Nintendo

After Dropping A Tier, I Am Freaking Out About My Overwatch Rank

After a difficult string of placement matches for the current Overwatch competitive season, the unthinkable happened. I dropped to a lower tier. I had spent multiple seasons comfortably sitting in the Platinum tier, and suddenly I was Gold. I have become obsessed with undoing this demotion. I like to think that I’m a decent video…

Arms: The Kotaku Review

Arms may look like a Mario Party mini-game, but it doesn’t play like one. Charming and involved, Arms toes the line between a party game and an entry-level fighter with moderate depth. While Arms succeeds as an easy-to-pick-up brawler, its ambitions as a hardcore game for serious players are less certain. Arms does one thing,…

New Nintendo Switch Update Lets You Find Lost Controllers 

JoyCon, the detachable controllers that latch onto the Switch tablet, are small pieces of hardware. They’re probably easy to lose, if you’re not careful. Good thing, then, that there’s a feature for that now. Last night, a Switch system update dropped, and it introduced a number of small quality of life improvements. The most notable…

Japanese Airport Cosplays As Nintendo Advertisement

Travellers arriving at Kansai International Airport in Osaka will soon be greeted by Nintendo characters plastered all over the place. Starting June 23, Nintendo is setting up what it’s calling the “Nintendo Check In” at the airpot’s Terminal 1 with Switch, 3DS, and smart device titles. The airport is also slipping on some huge Nintendo…

Metroid: Samus Returns Feels Great To Play

Last week, Nintendo surprised everyone with the announcement of Metroid: Samus Returns, a remake of Metroid II. Here’s another surprise: It’s basically finished. And a fact that’s probably not so surprising: It looks and feels fantastic. At E3 in Los Angeles last Thursday, in a private room within Nintendo’s VIP booth, I sat down with…

Recent Japanese Pokémon Tournament Full Of Monsters You Rarely See

This weekend’s Japanese National Championships proves that competitive Pokémon plays almost like an entirely different game in the franchise’s home country. While every Japanese top eight team had some common picks you might spot at other tournaments around the world, players made plenty of choices that are almost never seen anywhere else. As an example,…

Pokémon Go Revamping Gyms, Adding Co-op Raids

In celebration of its anniversary, Pokemon Go is undergoing some major changes. Before you get too excited, no, player-vs-player battles aren’t among them. Gyms, though, are about to get more accessible, and you’ll soon be able to team up with friends to go on raids against mega-powerful Pokemon. The gym overhaul should launch at some…

ARMS‘ Helix Is Even More Unnerving In Clay Form

People love the characters from ARMS. For the most part. One Flubber-wannabe in particular hasn’t gotten much love: Helix. A lovingly crafted clay tribute to the DNA molecule might help change that (but probably not). This is the character’s origin story accoridng to the ARMS wiki: “Helix is an anthropomorphic being made of a slimy…

In Super Mario Odyssey Gaming’s Original Damsel In Distress Might Finally Get Her Due

Over three decades ago she was stuck sitting atop steel beams waiting for “the plumber” to rescue her, but in 2017, Pauline has risen to the highest public office of New Donk City, the fictional urban backdrop for Super Mario Odyssey Looking back at the Donkey Kong arcade game from 1981, it’s hard not to…

The Creator Of Metroid II Fan Game AM2R Isn’t Mad About Nintendo

DoctorM64 spent over ten years remaking Metroid II: Samus Return in his free time, only to have Nintendo send him a DMCA and have to take the project down. Now that Nintendo has announced their own reimagining of the same game, he’s just as pumped as everyone else is. When DoctorM64 was working on Another…

The Six Biggest Announcements Of E3 2017

E3 is drawing to a close, and the rain of game announcements has abated. EA, Microsoft, Bethesda, Ubisoft, Sony, and Nintendo all did their thing. It’s up to us to sort through the rubble. Among the dozens of hype reels, hardware breakdowns, marketing buzzwords and game announcements, a few things stood out. If you don’t…

Tips For Playing Arms

On the surface, Arms looks like a cute game about the dangers of slinky arms, but it quickly gets challenging. Out today, Nintendo’s new fighting game has players throwing punches with spring-loaded limbs. Programming good impulses takes time and guidance. And although only ten fighters feature in Arms, with so many detachable arms to choose…

Xenoblade Chronicles X‘s Director On Localization Changes: ‘I Didn’t Mind Much At All’ 

In the heated ongoing conversation over “censorship” in localization, we’ve heard a whole lot from fans and even translators, but we haven’t seen much discussion from Japanese developers. Which is why, when speaking to Tetsuya Takahashi this week in Los Angeles, I asked him for his thoughts on the matter. His answers were a little…

Watch a bunch of Nintendo fans completely lose it over the announcement of Metroid Prime 4 Their enthusiasm is infectious.

Thirty Minutes Of Splatoon 2 Single Player

We’ve seen Splatoon 2‘s competitive game andco-op Salmon Run mode, but what about those of us who’d rather go it alone? Here’s 30 minutes of Splatoon 2‘s story mode, direct from the Nintendo E3 2017 Treehouse stream. There’s a ton of rail grinding, tentacle shooting and boss fighting in Splatoon 2‘s single-player story mode, which…

Another prototype of EarthBound for the NES has been discovered, this time at a garage sale in Portland, Oregon. It seems identical to the prototype found back in the 1990s. Nintendo has since released the game officially on Wii U as EarthBound Beginnings. Just goes to show you what might still be out there at…

Nintendo Fans Need A New Series To Complain About

Nintendo fans have spent years frustrated that the Metroid series, once a pillar of the company’s console lineup, had been left to rot. Now that not one but two new Metroid games are coming, it leaves them/us with an important decision to make: what to complain about next The obvious culprits are out. There’s a…

Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aime On Switch Voice Chat, Lack Of Back-Ups Saves And ‘Virtual Console’

Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, is at E3 in Los Angeles this week to promote Nintendo’s latest resurgence and hype people up on the coming year of Switch and 3DS games. But he’s also ready to field questions, and we had a bunch. After grilling the man, here are some of our key…

Arms Player Tears Through E3 Tournament, Only To Get Wrecked By Game Producer

After winning yesterday’s E3 Arms Invitational, the people’s champ Zerk had the chance to play the game’s producer, Kosuke Yabuki, in an exhibition. Mr. Yabuki showed no mercy. At the end of the first match, Yabuki (on Min Min, the right-hand side character) executed a combo that had been tossed around in testing during the…

The New Yoshi Switch Game Looks So Good

The handcrafted look for the upcoming Yoshi game on the Switch is freaking adorable. On yesterday’s Treehouse stream, Nintendo showed off a little over half an hour of their new Yoshi game, which takes place in a papercraft diorama. Each of the stages has two sides—the front is covered in colorful paper models of a…