on. I daresay they could be applied to…

Gaming Industry Had a ‘Productive and Candid’ Chat With Joe Biden

What did the Vice President of the United States and the leaders of the video game industry talk about today at the White House during today’s meeting by the VP’s Sandy Hook task force? Other than Blastman III? Considering that representatives from any of the game publishers who attended either don’t respond to requests for…