The Week in Games: Assassin Nation

If Hurricane Sandy doesn’t wipe out their releases in the American northeast, Tuesday will see two heavily anticipated arrivals on retail shelves: Assassin’s Creed III and the reboot of Need for Speed: Most Wanted. There’s also Assassin’s Creed: Liberation on the Vita, starring a completely different protagonist. For pro wrestling fans, WWE 13 brings the…

XCOM is Secretly One of the Year’s Best Sports Games

He renamed all his teammates for his friends, he put himself on the roster and took all of the best equipment. He rebounded from painful defeats—or, eh, restarted a few here and there—and scored fist-pumping victories in all the others. He felt all the vicarious thrills that every sports video game offers. But when Garth…

Stop “Zombie Mouth.” Give Free Plants vs. Zombies to Trick-or-Treaters (Or Yourself)

The maker of Plants vs. Zombies is teaming up with the American Dental Association to offer free copies of the game as Halloween treats, balancing out the usual bagful of teeth-rotting sugar and plastic every kid scarfs down on Nov. 1. This site “StopZombieMouth.com” offers the printable coupons in .pdf form. (Dentists also are giving…

Minecraft Dethrones Call of Duty as the Xbox 360’s Most-Played Game

Death, taxes and a shooter atop the chart of Xbox Live’s top activity. Since Major Nelson has publicized the numbers, the most popular game on Xbox Live—this is according to unique users playing the game while logging into the service, not just those playing multiplayer—has always been a shooter. Gears of War. Halo. And, for…

Close Out the PlayStation All-Stars Beta With This Guide to the Basics

With two days to go in the PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale beta the game’s developer, SuperBot Entertainment, has released this video covering the basics of the game. It’s an attempt to answer a lot of the questions the studio has been fielding since the beta opened Oct. 16, but it also functions as a video…

Hurricane Sandy Forces Triforce Johnson Out of the Line for the Wii U

With Hurricane Sandy bearing down on New York City, Isaiah-Triforce Johnson (real name: Isaiah-Triforce Johnson) has been told to vacate his position as first in line to purchase a Wii U at Nintendo World in Manhattan. The console releases in 21 days. Johnson had begun the vigil on Oct. 22. Johnson was told by Rockefeller…

Kotaku ‘Shop Contest: Hipster Sixty-Fourrr

On NeoGAF late last night, someone discovered that the awful warehouse of pretension Urban Outfitters was selling cloned Nintendo 64 controllers. This can only mean one thing: Hipsters have discovered that console generation and will now commence to telling everyone they enjoyed it before you did, but now they don’t anymore because everyone notices that…

Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask: The Kotaku Review

Like pumpkin pie and military shooters, Professor Layton has become something of a yearly fall tradition for American gamers. Over the past five years, the folks at Nintendo of America have released five entries in Level-5’s delightful puzzle series. These games have mostly blended together in my mind: ask me to tell you why intrepid…

Sunday Comics: Hit Me, Dealer.

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. Awkward Zombie by Katie Tiedrich published Oct. 22.—Read more of Awkward Zombie Nerf NOW!! by Josué Pereira published Oct. 24.—Read more of Nerf NOW!! Penny Arcade by…

Supposed GTA V Posters Promise Spring 2013 Release Date

A Polish website has posted images of what they say are real promotional posters for Grand Theft Auto V. The posters peg the game for a spring 2013 release date for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. We can’t verify their authenticity but have asked a Rockstar rep if he will. This post will be updated…

Kotaku ‘Shop Contest: Sexy Video Game Halloween 2.0: The Winners

What the hell do you do when Halloween’s on a Wednesday? Do you have your costume party that night? Hell no, people gotta work the next day. Do you have it the following weekend? Hell no, it’s November! We’re going to have our sexy costume party now, with our Kotaku ‘Shop Contest finalists, and overall…

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…