Nintendo

New Nintendo Direct coming tomorrow at 9am Eastern. This one’s all about upcoming 3DS and Wii U games, Nintendo says.

Nintendo’s Awkward 1990s, Remembered On Resurrected VHS

NeoGAF user jjgames has done the history of video games—or at least our ability to easily access some awkwardly amusing parts of it—a great favour. He’s bought six old VHS tapes from the 90s, each containing a Nintendo marketing or training video. They remind us of a time Nintendo was a lot warmer, a lot…

Beware of Fake Pokémon Scans

This Pokémon trainer art does resemble the male trainer in very real Pokémon X/Y screens. But it is not a real Japanese magazine scan. It looks like one, but it’s so fake. Here’s why. For example, here it gives “atarashishii” as the reading for the Japanese word for “new”, which is “atarashii” (新しい). This mistake…

Let’s Rank Nintendo’s Controllers, Best To Worst

I published an innocent little story yesterday about an N64 controller that provoked an unexpected response. You see, I hate the Nintendo 64 controller. All my friends hate it. Everyone I ever gamed on the console with hated it. I figured it was pretty safe to share that dislike. Others, on the internet, disagreed. Some…

Fire Emblem: Awakening‘s Amazing Musical Milieu

We’ve talked plenty about how much we like the new 3DS strategy role-playing game Fire Emblem: Awakening here at Kotaku. Among other things, we like the romance, the permanent death and the even more permanent marriage. And all this despite the fact that no one in the game has feet But while I’ve talked a…

DS Homebrewing Still Going Strong with Portal Adaptation

The DS still is home to a robust homebrew scene, as we see here in this Portal port that modder Smealum has been working on for about the past six months. “Still nowhere near playable,” he writes under the latest video, but it’s brought along Portal staples like turrets, cubes, switches and energy balls. “This…

Nintendo Fan Is Happy With Nintendo’s $620 Answer to His $570 Wii U Problem

On Friday, we brought you the story of Jon, a Nintendo fan who spent $400 downloading old games to his Wii, but, through a mistake of his own and due to Nintendo’s unusually strict digital-downloads policy, found himself with access to none of those games. The lesson: a Nintendo machine isn’t like an iPhone; your…

The Arrest of Japan’s Most Wanted Troll Leads to Cute Cat Pic

Well, they caught him. Apparently. After turning an anime director’s computer into a Trojan Horse for menacing messages, after threatening to blow up Nintendo, and after sending a Japanese cops on a wild goose cat chase, the man believed to be the country’s most wanted (and dangerous) troll is in police custody. The suspect is…

A Gaming Room For Which The Word “Room” Doesn’t Really Do It Justice

Reddit user ScienceBrah has a personal trainer, and that personal trainer’s name is James. I tell you this only because James has one of the most kick-ass gaming rooms I’ve ever seen. There are so many games—organised properly, thank the Maker—down there he could hand out plastic cards and call it a game library my…

I Never Thought I’d See An N64 Controller As Beautiful As This One

Funny-looking and with a propensity for their joysticks to break just by looking at them, I think the N64 controller is—and I realise this is a relative award—Nintendo’s worst ever controller. Oh. Except this one, by Zoki64. This one’s wonderful. Painted in a retro style and with a fabulous glossy finish, it looks so hot…

The Legend of Zelda is a New York Times Bestseller. No, Really.

Barely a week into its western release, The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia is a New York Times No. 1 bestseller. Shouldn’t that designation come with an exclamation point or two? Fine! Here!! See for yourself here, it’s topping the “Hardcover Advice & Misc.” category, though that doesn’t mean it’s a strategy guide or a…

Three Months After It Launched, the Wii U is Irrelevant to Sports Gaming

For sports gaming, the Wii U wasn’t looking much better than its predecessor even a month after release, and there are no signs the console is going to be a full partner anytime soon. The signals sent by sports’ dominant publisher indicate it just has no interest in building for the console. It’s not just…

Ubisoft, Now Totally Desperate, Promises Rayman Legends Gets a Wii U Exclusive Demo

Disappointment over a six-month delay of a video game’s release may be a first-world problem. But there’s a good case Ubisoft is holding Rayman Legends back from Wii U while it gets the newly announced PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions ready for a September release. Going multiplatform here isn’t raising garden-variety console fanboy butthurt.…

Nintendo Fan Is Unhappy With Nintendo’s $200 Answer to His $400 Wii U Problem

Jon is an enthusiastic Nintendo fan. He buys all of Nintendo’s systems. He buys many, many Nintendo games. But he’s gotten himself into a jam that he says has cost him access to more than $400 worth of downloadable games he’s purchased from Nintendo over the several years. How does one lose access to $400…

Wii U Gets A $390 ZombiU Package

Nintendo is coming out with a new Wii U package, and it’s full of zombies. Starting February 17 in North America, you’ll be able to find this $390 “ZombiU Deluxe Set,” which comes complete with a black deluxe Wii U and GamePad, a digital copy of Nintendo Land, and a ZombiU disc. It also comes…

This Pokémon X/Y Fake Amuses Japan, At Least

Blurry Japanese magazine scans are often a source of new info about eagerly anticipated games. Games like Pokémon X/Y. That is, unless the scans are totally fake. Earlier this month, what’s supposedly (apparently?) a “leaked” image from a Japanese magazine popped up on YouTube. To date, the video has been viewed over 50,000 times, and…

Activision Is “Somewhat Disappointed” With The Launch Of The Wii U

It seems that Activision, the biggest video game publisher in the world, wasn’t exactly thrilled with the Wii U’s launch. Why? Forget Call of Duty’s performance, it’s the console’s potential for Skylanders that has Bobby Kotick and co. worried. During the company’s latest earnings call, Kotick was asked about the future of the money-printing Skylanders…

You Can Visit Heaven with Mega Man, Sam Fisher and Brain Age in This Week’s Nintendo Download

Comparatively speaking, it’s not that often that you get to engage in wanton bloodshed in a game released for Nintendo platforms. (Well, you can creatively interpret Mario’s adventures in an ultra-violent way, if you wanted.) So, The Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage 2—where you can kick guys to bloody bits—is a departure from…

Here Are The Top 30 Games Japanese Gamers Are Looking Forward To In 2013

2013 is only 1/12th over. With 11 months left and new console news on the horizon, Weekly Famitsu asked its readers what games they were looking forward to for this year. Here’s a list of the top 30 anticipated upcoming games for 2013 (note: All publishers and release dates are for Japanese release versions): 30…

Japanese Xbox Users Made a Miiverse Clone. Yep, It’s Covered in Dicks.

Dicks, why does it always have to be dicks? Before the Wii U’s user forum, dubbed the Miiverse, launched, I said that it would be a dick drawing inferno. Little did I know that Japanese Xbox users would launch their own Miiverse clone. But, I’ll tell you what, I sure saw the dick drawings coming.…