If you're skilled enough, you don't need a party to play through the new Dragon Age—even on the hardest difficulty available, soloing Inquisition is totally possible.

So Ubisoft officially confirmed Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag today. If you're a weirdo like me, then you weren't spending the majority of your time speculating on the gameplay or setting, but instead were wondering what level of involvement the American hardcore band Black Flag had in the process.

The other day, I thought to myself: "I've been working at Kotaku for nearly a year and not once have I brought up the band Black Flag and the game EarthBound in the same post." Then I thought to myself, "You know what I should do? Fire up Photoshop and make that a reality."

While the folks at the iTunes gaming division might have trouble rooting out copycat games, what they excel at is making lists. In creating a list of ten games that can take a mobile gamer from casual to hardcore, those Apple list-builders have created a mini history of gaming in portable form.

A team of four Barbarians joined together recently with a simple goal in mind: to take down the Skeleton King, one of Diablo III's earliest boss fights. An easy task, unless you're playing on Hardcore Mode, and you aren't allowed to upgrade your equipment. Girlish shouts ensue.

When you first spin up BioShock Infinite later this year don't expect to see the recently-announced retro-difficult 1999 mode on the main menu. That's because it's so tough Ken Levine doesn't want "the non old-school, hardcore gamer" stumbling into it.

Do you ever use a word without fully understanding what it means? I have a friend like that. He uses the word "frumpy," but I'm fairly sure he's never opened the dictionary to find out just what it means. In his mind, "frumpy" means "bloated" or "bored" or whatever he needs it to mean in his present case of…

If you asked Meterora3255 if he liked Uncharted 2 he'll tell you he never played it, but that's a lie. You see, Meteora3255 has a dirty secret. He didn't like Uncharted 2. He tried to hide his true feelings at first, but as we all know, the gaming community can be cruel and shamed him into silence, until now. So what…

While Atomic Games has missed the chance to get "Destruction 3.0" shooter Breach onto Xbox Live this summer, the new January 2011 release window gives the developer time to blur the line between military simulation and video game even further.

Microsoft's Kinect messaging is definitely core-obsessed. First they said they didn't want core shooters like Halo on it. Then they said it's got casual approachability, but core depth. Now, they're saying hardcore gamers will be first in line for it.

As seen on Flickr.

New York City is difficult in the winter. Most residents still do much of their navigation on foot, and Manhattan's grid-like avenues and towering buildings can funnel the approaching winter's dry cold snaps into veritable wind tunnels. Coats never seem quite warm enough, and gloves make it clumsy to fumble for the…

"I don't like this divide we are building," Peter Molyneux tells me. "More and more we are saying these ones here are core games and these one here are casual games. Actually I think that is an incredibly divisive thing and if we're not careful the amount of attention we put into these core games will get less and…

Chris Bateman of Only A Game has spent a not insignificant chunk of time talking about the 'hardcore/casual' divide — especially in terms of discussing the accuracy of such a distinction. As he points out, more complex models of how people like to play their games are simply too unwieldy to be of use for general…

Well, it reads like an essay, but this piece by David Hayward is actually a transcript of a talk given at the "Under The Mask, Perspectives on the Gamer" event a few days ago (slides included!). It's a brilliant and somewhat lengthy piece on culture-with-a-small-c, as it relates to gaming (as, in Hayward's appraisal,…