Turkey Day

To: Ash From: Crecente Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving! The day after? Black Friday! Crazy!! I can’t believe how quickly this year has been zipping buy. While we’re going to be running on skeleton staff tomorrow, we’ll still have some interesting stories coming, including at least one review and our Black Friday Survival guide. Exciting! Off to ponder…

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood Gives You ‘Animus Project’ For Free

Ubisoft is giving the gift of downloadable content to Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood owners a little early, handing out the “Animus Project Update 1.0” for free on December 14. What do you get for your precious time and bandwidth? A new game mode, “Advanced Alliance,” for one. It’s a spin on the original Alliance Mode with…

GoldenSunDarkDawn Visual Thing

Psynergy is the power of the elemental forces in Golden Sun, used by characters in battle and to solve environmental puzzles. All about Djinni. These are Djinni (singular Djinn). How could you not collect them? Meet the new Heroes of Vale, same as the old Heroes of Vale, mostly.

A Visual Guide To Racing Games

Whether you feel the need for speed or the need to make the car you’re driving sounds as close to the real thing as possible, The Kotaku Genre Guide to Racing Games has you covered. We’ve covered role-playing games, first-person shooters, and real-time strategy games in our ongoing genre guide series, so naturally the next…

Activision: Call of Duty Boxed Copies Will Never Have Subscriptions

The Call of Duty experience you have now, the one that includes Modern Warfare 2, Black Ops and future Call of Duty boxed games, will never include a subscription fee, Activision tells Kotaku. “We will never charge for multiplayer for Call of Duty,” Eric Hirshberg, newly appointed CEO of Activision Publishing, told me as our…

Steam Is Just Giving Away Games This Thanksgiving

Savings just got ridiculous on Valve’s Steam service, with the company practically giving away games like Deus Ex, Half-Life 2, and Borderlands… and actually giving away tons of video games to Steam members on top of that. Check the official Steam site for “Give & Get” daily deals on the aforementioned games and more, because…

Review: Dead Nation Justifies The Existence Of Yet Another Zombie Game

Game developers, please stop making zombie games when you stop making good ones. The PlayStation 3-exclusive Dead Nation is allowed. It’s a good one. Dead Nation could have been a bad one. It’s not just another groaning zombie game, following Left 4 Dead, Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead 2, Dead Rising 2, Avatar Zombie Massage…

Dead Nation Gallery

These Are Wood Pokémon

Some people say there are no wood Pokémon. Not true. There are woodcut Pokémon. Friend of the site Matt Hawkins curated a recent event at New York City arts gaming showcase Babycastles featuring an artist’s Pokémon woodcuts. They come from artist Maré Odomo, who used a laser cutter to make them, and will be on…

Blizzard Really Wants You To Start Playing World of Warcraft Now

If World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm expansion has finally piqued your interest in jumping into Blizzard’s massive-multiplayer online role-playing game, right now may be most fiscally sound time to invest in WoW. Blizzard is selling the first three releases in the six-year-old series for a pittance. Just five bucks for World of Warcraft, another five for…

When Pokémon Fans Are All Grown Up…

If Pokémon was a little more adult, a little classier, maybe its posters would look less like toy commercials and more like this. By Kody Christian

Hopefully, Gears of War 3 Has Some Of This In It

Whenever I see a new look at the Unreal Engine, I wonder: How will they use this in the next Gears of War? I did that in March. I’m doing it again with this brand-new look at the updated Engine. This is a trailer for the latest iteration of the Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, the…

Guess How Many Points Deadspin Scored Against John Salley

Why in the name of NBA JAM shouldn’t Deadspin EIC A.J. Daulerio and contributing editor Drew Magary fly to LA to play 2-on-2 with ex-NBA power forward John Salley (aka Spider) and the short but court-prowess possessing Kevin Hench (the Henchman)? On November 12, at the Cheviot Hills recreation center in sunny Los Angeles, a…

A silver UFO hovers quietly in the air over a Turkish city

Filled with the sound of morning birdsong, this video of a UFO over Turkey taken last week is as much a slice of Turkish city life as it is a record of possible alien incursion. I like the way you can hear what sounds like somebody chopping vegetables in the background – I think this…

The Best Notebooks of 2010

To find out the best laptops of 2010, we checked in with Mark Spoonauer who, as editor-in-chief of Laptop Magazine and Laptopmag.com, oversaw 140+ notebook and netbook reviews this year. If you’re buying, buy one of these. Breakthrough Device Apple MacBook Air (11- and 13-Inch) Lowest Price: $900 Talk about instant gratification. Flip the lid…

Mass Effect 2 Gamers Greatly Prefer Playing As Soldier Dudes

I’m a guy, and I seldom play games as anything but a guy. I play Mass Effect as a female character, though, for some reason. Very few of my fellow Mass Effect gamers do. Fewer than one of five. What to make of this? It’s hard to say without knowing the percentage of Mass Effect…

Join these cute fluffy Star Wars mice… it is your Destiny!

We can’t resist cuteness of this magnitude! These Star Wars mice are the sort of thing you’ll buy as presents for your friends… and then wind up hoarding them for yourself. Plus check out Harry Potter and Hermione mice! George Lucas has been trying to make the Star Wars universe cuter ever since the days…

Mission Accomplished

Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi can afford a smile; after six years of development and more than a few jokes at his expense, GT5 is finally on sale. Gameface is a photographic celebration of the people who make, play and love video games.

Black Rock Shooter Ready To Shoot Up The PSP

Lock and load, because popular original video anime Black Rock Shooter is getting a PSP title. Today in Tokyo, developer Imageepoch revealed the game’s debut trailer, which follows the adventures of the Black Rock Shooter, a girl with a glowing eye and a gun that can fire 20 shoots per second. Osaka-based studio Ordet handled…

It Rubs The Lotion On Its Skin…

As seen on A Public Flogging, as inspired by Silence of the Lambs, and perhaps some of my nightmares. (NSFW) A Public Flogging [Thanks KindaGamey]