The Top-Rated Players at Every Position in Madden NFL 11

My time with Madden NFL 11 was in the cooperative team-play booth. On the floor, someone managed a video peek at this year’s ratings and piece together the eight best players at all positions, and overall, when the game ships. There are six 99-rated players in this year’s game – Tennessee running back Chris Johnson;…

Marvel To Tackle The Fall Of Halo’s Reach, Rise Of Master Chief

The story behind Halo’s most famous Spartan, Master Chief, is ready to be (re)told in comic book form this September. Marvel Comics will adapt Eric Nylund’s bestselling novel prequel to Halo: Reach as part of a “graphic fiction event.” Halo: Fall of Reach “Boot Camp #1” is no mere comic book. It’s graphic fiction and…

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Hands-On: A Whole Lotta Car

Under EA Black Box, Need For Speed had conditioned me to put the accelerator trigger in a death grip and never let go until the end of the race. That won’t help in Criterion’s Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. During a quick hands-on with the game’s multiplayer cops-vs-robbers mode (shown during Electronic Arts’ news conference),…

DeathSpank, Like Diablo With A Sense Of Humor, Hits July

Are you perfectly fine with rainbows in your Diablo III? Then you might like the gameplay and lighthearted approach of Hothead Games’ action-RPG DeathSpank, which marries deep role-playing with broad humor in just a couple of weeks. EA put a firm date and price on the downloadable action role-playing game today, inking it in the…

PlayStation Store Update: Miley Cyrus & MAG Interdiction

Whether you want to add some Miley Cyrus songs to your Rock Band library or you’re looking for something new to do with your copy of MAG for the PlayStation 3, this week’s PlayStation Store update has something for you. What about the rest of us, who may not want to sing the song’s of…

Kevin Durant Gets the Cover of NBA Elite 11

EA Sports’ rechristened NBA franchise picked Kevin Durant of the Oklahoma City Thunder for its cover today. He’s the third player to make the cover of an EA Sports video game both as a collegian and as a pro. Durant, entering his fourth year in the NBA, was also on the cover of NCAA March…

Kicked Out Again

To: Luke From: Crecente Re: Tomorrow, Mini-Bash Is Seven. Seven! As I’ve mentioned before, our house is currently on the market here in Colorado. Apparently, it’s a very popular home. Every time someone wants to come look at it, Trish runs around re-cleaning the house, I try to wrap up whatever I’m working on and…

E3’s Missed Connections: In Search Of Helghast Hunks & Soft Star Wars Girl Hands

What resources does the shy E3 attendee have when a pretty girl shows an interest in them at the The Old Republic booth or a talk, dark, glowing-eyed Helghan soldier makes them swoon, but they don’t get a number? Craigslist! Craigslist’s “Missed Connections,” the home to those one-in-a-million shots at finding love after the fact,…

The Glaring Omissions of E3 2010

Missing in action. Conspicuous by their absence. The elephants not in the room. E3 delivered a cornucopia of news about new games, devices and concepts, but there were plenty of no-shows, too. These are the Glaring Omissions of E3 2010. The Last Guardian (pictured above) was a very notable although not an unexpected absence. Its…

Scientific America Looks at GTA, Calls for Non-Sexist, Non-Racist, Non-Violent Video Games

The problem of using science to determine whether or not violent video games like Grand Theft Auto do harm to our children is neatly summed up in one article on Scientific American – there’s always good news and bad news. In an article titled “Grand Theft Auto Is Good for You? Not So Fast…,” Scientific…

Battlefield: Bad Company 2’s ‘Onslaught’ Update Deployed (Mostly)

Want more Bad Company 2? Today’s your day to get more Battlefield-style action with the four-player “Onslaught” cooperative mode, which is shipping on time for at least one of the console’s it was promised for today. EA and DICE have deployed the new update to PlayStation 3 owners in North America, with owners of that…

City Of Heroes Goes Rogue In August

Gripping moral decisions come to NCSoft’s super hero MMO City of Heroes this summer, as the company sets an August 17 release date for the game’s second major expansion, Going Rogue. Mark your calendars!

Transformers: Robots In My House

Hours after running this morning’s review of Transformers: War for Cybertron, a package showed up on my doorstep featuring the toy versions of two of the game’s Autobot stars. I’ve been actively seeking these two figures out for a couple of weeks now, just in case they slipped out into stores early. I’ve been collecting…

Nintendo Files Downloadable Games Strategy In ‘What We Don’t Do So Well’ Category

Nintendo’s approach to downloadable games for Wii and DS is something the company “do[es]n’t do so well,” Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime told Kotaku last week. He promises an unpredictable solution. “We look at what we do well. We look at what we don’t do so well,” he said during an interview at E3…

Slayer Pinball Shows No Mercy On iPhone Today

Not since Electronic Arts’ Crüe Ball hit the Genesis in 1992 have we been this excited to experience the unholy marriage of pinball and heavy metal. Thanks to thrash metal outfit Slayer’s new iPhone game, heavy pinball is back! Slayer Pinball Rocks HD combines the loud, fast and evil sounds of Slayer with traditional pinball…

Smuggling Myself Into The Old Republic

As Kotaku’s resident massively multiplayer online gamer, you’d think I would have gone hands on with Star Wars: The Old Republic before last week. Was it worth the wait? Following a brief presentation of a couple trailers for The Old Republic, BioWare representatives led me to a small room lined with computers and asked me…

Sin & Punishment 2 Screens

A Brief Taste Of True Crime: Hong Kong

One of Activision’s big fall games is a revival of its open-world True Crime series, the closest thing the publisher has to a Grand Theft Auto. At least one part of the game that I saw at E3 had me thinking more Assassin’s Creed. And I’m not talking about the part on motorcycles. True Crime:…

There’s An APB Out For Kotaku’s Next Podcast

What do you want to know about Crackdown developer Realtime Worlds’ new online cops and crooks game APB? Ask the game’s lead designer, who will be joining us on this week’s episode of Kotaku Talk Radio, anything and everything. In addition to fielding your calls about all things E3—PlayStation Move, Nintendo 3DS, Kinect for Xbox…

Missed Connections – Rift: Planes of Telara

Dear Trion Worlds. I am terribly sorry I missed our appointment at E3 2010. If it’s any comfort, the E3 trailer for your MMO Rift: Planes of Telara looks very pretty. Rift is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game with a very intriguing concept. The land of Telara is being ravaged by rifts opening in…