• Kotaku East

  She’s Not Just the Tekken Lady. She’s a Bowler.

  To promote Street Fighter X Tekken, Capcom roped in a handful of women to cosplay as the fighting game characters. Dubbed “Miss St. X”, the women are bikini models and starlets. One, however, stands apart when wearing funny shoes and throwing big, heavy balls. See, Rina Ohtsuka, who is cosplaying as Tekken‘s Nina, is a…

  By Brian Ashcraft Published March 13, 2012
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  Kotaku East

  This RPG Teaches You Japanese

  As a game journalist living and working in Japan, the question I’m most commonly asked is, “What game can help me learn Japanese?” The answer: Slime Forest Adventure. Set up like a traditional JRPG, you go around the world, battle monsters, and try to rescue a princess. The story is simple and the graphics are…

  By Richard Eisenbeis Published March 13, 2012
• Kotaku East

  Snowboarding Gets All Nerdy

  No wonder a former Japanese Olympic snowboarder is so into otaku (“geek”) culture. It seems there a whole group of snowboarding otaku, decked out in unabashedly nerdy attire. These photos are from the ski slops of Nagano Prefecture. Besides the cosplaying snowboarders, there are geeked out snowboards, called “ita-board”. They feature anime and video game…

  By Brian Ashcraft Published March 13, 2012
• Kotaku East

  The Art of Outselling Skyrim (…in Japan)

  Western games are getting increasingly popular in Japan. But they’re still a small slice of the pie. Just ask ZeniMax Asia’s Tetsu Takahashi. ZeniMax Media, of course, owns American developers id Software (Doom) and Bethesda Softworks (The Elder Scrolls) as well as new Japanese studio, Tango Gameworks, with Shinji Mikami (above). Mikami, best known for…

  By Brian Ashcraft Published March 13, 2012
• Kotaku East

  Underpants! Beer Mugs! Badass Superhero Goes Retail Crazy.

  It’s a period of time in nearly every Japanese boy’s life. Sometime before preschool starts and shortly after it ends, kids become enamored with Ultraman. Some never outgrow their fascination with the towering superhero who flies to earth to kick monster butt. I don’t blame them. Ultraman is badass. Ultraman debuted in Japan during the…

  By Brian Ashcraft Published March 13, 2012
• Kotaku East

  Kotaku East Starts Now

  Kotaku East runs from 4am to 8am Eastern. For more info about Kotaku East click here

  By Brian Ashcraft Published March 13, 2012
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  Uncategorized

  Bomberman, the Team Fortress 2 Edition

  A pair of Team Fortress 2 modders have taken the game’s bones, a bunch of angry Scottish men and the classic Hudson game Bomberman and turned it into something wonderful Their TF2 mod, called TF2 Bomberman, keeps the original game’s core principles of bombs and a maze while putting you in control of Team Fortress…

  By Luke Plunkett Published March 13, 2012
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  An Enormous, Amazing Monkey Island Tattoo

  Reader Jonathan Hansen, who we actually featured a couple of years ago for his awesome “classic” art, thought we’d be interested in seeing his new Monkey Island tattoo. Given the scale and the subject matter, you’re damn right we’re interested. This flesh-based epic took over three years and fifty hours in the chair to complete.…

  By Luke Plunkett Published March 13, 2012
• Culture

  This Wonderful Mass Effect 3 Art is Full of GIANT SPOILERS

  Matt Rhodes is one of my favourite concept artists in the business. Why? Because his style, using bright, colourful cartoon characters for games that are often very dark and serious in tone, is a breath of fresh air in an industry where a lot of art ends up looking exactly the same. We’ve featured his…

  By Luke Plunkett Published March 13, 2012
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  It’s Insane How Many People Read Gaming Wiki Pages Every Month

  Signalling just how radically the way we read and learn about video games has changed over the past decade, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales now says he has the world’s biggest network of gaming sites on the internet. Which is a bit of a stretch; unlike his commercial rivals, Wales’ Wikia system for games – which…

