Uncategorized

Kotaku ‘Shop Contest: A Very Scare Bear Halloween: Winners!

I just cannot tell. I think this is the winner oflast week’s bear mask Photoshop contest, but I’ve seen such horrors. Such maddening horrors. The picture above wasn’t technically Ozimov’s main entry, but I feel as if his take on one of the strangest moments from The Shining is a great deal more horrifying that…

While We Wait For Fallout 4, Here’s Fallout ’84

Passing some time before their November 10 trip to Boston, chiptune artists 8 Bit Weapon put together a art project to pay tribute to the upcoming sequel—a demo for Fallout ‘84 running on an Apple IIc. With a name like 8 Bit Weapon, what else could they do? The prominent chiptune group (who appear in…

Graphics Card Battle 2015: Nvidia Versus AMD At Every Price Point

You might say 2015 hasn’t been the most exciting year for graphics cards, though in many ways it was more eventful than 2014. The only big highlight last year was the arrival high-end Maxwell GPUs in the form of the GeForce GTX 980 and 970. Then this year Maxwell did what many thought was impossible:…

The Only Reed Richards in the New Marvel Universe Is A Bad Guy

Reed Richards is one of the most important characters in Marvel’s history. He’s the father figure of the Fantastic Four, the first superhero series that began turning a then-unremarkable publisher into a cultural powerhouse. There used to be dozens of versions of Reed but now there’s only one. And he’s not here to save the…

A Cool-Looking Xbox Caveman Game That Never Happened

One of the earliest games shown for the original Xbox was BC. Dinosaurs! Cave men! I was so hyped for this game, and then it was cancelled. Games are canned all the time, but it happens quietly and without much fanfare. It’s not like the developers suddenly release the incomplete game into the wild, so…

Heroes Of The Storm’s New Protoss Warrior Is A Teleporting, Death Ray-Shooting Badass

The Protoss have always been the coolest race in StarCraft. Proud but adaptable, aggressive yet agile, the ornate alien species embodies what’s great about the real-time strategy and MOBA games they inhabit. This week has been exciting in Heroes of the Storm thanks to the introduction of their fearless leader Artanis. Artanis is a melee…

Shocktober, Week Four: Paranormal Activity Is Dead

October, we hardly knew ye. I’ve been watching a glut of horror movies every week as part of Shocktober, and it’s been an especially fruitful year. It’s a genre best known for jump scares, but that’s selling good horror short—done right, it’s deeply thought provoking. Every week, I’ve been filing reports from the field. So…

The Truth About Ninjas

If you do anything for Halloween this weekend, chances are pretty good you might see a child (or an adult) trick-or-treating (or partying) dressed as a ninja. Maybe it’ll be a generic ninja, or maybe a specific one, like a Naruto character or a Ninja Turtle. Today, ninjas are all around us. They’re in our…

Dota 2 Turns Into A Haunted House For Halloween

Dota 2 has always led the MOBA pack in rad game modes and fun seasonal Halloween content, but they managed to outdo even themselves this year with “Haunted Colosseum.” It’s a new custom game mode that makes Dota much more…haunted. More in a ridiculous slap-stick way than a creepy one. As the name implies, “Haunted…

Planetary Physicist Tries To Work Out The Science Behind Halo

The temperature is dropping and it’s threatening to snow, so why not cozy up with Worth Reading, your weekly guide to the best in games writing? C’mon. Hey, You Should Read These “Halo Science 101” by Kevin Grazier This is an old piece, but I love stuff like this. Kevin Grazier takes the ridiculous fiction…

Sony’s announced its PlayStation Plus lineup for November, which includes The Walking Dead: Season Two and Magika 2 on PS4. PS3 owners are getting Mass Effect 2 and Beyond Good & Evil; it’s Dragon Fin Soup and Invizimals on Vita. Contact the author at [email protected]

Festival South By Southwest has reinstated the two cancelled gaming panels, and announced an all-day seminar. One panel was about harassment; the other, GamerGate-leaning panel focused on ethics and politics. Both return, though SXSW will work with them to “to develop the most productive focus for their appearances.”

Badass Player Makes GTA Online Look Like A Horror Movie

Wow. GTA Online can be damn terrifying! Yesterday, GTA Online got a special holiday update that included a new “Slasher Adversary” mode. Seven people get flashlights. One person gets a shotgun. If the prey can survive for three minutes, they get a chance to be a slasher. Obviously, this is pretty seasonally appropriate given that…

What the New Assassin’s Creed Gets Wrong (and Right), According to a Historian

Bob Whitaker, a historian of modern Britain at Louisiana Tech and the host of the YouTube series History Respawned, recommends Assassin’s CreedSyndicate, the entertaining new Ubisoft game set in Victorian London. He likes the way it successfully captures the feel of the British capital in the 19th century, and he particularly likes the way the…

Street Fighter EX Character Gets A Badass Tribute Video

It’s an awesome combo video with a twist: Street Fighter veteran Desk used Street Fighter IV’s Mexican luchador El Fuerte and one of the game’s new horror costumes to recreate the goofy fan favorite from the EX series. He even remixed Skullomania’s theme to make it perfect. To contact the author of this post, write…

Real-Life First-Person Shooter, Controlled Through Chatroulette

RealmPictures’ concept was to build an immersive first person shooter level, and let unsuspecting people on Chatroulette take control of the protagonist. They had to make it perfect for it to be immersive, but it’s safe to say they succeeded. Their first level took place in a garden, so this second one is a huge…

Mario Sure Likes To Play Dress-up

This piece of fanart illustrates just twelve of Mario’s many, many outfits. Here’s the artwork itself: Called “A Fashionable Plumber,” it was drawn by Dave Bardin, a freelance illustrator, over the course of several months. It would make a cool poster. There’s a sampling of Bardin’s other works below. You can find more, mostly comic-related,…

50,000 People Are Watching Bob Ross Paint On Twitch Right Now

There’s something really awesome about seeing people react in real time to brush strokes on canvas. It’s like every single thing Bob Ross does, no matter how gentle and delicate, is as big as a major play in the World Series. Confused? Well, Twitch just launched a new initiative, which happens to be called ‘Twitch…

Some Real Talk From Pewdiepie About YouTube Red

YouTube’s biggest star Pewdiepie weighs in on YouTube’s upcoming subscription service over on Tumblr, and he’s got some healthy dose of realism for everybody. While Pewdiepie understands that folks are wary of YouTube’s new plan, he says it’s worth remembering that Red is the direct result of how people choose to consume the internet without…

Destiny x Star Wars Trailer Mashup Is Suitably Epic

Drama! Darkness! Space magic! Weird swords! I’m talking about Destiny… or am I talking about Star Wars? On YouTube, Sam Goodey (via r/DTG) has cut together a special Destiny video by syncing it to audio from the latest mega Star Wars trailer. It’s good shit. I’ll be honest: The Destiny stuff is fine, but that…