This Is What The Halo Reach Xbox 360 Sounds Like

Microsoft’s Major Nelson just posted the Halo sound-effects the Halo Reach edition of the Xbox 360 makes when powered up and when the tray slides. He’s offering them as ring tones, an act we’re not prepared to judge yet.

iTunes Chart Topper: Madden Fever

Madden reigns supreme on this weeks iTunes Chart Topper. Being a digitally distributed port, bargain bin deals the day Madden 12 is inevitably unveiled is out of the question. Here’s the full list of games for both platforms: iPhone Position Title Price Weeks Last Week 1 Madden NFL 11 (EA) $7.99 1 — 2 Angry…

We’re In Germany This Week, These Are The Big Gamescom Events

We’ve got two Mikes and one Brian in Cologne, Germany this week for Gamescom, the ever-expanding video game showcase that makes E3 look tiny and introduced the PS3 Slim to the world last year. We’ll be covering some big events live. Bookmark this. Cologne is six hours ahead of my time zone (East Coast) and…

Sony PSP Ad Mocks Apple iPhone Gaming

Apple has taken shots at the DS and PSP. The iPhone has more games, they say. Sony fires back with this ad, basically saying, yeah, but our games are better. I’ve seen game companies take shots at each other in ads. It’s common. In fact, mocking Nintendo has been a seasonal sport for Mario rivals.…

Doom 4 Targeted For Console And PC, Wolfenstein In ‘Thinking About It’ Phase

Doom 4 was a no-show at this year’s QuakeCon, and id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead told me he’ll take the arrows for raising expectations it would be there. He also share with me a sliver of details about the game. Doom 4 is well into development at id. Hollenshead said “a team and a half”…

Xbox 360 Re-Done As Arcade Cabinet

This is a custom-made arcade cabinet for this week’s downloadable Xbox Live Arcade game (coming later to PS3 and PC) Lara Croft and The Guardian of Light. Xbox Live hype man Major Nelson Tweets that he’s giving this away

Talk Amongst Yourselves

Talk about video games, will you? Thanks to reader Resonance462 for the lawyerly submission. Submit your TAY pic to #TAYpics Want to know more about commenting on Kotaku? Read our FAQ

Red Faction Battlegrounds Screens

You Could Download Kinect Betas Now, But They’re Useless

Does your Xbox 360 feel incomplete? Is it full of save files and Xbox Live Arcade games, maybe a theme or two but no Kinect-enabled software? You can waste some bandwidth today and change that. You can download the 1.7 GB Joyride Beta file, so that you can prepare to play a controller-free driving game.…

Spoiler Alert

To: Brian From: Luke I haven’t seen Inception yet. And would have liked it to be a complete surprise, as I’m was intended. But man, when it’s your job to be on the internet all day, it makes stuff like that hard. No. Not hard. Impossible. 🙁 Here’s what you missed: What Came First, The…

Red Faction Gets A Vehicle Combat Game

The question over the weekend was “Is THQ working on a downloadable Red Faction game?” The answer on Monday morning is “yes!” Speaking at GDC Europe today,THQ Digital creative director Don Whiteford has revealed Red Faction: Battlegrounds to be a downloadable title for the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade, which unlike the last (and…

Hey, Don’t Run Unauthorised World Of Warcraft Servers, OK?

Because if you do, it’ll cost you $88 million. That’s how much Scapegaming’s Alyson Reeves was ordered to pay Blizzard following a court case, in which Reeves was found guilty of charging users to play on an unauthorised World of Warcraft server. Over the years, she’d amassed over $3 million from these unsuspecting players, which…

Metroid: Other M Puts Those Duct-Taped GameCubes To Work

I think it’s the highest praise you can heap on a Wii game, at least in terms of its appearance, when you can say it doesn’t look like a Wii game. Instead, with all those colours, explosions and (most important of all) clever camera placement, Team Ninja’s debut Metroid effort looks closer to something you’d…

Scott Pilgrim vs Some Badass Animated Gifs

The super-talented Paul Robertson was one of the main men to thank for Scott Pilgrim being one of the best-looking games we’ve seen so far this year. Here, we take a look at some of the reasons why that is. Robertson has posted several examples of his work for the game on his personal site,…

New Batman Game Lets You Use Your DS On The Wii

The upcoming Batman: The Brave and the Bold will be doing something too few games have done so far this hardware generation: feature cross-play compatibility between the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS. The game will be available on both systems, and if someone is playing the Wii version alongside someone on the DS, the person…

Zoey Goes Ninja While The Engineer Does The Robot

Using sparse backgrounds, 3DS Max and the power of C&C Music Factory, Lionhead animator James Benson has for the last month been taking some of Valve’s best characters and breathing a little extra life into them. In the clip above, Left 4 Dead’s Zoey breaks free from the confines of a first-person perspective and figures…

What Came First, The XCOM Or The Game?

I paid a visit to 2K Marin’s Canberra offices last week to have a chat with the developers of the upcoming XCOM reboot for the 360 and PC. And there was really only one question I wanted to ask. As a big fan of the old series, and someone more than a little disappointed to…

Lemonade Tycoon

To: Luke From: Owen Re: Gamescom Spectacular Days Away My neighbor’s kids visit him every other weekend. Today they set up a lemonade stand. We’re not on a high traffic street. I just know I’m gonna buy two cups of lemonade when I go to the gym and when I come back, pay them $1…

A Few Notes of Elton John in Mega Man 2’s Soundtrack

Reader Andrew G. has, since he was six, always thought that the theme for Dr. Wily’s Castle from Mega Man 2 sounded like Elton John’s “I Don’t Wanna Go On With You Like That.” Both were released in 1988. So, this is what it’s come to this weekend. Alright. Well, enjoy watching Mega Man rock…

Hey — Why Aren’t There Any Ladders In Fallout?

Answer: “We’re game development pussies,” Bethesda’s Todd Howard said at a QuakeCon panel on Friday. No really, the engine in Fallout and Elder Scrolls runs into AI problems if ladders are introduced, and the developer just works around them. “One day, we tried to figure out why we wanted ladders so bad because we don’t…