The Problem With Names In Japanese And In English

Yesterday, Japan’s foreign minister asked the English-language media to write Japanese family names first, as done in Japanese. This would change how Japanese names are typically written in English. For example, famed animator Hayao Miyazaki is Miyazaki Hayao in Japanese, Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto is Miyamoto Shigeru and Prime Minister Shizo Abe is Abe Shinzo.…

Delicious Meal. Kyoto, Japan. By ShuYung Wu. JPGs is a photo peek into wherever gamers might find interesting. If you’re a photographer and have images you want to share, drop us a line! 

Time Buddies

Raul Aguiar is an illustrator and graphic designer from Brazil who has worked in video games, children’s books and magazines. You can see more of Raul’s stuff at his Behance page

Fancy Logos For Games That Don’t Actually Exist

For the past few days, I’ve had the pleasure of reading a copy of Raid, a magazine featuring a bunch of super talented artists and graphic designers coming up with logos and briefs for games that don’t actually exist. A bit like Famicase, then, but just the logos, and not the entire cover/cartridge art. And…

Star Wars: Rogue Squadron Looks Great In HD

A team of fans have been working for over a year on an Unreal Engine 4 version of the original Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, and it is looking absolutely delicious. First released in 1998 on PC and N64, later games in the series—developed for the GameCube—looked a lot nicer, but the original suffered from low-res…

Valve Is Making Its Own Version Of Dota Auto Chess

Late last year, Valve launched the collectible card game Artifact, a spinoff of Dota 2. It flopped so hard that Valve is now revamping it from the ground up. Earlier this year, Dota’s community beat Valve at its own game, creating Dota Auto Chess, a similarly strategic spin-off that, unlike Artifact, has become one of…

Modiphius is releasing a tabletop wargame based on The Elder Scrolls universe Weird choice, seeing as this is an RPG series in which combat is usually a small-scale solo affair, but whatever, licensing! 

Meet The Modder Painstakingly Rebuilding Fallout 76 In Fallout 4

Fallout 76 had a rocky launch, but it’s since established a community that’s making do with what they’ve been given. Still, some of those fans don’t see Fallout 76 as a proper Fallout game, which, for one fan, gave rise to an idea: What if Fallout 76‘s setting of Appalachia was in a proper Fallout…

Nowhere Prophet Is A Deck-Building Roguelike Where Losing Your Cards Matters

Nowhere Prophet has a fascinating mix of card game mechanics and choose-your-own-adventure strategizing, with a crisp art style and a straightforward interface that makes it a breeze to play. While it’s still too early in development to know if it will end up being as deep as the great indie games it draws inspiration from,…

In Observation, You Play A Computer That Might Be Losing Its Damn Mind

In most science fiction stories, artificial intelligence is bad news. With the familiar beats of Greek tragedy, AI is almost always destined to bring ruin to those with the hubris to create it. So how would it feel if you were the AI, and it was your job to keep a human safe—even while something…

Clever No Man’s Sky Players Are Trying To Add Cities To The Game

No Man’s Sky players are pretty used to doing everything by themselves. Before the game’s revitalizing Next update, players who stuck with the game since it launched turned its universe into a series of sprawling civilizations, many with their own government, police forces and even wars. Now that more players are joining the game with…

Overwatch‘s New Anniversary Skins Are All Over The Place

Overwatch’s third anniversary event is live, and it is as Britney Spears once famously said: “The taste of your lips, I’m on a ride. [Roadhog]’s toxic, I’m slipping under.” The new batch of skins runs the gamut from cutesy (albeit infantilizing, when it comes to some fans’ takes on D.Va’s schoolgirl outfit) to literally toxic…

Blizzard Will Release Significant Hearthstone Buffs For The First Time Since 2014

Yesterday, Blizzard announced that it would be nerfing some of the most powerful cards in Hearthstone in an attempt to break up the dominance of two classes: Rogue and Warrior. If you’ve played the game at all since the release of its latest “Rise of Shadows” expansion, you know that these decks were so powerful…

Pokémon T-Shirt Contest Winners Are The Very Best, Like No One Ever Was

The Japanese clothing company Uniqlo has announced the winners of its Pokémon-themed T-shirt design contest. While the first-place design will be included in this year’s Pokémon Sword and Shield games, the rest are really cool-looking as well, and already have me searching for my old Game Boy Color and link cable. Each entry was judged…

U.S. Senator Says His Anti-Loot Box Bill Has The Video Game Industry Worried

Is Republican senator Josh Hawley an advocate for video game players or an ambitious politician with a savvy staff who know a win-win argument when they see one? The freshman senator from Missouri, who plans to soon introduce a bill that will ban loot boxes and pay-to-win microtransactions, spoke to Kotaku yesterday about his plans.…

Stop Quitting Magic: Arena Games Before I Can Beat You Properly

Magic: The Gathering is a game about slowly (or quickly) squeezing the life out of your opponent until they’re demoralized, defeated, and feeling the weight of their many, many mistakes. That’s why I am unhappy with the lot of you serial conceders depriving me of that. I’m not a great player of Magic Arena, the…