Portal 2’s Long Fall Boots Can’t Be Far Off

There’s been a couple of takes on shock-absorbing feet-tech in the Portal-verse. Now, someone’s trying to make impact absorbing footwear for real. This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK Meet the Enko running shoe (via Engadget): a trainer with two built-in pistons that’s the result of 12 years of work by engineer Christian Freschi. Those…

Teen Stabbed While Gaming with Friends Late at Night

In Gifu, Japan, a sixteen-year-old young man was visiting a friend’s house to play video games when a neighbor told them to keep it down. That’s when things escalated. Chunichi Web reports that the sixteen-year old was up late playing video games at a friend’s house. At around 2:10am, 38 year-old Shigetaka Ishimoto allegedly barged…

The Short, Sweet Comedy of Being Married to an Otaku

Marriage is hard. It’s even harder when one of you is an otaku and the other is not. I Can’t Understand What My Husband Is Saying is the story of Kaoru and Hajime. Kaoru is an average young woman in her late 20s, employed as a typical office worker. Hajime, on the other hand, is…

League Of Legends‘ Latest Character Skin Is Damn Cool, Damn Expensive

Meet DJ Sona. She doesn’t just look radically different from her old self/selves, she also sounds different. Using her mighty technicolor turntable, she can alter League of Legends‘ entire soundtrack. Oh, and she has multiple forms. The only drawback? A possible deal-breaker of a price tag. DJ Sona is a new League of Legends ultimate…

Very 90s Commercial Has Guitars And…Stuff

The acting, the wardrobe, the guitars, the first half of this fake commercial is about as 90s as it gets. Only… Look, just don’t watch this at work.

A Game About Taking Selfies As A Skeleton. That’s It.

You are a spooky, scary skeleton. You take selfies. That is the whole joke. It’s fucking fantastic. OK, there’s a bit more to it than that, but not much. Spooky Selfies is a free game where you walk—or, you know, skulk—around a graveyard and take selfies. It’s simple and dumb and, for roughly two minutes…

Track: Unicorns Were Horses | Album: Paradise Don’t Come Cheap | Artist: New Kingdom Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to – and gaming to – at the moment.

Making A Destiny Helmet Seems Like A Grind

Prop maker Gary Sterley has put this video together showing the amount of work that goes into just one aspect of making a quality Destiny helmet. So, yeah, if you’ve ever wondered why it’s so expensive to buy one of these custom pieces, now you know. Labour costs The timelapse shots are handy! If only…

H1Z1 Players Have Created An Actual Fight Club

You know the first rule of fight club, don’t you? Well, these H1Z1 players broke it a bunch. But in the process, they herded other hapless players into a tooth-and-nail brawl to the death, and I’d like to think that having a fight club at all is more important than remembering to not talk about…

Joystiq, an essential read for many years for gamers interested in gaming news, shut down today, a victim of cost-cutting by parent company AOL as it gets folded into Engadget. All of us at Kotaku wish the entire Joystiq team the very best. Read Joystiq editor Ludwig Kietzmann’s farewell.

​What Are You Playing This February?

It’s February! That magical month where we all start to feel like maybe winter will end… and then the weather turns, and it’s super awful and dark and cold again. Last month I forgot about this post and wound up running it in the middle of the month, but I’m determined to get us all…

Vietnam Contra Game Is A Huge Bummer

Aliens! You can always feel good about killing aliens! Too bad imaginary Contra clone Hanoi Strike is set duringthe Vietnam War. It’s a different kind of hard. The soul-crushing kind. Modern war games like Spec Ops: The Line have tried to put players in the middle of combat scenarios weighed down with horrible moral consequences.…

Life Is Strange‘s Mouths Are Freaking Me Out

As Keza’s already mentioned, you’ll want to play Life Is Strange. It’s a clever and heartfelt ode to being an awkward teenager, albeit one who can rewind time by holding out their hand. But I can’t help but get distracted by one of my modern gaming pet peeves: horrible lip-syncing. It’s not terribly apparent in…