PlayStation

The State Of The PlayStation 4 In 2017

Nintendo might have gotten more buzz in 2017, but Sony’s PlayStation 4 just had a quietly excellent year. In fact, it was arguably the system’s best run since it came out. Throughout 2017, Sony’s approach to the PS4 was a mix of reliable and experimental. That’s a good combination. The company delivered a pile of…

The Division’s Free 1.8 Update Is Better Than Its Paid Expansions

After numerous multiplayer-centric patches and expansions, The Division finally got a big improvement for solo players this week. The new update is shockingly large and shockingly good. It seems designed to make every type of Division player happy. Update 1.8 adds two new, enemy-filled zones called West Side Piers to the game’s Manhattan-based map, throws…

Sony Has Sold Over 70.6 Million PS4s Worldwide

After hitting the 60.4 million mark this June, Sony has now sold over 70.6 million PlayStation 4 consoles globally as of December 3. The PlayStation 4 originally launched on November 15, 2013 in North America and later that same month in PAL territories. It went on sale in Japan the following February. Sony launched a…

Shadow of War‘s New Online Mode Makes It Clear: They Want You To Play This Game Forever

Five of my orcs died in Shadow of War yesterday. I callously dropped them, one by one, into the game’s new online fight pits. They didn’t make it out. Rash Skull Bow, a feral marksman with little skulls for shoulder pads, got killed in 20 seconds after Ghash The Bloated struck him in the stomach…

Just Released PlayStation VR Game Already Has Porn Parody

Today, PSVR game Fate/Grand Order VR feat. Mashu Kyrielight was released in Japan. It already has a VR porn parody, and the side-by-side comparisons are unexpectedly accurate. Well, save for the sex parts. Those aren’t in the PlayStation VR game. In original PS4 game, players interact with virtual lady Mashu Kyrielight. It’s all rather tame.…

Deciding to go up against Destiny 2‘s first expansion for some reason, The Division’s huge and excellent-sounding free 1.8 update will be out tomorrow. Check out detailed patch notes (including radical changes to Underground). The game and its DLC will be free this weekend.

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…