Xbox

One of the villains hunting the Dark Knight in Batman: Arkham Origins must hate water. Revealed during the game’s spotlight panel during this past weekend’s New York Comic-Con, the Electrocutioner is one of the super-assassins looking to collect a bounty on Batman’s head. It’s a safe bet that some of that electrified villain tech will…

The New Voice Of The Joker Killed It At Comic Con

Troy Baker, who has replaced Mark Hamill as the Joker in the next big Batman Arkham video game, and who has replaced Nolan North as the ubiquitous voice-actor who seems to star in every other major game, read some lines at New York Comic Con yesterday. And not just any lines. Some lines the great…

Skylanders: Swap Force: The Kotaku Review

It’s taken 40 long years, but it’s finally happened. I’ve finally become an adult, and it’s all thanks to the latest Skylanders game. I just don’t understand the Swap Force The first Skylanders game gave us a batch of toys we could place on a portal to use as characters in a well-crafted action role-playing…

Skylanders: Swap Force Buyers’ Guide: What You Need, What You Don’t

You would think that on the third installment of Activision’s highly-successful toys-meets-games series they’d give folks the option to just buy the game by itself. Ha ha! We’re not getting off that easy. Every Skylander figure released thus far will work on Skylanders: Swap Force. You could play through the entire game using only first…

GTA Online, Week Two: All People Want To Do Is Kill Each Other

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNfhcD… I’m a week into playing GTA Online. My character mysteriously had a sex change during one of the Social Club outages. She still never has arms when I log in, and changes clothes every time I look away. Somehow I ended up in a dogfight with a fighter jet and, some time before that,…

GTA Online Players Get $500,000 In-Game Make-Good for Unstable Launch

If you’ve played GTA Online over the last few days, you might have noticed that things feel a bit better than when the multiplayer portion of GTA V first opened its doors. It takes patience to stick around during a launch as creaky as the one GTA Online had. So Rockstar wants to say thank…

Rapper Says GTA V Stole His Music

Grand Theft Auto V is packed with tunes. But according to rapper and music producer Daz Dillinger, the game uses two of his without permission. Now, he wants Rockstar to pay up or to destroy all unsold copies of the game. Dillinger’s tracks “C-Walk” and “Nothin’ But the Cavi Hit” appear in the game. But…

Let The Xbox One Pranking Begin

You can turn an Xbox One on (and off) using voice commands. Handy for the home, but in the workplace? There’s room for pranks. These tweets by Andreas Fredriksson, a senior engine programmer at the freshly-multiplatform Insomniac, are hilarious, because you don’t need video to imagine exactly how it goes down. Andreas Fredriksson [Twitter, via…

The New Fables Game Is Cool, But Something’s Off

It’s a killer setup for a mystery: Hundreds of storybook fables have relocated to New York. One man—the Big Bad Wolf—is in charge of keeping order. And now, someone is murdering fables. That’s the premise for The Wolf Among Us, a new game based on Vertigo’s popular Fables comics. And while the game is often…

Saints Row IV‘s Next DLC Stars An Evil Dominatrix

See that scantily clad dominatrix? She’s your new villain this month in Saints Row IV. You’ll be fighting her and her army of sex-workers. Seriously. Check her out: Remember the expansion we were going to get for Saints Row: The Third? It was called Enter The Dominatrix. Volition is still calling it by that same…

Multiplayer Isn’t So Massive Anymore

Bungie seems to have coined the term “shared world shooter” for their newest IP, Destiny, but the general concept might sound familiar. While not everyone may be a fan of huge MMOs, lots of people seem to be into multiplayer gaming and downsized, explorable worlds where you can play with a relative handful of other…

XCOM Has Changed. See For Yourself.

Strategy games have a tendency to straddle an area between slow, decisive moves and the chaos of action happening seemingly out of your hands and all around you. Some strategy games are slower-paced than others. As tense as things can get in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, it’s more or less leaned towards the ease of turn-based…

Glitch Turns GTA V Into An Accidental Bloodbath

In this dramatic Grand Theft Auto V cutscene, Michael and his friend Trevor have a heated conversation. A stupid-AI bug makes it even more so. Warning: This clip might contain spoilers, blood. The bug has police officers firing on both characters as they talk at Michael’s house. If only the cops could’ve given a fuck…

Obama Puts Shutdown In Terms Home-Owning Xbox Gamers Can Understand

In case you were confused about the Democrats’ position re: the ongoing U.S. government shutdown—namely that they think it’s dirty for Republicans to demand the defunding of Obamacare in order to pass a budget to keep the government open—Barack Obama dumbed it down a little in a press conference today. “You don’t get a chance…

Wrecked GTA Car Still Runs Pretty Well

I’m not entirely sure how this pile of junk is still functioning, but I’m also not sure I want to know. Because it’s magical and magical things deserve to be preserved in their mystery. YouTuber MetalDevils hows us how to get a fancy sports car in GTA Online all banged up while still working. Basically…

Saints Row Does Relationships Better Than Most Video Games

If you find yourself discussing the merits of relationships represented in video games, you’ll probably find a lot of people bringing up BioWare games as examples to follow. The Saints Row series doesn’t seem like a serious suggestion considering, well, how unserious those games are. And yet if you look beyond the dick jokes and…

Ninja Gaiden‘s cyborg vs. zombies spin-off is coming to PC. Tecmo Koei announced this morning that the Steam version of Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z will be launching day-and-date with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions in early 2014. Thank goodness. Ninja Gaiden and PCs go together like … you know.

5 Minutes in BioShock Infinite‘s Rapture Shows a City Before the Fall

We’re goin’ back to Rapture … Rapture … with Booker and Elizabeth in Burial at Sea, the first downloadable extension to BioShock Infinite, and if you have to ask why they ended up there and Booker is a Sam Spade caricature, you probably have not finished the game. It’s nice to see Rapture looking so…

Lost Planet 3 Needed More Crazy “Capcom-Style” Moments, Says Developer

Lost Planet 3 wasn’t perfect. But, despite being an overly familiar shooter, the story it told and the main character that players controlled manage to feel more meaningful than most other action-centric games out there. It felt like the cast’s relationships to each other and their own feelings were at stake. It also felt like…

The Ball’s in Your Court, NBA Live

The next six weeks will shine a bright light on a four-year question mark in sports video gaming: NBA Live. Every other team sport due for release this year has launched but this one. Like it or not, EA Sports will have the next month mostly to itself, and what it doesn’t say will speak…