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This Nintendo Bootlegger’s Middle Name Is Success. Really.
Justin Success Brooks—yes, success is his middle name—made about £600,000 selling cartridges and discs loaded with pirated Nintendo games from 2009 to 2011. He’s now headed for the slammer, or whatever they call it in the U.K., following a guilty plea last week. From the report, it sounds as though Brooks, 41, was selling his…
By Owen Good Published October 20, 2012 - Uncategorized
Moneysaver of Honor: Dealbuyer
Microsoft seems to be having success bundling up full price releases with $20 worth of funny money on Xbox Live, so they’re doing that again this week with Medal of Honor: Warfighter. In other news, recent, solid releases like Borderlands 2, Sleeping Dogs and Darksiders 2 can all be found for less than full price.…
By Owen Good Published October 20, 2012 - Uncategorized
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 mashup of Adventure Time with Yoshi’s Island, by Classy Raptor. I particularly like it because I can totally see Jake molding himself into Yoshi to take Finn on adventures. Classy Raptor indeed. Moving…
By Tina Amini Published October 20, 2012 - Uncategorized
Get Three Credit Hours Toward Your Degree Playing Skyrim Next Semester
The English department at Rice University, to my knowledge the only American university established by the murder of its benefactor (true story, actually) will next semester offer “Scandinavian Fantasy Worlds: Old Norse Sagas and Skyrim.” That’s right. You get to play Skyrim for college credit. If you’re enrolled at Rice, which is a rather selective…
By Owen Good Published October 19, 2012 - Uncategorized
Video Games’ First Spoken Words Still Sound Good Today
When it released in 1980, computer voice compression cost around $1,000 per word. Berzerk spoke about 20, and it was a sensation. Gorf and later Wizard of Wor likewise used speech synthesis to heckle players. We’ve come a long way since those dark ages, as this roundup of 50 early attempts at voice synthesis, compiled…
By Owen Good Published October 19, 2012 -
UncategorizedA TV Appearance By A Man Who Saw Lincoln Get Shot
Now here’s a YouTube video you don’t see every day. In this video uploaded by GiveMeBlackandWhite, a Maryland man named Samuel Seymour, who witnessed Lincoln’s assassination, turns up on the 50’s game show “I’ve Got A Secret.” No, not JFK. Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln I swear, every time people complain about the irreverence of most YouTube…
By Kirk Hamilton Published October 19, 2012 -
UncategorizedLet This 12-Minute Video Sell You On Virtue’s Last Reward
I wrote a bit yesterday about Virtue’s Last Reward, the fantastic adventure game that has been keeping me up every night for the past week and a half Today publisher Aksys released the English version of an animated 12-minute intro video created to show off the new visual novel, which is out for 3DS and…
By Jason Schreier Published October 19, 2012 - Uncategorized
Backhanded Box Quotes: BFG is a POS.
Welcome back to “Backhanded Box Quotes,” a collection of measured, thoughtful criticism from the user reviews of Metacritic and elsewhere. Doom? James Bond? Dragon Ball Z? Big names, big deal. With critic scores inflated like your typical Ivy League comparative lit final, we’ve got to go to the vox populi to get the real word…
By Owen Good Published October 19, 2012 - Uncategorized
I Hate That I’m Addicted To Boring Video Game Challenges
I’m having the same, recurring nightmare of late. It’s one of those stupid ones where something that’s normally inane and innocuous becomes unreasonably horrible. Here’s what happens: I’m on Pandora, out on a mission—to kill someone, probably—when I notice something. Maybe it’s a a box or a locker. And the second that I notice that,…
By Patricia Hernandez Published October 19, 2012 - Uncategorized
Their Studio Gave them an Amusement Park Ticket—and Then a Pink Slip
How would you like to be fired? Do you want to go out in a take-this-job-and-shove-it blaze of glory? Would you like security to martyr you, marching you out by the elbows, as you clutched your box of things like Richard Gere carrying off Debra Winger? Would you just want the chance to look into…
By Owen Good Published October 19, 2012 -
UncategorizedThis Dishonored Skin For Minecraft Is Pretty Damn Impressive
It’s tough to get really excited about Minecraft mods these days, but I have to admit this one got me. You can get the mod right here. And the map here Minecraft – Dishonored Mod [YouTube via PC Gamer]
By Jason Schreier Published October 19, 2012 - Uncategorized
Two Years Later, Sleep Researchers Now Say Gaming Before Bed Is Bad
Two years ago, sleep researchers at Flinders University of Australia found that playing video games before bed was indistinct from watching a movie, in terms of the good night’s rest a teenager would have after either. This week researchers at the same university said that “prolonged gaming” before bed is disruptive to that longtime childhood…
By Owen Good Published October 19, 2012 - Uncategorized
He Raised $25,000 To Make A Game. Then All His Programmers Quit.
