The First Unofficial ‘Steam Box’ Will Launch This Holiday Season Starting At $1,000

Xi3’s Piston—the first unofficial Steam Box console—will launch this holiday at a starting price of $1,000, the hardware manufacturer announced today. If you preorder it before March 18, you’ll get a $100 discount. The Piston is the first PC designed specifically to play games in your living room using Steam’s Big Picture mode. Valve is…

ESPN brought in Tim Kitzrow, the boom-shakalaka announcer of NBA Jam, to call this package of college and pro dunks.

SimCity Boss on Game’s Failure: ‘This is on Maxis. We Own It.’

After fielding some 1900 questions in a 45-minute Twitter Q&A, Maxis, the maker of SimCity, directly answered about eight regarding the game, which has been inaccessible to many since it released on Tuesday. “This is on Maxis,” said Lucy Bradshaw, the studio’s boss, in response to a customer’s allegation that publisher Electronic Arts required SimCity…

Reminder: Maxis studio boss Lucy Bradshaw is now taking questions on Twitter about the SimCity fiasco.

Someone, Quick, Send UN Election Monitors to Observe the NCAA Football Cover Voting

I’ve already had my say on the cynical, abusive b.s.. of running a Twitter or Facebook campaign to get folks to vote on a cover or a character or to pretend to give them some kind of influence over a video game publishing decision. In a nutshell, it’s garbage, and its true purpose is to…

This Week in the Business: ‘We Don’t Think There Are Enough Games for Mature Players’

What’s happened in the business of video games this past week … QUOTE | “We don’t think that there are enough games for mature, adult players.”—Adam Badowski, head of CD Projekt, talking about developing Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077 and other PC games QUOTE | “Video games are not all they can be… most of them…

Major League Baseball 2K13: The Kotaku Review

Major League Baseball 2K13 is an offensively recycled product and an embarrassment to sports video games. In my five years as Kotaku‘s sports writer, I’ve spent a good deal of time in comments defending the genre, and those who make its games, from the worn-out slur that annual sports titles are nothing but reskinned roster…

The Moneysaver: Call of Duty on the Cheap

Kotaku’s twice weekly roundup of the best discounts, combinations, offers and incentives in video gaming is brought to you by Dealzon Downloadables GameFly expired their 20% off coupon for last Tuesday’s release SimCity and the upcoming June 25 release of Company of Heroes 2. Thankfully, it still applies to March of the Eagles ($15.99), and…

It Would Take ‘Significant Engineering’ to Make SimCity an Offline Game

Later this afternoon, Lucy Bradshaw, the general manager of SimCity maker Maxis, is going to take over the studio’s official account to answer questions from gamers who, four days after the game’s release, are still unable to play the thing they purchased. She’s already given a preview answer to the question most of them likely…

The Best Of Kotaku, This Week

Welcome to the Best of Kotaku, where I round up all of this week’s best content. I’m back from vacation (with a slight tan and a cold) and ready to unleash this pretty, wooden Atari 2600 at you. It’s currently running for $1.2k on ebay. Or, if that’s too much for you, you can always…

‘That Was Dumb’: EA Says They’ll Give A Free PC Game To Anyone Who Bought SimCity

Anyone who bought SimCity will get a free video game, publisher EA said tonight. Apologizing for the crippling server issues that have rendered the new simulation game near-unplayable for the past week, Maxis boss Lucy Bradshaw wrote in a blog post that anyone with a copy of SimCity activated before March 18 will get a…

Hope Nobody Ever Tries To Wake You Up Like This

Sure, pranks are things jerks often do—but sometimes, things can get genuinely mean. And there’s really no other way to describe this supercut of cruel wake up pranks, where people find the most awful ways to get people to rise from their slumber. Despite how mean the video often is (if not dangerous, and arguably…

Gearbox Teases Burly New Borderlands 2 Playable Character

At South By Southwest in Austin, Gearbox debuted a teaser trailer that hints at the addition of a new character to Borderlands 2. The character isn’t fully shown, but looks to be some sort of melee-focused badass. The video above comes via Polygon, who are on the ground at SXSW. “A new vault hunter is…

Wow, Someone Basically Invented Mass Effect’s Medi-Gel

Without medi-gels—the life-saving healing salves in Mass Effect—our Commander Shepards would be toast. Out in the real world, though, we can’t just apply medi-gel to our injuries: it doesn’t exist. Or well, it didn’t, not like this. Not until recently. According to Mother Nature Network, Joe Landolina, a college student at NYU, has invented something…

Tomb Raider‘s PC Version Is Good, Despite A Few Stray Hairs

After about seven hours with Tomb Raider, I’m on board with Evan’s endorsement. It’s a very good game, and a strong example of the whole “game that’s like a movie” thing that Uncharted laid out a few years back. But what of the PC version? I’ve been putting it through its paces, and can happily…

Not One Server Problem or Disconnect in This Week in Gaming Apps

Want to know what it’s like to be unfamous Kotaku mobile editor Michael Fahey for a week? Play around 30 gaming apps across three platforms while attempting to connect to SimCity in order to write a review of a game that you assure everyone will think is pretty good once they can connect to it.…

This Was In Lord British’s Backpack

Richard Garriott, aka Lord British, was carrying a backpack full of fascinating things, when he stopped by Kotaku‘s offices last week to talk about his next game, Shroud of the Avatar What was in the backpack? His very first computer role-playing game—he’s holding it in his hand right here; it’s all in ASCII code on…

The maker of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset leads an all-star panel about VR that you can watch live at 7pm ET.

Funcom’s Three MMO Worlds Are In His Hands. What Will He Do?

Just a few short years ago, Funcom’s Joel Bylos was in charge of level 20 through 40 of Age of Conan, a massively multiplayer online game that was, at launch, widely criticized for a lack of quality content past level 20. Now he’s the creative director in charge of Age of Conan, Anarchy Online and…

EA Admits Games Can Do Better For The LGBT Community

Yesterday in New York City, Electronic Arts held a special event focused on queer issues in gaming. And it happened mostly because the company itself was willing to face its own stumbles in presenting gay characters in its video games. The impetus for Thursday’s Full Spectrum event—co-sponsored by the Entertainment Software Association and the Human…