First Look at Call of Duty: Black Ops II‘s Multiplayer

This is your first look at multiplayer in this November’s presumed mega-hit, Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Call of Duty fans, this is why you play, no? The battles appear to be taking place in the game’s near-future of 2025. We’ve got some most unusual knife and tomahawk kills. Some sort of microwave transmitter…

Amazon’s First Game is a Hallucinatory Minutiae-Spotters Wonderland

As mentioned this morning, Amazon.com is in the game development business. The first Facebook title from the newly-revealed Amazon Game Studios is a fresh take on the hidden object genre that’ll have you seeing things. WithinLiving Classics‘s colorful storybook exterior lies a twisted take on the hidden object puzzle games that are so prolific on…

Sound Shapes: The Kotaku Review

Though there’s a smorgasbord of audio pulsing through it, Sound Shapes won’t make a musician out of you. What it does is more esoteric and impressive than that. This new PlayStation Vita game lets you feel what it’s like to live inside a song. At its most basic, Sound Shapes has you playing your way…

Square Enix Offering Free Copies Of Final Fantasy VII To Anyone Who Bought Accidental Re-Release Last Weekend

Over the weekend, the PC rerelease of Final Fantasy VII accidentally went live. People who bought the game found themselves unable to actually play it. To apologize for the mistake, Square Enix has told Kotaku that the company will offer refunds and free copies of the game to anyone who bought it early. Here’s the…

Guy Beats Super Mario Bros. Level Without Looking at the Screen

Challenged to a blind round of Super Mario Bros.—specifically, the remake in Super Mario All-Stars—one dexterous YouTuber manages to get through the level almost unscathed. I’m pretty sure the strategy here is to jump. Many, many times over.

Game Informer is now America’s third-most popular magazine, according to official stats. Sorry, Better Homes & Gardens

The Most Exciting (and First) Game of Snooker I’ve Ever Played

It wasn’t looking good. My erstwhile online opponent was sinking balls left and right. A red. A yellow. Some other color. After a seemingly endless run of the table he finally missed his mark, giving me the opening I needed. I lined up the green ball with the side pocket, pulled back my cue, and…

This External Hard Drive Is Wrapped in a Shiny Zelda Cartridge

Wait, external hard drive? Yes, external hard drive. Etsy hardware creator 8BitMemory has a bunch of cartridges reworked into external hard drives, this is just the prettiest. It’s also the most elusive, because it doesn’t seem to be available in the the store anymore. You can, however, enjoy an NES controller USB hub, or maybe…

Today’s Best Trailer For A Tweedpunk Video Game

Kotaku friend and Rock Paper Shotgun co-czar Jim Rossignol is moonlighting as a video game developer at a studio called Big Robot. Occasionally he updates us about the progress of his team’s PC/Mac/Linux game, Sir, You Are Being Hunted. Happily, this is never awkward, because our friend’s procedurally-generated open-world game continues to look fantastic. Sir,…

Worms Facebook Is Now In Closed Beta

Remember Worms? That great old PC action game that’s been released and remade quite a few times over the past couple of decades? It’s coming to Facebook, and you can apply for the beta right here

Uncharted 3‘s Multiplayer Will Soon Look Very Different, If You Like to Experiment

Most of the changes in the big new patch for Uncharted 3 include the things you’d expect: new items, new taunts, balance tweaks, etc. A lot of it is goofy. But this… this shot here is a look at the new “block mesh maps” that will be added, post-patch, to the game’s Lab, the experimental…

Talk Amongst Yourselves is where you should go to talk about games. And life. And iced coffee.

Chell Explores The World Outside of Aperture in This Gorgeous Short

We featured a work in progress last week, the beginnings of a music video looking at Chell’s life after Aperture. Zachariah Scott has finished his work now, and sent the new link along to us. “After Aperture” is a slow, meditative, thoughtful look at Chell from outside the first person perspective. What exactly does one…

LittleBigPlanet Karting Crosses the Finish Line in November

The coolest kart racer we never knew we wanted fires the starting gun on November 6, when creative types begin flooding the PlayStation Network with crazy tracks for the crazy racers of LittleBigPlanet Karting When ModNation Racers was first announced I was certain I would never need another kart racer for my PlayStation 3, but…

What In The World Is Final Fantasy? A Beginner’s Guide To The Biggest RPG Series On The Planet

Maybe you’ve heard of Final Fantasy. Maybe you’re familiar with some of the basics: shiny crystals, giant swords, dead Aerises. Angry teens. But you might not know much more about Square Enix’s massive set of role-playing games. They can be intimidating to newcomers, chock full of strange gameplay systems and confusing nomenclature. How can you…

DayZ is Officially Being Turned Into a Standalone Game

It’s been discussed before, but now it’s official: smash hit zombie survival mod DayZ is being turned into its own game. Dean Hall, the mod’s creator, will be overseeing the game as project lead, and it’ll be published by Dean’s co-workers (and ArmA creators) Bohemia Interactive. Hall says the game will “follow the Minecraft development…

Making Dragon Quest into an MMO

Dragon Quest X is the newest game in the immensely popular Dragon Quest series. It is also the series’ first MMORPG. While the prologue of the game (the first two hours or so) is a strictly single player affair, the game soon opens up into a massive online world. But as Dragon Quest X is…

Don’t Be Surprised if Tales Characters Appear in Smash Bros.

So Namco Bandai is making the new Smash Bros. games. Know what that means, don’t you? There’s a really good chance Namco characters will pop up in Smash Bros Tales director and producer Yoshito Higuchi tells The Official Nintendo Magazine that he would totally be happy if Tales characters appeared in Smash Bros. Of course…

Here Is the Future Computer World Japan Predicted in 1969

Computers are an important part of our lives. They have transformed the way we lived. Right now, we are living in the future. But what did that future look like in a 1960s Japanese children’s magazine? Like this. In 1969, Shonen Sunday published a series of articles called “Computopia”. They depicted how computers would be…

Dragon Quest X Plays Like a Co-op Final Fantasy XII

While doing our Kotaku East live stream of Dragon Quest X last week, the most common question I got was “What is the battle system like when you’re in a group?” Well, at that time, I was just starting out and had yet to get a full group going. However, since then I have spent…