2012 in gaming may well be remembered as the year of the Kickstarter. Crowdfunding, in all its forms, took off into the stratosphere with the DoubleFine drive back in February, and has just kept going since. Many gaming projects have been successfully funded, from little $5000 art and experimental games to multi-million dollar juggernauts like…
By Kate Cox Published October 19, 2012 - Esports
Today is the 40th Anniversary of the World’s First Known Video Gaming Tournament
In October 1972, video games were still mostly an after-hours pastime in corporate or university laboratories. Pong had been installed only one month earlier at a Sunnyvale bar called Andy Capp’s Tavern (today a comedy club.) Forty years ago today, just up U.S. 101, on Stanford’s campus, computer science students saw this flyer tacked to…
By Owen Good Published October 19, 2012 - Uncategorized
ChefVille Great Pumpkin Hay Bale Quests: Everything You Need to Know
As the Halloween event continues to expand in ChefVille, we’ve seen players become more stressed about Wild Pumpkins (or the lack thereof) within the game. Zynga has automatically programmed Wild Pumpkins to grow at random on our land, but that takes time, which is something we don’t have in the game’s limited time Halloween Event.…
by Brandy Shaul | Games.com Published October 19, 2012 - Uncategorized
There’s Just Too Much Beauty in The Week in Gaming Apps
Sometimes there’s so much beauty in Google Play, iTunes and the Windows Phone Marketplace I feel I can’t take it; like my heart’s going to cave in. That’s my completely original explanation for why I did three of our Gaming App of the Day entries this week. I might have done five, but Ashcraft loves…
By Mike Fahey Published October 19, 2012 -
UncategorizedThese Former Big-Budget Shooter Devs are Overjoyed to Bring You the $.99 Twist Pilot
Steve Ellis is responsible for the beloved multiplayer aspect of Rare’s classic Nintendo 64 shooter Goldeneye 007, and was a founder of Free Radical Design, the studio behind the TimeSplitters franchise. Martin Wakeley was a designer and producer at Rare, creating beloved titles like Blast Corps and Jet Force Gemini before joining Ellis at Free…
By Mike Fahey Published October 19, 2012 - Uncategorized
Your Favorite Video Game Is Probably Part of This Guy’s Amazing Tattoo
This is Charles Wheeler’s right arm. In case you can’t tell, he loves video games. A couple of years ago, he decided to get a major tattoo. “I had wanted to do a sleeve but could not figure out an idea,” he told Kotaku. “Then I said, ‘Why not a gaming sleeve?'” The 30-year-old native…
By Stephen Totilo Published October 19, 2012 - Uncategorized
Nine Words Have Sold Me On Jason Rohrer’s Next Game
From Jason Rohrer, the maker of Passage, Sleep is Death and Diamond Trust of London, we’re getting a new PC/Mac/Linux game called The Castle Doctrine This is the description: “a massively-multiplayer game of burglary and home defense”. I don’t need to know anything else! Sign me up. Follow the game at the official Castle Doctrine…
By Stephen Totilo Published October 19, 2012