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Uncategorized11-Year-Old Exposed to Contra for the First Time, Hates It
The old-school gamers at Nerdballoon sat down with a slightly uncommunicative 11-year-old and asked him to describe his first experience ever with a platform shooter – the beloved Contra. Predictably, he hated it. The graphics “suck,” the music is “boring” and – I’m not sure if this is a positive or a negative – “it’s…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
About This Nascent Modern Warfare 2 “Boycott”
Someone ran a poll and, guess what, two out of three people hate paying higher prices. This is called a potential boycott of Modern Warfare 2, unless Activision lowers the $60 price for PC versions. Total Gaming Network, citing its own poll of the situation, says 68 percent of respondents “will not support the newer,…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Booth Babe Hauls Off on Dante’s Fiasco
“The brass BALLS on EA to put a bounty on OTHER booth girls,” writes one woman, a costumed rep fed up with the predictable reactions to EA’s “Sin to Win” promo at San Diego Comic-Con. “Iola,” commenting on Ars Technica, one of the first and loudest to decry the Dante’s Inferno “Acts of Lust” contest…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Week in Games: First Resort
Swordplay, archery and skydiving are on tap as of today with the release of Wii Sports Resort. Also, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 hits Xbox Live Marketplace and Bionic Commando arrives on the PC. This week’s count: six for PC, four for DS, three for Wii, two for 360 and one for PS3 Sunday (July 26)…
By Owen Good -
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Today’s Punishment: We Cheer, in Japanese
This has a run-up of about 30 seconds, but immediately after that, you’ll be running for the nearest bottle of Texas Pete. To pour it on your eyeballs. I tap out at about 41 seconds, right when the Hey!-ing stops and the singin’ starts. How long can you last? BTW, I haven’t done a great…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Dogmeat, the Emotional Center of Fallout
Fallout originally did not plan on having NPC followers at all. But the original game’s designer figured out how to make a system work. Thus was born one of the franchise’s most iconic characters. Not only that, the original design of Fallout 3, by Black Isle, there were no plans to include Dogmeat. But Bethesda…
By Owen Good -
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Insert Kopeks to Enjoy This Goat-Carcass Polo Game
Jason Torchinsky tried to import a Polish automobile; he got this instead, Ulak-Tartysh, a video game about the Central Asian sport of buzkashi, in which polo is played with the headless body of a goat. Torchinsky, the guy who built a gigantic functional Atari joystick for the I Am 8-Bit art expo, breaks down the…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
South Park Tower Defense’s Working Titles Sucked
While South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense Play! is a long title for the upcoming Xbox Live Arcade game, some of the working titles were even more of a mouthful. Snowballing, anyone? At the “Save South Park One Snowball At A Time” panel at Comic-Con yesterday, South Park Digital’s Chris Brion explained how the tower…
By Mike Fahey -
UncategorizedDragon Age “Ultimate Collector’s Edition” Features Night-Vision Sausage
This unboxing spoof of the Modern Warfare 2 Prestige Edition foofaraw shows you what you get if you pony up for Dragon Age’s “ultimate collector’s edition.” Like both the PC and 360 versions. And sausage. Specifically, it’s “from dwarven butcher shops.” Makes sense, don’t dwarves have infravision? I guess that’s why one bite bathes the…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Comic-Con Cosplay Stories
Why does Wonder Woman remind me of my mother? Does dressing as Starfox make you a furry? Isn’t being asked to pose every other minute annoying? These questions answered in my last Comic-Con cosplay post. My mother, a 5’11” tall former dance instructor with long, dark hair (it’s reddish now, but don’t let the dye…
By Mike Fahey - Uncategorized
Kotaku’s Top 5 List of Top 10 Lists
Another thing I want to do with our expanded weekends is this: The List of Lists. Each week throws off several new lists ranging from the humorous to the trivial – Top 6 Phallic Objects in Video Games; Top 12 Most Hated Non-Human NPCs from 1990s RPG, you get the idea. Rather than run one…
By Owen Good -
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Bungie Says It’s ‘Close’ to Signing New IP Deal
Earlier this week, Bungie’s Lars Bakken strongly implied that Halo: Reach would be the last Bungie-made Halo title. Bakken now suggests that the studio is close to getting a publisher for its new, non-Halo IP. Says Bakken to Eurogamer: I think internally we’ll know sometime soon. I don’t handle these things, but I’d imagine we’re…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
London, Mapped in Warcraft Style
A programmer showcasing the capabilities of an open-source, dynamic mapping framework has rendered the entire world – in a Warcraft II motif. You can head over to Cartagen, the mapping utility, and see for yourself. It runs in HTML5 and does not require Java or Flash. Punch in a landmark and off you go. (I…
By Owen Good - Culture
Sunday Comics
Penny Arcade published July 22 PvPonline published July 24 ActionTrip published July 20 Digital Unrest published July 20 Least I Could Do published July 20 Little Gamers published July 22 EXTRALIFE published July 20 GU Comics published July 22 Ctrl-Alt-Delete published July 22 Dueling Analogs published July 20 8-Bit Theater published July 23 Awkward Zombie…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Weekend Talk Amongst Yourselves
Enjoy a more standards-compliant Weekend TAY, now that we’ve got an image and dialogue that conforms to the one-and-only Kotaku open thread that runs midweek. P.S. No, you weren’t seeing things. Or not seeing them. My screwup this morning delayed your TAY. Rest assured everything is now fully on schedule. Confused about commenting on Kotaku?…
By Owen Good -