The Rise Of Egypt And How You’ll Pay For Age Of Empires Online

Age of Empires Online is a free-to-play online game, but every free-to-play game needs to make money somehow. Kotaku spoke to members of the game’s development team about the newly-unveiled Egyptian civilization and how gamers can pay to play. Age of Empires, released in 1997 for the PC, was one of the first real-time strategy…

Did This Student Improve This PS3 Game’s Sound Effects?

Jim McGowan studies sound and music for video games at a school in England. He figured he’d test his skills by trying to improve the sound effects in WipEout HD. Listen to the results. First, we’ve got Jim’s version of the sound effects in the PlayStation 3 racing game. He recommends that you listen with…

Russian TV Links Modern Warfare 2 To Russian Massacre

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 may have influenced the deadly attack on Russia’s busiest airport earlier this week, state run news network Russia Today suggests. RT points out what they say are similarities between the bloody scenes depicted in the No Russian level of 2009’s game with the gruesome reality of yesterday’s attack at…

Witness The Awesome Power Of A Runaway Star

NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer captured this amazing image of the star Zeta Ophiuchi plowing through a radiant dust cloud at 54,000 miles per hour. Why is Zeta Ophiuchi on the run? We like to think of stars as fixed objects hanging in the sky, but as we’ve seen before in Kotaku’s daily science post,…

Giggling My Way Through The Bloody Bulletstorm Demo

Epic’s demo of its upcoming over-the-top first-person shooter Bulletstorm urges players to kill with skill. Lacking any real skill myself, fits of childish giggling will have to do. Keep in mind this is the first time I’ve gotten my hands on Bulletstorm, and I did sort of skip the tutorial for brevity’s sake, so my…

A Look at the Maps And Zombies of Black Ops First Strike

Call of Duty: Black Ops isn’t just getting four new maps when First Strike hits the Xbox 360 next month, it’s also getting more zombies. While we have already seen a bit of the four multiplayer maps included in First Strike, due to hit the Xbox 360 on Feb. 1 for 1,200 Microsoft points, or…

Dead Space 2: Severed DLC Reunites Players With Some Old Friends

Visceral Games’ first batch of downloadable content for Dead Space 2 is Severed, a single-player add-on starring Gabe Weller and Lexine Murdock from Dead Space Extraction. Severed will hit the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live in the coming weeks.

Killzone 3 Lays Waste To PlayStation Home

The Central Plaza of Sony’s PlayStation 3 virtual playground PlayStation Home has never looked quite as attractive as it will this Thursday. To think all it needed was an alien invasion. Killzone 3 is coming on February 22, but the Helghast are touching down in PlayStation Home a little bit earlier than that. Starting Thursday,…

Age of Empires Online Egypt Gallery

Spell Check: 5 Mistakes To Avoid In Magicka

Co-op wizardly action extravaganza Magicka comes out today, making this the perfect time for the following public service announcement. You will suck at Magicka. You will be so terrible. You’ll be introduced to its innovative element-mixing system, you’ll nod, smile at the power at your disposal, and then proceed to screw up in a thousand…

Crysis 2 and Bulletstorm Demos Are Live

Free demos for Bulletstorm (single-player) and Crysis 2 (multiplayer demo) are now on Xbox Live. That’s demos of two upcoming first-person shooters for the price of none. The Bulletstorm demo should be downloadable today for PlayStation 3 as well.

This Is What Super Meat Boy Success Feels Like

Super Meat Boy is a 2D game with relatively simple graphics. That’s what it looks like, at least. This action-packed fan film by Joseph Manalaysay captures what beating one of the game’s brutal levels feels like. As anyone that’s been playing games since the Atari age will tell you, video games don’t need elaborate visuals…

Mammoth Sale on Xbox Live

There’s a big sale running now through the end of the month on Xbox Live on 2K and Rockstar content. The deals include loads of Borderlands, GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption DLC. Full list here.

The Cheaper, Better Tasting Alternative To The Nintendo 3DS

In today’s short but sweet episode of Speak-Up on Kotaku, commenter 100Tacks spends a dollar on a portable Nintendo product that does 3D without the aid of special glasses. I got my 3D’S today for one dollar! About Speak-Up on Kotaku: Our readers have a lot to say, and sometimes what they have to say…

Dead Space 2 Steam Purchasers Are Dead In The Water

Dead Space 2 became available for pre-purchase on digital download service Steam yesterday. It went live early this morning. So why aren’t Steam users able to play it yet? Several readers have alerted us to an issue with invalid serial key errors when trying to activate newly-purchased copies of Dead Space 2 on Steam. The…

Talk Amongst Yourselves

This is Kotaku’s official forum. Today, we’d like to talk about video games. But we also need a favor. We’ve got this frightful image today from reader Nexus SIX, but we are running low on new January images. If you have Photoshop skills, please head over to #TAYpics and scare us up a few more…

The Surprise Dead Space Game You Need to Play

This week I found myself doing something I’ve never done before with an iPad. Playing a game, not to pass time, but because it was fun, frightening and I wanted to see what was going to happen next. Gaming on the iPhone and iPad is for me a diversion, something I do to take the…

Gearing Up For Sony Later This Week

Live from my hotel room in Tokyo! Sleepy, too. What you missed last night Rumor: The First Official Shot Of The PSP2? The Best Way To Stop Game Piracy Is With Silly Pirate Heads The Best Video Game Costume & Character Design Of 2010 The Nintendo 3DS Is The Anti-Game Boy When Street Fighters Go…

Inception Among Academy Award Nominees

Video game-like Inception was among the ten movies nominated for a best picture Oscar this morning. Other nominees included Toy Story 3 and The Social Network. Full list here.

The iPhone’s Most Popular Game Will Put Your Eye Out

Angry Birds didn’t sweep the nation, it swept the whole damn world. The game’s popular enough to merit more than stuffed animals, a board game and an animated series. It’s popular enough for a slingshot that you can shoot things with. This Angry Birds catapult is from the folks behind the stuffed toys and was…