Here is What a Kotaku Meet Up is Like

Every so often we at Kotaku try to throw meet up parties for our readers. Ever wonder what it’s like? Check out the video, and try to come to our next one! Like the music that’s playing? It’s by our own Kirk Hamilton, and you can listen to and download his whole album from bandcamp

This Week in the Business: ‘Nintendo has been Left for Dead’

What’s happened in the business of video games this past week … QUOTE | “Nintendo has been left for dead.”—Asif Khan, CEO of Panoptic Management Consultants talks about investors’ stance on Nintendo and whether Miyamoto leaving Nintendo would affect the stock. QUOTE | “Our games industry is shockingly immature.”—Epic Games president Mike Capps, referring to…

The Man Behind The World’s Best Video Game Screenshots

Most photographers ply their trade by capturing snapshots of reality and preserving them on film. Through careful framing, posing, and a bit of luck, they seek to distill the essence of foreign lands, exotic vistas, war zones, and even distant planets. But what about the places we visit in video games? Games contain striking panoramas,…

If You’re Going to Add a Penis to a Game, Do it the Battlefield 3 Way

Few things confirm the ingenuity of gamers as effectively as the lengths they’ll go to add penises to video games that don’t include penises. Battlefield 3 may be a war video game full of phallic symbols, but it didn’t ship with drawings of genitalia. But the gamer in the clip here added one in the…

What is FXAA?

Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing may not be known by its name to many gamers, but they certainly do recognize its good looks, being used in such visually luxurious games as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Batman: Arkham City and Battlefield 3 But what is it, really? It’s an improvement above three earlier iterations of anti-aliasing, rendering…

Kotaku Meat Up

More like Meat-Up, AmIRite?? | Last night’s Kotaku reader meet-up at the Gizmodo Gallery was great. I loved seeing all of you. But what I loved most were those gi-normous crocodile-sized subs down in the basement. So glorious. I’m on Board. The PlayStation Vita is Going to Launch with a Bang. The PlayStation Vita is…

The Skyrim Theme Becomes Elevator Music

Courtesy of the fine folks at Reddit, we’ve got a video of YouTube user (and pianist) live4divin, who performs a jazz reharmonization of Jeremy Soule’s main theme from Skyrim. For non-musicos, reharmonization is when you take an established melody (say, “All The Things You Are“) and write new chords to go underneath it. It can…

DeadEndThrills’ Finest Screenshots

You May Need a Finance Degree to Understand Fortune Street

The Wii’s new virtual board game Fortune Street threatens to overwhelm you at first, but don’t let that stop you from becoming part of the 1 percent in this Monopoly-esque game. The only problem I had with Fortune Street was with its pacing. It feels slow at times, and if you’re playing alone it can…

The Most Spectacular Battlefield 3 Jet Takedown You’ll See Today (Or Ever)

Technically speaking this isn’t a kill made with a jet. But it is made by a gamer who was recently in a jet. We’ve seen some amazing things in Battlefield 3, but I’ve never seen a video that shows someone jumping out of a jet in mid-dogfight, twisting in the air to shoot the aggressor…

The Sith Inquisitor’s Inquisitiveness Pays Off in the Long Run

With only four days left before the launch of the early start program for Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare gives hopeful Sith Inquisitors some rather fetching outfits and tactics to look forward to. The Sith Inquisitor isn’t all Force Lightning and stoic standing in The Old Republic. During my brief spin in the role…

Here’s Why You Need to Stop Dismissing OnLive’s Tablet Gaming

For much of the past week, I’ve been test driving OnLive’s new app and controller pairing. The tech on display impressed me with the response time and the simple fact that, all of a sudden, the gaming options on an iPad are approaching parity with what you can get on a PC. Let’s get one…

Figuring Out Rainbows Could Lead to Prettier Video Game Graphics

Better visuals in the coming generation of games may come courtesy of Mother Nature. Computer graphics researchers at the University of California San Diego were looking for way to create better animation and their work took them into the colorfully iconic rainy-day phenomenon. The results reveal exactly how rainbows manifest and includes new findings on…

Could This Be the End of GSC Game World and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2?

The Kiev, Ukraine based developer that put a dramatic spin on nuclear horror in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of PC first-person shooters has reportedly closed its doors, leaving the fate of the eagerly-anticipated S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 up in the air. Reports of the closure of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. began this morning via a story on the Ukraine’s UkraNews…

Steamy Batman / Catball Romance Rekindled in This Week’s Gaming Apps

Sparks fly when the Caped Crusader meets one sexy feline sphere in this week’s round up of the hottest gaming apps. Can you feel the simmering sexual tension? No? Then maybe it’s just me still trying to work the Batman sex scene from the first issue of DC’s New 52 Catwoman out of my system.…

The Stranger’s Dream $1 DLC for Bastion Sheds Light on the Narrator’s Past, Makes Things Easier or Harder

It’s been a day of surprises for fans of Bastion. First, they announce that you can play the gravel-voiced adventure in the Chrome browser. And now comes word that they’ll be releasing DLC for the game next week. (This comes after saying that they’d never make any.) The Stranger’s Dream add-on hits on 12/14 for…

OC ReMix’s Latest Free Album Explores the Evil Themes of 18 BadAss Video Game Bosses

What happens when 20 top video game music remixers take on 18 of the biggest, baddest bosses ever committed to CD or cartridge? That would be OC Remix’s 30th free album, BadAss: Boss Themes Only the amazing artists of the OC Remix community could collectively take on the likes of Sephiroth, Donkey Kong, Astaroth, Shredder,…

The King of Chinatown Documentary Focuses on Competitive Gaming at New York’s Shuttered Arcade Mecca

For years, fighting game fans in the New York City area gathered at Chinatown Fair, to hone their skills at the location’s stand-up machines. That all ended earlier this year to the dismay of many. Chinatown Fair’s legacy lives on across the river in Brooklyn’s Next Level but you can relive the glory of days…

2011 Gamers Played Modern Warfare 3 the Most, Skyrim the Longest

Video game social network and stat tracking service Raptr has announced the winners of its 2011 Most Played Games awards, and while overall gamers spent more time playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 than any other 2011 title, it’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that walked home with the Most Played Game of 2011…

Metro 2033, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Fallout Helped An Artist Dismantle Manchester

James Chadderton’s take on Manchester in ruins hints at the apocalypse without bothering to identify its nature. His artwork, amalgams of computer graphics, painting and photo, show the effect, but not the cause. It’s a deliberate ploy to pull viewers into the scenes of devastation and then allow their imaginations to fill in the back-story.…