A Celebration Of Some Amazing Video Game Manuals

As Ubisoft today bids farewell to the printed instruction manual, other publishers will surely follow suit. I, for one, am a little saddened by this, as some of my best memories in gaming involve…reading the manual. Sounds weird when you type it out like that, I know, but don’t you judge me! Just like few…

A Week In Comments

Current Pokemon Anime Series Coming To An End Comment by: Demonbird Nominated by: puresewas1de Ash, you are 23 years old. It’s time to maybe consider settling down, or at least step up your game and go big. I’ve become the Pokemon Master like thirty times in the last 13 years ash. Thirty times. Come on,…

Nintendo’s Kooky, Room-Moving Wii Accessory Kit

Tired of moving your Wii from one room to another? No, me neither, but just in case you are the type of person who has to shuffle their console from room to room, Nintendo’s new “Wii Migration Connection Kit” has you covered. Out now in Japan, and as an official first-party deal, it’s a box…

Nintendo Blames DS Piracy For 50% Sales Drop In Europe

Nintendo has been cracking down hard on sellers of R4 cartridges (and similar devices) lately. Want to know why? The Japanese company is blaming them for a 50% drop in sales of DS games in Europe. According to a report on the Asahi Shimbum’s website, Nintendo reckons sales of the devices – which allow users…

New Left 4 Dead 2 Achievements Tease New Additions

Valve’s seems quite serious about releasing Left 4 Dead 2’s first expansion, The Passing, this week… or, according to today’s update, “soon.” So it’s probably high time we find out what those new game modes are. While Valve still isn’t telling, officially, it’s hinting at new changes to the game in a new update at…

Kotaku Off Topic: Left In A Bar

Welcome to Kotaku Off Topic, in which nothing that was found in a bar by a drunken employee of a multi-billion dollar technology company must necessarily be discussed. The discussion is officially open. The key takeaway from today’s Gizmodo scoop—or whatever you want to call it—is that I have a new excuse to go to…

Jetpacks Let You Jump All Over Battlefield Heroes’ New Map

Battlefield Heroes, the zany, free-to-play combat game from EA DICE has a new map, a new game mode to play on it, and jet packs to get you around it. The map, “Midnight Mayhem” sets the Heroes in a nighttime environment – the ruins of a military compound. The game mode, V2 Vengeance, is a…

Tony Hawk’s Tony Hawk: Shred Outed By Tony Hawk

Skateboarding legend Tony Hawk may have just officially sent the Activision PR team into a 720-degree tizzy, tweeting about Tony Hawk: Shred, quite possibly the more shred-tastic follow-up to the skateboard-as-controller experiment Tony Hawk: Ride. Mr. Hawk cryptically named something that we’re just wildly assuming is his next project by way of the Twitter, saying…

Two Voice Actors Out Arkham Asylum 2 Villains

Mister Freeze and Talia al Ghul, daughter of Ra’s (Ra?) will be foes in Batman: Arkham Asylum, according to two voice actors’ comments on a podcast and via Twitter. First up, Talia. Stana Katic, who stars on ABC’s Castle, tweeted on Friday that she’d “Just recorded a character voice on the next Batman video game,”…

Star Fox Dog Needs To Do A Barrel Roll

Dog does Star Fox. But where are the real life frogs dressed as Slippy? [As see on IHasAHotDog]

It’s Not Saturday Yet, but It’s Getting Closer in NCAA Football

Some earlier screenshots gave us an idea of the lighting and detail upgrades due for NCAA Football 11. Now footage just released by EA Sports shows what it all looks like in motion. The game gives good visual treatment to its subjects, but right now, things still look a little floaty in some of the…

My Response To Roger Ebert, Video Game Skeptic

Kellee Santiago, the game developer whose recent talk about games and art was critiqued by Roger Ebert, is ready to move on. But first, she has an argument to defend and an offer to make. April 16, 2010 unexpectedly became a new watermark in my career as a game maker – Roger Ebert wrote an…

Game Manuals

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Not all great manuals had to come from the dawn of time. Rockstar put a surprising amount of work into San Andreas’ PC edition, with the game box remodelled into a tourist guide to Grand Theft Auto’s fictional state. Where the guide began and the manual ended was often a…

Beat Hazard: One Man’s Quest To Make Your Music Hurt You

This weekend while poking about Steam I stumbled over Beat Hazard, the game that turns your music into colorful, frantic shooter levels, and I fell in love. Watch me play, and then read about the one-man studio behind the game. As someone who often worries about the lack of exposure Xbox Live Indie Games get…

Not That Far From The Truth

We didn’t turn out too badly, did we? A comic from famed 80’s – early 90’s prophet Gary Larson, found via Reddit.

Burning Up!

To: Ash From: Crecente Yikes, today was busy and frustrating. We have a slew of news hitting tomorrow morning, so I spent some time today prepping it. Then my computer started to melt down thanks to a faulty CPU fan. I ended up having to take the thing apart to figure out what was wrong…

KOS-MOS Statue

Nolan Bushnell Rejoins the Atari Force

Nolan Bushnell, who founded the original Atari Inc. in 1972, has returned to the company masthead as a member of Atari S.A.’s board of directors. “Original Atari” and “Atari S.A.” have to be specified because technically they’re not the same company. It’s complicated but it all has to do with Infogrames’ 2008 acquisition of Atari…

Here’s 45 Seconds of Guys Getting Kneed in the Balls

New iPhone? Pfft. How about three pairs of sweaty men humping kicking the crap out of each other? Wait! Wait! Calm down! Form an orderly line or you’ll crash the Internet! This is 45 seconds of mostly in-game footage from EA Sports MMA, featuring Jake Shields, whose entourage went all Sharks and Jets with Jason…

Crackdown 2 Becomes “A Beautiful Fusion Of Killing”

Apparently no one told Crackdown 2 senior designer Dean Smith that you aren’t supposed to make up your own cover blurbs, but then this video is titled “Nothing Is Sacred,” so at least he’s keeping in theme. Seriously though, that line needs to go on the game’s box art. I don’t care if it’s from…