PlayStation

PS2 Theme Takes Your PS4 Back To 2001

On December 6, a new theme will be made available for the PS4 that will have your modern console’s dashboard looking like something from a couple of generations back. Built by Truant Pixel, with help from PlayStation US, Japan and even Naughty Dog, it combines “multiple disparate elements into a single piece of theme software…

Bloodborne Fans Find Gnarly Unused Beasts and Bosses In The Game’s Files

Bloodborne’s Lovecraftian setting is full of creative enemies, from multi-eyed brain beasts to half flayed wolf demons. It’s exciting to think about what creatures may still be lurking in the game years later or lost on the cutting room floor. The game’s files recently ended up in the hands of dataminers, one of which decided…

The Division’s free, ambitious 1.8 update will hit the game next week, date TBD (likely Tuesday). It will expand the map with a new region that adds twists to the game’s PvE. It will also offer a horde mode called Resistance and a PvP mode called Skirmish. Oh, and it’ll overhaul the rogue system in…

Many Assassin’s Creed Origins Players Aren’t Ready For The Game’s First Post-Release Boss Battles

A couple times over the past few weeks, a giant Egyptian deity has sprung up in Assassin’s Creed Origins for players to fight. In early November, it was Anubis, god of the dead. Around Thanksgiving it was Sobek, the crocodile god. The gods weren’t accessible when the game launched in late October and they each…

New Evidence Suggests Super Meat Boy Speedrunners Cheated

Super Meat Boy’s challenging platforming and hidden secrets have turned it into a popular game for speedrunning. A new method for detecting cheaters now suggests that some famous runs might not be what they appear to be. There are two kinds of Super Meat Boy speedruns: real-time attacks, which show the entire game without interruption,…

Demon’s Souls Servers Are Shutting Down, Removing Part Of What Made The Game Great

Today, Sony Entertainment and Atlus announced that the online servers for Demon’s Souls will shut down next year on February 28th. The game, which mixed online and single-player elements, will transform into something completely different. This asks the question: how do we preserve experiences tied to online features? FromSoftware initially entered into the fantasy RPG…

I Love This Unrealistic Assassin’s Creed Origins Boat

I play a lot of video games, but I don’t see many great glitches. Say what you will about modern gaming’s abundance of patches, but major glitches are still fairly rare. I fall through the floor of a third-person action game maybe once every two years. I played all of Red Dead Redemption and never…

Skyrim VR Actually Made Me Throw Up, Yet I Want To Play More

Skyrim released today on Playstation VR. The VR version manages to capture the game’s scale and beauty in astounding new ways, but you might need to equip a barf bag alongside your ancient nordic axe. Leaping into Skyrim with a VR headset on feels a bit like placing an LSD sweetart under your tongue before…

The L.A. Noire Remaster’s New Dialogue System Isn’t Specific Enough

L.A. Noire’s remaster brings the cult detective story back for another round of sleuthing. A change to the dialog system meant to fix the original game’s flaws makes interrogations more difficult than before. In L.A. Noire, Detective Cole Phelps investigates various crimes before getting swept up in a city-wide conspiracy. A major component of the…

That Time Square Enix Made A Shooter Sequel To Final Fantasy VII

Final Fantasy VII is one of the most influential roleplaying games of all time. Nine years after its release in 1997, Square Enix released a sequel that isn’t really talked about: the third person shooter Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII By the end of the 90s, Sony had firmly established themselves as producers of…

A Guide To The Real-Life Figures In Nioh

Nioh takes a lot of liberty with its historical setting but still maintains a large cast of famous warlords, samurai, explorers, and ninja. Every one of them has a story. Here’s a quick primer on what history tells us about these individuals. This post initially appeared 2/16/17. Works of historical fiction have always fascinated me…

Man Livestreams His Roach-Infested PlayStation 4

In late September, a guy on South Korea’s Ruliweb posted that his PS4 had roaches coming out of it. He decided to take it apart and stream the experience on Twitch. Apparently, at peak, his stream had over 30,000 viewers! The guy, whose Twitch and YouTube channels are now called “Roach Man” in Korean, bought…

Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds: The Kotaku Review

Horizon Zero Dawn was a terrific game. Guess what? Its new expansion, The Frozen Wilds, is also good. For more on the many things that made Horizon Zero Dawn a good game, go read my colleague Patricia Hernandez’s review from February. Developed by Killzone studio Guerrilla Games, it was an open-world action game about a…

PlayStation Trophies Can Now Earn You A Very Small Amount Of Money

There’s finally a reason to pay attention to the Sony Rewards program: you can now start trading in new PSN trophies for money on your PSN account. A new section of the Rewards Passes page over at the Sony Rewards website that appeared late week lists silver, gold and platinum trophies as milestones you can…

Overwatch Gets A New Hero: Moira, A Support Healer

Overwatch is getting a new hero and she looks rad as hell. Moira is a powerful support healer that mixes DPS and healing. A geneticist working for the nefarious organization Talon with additional ties to the Overwatch’s spec ops group Blackwatch, Moira (full name Moira O’Deorain) mixes high mobility with support skills. In a trailer shown…

Here’s November’s PlayStation Plus Lineup

I managed to miss Bound when it came out last year, so I’m excited to see it make its way to November’s PlayStation Plus lineup. As always, the following games are only “free” if you have an active PlayStation Plus membership. November’s PS Plus lineup is: PlayStation 4 Worms Battlegrounds Bound PlayStation 3 R-Type Dimensions…

Beautiful New PS4 Game Isn’t Very Fun To Play

Yesterday, at Sony’s glitzy Paris Games Show presentation, a pastel, nonviolent game about being a human-dragon hybrid surprised viewers with its same-day announcement and release. Presenters’ comparisons to the respected titles Abzu and Journey added to its branding as a chill, atmospheric game with lots of style (and a little mystery). I am an optimistic…

Why Remakes, Like Shadow of the Colossus, Are Awesome

After spending a little bit of time with the PlayStation 4 version of Shadow of the Colossus, I have to say that I’m really into the idea of game remakes. Yesterday, following its Paris Game Week announcements, Sony held a small event in San Francisco for those of us not lucky enough to be visiting…

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus: The Kotaku Review

The warm sun beats down on a main street in Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, just in time for the Victory Day parade. Uniformed SS march down swastika-filled streets to thunderous applause. By the old diner, two members of the Ku Klux Klan practice their German. Everyone is white and happy. And it is so…

Here Are A Bunch Of Cool PS4 Trailers Sony Showed Today

Just like they did at E3, the folks at Sony showed off some new footage today from some of their PlayStation 4 games planned for 2018 and beyond, including God of War, Spider-Man, and Detroit. Here are some of the more interesting trailers Sony showed during its conference at Paris Games Week today. First up…