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The Difficult Dilemma Of Dragon Quest XI’s Post Credit Sequence

Dragon Quest XI is a very long game full of tragic twists and turns, so when my journey finally came to an end, it felt like a real accomplishment. The credits rolled. I’d defeated the main villain and brought peace to the land. I actually felt sad that my time with my companions was coming…

Death Mark Reminds Us That We Can Never Vanquish Our Ghosts

There was a time I was obsessed with American urban legends, especially the horror-themed ones. Learning more about their roots and origins, and how a story evolves over time to fit the social mores of its time was fascinating, if terrifying. Death Mark is kind of like a mix track of creepy Japanese urban legends…

In Defense of Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest

The original Castlevania was one of the first NES games I played. So when the sequel came out for the NES in December 1988, I knew I had to play it. Simon’s Quest mixed up the first game’s action-platforming formula and gave players a Metroidvania-style game with RPG mechanics, revolving around a curse that Dracula…

Hotel Dusk: Room 215 Is A Compelling Story About Loss And Guilt

I still have a classic Nintendo DS that even plays the old GBA games, but I only take it out when I go on airplanes. Recently having finished Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations, I turned to Hotel Dusk: Room 215, knowing nothing about the game. I quickly became addicted to the mystery interactive novel developed…

The Classic JRPG About Two Scientists Saving The World

A mix of The Legend of Zelda and the works of Hayao Miyazaki, Crystalis was an incredible action RPG for the NES whose surprisingly complex story helped elevate it above many of its peers. It’s also one of the games I most fondly recall from my childhood, so re-playing it on the SNK 40th Anniversary…

The Latest Sims 4 Expansion Is Fascinating, But Not Because Of Mermaids

There are a lot of things I like about Island Living, today’s new Sims 4 expansion. Almost none of them are the new mechanics that come with the pack. Mermaids, the new “occult” type of Sim that comes with Island Living, are ho-hum. Mermaids have their hygiene need replaced with “hydration,” but there’s not a…

Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night, As Told By Steam Reviews

What is a Kickstarter-funded spiritual successor to Castlevania? Either a miserable or non-miserable pile of secrets (and gameplay mechanics), depending on which Steam reviewer you talk to. Whether they love it or feel lukewarm about it, like Kotaku’s Joshua Rivera, nobody’s pretending Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night is something that it’s not. This, pretty much…

We’ve updated our June 8 story about publisher Xseed’s game-crediting policy with a lengthy statement from company VP Ken Berry. He notes that the small but growing company’s policy has been for credits to provide a “snapshot” of who is at Xseed at the moment, but acknowledges room to revise the policy as the company…

Capcom has updated its official Street Fighter V tournament rules to address controllers capable of simultaneous opposite cardinal direction inputs, or SOCDs. This sets a new standard for box style peripherals: the original Hit Box is legal, while the custom “Gafro box” that Daigo helped gain notoriety is not.

Neon-Soaked Shooter Amid Evil Really Hits The Spot

Sometimes, you just wanna play a damn shooter. You want some gnarly weapons, some mazes to wander in, and no particular justification for blowing up whatever demons cross your path. Amid Evil, a throwback shooter now released out of early access, channels the spirit of Heretic and Hexen for a frantic, first-person burst of blood…

I played all the way through Judgment in Japanese earlier this year. Now it’s time to play its Western release on our Twitch channel, and judge the quality of the English dub. Something tells me it’s going to be good. Uh-oh: did I just pre-judge it? Shout your loudest objections in the chat!

Sexting With A Robot Is Just About As Weird As You’d Expect

Does anyone remember Cleverbot, the sort-of-not-really AI that you could sort-of-not-really have a conversation with? It was really popular around the time I was sitting my Italian exam at university, circa 2011. I know this because I asked it if it could help me learn Italian, and it replied: “pizza, pizza, spaghetti cappuccino.” Thanks, Cleverbot.…

The Netflix Release Of Neon Genesis Evangelion Is Missing Its Iconic Ending Theme

All 26 episodes of legendary anime Neon Genesis Evangelion are now available for streaming on U.S. Netflix, but there’s something missing. The end credits theme, Claire Littley’s beautiful version of “Fly Me to the Moon”, has been replaced. That’s disappointing. This week’s Netflix release of Neon Genesis Evangelion marks the first time fans in the…

YouTuber Etika Reported Missing Following Mental Health Struggles

Gaming YouTuber Desmond “Etika” Amofah has been missing for over 36 hours, the New York Police Department reports. His disappearance comes at the end of a long and public battle with mental health that, on Wednesday night, culminated in an eight-minute video in which Amofah discusses his struggles with suicidal ideation. Walking down the street,…

What Tetsuya Nomura Actually Said About Tifa’s Breasts In The Final Fantasy 7 Remake

This past Wednesday, like every Wednesday, summaries of the leaked Weekly Famitsu appeared online in Japanese. The magazine doesn’t go on sale until Thursday, and this week’s leaks, along with some insufficient translations, have created confusions of what exactly Tetsuya Nomura said regarding Tifa Lockhart’s body in the Final Fantasy 7 remake. As pointed out…

Here is the trailer for the live action version of The Flowers of Evil. Debuting as a manga, it was adapted into a rotoscoped anime in 2013. The movie will open in Japan on September 27. No word yet of an international release. 

New Total War DLC Looks Like A Horror Movie

For a while now, Creative Assembly has sold a “gore” or “blood” pack for their Total War games as DLC. It’s now Three Kingdoms’ turn, with an update called Reign Of Blood, and it is bloody I mean…pools of blood, big juicy stabbings I get, this is a game about war! But horse dismemberment and…

Metal Gear Solid Gets 4K Remaster Thanks To AI

Thanks to ERSGAN(Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks) and the work of tophergopher1, this is Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes (the GameCube version/remake) featuring full 4K visuals, with none of the upscaling having been done by human hands. Instead, machine-learning has looked at the game’s old textures and cleaned them up the best way it saw…

Auto Chess Took Over My Life In A Single Afternoon

I had plans, darn it. Grand plans. I was going to go outside, probably. I might have picked a flower. Maybe it would’ve slipped from between my fingers, only for me to bend down and find three stray kittens, who I’d have ultimately adopted and come to love like the furry little couch-ruining aliens they…

Gardens of Fog is a new D&D module whose adventure has been “designed to turn some stereotypes [about mental illness] on their head”, and where players will “encounter and interact with living representations of anxiety and depression”. Some of the proceeds of its sale go towards the charity Take This