One of Metal Gear Solid‘s Most Iconic Tropes Was Almost Axed

Looking at its gameplay, Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain and its prologue, Ground Zeroes capture the spirit of the Metal Gear series despite worries arising from director Hideo Kojima’s announcement that the game would be open world. However, a staple of the series—the exclamation point—was almost not included in Metal Gear Solid 5…

This Week in the Business: ‘The Most Overtly Sexist Environment Ever’

What’s happened in the business of video games this past week … QUOTE | “When I first started playing in 1999, it was the most overtly sexist environment ever.”—Linda Carlson, SOE director of global community relations, on EverQuest and how online communities are changing QUOTE | “You don’t force anything, you don’t drive anything, you…

PS4 or Xbox One? We Poll The Tokyo Game Show

Thirty-two responses later, we had one very clear answer. Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am. To contact the author of this post, write to [email protected] or find him on Twitter @BiggestinJapan

Lock Your New iPhone with Nipples (Apparently!)

Apple’s new scanning security tech is pretty clever. It’s not only smart enough to identify different fingers, but supposedly also clever to i.d. different nipples. Welcome to the future! According to Japanese site Rocket News, the new iPhones can recognize your nipples (um, okay!), keeping it locked for different nipples. In the above video, you…

The Best of Kotaku, The Week of September 16

Morning, Kotaku. How are you doing? Still playing GTA V? Since last night? Haven’t slept or ate at all? Oh, ok, glad we’re on the same page then. When you’re taking breaks in between, how about browsing some of our best content from over the week, collected over at Kotaku Selects? Our guys in Asia…

The New Theatrhythm is More of the Same

Undoubtedly one of the best features of the Final Fantasy series is its amazing soundtrack—hence the creation of last year’s music game Theatrhythm Final Fantasy. Of course, even with over 70 songs in the game, that was just the tip of the iceberg: hence the creation of its upcoming sequel, Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call…

So Far, Titanfall Is Getting Thumbs Up from Japan

Japan knows a good giant mecha when it sees one. And from the sound of it, the country’s gamers are more than pleased with what they are seeing with Titanfall Today is the first public day of the Tokyo Game Show and the first time that Respawn Entertainment has shown its mecha-filled FPS Titanfall in…

BatDad Is The Best Dad. Also Maybe The Worst.

Can you imagine being a kid and having your dad sometimes sport a Batman mask as he waits for opportunities to parent you in that iconic gritty Batman voice? That’s exactly what Vine user BatDad does, and it’s amazing. Well, for us, the viewers. His family seems to go between amused, nonplussed and annoyed based…

Try Not to Punch the TV When Playing D4

Dark Dreams Don’t Die, or D4, is an Xbox One exclusive episodic game that tells the story of a time-traveling detective trying to solve and prevent the murder of his wife. Japanese game designer Hidetaka Suehiro, or Swery, is developing this game. The cel-shaded game is centered around the Kinect—you will be interacting with an…

Seeing Game of Thrones Actors In Sesame Street Is A Little Weird

Peter Dinklage and Lena Heady have a life outside of butting heads as the Lannister siblings in Game of Thrones. I know that. It’s still kind of strange (if not amusing!) to see them both on a show like Sesame Street, though. I mean, it’s so wholesome! They’re not plotting any schemes! What is this?…

A Lovecraft-Inspired Game That’s Sillier, Smarter Than It Is Scary

With both Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Outlast released so recently, it might seem as though there wouldn’t be room for another horror game. But the free browser horror game Catachresis fits neatly in between them. Developed by Cameron Kunzelman, Catachresis is a sort of linear story-game-non-game thing that combines the verbose, too-big-and-awful-to-actually-contain monsters…

Guy Re-Scores All Of Ni no Kuni‘s Music

This is pretty incredible: 23-year-old musician Sam Joseph Delves put together an orchestra and re-scored the RPG Ni no Kuni in its entirety. “With the help of BBC documentary composer Howard Davidson I was able to take the music to the studio with a purpose built video game orchestra in an attempt to film and…

Pulling Off One of Gaming’s Biggest Cons

Doctored screenshots? A demo that directly contradicts the actual game? In-game writing specifically designed to mislead the player? Producer Yoshinori Terasawa talks about crafting one of gaming’s biggest cons for Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc [Note: The following article contains spoilers for the first murder case of Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc.] Before the release of Danganronpa…

An N64 That Looks Like It’s Straight Out of Tron

Man. What a gorgeous N64. Just like most of Zoki64‘s work, it’s so pretty that I’d almost feel bad for using the console at all, if I could use it. Almost. Consoles are meant to be played, people. Here’s a video that gets you up close with the console and controller: (Via it8Bit)

Grand Theft Auto V GIFs Are Here To Destroy The Internet

Thanks to the deep and immersive world of Los Santos and the hysteria surrounding Grand Theft Auto V, people are already having a ton of fun with the game online, including using our favorite format: the GIF. It’s still early and GTA V has a massive open world, so this is possibly only the tip…

IGN shares the great little story about why a former Sonic the Hedgehog developer kept a short poem near his desk. The poem read: “Shigeru Miyamoto is a fart.” It wasn’t an insult; it was a motivational tool!

Kojima: Waterboarding, Torture “Needs to Be Done” In Games Like MGS

While Metal Gear Solid is a franchise that has included torture in the past, not only are more and more games including it recently—GTA and Splinter Cell, for example—it’s still a sensitive subject that’s hard to pull off tastefully. So naturally, it’s always a thing that people like to discuss—particularly, how to handle it properly,…

Let’s Analyze This Week’s Weirdest Nintendo News In a Positive Way

Two days ago, Nintendo revealed how two of their biggest Wii franchises, Wii Fit U and Wii Sports, would be returning on Wii U. They are both arriving on the Wii U in very unusual ways. And there’s one very telling catch. Let’s go glass half-full on this one, shall we? Wii Sports is coming…

Your Xbox One And PS4 Can Hook Up

This is it, guys. The console wars are over. Your PS4 and Xbox One don’t need to fight—they can hook up instead. See, the next Xbox has an HDMI-in port, so you can plug in an HDMI cord and output video from another device, like your TV cable box, and run it through the Xbox…

A New Jaws Game With A Text Adventure Twist

You’ve probably seen Steven Spielberg’s epoch-shifting 1975 blockbuster Jaws, and if you grew up playing games, you’ve probably played a video game based on the film. But you probably haven’t played a video game version quite like this. The new, free browser game Jaws: The Text Adventure takes classic scenes from the film and cleverly…