No Surprises After One Round in Madden‘s Cover Contest

News and notes from around the world of sports video gaming: • Madden NFL 13‘s cover athlete contest has moved to the second round, with few surprises. Aaron Rodgers advanced, despite Packer fans’ superstitions. Megatron absolutely dominated his first round matchup, with the largest margin of victory. Sebastian Janikowski was eliminated, despite everyone’s desire to…

A Very Moving Day for a Woman at The Masters

After two rounds at The Masters, the 44 best scores and ties, plus anyone within 10 strokes of the leader, make the cut. Since 2006, when the course was lengthened, no American amateur has survived to “Moving Day,” the nickname for Saturday’s round. Yesterday, I did so. As a woman. This past Sunday, I wrote…

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From the Worldwide Leader in Sports … Video Games, your 6 p.m. Sportaku begins now.

Best Game Ever: Thief: The Dark Project is the Only Way to Stealth

Thought we forgot about Speak Up on Kotaku’s Best Game Ever? We were only biding our time until commenter DocSeuss and admitted his love for the one stealth action game that got nearly everything right. I’m done playing third-person stealth games. I can’t do it anymore. I want to, believe me, but… yeah. No. I…

Stop Hoarding Things In Skyrim Or Your Housecarl Will Leave You

College Humor has a great video out today that examines what happens when one resident of Skyrim hoards too much. And no, it’s not okay to stockpile all of those books that you’ll “read eventually” and all that random meat that you “might need one day.” It’s gross. In other words, clean out your house…

Five Reasons A World Without Used Games Might Not Be So Bad

The next generation of gaming consoles might not play used games. Sounds terrible, right? Maybe not. Over the past few months, rumors have suggested that both the next Xbox (codenamed Durango) and the next PlayStation (codenamed Orbis) will use technology that prevents customers from sharing and selling the games they play. Games might be tied…

Denis Dyack Claims Used Games Will Destroy Gaming

Secondhand games have been the bread and butter of retail chain GameStop for years, and the target of publishers’ ire for just as long. Many consumers prefer not to pay the new retail price (a hefty $60, for most titles) for every game they play, and the system of selling and purchasing pre-owned discs works…

The Joy Of Falling Through The Floor

Republished from Rock, Paper Shotgun However hard games try to create worlds, they remain artifice. They are stage sets. Painted boxes. And when you step outside them, you get to see how unreal that game world actually is. This, from time to time, can be a wonderful thing. Let’s raise a glass to the strange…

Digital Storm Beats the Heat With the “World’s Most Advanced PC”

Most boutique shops rely on other people’s technology to keep the insides of your expensive machine cool. With a custom-designed chassis, the proprietary Cryo-TEC liquid cooling system, and software capable of controlling 13 case fans all at once, Digital Storm’s Aventum isn’t your average boutique machine. The Aventum is a PC designed from the ground-up…

Brave the Darkest Depths of This Post for a Copy of Legend of Grimrock

The nice folks at GOG.com were so excited to Almost human’s Legend of Grimrock in our PC Indie Spotlight they spontaneously expelled 15 codes for the full game. I’m not touching them. I don’t know where they’ve been. As you may or may not have heard, the digital distribution platform formerly known as Good Old…

The Aerodyne is a Minimal, Modern Take on Art Deco Design

Jeffrey Stephenson specializes in making sleek, minimalist, art-deco and mid-century inspired PCs. His website features a solid decade’s worth of custom wooden mods, spanning the range from full-fledged furniture to cigar box. The Aerodyne is his most recent project, completed this January. The sleek, compact retro PC is made of mahogany and aluminum. Stephenson’s gallery…

World of Warcraft Monopoly Replaces Uncle Pennybags with a Miniature Murloc

Just as the money for World of Warcraft Monopoly replaces those boring old numbers with the faces of Azeroth’s most influential, the Chance and Community Chest cards replace the stale old man in a top hat with the freshest seafood Azeroth has to offer. Two weeks ago PC Gaming Lives gave you an exclusive first-look…

Tera‘s Rabid Spokesman Brutalizes the Developers of Land of Dragonrunes

If you’re wondering why the graphics update for Land of Dragonrunes never came out, you only have the brutal hands of Tera spokesman and MMA legend Bas Rutten to blame. Well, that and the fact that the game doesn’t technically exist. Bas Rutten doesn’t let something as paltry as non-existence get in the way of…

Lovely New Pictures of Lovely Old Adventure Games

Artist Jón Kristinsson has started a Tumblr dedicated to his beautiful illustrations of point-and-click adventure games like Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle. Kristinsson says the project was inspired by developer Double Fine and its success raising roughly a bazillion dollars on Kickstarter for its upcoming new point-and-click adventure game. Check out the Tumblr…

Crucial Adrenaline SSD Review: Solid State Cache for Your Hard Drive

Last year we reviewed OCZ’s RevoDrive Hybrid, which saw the marriage of a 1TB hard drive and a pair of 50GB SandForce SSDs on a PCI Express card. The idea was to use the SSD controllers and 100GB of NAND flash as a high-speed cache for the much larger spinning disk drive. Potentially achieving performance…

Legend of Grimrock is Everything I Wanted in a Modern-Day Dungeon Crawler

Our beaten, bloodied and bruise party stood before the gold-trimmed door, attempting to unravel the secret means of accessing the treasures beyond it. Decimated after a fierce battle with skeletal knights, we should be making haste to the nearest healing stone, but we’d caught the whiff of treasure, and there was no turning back. The…

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Aventum

Sketches of ‘PlayStation Orbis Features’ Surface, Then Disappear

The design firm Coque Design may have worked on illustrations for certain features of the next PlayStation, according to pictures a tipster spotted on its website today. The pictures, which have since been removed from the site, were labeled “Illustrations & Sketches for new PlayStation Orbis features.” Orbis is the codename for Sony’s next gaming…

The Nasty Twitter Hate Sent To the Former Face of Call of Duty

We know that Twitter is a forum rife with negativity, just as surely as we know that Xbox Live contains the same. But it’s still sobering to look at the kind of venom that was spewed in the direction of Robert Bowling, who recently resigned as the public face and “creative strategist” of lead Call…