Looks Like Xbox Live Is Down For Some People

For the second time in less than a month, Microsoft’s online service for the Xbox 360 appears to be experiencing problems affecting a broad swath of users. Here’s what the official Xbox Live status page says: Members will experience difficulties attempting to login to Xbox LIVE. Our engineers are hard at work to find and…

Obama Might Have Lost The First Debate, But The Xbox Did Even Worse

General consensus is that Mitt Romney won the presidential debate last night. President Barack Obama came in second. Jim Lehrer’s moderating skills were a distant third. But Microsoft’s Xbox Elections 2012, a platform that promised to let viewers watch the debate on their 360s and witness as audiences react in real time, might have performed…

Snacktaku PSA: It’s National Taco Day. Why Are You Sitting There Not Eating?

Did you know it was National Taco Day? Deadpool knows. I’m sure the people that make the Facebook game Rubber Taco do. I’m not so sure you do. Because if you did realize it was the day to celebrate the traditional Mexican dish of a flour or corn tortilla packed with stuff (i.e. Taco Bell’s…

The Next Paper Mario Reminds Me Why I Cherished Stickers As A Kid

Stickers, ineffable wonder, and childhood go hand in hand. And perhaps Mario has always spoken to this. Cliff Bleszinski once said that “There’s something about the hidden element to Mario where you jump and hit your head on a block and just out of nowhere secret things would appear. They made you feel like a…

Gamevil’s Turn-Based RPG Kingdom Royale Now Available in the App Store

Part kingdom-building sim, part Advance Wars, Gamevil’s Kingdom Royale is turn-based RPG battles with a social twist, and it’s available for free right now.

Maine Democrat is Supposedly Unfit For Office Because She Loves ‘Poisoning and Stabbing’ in World of Warcraft

Colleen Lachowicz is running for state senate in Waterville, Maine. She also plays a lot of World of Warcraft. According to Maine Republicans, this means that she is unfit for office. The Maine Republican Party has set up an entire website dedicated to digging up old forum posts made by Lachowicz on Blizzard’s online role-playing…

Free New Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer DLC Adds Collectors, Challenges, and Creepy Hazards

Mass Effect 3 is getting its largest multiplayer DLC to date, BioWare announced on their blog today. The update, called “Retaliation,” adds not only new character classes and weapons, but also new enemies, new modes to existing maps, and a challenge feature, with a whole host of unlockables to earn. “Retaliation,” like the game’s other…

Try Not To Get Yourself Killed In This Dishonored Interactive Trailer

Dying to play Dishonored? This interactive trailer isn’t the game, but it might tide you over until Tuesday. Like other interactive trailers, this set of videos lets you choose your own approach to handle one of the early levels from Dishonored. As such, the trailer contains spoilers for this particular area of the game. That…

Assassin’s Creed III‘s Native American Hero Had A Very Hard Life

This teaser for Assassin’s Creed III is different from the blitz of video we’ve been getting as the threequel nears release. In the clip, you see a bit of Connor’s life from before he became an Assassin. The scenes of him running through the forest look beautiful but get harshly contrasted when he comes home…

The New SimCity Looks Gorgeous In This Day-By-Day Gameplay Demo

We’ve heard and seen a lot about the built-in multiplayer aspects of the new SimCity, and we’ve had stills showing off how much life there suddenly is in our virtual towns. But now, this video shows off the actual day-to-day play—and, excitingly, the nights as well— in SimCity. It all begins, of course, with choosing…

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria sold 2.7 million copies, Blizzard announced this morning. Total WoW subs: 10 mil.

The Original Grand Theft Auto iPhone Clone Returns with Payback 2

Back in 2009 James Daniels released Payback for the iPhone, a game that was essentially a knock-off of the original isometric Grand Theft Auto. Now Payback is back, switching focus from solo slaughter to multiplayer mayhem. The darker, shinier Payback 2 slices up the open-world gameplay of the original game into a series of eight…

Burrow Your Way into the Worms Facebook Beta

Team17’s battling invertebrates hunger for the blood of a billion Facebook users. The original Lumbricus terrestris-based trajectory shooter is going social, and it craves your beta testing prowess. With bite-sized real-time multiplayer battles, weapons drawn from the span of the series’ 17-year history and an array of stylish hats, Worms for Facebook is a different…

A Debate of a Different Sort, About The State of Video Games in 2012

Over in The New York Times, where you can see more and more contributions by Kotaku writers, Yahoo News deputy editor Chris Suellentrop and I just had a debate—or maybe, more accurately, a conversation—about video games. We’d been asked by the editors there about the state of gaming, about signs of financial struggles at nearly…

If you’re looking for a challenge, you can now pick up the remake of oldie-but-goodie La Mulana from GoG.

New Super Mario Bros 2 DLC and Real-World Pokémon Hunting Descend Onto the Nintendo Download This Week

Used to be that Nintendo and downloadable content were two terms that you almost never saw together. But that changes in a big way this week as the company rolls out the first wave of add-on coin packs for New Super Mario Bros 2 on the 3DS There’s also Pokémon Dream Radar, a downloadable augmented…

The Pinball Duo Transforms the iPad Into an Incredibly Limited Pinball Machine

From the creators of the Gameloft-exclusive Duo Gamer and the Atari Arcade controller comes the Duo Pinball, a plastic frame that adds side buttons, a plunger and a lot of bulk to the Apple iPad. It’s the sort of controller only a pinball video game addict could love. I’m Mike Fahey, and I’m a video…

Medal of Honor Warfighter’s Open Beta Starts Tomorrow, But Only on Xbox Live

If you’re all excited about EA’s upcoming multinational FPS, then tomorrow’s your lucky day. The open beta for Medal of Honor Warfighter comes exclusively to Xbox 360 tomorrow, bringing with it a new game mode called Hotspot. Hotspot requires co-op teams to scurry back and forth across the map to defend or lay siege to…

Confessions Of A Teenage Xbox Hacker

In some ways Juvi is just an average eighteen-year-old. He speaks in short, brusque sentences. He works as an artist at a tattoo parlor. He was born in the U.K., but he now shares a loft with his girlfriend in Spain. He spends a lot of time on the Internet, and he sometimes says mean…

This is, Apparently, the World’s Tallest LEGO Vampire

It’s a stupid record, I know, since competition in the category can’t be exactly fierce, but this is still a cool time-lapse video of a ten-foot LEGO vampire being built in New Orleans’ Jackson Square.