This morning, Microsoft confirmed the price and release date of the new next generation Xbox. With a suggested retail price of $499, the Xbox Series X, Microsoft’s beefier, terafloppier, next-gen console, will be available for pre-orders beginning September 22, with a retail release date of November 10th. This news…

Welcome to Morning Music, Kotaku’s new, daily hangout for folks who love video games and the cool-ass sounds they make. Today we’ll hit our first PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16 chip soundtrack, the brief but memorable Alien Crush. Weird pinball! (That was my nickname in high school.)

Tucked away in a Bloomberg story about Nintendo ramping up manufacturing of the Switch in the lead-up to the holiday season is yet another mention of an upgraded version of the console, one that will allow for 4K visuals.

Yeeky Zhang is a Chinese student who has re-imagined Star Wars from the ground up, taking inspiration from both the middle ages and steampunk, and ending up with something that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Final Fantasy XII.

Unpacking, coming next year to the PC, is “a zen puzzle game about the familiar experience of pulling possessions out of boxes and fitting them into a new home.”

With Microsoft’s smaller next-gen console finally official, there’s not much to do between now and its release but talk about how excellent the machine’s one defining visual feature is. And I’m not talking about its diminutive size.

Over the weekend, the Washington Justice became the embodiment of Overwatch League playoff chaos. They are other teams’ spoilers and the playoff Cinderellas. They’ve gone from one of the worst regular season performances to knocking out one tournament champ and almost knocking out another. And although their chances…

Paradox Interactive, one of the biggest developers and publishers of PC strategy games—they’re responsible for this month’s Crusader Kings III—closed their internal Quality Assurance (QA) department last year, and a report on Rock Paper Shotgun alleges it was done in about the worst way possible.

Smash-like platform fighter Rivals of Aether allows players to create custom characters and put them up for download through the Steam Workshop. One such character, modeled after the Nintendo Switch’s ubiquitous Joy-Con controllers, is pretty dang accurate. So accurate, in fact, that it even drifts like a real Joy-Con.

When Among Us, a game of deception set in deep space, was first conceived a few years ago, online multiplayer wasn’t in the cards. It wasn’t even going to be on PC. Streamers were the last thing on its developers’ minds. And yet, over the weekend, the game solidified its status as a Twitch phenomenon, peaking at…

Marvel’s Avengers becomes a different game once you wrap up the campaign. Though the fundamentals—punch evil robots while on a never-ending quest for better gear—are unchanged, the game shifts from narrative-driven, third-person action game into a never-ending feedback loop: find better gear to level up enough to find…

The Venture Brothers isn’t just one of my favorite animated shows, it’s one of my very favorite TV shows period. Adult Swim ended one of the longest-running shows in its line up this week after 81 episodes over 17 years. If you’ve never seen it (There’s no excuse, it’s been around for 17 years. Seriously, get your…

With the price of one of the next-generation Xbox consoles confirmed and the other one likely forthcoming as Microsoft and Sony’s big game of next-gen pricing chicken drags on, there needs to be a frank discussion about the names of these consoles. A discussion wherein I sit down with Mr. Microsoft and ask a simple…

Colin Kaepernick, the former NFL quarterback whose political activism made him a divisive figure, has today been added to Madden NFL 21 as a free agent after being left out of several previous iterations due to his status with the league.

Younger is not always better, especially when it comes to rough-and-tumble Swedish police inspectors. Welcome back to our daily open thread.