PlayStation

The PlayStation Turns 20 Today — What’s Your Favorite Memory?

As incredible as this sounds, PlayStation is 20 years old today in America. (It hit Japan back in December 1994). My first encounter with the original PlayStation wasn’t on launch day, but rather, the machine’s first Christmas. It was nearly a total disaster, too, with two kids on the verge of tears for hours. I…

The Excellent Vita Game Tearaway Gets A Second Chance On PS4

When the Vita game Tearaway came out in November of 2013, it was hard not to feel bad for the little guy. Here was this charming, idiosyncratic game, released exclusively on a stumbling handheld console in the same month as the PS4 and Xbox One were hogging all the limelight. Poor Tearaway! How nice, then,…

Take A Break From Metal Gear And Play Nova-111

Have you heard of Nova-111? I barely had, but now I must show it to you. It’s a wonderful surprise of a video game. It’s partially turn-based, partially real-time. It’s action mixed with puzzles. Its on Xbox One, PS4, PS3, Vita, PC and Mac and is coming to Wii U. It just came out. It’s…

I Can’t Stop Collecting Stuff in Video Games

Here’s something I wish more game designers understood: If you put an interaction in your game, I am going to interact with it. Anytime a game responds to its players, the rats—or at least this rat—are going to press the lever for more cocaine pellets. Jenova Chen, during a talk about the design of Journey…

Batman Arkham Knight DLC Still At A Drip-Feed, Still Needs Something Great

We’ve been hard on the six-month downloadable content roll-out for Batman Arkham Knight, because, so far, it just hasn’t been that good. The newest morsel, released yesterday, isn’t much of an improvement, but this month does bring promise of a potential turnaround. Yesterday’s addition was a $1.99, 76.2MB bundle of extra battle maps called the…

Mad Max: The Kotaku Review

A little more than 10 years ago, not long after I quit my job to become a freelance writer, a colleague warned me that sometimes the work could be grueling and unrewarding. “I want to talk to you when you’re writing a story only for money,” he said. It took a decade, but I finally…

The Next Deus Ex Launches in February

Square Enix has given a launch date of February 23 for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided in a recent press release. The accompanying PS Blog post also describes the pre-order bonuses for the game. It’s one of those “get more people to pre-order, get more stuff” kind of deals, capped by a four-day early release reward.…

You’re a Disembodied Head in Double Fine’s Next Game

See that head with the jetflame coming out of it? Yep, that’s you. Aptly enough, the game is called Headlander In Headlander, you, as a head, land on various bodies, taking them over—thus netting you all kinds of new abilities, be that new weapons, new methods of locomotion, or dance moves. The game itself is…

Fallout 3’s Point Lookout Set The Standard for Great DLC

Point Lookout is one of those add-ons that sticks with you. In a world where downloadable content is often forgettable, Bethesda crafted an interesting new addition to Fallout 3 and populated it with some of the best quests they’ve ever produced. Expansions are hard to pull off well. All too often, developers release something that’s…

Fallout 3 Isn’t Really An RPG

Fallout 3 doesn’t follow the same basic formula for open-world sandbox games that has produced some truly great games, from Grand Theft Auto V to The Witcher 3. But what if Bethesda wasn’t making an open-world sandbox RPG at all? When Grand Theft Auto III released in 2001, it was a revelation. Sure, open-world games…

Dead or Alive Xtreme Volleyball Returns for More Volleyball

Because, of course it will. Though, don’t hold your breath just yet for a Western release. Announced at the Dead or Alive Festival held earlier this month, Koei Tecmo is revisiting their jiggly beach volleyball game, Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball for current gen systems as Dead or Alive Xtreme 3: Fortune for the…

Velocity 2X: The Kotaku Review

Level 26 of Velocity 2X has taken over my day. I wish I could just let go and move on with my life, but I am literally ONE SECOND away from a gold Perfect medal. A SECOND. I have been chasing that second for about an hour, now. This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK…

Volume: The Kotaku Review

Thomas Was Alone, Mike Bithell’s charming 2010 platformer about the inner lives of hopping geometric shapes, was an experiment in the power of storytelling to triumph over abstraction. Volume, Bithell’s new game, is also a successful experiment in abstraction, although the narrative is realistic, or realistic science fiction. This time, it’s the interactions that are…

Tickets are on sale now for Sony’s PlayStation Experience fan gathering. This year’s show will be happening in San Francisco on December 5 and 6. The Capcom Cup will also be happening during the Experience event.

Realistic/historical RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance discusses its first-person melee combat in its most recent video, also talking about the “thousands of hours” of research that went into developing it. Looks fun! The swordfighting, that is, not the research. Video’s embedded below, so make sure to give it a watch. Dayshot is an image-based feature that…

Koei Tecmo’s Attack on Titan Won’t be Another Dynasty Warriors Game

Announced last week, Koei Tecmo is making an Attack on Titan game. It’s being developed by Omega-Force, the developers of all the Dynasty Warriors games. But it won’t be a Warriors game. And they want you to know that. In an interview with Dengeki Online, producer Hisashi Koinuma talked about the conception of the game.…

Homefront: The Revolution’s Demo Didn’t Deliver, Fingers Still Crossed for the Game

Last year, before E3, and back when Dambuster Studios was still called Crytek Nottingham and hadn’t been sold to Deep Silver, I saw a presentation of Homefront: The Revolution in action. I thought it looked fantastic, like an open-world version of Half-Life 2’s City 17. This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK At this year’s…

“We probably should have announced the run button before launch…” So say the developers of the new (and pretty good!) story-and-exploration game Everybody’s Gone to The Rapture. A last-minute change to the game’s controls left the run option unintentionally hidden from gamers. Just hold R2 for a bit!

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture: The Kotaku Review

The insult of “walking simulator,” lobbed at video games whose strongest elements are exploration, discovery, and story, misses its intended target. It conjures something more like Bennett Foddy’s QWOP. Then again, we all know what the term means by now: something like Gone Home that removes the elements of puzzling and physical challenge from an…

One Man’s Defense of The Order: 1886

Tom Bissell is the author of my favorite book on video games, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, which I called “the finest account yet of what it feels like to be a video game player” when I reviewed it in The New York Times. These days, he is a writer for video games like…