Arse Elektronika is a conference on gaming and sex. Here’s a discussion of sex in games, but it’s very NSFW.

Portal’s Still Alive, Performed Live On…CBS News

Not a headline you were probably expecting to see in 2012, since the song wore out its welcome just as 2008 was coming around, but the world is an amazing place. Jonathan Coulton performs “Still Alive” [CBS]

Is This the Face of a Heel? Debating Fighter Hayabusa’s Virtue in Nintendo’s Pro Wrestling

There were no storylines in Pro Wrestling for the Nintendo Entertainment System, beyond the ones you and your buddies would create for the six wrestlers it featured. But nearly everyone’s status—good guy or bad, face or heel—was easily interpreted in how the character was presented. Star Man was a face. The Amazon would assault you…

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria: The Kotaku Review

World of Warcraft‘s Mists of Pandaria expansion is huge. One one end, it starts at level one, with a new starting area for the new Pandaren race. On the other end, it raises the level cap from 85 to 90 and adds an enormous amount of high-end and end-game zones. Mists of Pandaria, then, is…

These Super Mario and Pac-Man Dioramas Capture the Fatal Charm of Classic Video Games

Death—or its watered-down digital equivalent—was never too far-off in the arcade classics of yesteryear. Whether it’s angry ghosts in primary colors from Pac-Man or a missed jump in Super Mario Bros, players never forgot that they were surrounded by end-of-life scenarios. Maybe that awareness is what makes these game-focused creations from California artist Senor Chips…

You’ve Been Voted In as the Sexy New President of Japan. Time To Get in Your Mech Suit and Save a Nation.

For $8 you can download a game called Liberation Maiden to the 3DS and then you can experience the probable future of the second president of New Japan hopping into a flying mech in order to shoot at the forces of an evil empire that has taken over old Japan. It’s not this premise that…

Wreck It Ralph Takes A Dubstep Dump On Modern Shooters

You can already tell that Wreck-It Ralph is going to gets lots of mileage from romping up and down the timeline of video game history. Disney has thrown in tons of cameos from iconic heroes and villains and created fake arcade machines to make their made-up retro franchise ring true to audiences. But this latest…

Ruby Blast Adds a Heaping Helping of Adventure

Ruby Blast, Zynga’s color-matching game that started life as a shameless clone of Bejeweled‘s Diamond Mine mode, has transformed itself into a shameless Diamond Mine clone with a difference, adding an extensive adventure mode on top of its regularly scheduled weekly tournaments. Ruby Blast‘s quietly implemented adventure mode (which I heard about via Games.com) adds…

StarCraft II: Heart Of The Swarm To Add Leveling For All Players

A new patch for StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm will introduce a progression system to the popular real-time strategy game Starting “soon” (which in Blizzard language usually means “not soon”), Heart of the Swarm beta players will be able to gain experience points by playing both competitive and custom matches. These experience points—which will…

Play This Funky, Spooky Mystery Game For Free

There’ll always be a place for the opaque in gaming—mysterious games that don’t immediately express their intent with garish tutorial pop-ups and button-prompts. Jake Clover’s Nuign Specter, a free experimental PC game, definitely falls into that category. It’d be no fun for me to tell you what happens in the game; you really should just…

Medal of Honor Warfighter: The Kotaku Review

The flashlights look pretty good. As I went through my notes searching for something positive I’d written about Medal of Honor Warfighter, that line stuck out to me. “The flashlights look pretty good.” They do look pretty good. Whatever lighting magic Electronic Arts has handed around to its subsidiary studios is nifty and authentic-looking. Often,…

Fighting Game Community Gives Out $20,500 In Student Scholarships

The folks at EVO—the biggest community of competitive fighting game players on the planet—are handing out $20,500 in scholarships to selected university students. They picked the winning students from a pool of over 500, EVO’s reps write on Shoryuken. UNLV student Dillon Jay Hageman will receive $10,000; Stanford graduate student Andrew Dotey Jr. will receive…

It’s Halloween Everywhere. Even in Minecraft.

Sure, creepers are, well, creepy on their own. But maybe they’re just not creepy enough The Xbox 360’s version of Minecraft is getting a new, Halloween-themed skin pack tomorrow, the Official Xbox Magazine reports. There are 55 new skins in the pack, contributed by a baker’s dozen of developers like Rare, Tequila Works, and Twisted…

Square Enix’s New Free-to-Play iOS Game is an Evil Revelation

Available today on the iTunes App Store, Square Enix’s free-to-play Wizardlings is a casual tap adventure in which a pair of tiny wizards reveal a magical fantasy world, one block at a time. It’s cute, colorful and incredibly evil. Taking control of one of two wizards—boy or girl—the player moves cross grid-based levels, tapping on…

This Week’s Nintendo Download is Full of Coins to Collect and Puzzles to Solve

It’s getting cold out. There’s a major storm coming this weekend (on the East coast, anyway). You really don’t want to go out to a store to get your games fix. Lucky for you, here’s this week’s Nintendo Download! The brand new Professor Layton game will be downloadable starting this weekend. It’s also a good…

Skyrim, Classic Arcade Games and Game of Thrones All Inspired Dance Central 3. Seriously.

Dance Central 3 isn’t just the superior choreography experience gamers can get this year. It’s also a video game that embeds homages to arcade classics and pop cultural ephemera deep inside super-clever, split-second easter eggs. Harmonix uses its time travel plot device to nod its own predecessors like Computer Space and make roundabout nods to…

Here’s A Two-Second Clip Of Reggie Fils-Aime Saying ‘Hey Ice King, Why’d You Steal Our Garbage?’

Because sometimes you just need a two-second clip of Reggie Fils-Aime saying “Hey Ice King, why’d you steal our garbage?”

Nobody Takes He-Man Seriously, And That’s Why I Love His Mobile Game

In late 1982 Mattel fashioned a generic fantasy barbarian with an even more generic name into a children’s media goldmine. First came the toys. Then came the cartoon, with its horribly-limited animation. It got so big that in 1987 Dolph Lundgren starred in a live action Masters of the Universe movie. Glitchsoft’s He-Man: The Most…

Nintendo Shows Off All The 3DS Games They’re Releasing In The Near Future

From Paper Mario to Monster Hunter, here’s the full sizzle reel shown off during Nintendo’s live-streamed Nintendo Direct event this morning. Lots of cool-looking games coming to 3DS soon! I’m particularly psyched for Fire Emblem and Paper Mario. Animal Crossing and Professor Layton are also pretty damn slick. And here’s the eShop sizzle reel, which…

This Week’s Windows Phone Charts: Cracking Sands and Circling Words

Welcome to the second-ever Kotaku Windows Phone game charts. In this second installment of this thrilling series we explore how the game rankings ebb and flow from week to week. I think it turned out rather well. In fact, I think it turned out so well that we’ll maintain the same theme every week, until…