Nothing Says Olympic Glory Like a Sonic the Hedgehog Tattoo

You know the Sonic Cycle meme, right? Gamers hear about a new Sonic game, they get excited. Then, the game comes out, and it’s a huge disappointment. With that kind of letdown baggage, you’d think Sonic would not make a good lucky charm. Then again, you’re not Puerto Rican runner Javier Culson, and you didn’t…

According to recent research, there may actually be a less slingshot-intensive way to calm down Angry Birds

Freshly-Announced Grid Sequel Follows Old-Fashioned Naming Conventions

Codemasters has seen fit to develop a second Grid game. The first, released in 2008, was pretty damn great, as you’d expect given the fact many of the team from the respected TOCA series had worked on it. The sequel, Grid 2, will be out in 2013.

A Short Film Made Entirely Out of Papercraft

Papercraft isn’t just useful for making tiny recreations of famous video game characters. You can also make terrific animated shorts with it. This clip, by Israeli student Neta Cohen, was the first piece of animation she’d ever done. If you can believe that. If she turns around and says it’s also the first papercraft she’s…

Get Your Ass to Mars in This Space Flight Video Game

Because landing on Mars is the hottest thing this year, Lunar Flight – the terrifyingly realistic space landing simulator – is being updated to include a map of the Martian surface, meaning you can recreate the sensation of touching down on an alien world over and over and over again to your heart’s content. While…

A Transformer to Light a Big Mac’s Darkest Hour

This is a customised Transformers action figure that gives Autobot leader Optimus Prime a day job. No longer can he just drive around as a giant truck for the hell of it. No, now he’s got deliveries to make. Deliveries of sesame seed buns, all beef patties and, if he can find the room, special…

57 Street Fighters, All in the One Place

How many Street Fighters are there? There’s loads. Unless you’re a hardcore fan, likely way more than you thought there were. Considering Street Fighter II started with only eight playable characters, you can blame the later games, when Capcom went a little crazy This awesome poster by artist Ken Wong puts 57 of them in…

Fallout 3 is Suddenly One of The Best-Looking Games on Earth

Fallout 3 was released in 2008. In that time, all kinds of gorgeous video games have come and gone, including Bethesda’s own Skyrim. But you wouldn’t tell by looking at these screens. You’d think they were for Fallout 4, a thing I’m pretty sure doesn’t even exist yet. That’s the power, and the beauty, of…

Thank Your God The SNES Didn’t Actually Look This Hideous

The North American Super Nintendo looked…OK. The Japanese and PAL version looked hot. Oh, how things could have turned out differently, had early concept art become reality. These two early designs for the SNES, drawn at a time when they were still calling the machine the “Nintendo Entertainment System 2”, were hideous. Where the final…

A Robot Sex Doll. From The Future.

This incredible animated gif doing the rounds this week (though first published in February) is taken from Paragon Sexa Doll (パラゴンセクサドール Doll), a Japanese “visual novel” developed by Heart Soft and released in the early 80s on the NEC PC-8801, a primitive PC that was pretty big in Japan. Visual novels are barely games; like…

Phone Controls Suck. Let’s Use a PS3 Controller Instead.

Unless the game has been designed with touch-screen (or tilt) controls in mind, moving around in mobile game is often an exercise in pain and frustration. So much so that I want to find the man/woman who first invented the virtual d-pad and set their hands on fire. Not to worry. There’s always the GameKlip,…

Phantasy Star Online 2 Bans Overseas Players. Sorry Foreigners! [Update]

Players outside of Japan have been enjoying online role-playing game Phantasy Star Online 2. Those days are over. Until its Western release, the game is now Japan only. Sega updated its terms of usage today, dropping this bombshell for PS02 players outside Japan: “Connecting to the game server through the installed software is restricted to…

A Computer Made These Polygon Faces. Warning: Nightmares Ahead.

These images are what happens when you combine a a random polygon generator with a “facial recognition algorithm”. Which means the generator keeps generating until the recognition algorithm detects a face. Then it keeps running while it tries to automatically improve it. To…mixed results. In short: it’s a million virtual chimps drawing a million virtual…

What a Real Mario Brother Would Look Like

Mario has a giant cap for a reason: so Nintendo didn’t need to animate his hair or eyebrows. That was back in the 1980s, though; if Mario was being designed now – or, heaven’s forbid, being redesigned – there’s every chance he’d look a little more realistic. Maybe not this realitic, though, which would be…

Minesweeper and Solitaire Now Have Achievements. Sigh.

Well, this is depressing. In preparation for the release of Windows 8, Microsoft is updating some of the platform’s stalwart titles, like Minesweeper, Solitaire and Majong. Updating them with achievements. Minesweeper, for example, has four of them. Four. One is for finishing a board, and one is for losing a round. Solitaire has 3. Presumably…

I Read Game of Thrones. I Watched Game of Thrones. And So I Will Read This Behind-The-Scenes Book About Game of Thrones.

There aren’t too many TV series that I’d go out and actually buy a book about, but HBO’s Game of Thrones is one of them. This mini-documentary about the making of a book highlighting the work of the art teams that bring George R.R. Martin’s world to life has sold me. Just imagining whose job…

Some of the Greatest Video Game Pictures You’ll Ever See

If you’ve been reading Kotaku for a while, you may already be familiar with the name Genzoman. Or, as his mother knows him, Gonzalo Ordoñez Arias. The Chilean illustrator, part of the illustrious Udon Crew, is responsible for some of the most amazing video game images on the internet. Some of them were clearly drawn…

This Guy Reckons He’s Made Over $10,000 Playing Diablo III

As soon as Blizzard announced its real-money auction house for Diablo III, no doubt millions of gamers around the world began fantasising that they’d be able to make some serious money on the service. Well, this guy claims he already is. Reddit user WishboneTheDog has posted screencaps of his transaction history, which if legit show…

Those Wii U cover designs we looked at yesterday? According to Ubisoft, they’re the real deal

This is $450 Worth of Pure Twilight Princess Evil

Okay, technically this is $475 worth of evil, as this is the exclusive version of First 4 Figures’ 1/4 Scale “Master Arts” Ganondorf Center Piece, which comes with an additional laughing head, but you get the point. Now that First 4 Figures has gotten Wolf Link, Link with Epona and Zant out of the way,…