Nintendo

How A Basically Blind Girl Can Play Nintendo Games

Jennifer Powers suffered an anoxic brain injury at birth, and as a result she’s practically blind, unable to “focus within a few inches of her face, even with very thick glasses”. That should rule her out of playing regular video games, but nope, luckily, she’s found a way to get her game on. As her…

Five Life Lessons I’ve Learned From Pokémon

I’ve grown up — rather fondly, I might add — with Pokémon. Over the years the several different hundreds of pocket monsters have become my dear friends. Simply settling into a new game (like I’ve recently done with Black) is a comfort to me. In a tumultuous, changing world, I find solace in the fact…

How Do We Feel About A Portable 3D Sonic Game? Watch This.

It’s been clear at least since the Dreamcast era, if not further back, that Sonic the Hedgehog’s console games were going to be in 3D. If you wanted old-school 2D Sonic, you went to the handhelds. Well, now the next Sonic game on handhelds is 3D, too. Is this a bad thing? Maybe not! To…

Link might need another one of those bombs to defeat this Dodongo, a classic enemy from The Legend of Zelda games. It’s hard to tell who’s scarier in digital artist Jason Custer‘s poster: Link with his bomb or the funky-looking reptilian. Dayshot is an image-based feature that runs every morning, showcasing some of the prettiest,funniest…

American Developers Comment on Japanese Video Games’ Weaknesses

Back in the 1980s and 90s, if you played arcade games or console games, you played Japanese games. Lots of them. But maybe things have changed. Why? At a recently held game developers’ convention in Japan, Kento Kojima, a lead animator at 2K Games, gave a presentation on things he has learned working for an…

Street Fighter II For The Virtual Boy Exists, Looks Amazing

And you thought the Virtual Boy was only good for tennis and tired failed hardware jokes. Coder Mr. Anon has somehow modified a homebrew fighting game engine to bring a bootleg version of Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting Edition to Nintendo’s ancient novelty “handheld”. This shouldn’t exist. And yet. It does. If you’ve got the…

Hideo Kojima Keeps It Short And Sweet For His 50th Birthday

All-star game designer Hideo Kojima turned 50 on Saturday, so consider this a belated happy birthday to the Metal Gear mastermind and your opportunity to wish him a happy 50th. What did the man himself have to say about 50? Not a ton. He tweeted this early Monday morning in what was either a delayed…

Well, that didn’t take long. Remember that $90,000 Kickstarter to make a Metroid fan film—one that didn’t have Nintendo’s permission? Yeah, it ended about like you’d expect. They’d gotten about $20,000, with two weeks left in the fund drive.

In this, the year of Luigi: here’s this kind of bizarre, kind of funny fake ‘documentary’ by Nintendo about finding a parkour pro version of Luigi.

Looks Like We’re Getting A Zelda-Themed Wii U (And It’s Pretty Slick)

Is that a slick gold design I see on this Wii U? Possibly part of a Zelda: Wind Waker Wii U bundle? Earlier this week, Destructoid floated rumors that we might be seeing a Zelda-packed Wii U bundle at some point in the near future, and this image, taken from a since-pulled Nintendo trailer spotted…

Disney Infinity: The Kotaku Review

Disney Infinity is a wonderful way for children of all ages to indulge their desire to create and explore, but are all of these colorful pieces ofexpensive plasticreally necessary? Setting aside the game’s creativity-exercising segment for the moment, let’s consider the origin of Disney Infinity. The game’s roots lie in 2010’s Toy Story 3: The…

Splinter Cell And One Of The Most Notorious Places in the World

I was reminded of how powerful big-budget video games can be—yet how frustratingly tame they often remain—while I was playing the new Splinter Cell. This game goes somewhere I didn’t expect. Spoilers ahead. Close the window you’re reading this in now if you don’t want to know. Keep it open if you want to know…

Nintendo’s Worst Bad Guys Look Awesomely Disgusting in These Busts

Man, you’d think that being a recurring villain in one of Nintendo’s best-loved franchises would get you a decent dental plan. But, from the looks of the choppers on Wario in the sculpture above, the job of evil doppelganger certainly does not. The busts above are the work of artist Cig Neutron, and will be…

Bad News for the PS Vita: No Monster Hunter 4 Anytime Soon

Remember how popular Monster Hunter was on the PSP in Japan? And how it became a system seller for the Sony hardware? And how the PSP was pretty much the machine Japanese people used to play Monster Hunter? Remember that? This time around things are different. Monster Hunter 4 is coming to the 3DS, and…

Sounds Like Zelda: Wind Waker HD Comes With A Lot Of Changes

The Wii U remake of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker has a bunch of new tweaks and features, if previews out of Germany are to believed. Reporters and attendees at GamesCom this week got to play the first-ever HD Zelda, which comes out for Wii U in October. They say it’s different. Much different.…

Are you ready to Fish On with this week’s Nintendo Download? Not just normal Fish On, mind you, but Fish On 3D. Now that I think about it, you’re probably not ready. Get started with some Ninja Gaiden II and the digital release of Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward, and we’ll see where you are…

For Japan’s Nerd Heroine, Pokémon is a Bridge Between Strangers

Shoko Nakagawa, Japan’s own nerd heroine and queen of Pokémonhasn’t exactly had an easy upbringing. Her school life after elementary school was mostly filled with rejection and alienation from classmates due to her being different. But staying true to her love of Pokémon has paid off in spades as she recalls in her new book,…

I Would So Play This Fake Pacific Rim Video Game

Pacific Rim never got an 8-bit Nintendo game. Why? Because Guillermo Del Toro wasn’t making big Hollywood movies during the 1980s, that’s why. But what if he were… Okay, title screen up there. Ignore the 2013 copyright and pencil in 1987. Do it. So, now kaiju are on Earth, threatening human existence, blah, blah, blah.…

I’ve Played Skylanders On The PS4, And There’s No Going Back

I didn’t fully appreciate the next generation of consoles until last Friday, when I got the chance to play Skylanders: Swap Force for a couple hours on the PlayStation 4. It’s not that I consider the third installment of Activision’s wildly popular toys-meets-games franchise to be the pinnacle of gaming achievement or anything. I know…

If you’re a sucker for hyper-detailed trailer analysis, then take a look at the detective work being done by the folks at ArkhamOriginsVideos on the news trailer for October’s Batman: Arkham Origins game. The Dark Knight detective would be proud.