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Lara Croft Can Starve To Death In Rise of The Tomb Raider’s Newest Mode

Lara Croft really didn’t have to worry about eating or staying warm in the main portion of Rise of the Tomb Raider. Oh, she got cold sometimes but you knew it wasn’t going to kill her. But, in the new Endurance add-on for her latest game, Lara Croft can freeze to death or die if…

Fallout 4’s ‘Full Dialogue’ Mod Makes The Game Way Better

Opinions about Fallout 4 may be as sprawling and changeable as the Commonwealth wasteland, but most people agree that the new dialogue system leaves something to be desired. Fortunately, there’s a mod for that. With their newest game, developer Bethesda decided to change the dialogue system they’d used in previous games like Skyrim and Fallout…

How A Mario Character Was Named After Motorhead’s Lemmy

One of gaming’s better rumors is each koopaling in Super Mario Bros. 3 was named after a celebrity. One of the seven is Lemmy, allegedly inspired by Lemmy Kilmister, founder of the rock band Motörhead. Kilmisterdied of cancer yesterday. To learn more, I asked the person who named the koopalings. Before Dayvv Brooks was a…

Far Cry Primal’s Gonna Get Pretty Raw

We’ve already seen that the main guy in Far Cry Primal will be pretty chill with animals, taming and commanding them after suppressing their whole eat-the-human instinct. But lead character Takkar will have some gnarlier interactions with his fellow humans. As in “ears cut off and kept as trophies.” According to the game’s ESRB listing,…

I’m slowly making progress in the latest catastrophe of level design from Giant Bomb’s Dan Ryckert. Dubbed The Armageddan—F8D1-0000-011D-7B5B—it’s yet another set of devious puzzles, tough platforming, and endless misdirection. Watch me play it here. I’ll eventually beat it, so the world may feel safe again. You can reach the author of this post at…

Microsoft has told Kotaku they’re aware of Halo: Reach’s frame rate problems “We’re aware some users are experiencing issues playing Halo: Reach via Xbox One Backward Compatibility,” said a spokesperson. “The Xbox engineering team is currently looking into the issues and are working to address them.”

One Of 2015’s Most Popular Mods Is From A 2006 Lord of the Rings Game

Mod DB is one of the best places to download fan-made add-ons, and every year, the community votes on their favorites. I expected this year’s biggest PC games—Fallout 4, The Witcher 3—to dominate the list but, uh, nope. Instead, tons of people voted on a mod for a 2006 Lord of the Rings strategy game.…

Valve Still Hasn’t Told Steam Users About The Christmas Fiasco

Four days after Steam’s Christmas fiasco, we still don’t know exactly what happened. We don’t know how many people were affected, how much personal information leaked, or if some friendly Team Fortress players saw our addresses and plan to stop by our homes for an impromptu New Year’s celebration. We don’t know any of this…

Fanmade Halo 5 Map Pays Homage To Metroid Prime

It’s anybody’s guess as to when Nintendo’s going to roll out a new Metroid game that stars Samus Aran. So, one enterprising player used Microsoft’s first-person shooter to craft a tribute to the House of Mario’s iconic space bounty hunter. On his YouTube channel, 0mni42 shows off a Forge Map he calls Primus, complete with…

R2-D2 And C-3PO Are Out Of Control

Forget C-3PO’s new red arm. That enhancement is nothing compared to Yamaguchi Katuhisa’s figure modifications of the two old, otherwise peaceful, robo-buddies. He swapped a few parts of R2-D2 and C-3PO figures with ones from Ultron, Snake or a Ghost in the Shell Tachikoma to create the most powerful fighting force the Star Wars universe…

Augmented Reality Fight Changes Office Desk Into Battle Arena

No mercy for the coffee cup. Ádám Horváth is developing a neat little Augmented Reality plugin for Unreal Engine 4, and to demonstrate its capabilities, he dropped the Unreal Engine “Matinee fight scene” demo into a completely different environment. It’s no longer a battle in the subway, but on top of an office desk, full…

Tales From The Borderlands’s Perfect Music Picks Made The Whole Game Better

Telltale’s episodic adventure series Tales From The Borderlands was one of 2015’s best surprises. That was mostly thanks to its funny script, well-developed characters, and killer voice acting. But the music definitely helped. After I finished the second episode back in April, I was already going on about how Telltale was wrecking it with their…

Luke Plunkett’s Top 10 Games Of 2015

2015 has been a weird year for me and video games. In one way, it’s been defined by the fact there’s been a shortage of games that I’ve found really memorable, to the point where picking out ten for this list was tough work. In another, that might be because I spent almost the entire…

Halo: Reach Doesn’t Run Very Well On Xbox One [UPDATE]

It’s awesome that Microsoft added backwards compatibility for (some) Xbox 360 games to Xbox One, but it’s hardly a perfect situation. One of most demanded games for compatibility, Halo: Reach, comes with a crappy frame rate. Update (12/29/15 at 1:20 pm): Microsoft knows there is a problem: “We’re aware some users are experiencing issues playing…

Evan Narcisse’s Top 10 Games of 2015

It was a damn shame Rise of the Tomb Raider came out on the same day as Fallout 4, wasn’t it? Nevertheless, release schedules be damned, a lot of great games came out this year. Here are the ones I liked the most. OlliOlli 2 Sequels to good games aren’t always a good thing. The…

Year-end podcast alert: Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo and Evan Narcisse (along with perma-Kotaku-friend Tina Amini) guested on the star-studded Game Of The Year episode of Chris Suellentrop’s “Shall We Play A Game” podcast. Listen here

Undertale, As Told By 123 Screenshots

By now, you’ve probably heard of a little game called Undertale. You may also have heard that it’s good. Good news: It really, really is. I’d started the game a little while back but had only had time to play for an hour or so. Since then, the game went on to become the source…

Players Spent Four Years Pushing Halo’s Physics To The Limit

Watch in awe as these gamers find ways to launch themselves into places no Halo player was ever meant to go. “Elevated Existence” is a 10-minute montage created by the folks over at Termacious Trickocity, and it chronicles the result of a countless number of hours messing around in various Halo games, trying to land…

Patrick Klepek’s Top 10 Games of 2015

It was a hell of a year for video games, a wonderful mixture of long-awaited games living up to their potential, and unexpected delights that completely snuck up on me. One big difference with 2015 was the way I played video games. As someone who avoids multiplayer games, I’m quickly bouncing from one game to…

Kotaku ‘Shop Contest: The 2015 Year-End All-Star Extravaganza

This year saw some of the greatest reader-created images in the history of the Kotaku ‘Shop Contest. Now it’s time to bring it all home. It’s a year-end mash-up, y’all. I’ll get the butter. Here’s how this works. I’m going to give you folks five of the finest ‘Shop Contest subjects of the year, and…