  By Luke Plunkett Published March 13, 2012
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  Uncategorized

  There Won’t Ever be Another Mojang Game Called Scrolls

  While Minecraft developers Mojang have put a legal dispute with Elder Scrolls publishers Bethesda (well, Bethesda’s parent company Zenimax) to bed, the settlement has come at a slight cost: there won’t ever be another Mojang game called Scrolls The terms of the settlement mean that the trademark Mojang has for the game won’t cover any…

  By Luke Plunkett Published March 13, 2012
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  CultureTotal Recall

  George Washington & Ben Franklin, as Seen by Video Games in 1993

  Two of America’s founding fathers, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, will be starring in the upcoming Assassin’s Creed III. It’s not, you know, their first time in a video game. They’ve been in plenty, some serious, some less so, but my favourite in both cases is 1993 adventure game classic Day of the Tentacle, in…

  By Luke Plunkett Published March 13, 2012
• Culture

  How to Look Like C-3PO. Or Mark Hamill. Or a Stormtrooper.

  Collector Jason Liebig has uploaded six of the greatest Flickr images you’re likely to ever see: cereal box scans that include giant masks for some of the main characters from Star Wars From a Canadian cereal cash-in (the cereal itself branded C-3POs) dating all the way back to 1984, there were six in all, for…

  By Luke Plunkett Published March 12, 2012
• CultureTotal Recall

  Science Proves Old Video Games Were Super Hard

  Sitting down with a bunch of old games in the Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda, Pokemon and Metroid franchises, Belgian scientists have proven beyond all doubt that those games are way hard. To showcase their work, they’ve written a scientific paper outlining their findings. Greg Aloupis from the Free University of Brussels…

  By Luke Plunkett Published March 12, 2012
• Uncategorized

  Total Recall Starts Now!

  Let’s go back in time. To the 90s. Maybe even the 80s, if we’ve got the juice.

  By Luke Plunkett Published March 12, 2012
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  Soul Vaccination

  Greetings Kotaku-eers, and welcome to a new week of evening open threads. I missed doing these last week during the Game Developers Conference! It’s good to be back. Below, please find a collection of things that you might enjoy checking out or talking about. The Tower of Power tune, in particular, is worthy of a…

  By Kirk Hamilton Published March 12, 2012
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  Why Mass Effect 3’s Ending Was So Damn Terrible

  There’s an almost universal outrage at the moment over the ending of Mass Effect 3. After playing a series for what’s usually over 100 hours, people are very upset at the manner in which the trilogy wound down. And they have every right to be. But not for the reasons I see so many putting…

  By Luke Plunkett Published March 12, 2012
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  The Next Onimusha Is… a Browser Game

  Capcom will bring a new Onimusha game to browsers this summer, it said Friday in a press release. Onimusha Soul, to be released “for PCs and smartphones,” will be out on June 28 in Japan. Here’s how the developer describes it, as translated by Capcom’s official website: “Onimusha Soul” is a Sengoku simulation RPG based…

  By Jason Schreier Published March 12, 2012
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  Finally, a Music Game That Lets You Look Cool While Playing

  It’s hard to look cool when you’re playing most music video games. You may think you look cool with your dinky plastic guitar or humorously scale-sized drum set, but in reality you look like… well, a person playing a plastic instrument. At a recent Penny Arcade Expo, a group of contest finalists assembled on-stage to…

  By Kirk Hamilton Published March 12, 2012
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  You Won’t Jump Over the Flagpole in These Awesome Mario Heels

  Artist Jamie Ferraioli proves that stunning, feminine accessories are in no way at odds with nerd culture with her gorgeous, hand-painted shoes. These heels and flats display meticulously detailed hand-painted art from Super Mario Brothers and The Legend of Zelda. My personal favorite part is the lava painted onto the platform sole of the black…

  By Kate Cox Published March 12, 2012