Tokitowa Has the Best Characters of Any JRPG This Year

What roleplaying games have that separates them from other types of games is their focus on story more than gameplay. And with this deep exploration of the story comes a game far longer than other genres. While you will spend an average of ten hours on most single-player titles, RPGs can easily last triple that…

Browser Sengoku Basara, the browser game version of Sengoku Basara, is going offline after debuting this summer.

Chinese Grandma Tries to Shut Down a Microsoft Event, Then Things Get Ugly

To kick off Surface, Microsoft held big launch events in China. At the midnight event in Beijing, there were dancers, loud music, and one pissed off grandma. That’s when things got ugly. According to Sina, the noise was apparently keeping her grandchildren awake—a problem since the next day was a schoolday. So the grandma and…

Time to Overdose on Awesome Plastic

This Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, Bandai’s annual Tamashii Nations figure event steamrolls Tokyo. Do you like collectable, plastic friends? Then this might be the event for you. On display were an array of Japanese figures, ranging from super heroes to heroines, as well as robots and monsters. Websites Moeyo and Gigazine were on hand to…

Seven Misconceptions about Vampires To Keep In Mind as You Kill Them

The author of The Zombie Combat Manual Roger Ma is back with a new guidebook: The Vampire Combat Manual, which dispenses advice on how to battle vampires. In the excerpt below, Ma tackles misconceptions about the imagery beings—just in time for Halloween: MISCONCEPTION #1: VAMPIRES ARE METAPHYSICAL BEINGS Of all the falsehoods that exist regarding…

Charizard Sets Japan Ablaze with a Special 3DS XL

This isn’t a matter of having enough badges to train Charizard—you’re going to need to win a raffle to snag this limited edition 3DS XL. Between November 3 and November 26 at Pokémon Center retail shops across Japan (or via mail-in), you can enter to win the chance to buy this very special 3DS XL…

They Pirated His Game, But This Developer is Giving Tech Support Anyway

Jonatan Soderstrom, one of the duo behind the fantastic Hotline Miami, should be the last person on Earth giving advice to people pirating his games. So it’s weird/nice to see him actually being one of the first. On the game’s thread at torrent site The Pirate Bay (and spotted by PC Gamer), Soderstrom has dropped…

Forget Wallpaper, This Art Deserves a Good Frame and a Spot on Your Wall

It’s all just so…beautiful. Where most game artists have a palette that starts at “violent” and ends at “dark”, Theo Prins’ work here has a warmth and colour to it that’s as refreshing as it is a pleasure to look at. Theo works at Guild Wars 2 developers ArenaNet, on whose site you can read…

Hey Samsung, Don’t Drag Video Games Into Your Apple Pissing Match

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past 12 months, the epic legal battle between Apple and Samsung has been one of the biggest tech stories of the year. It’s a bitter fued, with billions at stake, so it’s sad to see poor little ol’ video games dragged into the fight in…

Square Enix is Spying on You (But It’s To Make Better Games)

When you blindly click “agree” on Square Enix’s online terms & conditions, you probably didn’t notice that you’re saying you agree to allow the publisher to record the way you play a game. While this sounds nefarious, it’s actually part of an operation run from an office in London—and detailed in this MCV report—whose job…

We Are One Step (And Short Jump) Closer To Real Metal Gears

Terrifying robot watch update: in the video above, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) robot called “Pet-Proto” is locked in a corridor and presented with two obstacles. The first is a step it must climb onto. The second is a gap it must inch across. It’s like a video game tutorial. Only instead of…

Team Fortress 2 Gets Zombies in Halloween-Themed “Scream Fortress” Event

Just a few months after cold, unfeeling automatons came to Valve’s hit co-op shooter in Mann vs. Machine, the publisher’s unleashing waves of the undead on Team Fortress 2 According to Polygon, an update to the Team Fortress 2 website announced a two-week Scream Fortress event that will herald the return of necromancer Merasmus, who…

16 Years Later, Super Mario 64 Gets Co-op

Just when you thought one of the world’s greatest ever video games couldn’t get more perfect, along comes modder Skelux to pile more icing on top of the cake. Super Mario 64, for 16 years a singleplayer adventure (well, DS version excepted), has been modified to include a co-op mode. You can see it in…

If The Exorcist Had Been An 80s Sitcom…

It’s almost Halloween, which means it’s time to break out our ironic re-cuts of famous horror films and make them seem different than they actually were! I enjoyed this recut by Film School Rejects, though, mostly because it doesn’t just use happy images; it also uses some disturbing ones. And hey, while we’re here, let’s…

Paris, You Don’t Look so Good…

Paris, you used to be the city of romance, and beauty! Then Remember Me’s brutally dystopian sci-fi future came along and ruined everything. This piece is by Paul Chadeisson, who we’ve featured on Kotaku previously. Bonus shots below. Passage parisien [Paul Chadeisson]

It’s a Thursday, So Capcom Must Be Having a Problem With Street Fighter X Tekken DLC

Those who preordered Street Fighter X Tekken on the PS Vita didn’t receive all of the downloadable content bonuses—alternate costumes and additional characters—promised to them. It’s been three days without a definitive answer for what the heck is going on, although Capcom, via Twitter, acknowledged over Twitter that “we’re aware of the DLC redemption issues…

Silent Hill: Revelation 3D: The Kotaku Movie Review

Silent Hill: Revelation 3D opens nationwide tomorrow (or tonight at midnight in some areas). It’s the second stab at adapting Konami’s landmark survival horror franchise for the big screen. That being the case, no discussion of the sequel is complete without first discussing its predecessor. Especially since, in many people’s opinions, the first Silent Hill…

Watch Nine Minutes of the Mass Effect Anime, Right Here

It’s totally understandable to be wary of the upcoming Mass Effect anime. The track record for these kind of adaptations is…spotty at best. So it’s awful nice of FUNimation to share this nine-minute clip, giving us an extended look at how the flick is shaping up. It’s…well, it’s not as bad as I thought it…

Listen To One Of The Best Video Game Soundtracks Of The Year Right Now

Hopefully you are already hip to Hotline Miami, Cactus’ unhinged, techno-drenched top-down murderfest. It’s a wicked cool, incredibly fun game, and it sports one of the best soundtracks of the year. (If you’re not aware of the game, you can read some of my impressions here.) And now, can now listen to the entire soundtrack…

In Da Club: A Musical Moment Few Video Games Get Right

Games take us to all manner of fantastical, unlikely places. But as good as video games have gotten at accurately recreating a space-marine shootout or a mountaintop dragon battle, there’s one thing developers are still learning how to create: A dance club. Many games try to create thriving urban environments for players to occupy, and…