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StarCraft Gets An Official Cartoon Makeover

Blizzard is going to release a graphics pack for Starcraft: Remastered that transforms the game, giving it the look of Carbot Animations’ Starcrafts series This isn’t a fan mod that Blizzard simply gave its blessing to; it’s the real deal, which applies to everything from ladder matches to the campaign to mission briefings, a nice…

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite Improves On What Makes Pokémon Go Great

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is the amount of game that I wanted Pokémon Go to be at launch. It’s polished, there’s lots of stuff to do, and it sometimes really makes you feel like you’re a wizard. Having been a Harry Potter fan since I was around 11 years old, I am constantly combating the…

One Of EVE Online‘s Most Challenging Jobs Is Being A Space Trucker

Cocky fighter pilots, brilliant fleet tacticians, devious political overlords, and bloodthirsty pirates are all science fiction tropes associated with the players of EVE Online. While each of these types can be found traveling between the stars, all of them would be crippled without an often forgotten archetype: space truckers. The space truckers of EVE navigate…

Wiki Titles You Can Sing To The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Theme Is Good Twitter

In 2014, webcomic XKCD introduced readers to the joy of Wikipedia article titles that can be sung to the tune of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song. Now there’s a Twitter bot spitting out fresh examples on a regular basis, turning even the most horrible eight-syllable tragedies into delightful singalongs. The “Wiki Titles…

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Developers Say Breaking Series Traditions Made For A Better Game

When I sat down with the makers of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey last week, I had to ask them about Alexios, Kassandra, and the state of the franchise’s playable modern-day sequences. I also had to ask them about the option to ride a flaming horse. The flaming horse is a very small part of the huge…

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, Niantic’s latest augmented reality games is available now on iOS and Android apps stores one day earlier than expected. Download it and yer a wizard, Kotaku!

Someone Turned Mario Into A Battle Royale, And It’s The Best Thing

Battle royale is one of the most dominant gameplay forms of the last few years, and Tetris 99 showed that you could apply the battle royale concept to anything. Mario Royale turns the classic NES game into a 75-person death race that’s some of the most fun I’ve had all year. Mario Royale, which can…

Vendors were selling amazing Yoshi piñatas in Mexico City’s Mercado de Sonora (“Sonora Market”) when I visited last week.

What Happens When Your Kids Develop Their Own Gaming Taste

For a beautiful few years, you have near-complete control over what your child plays. You decide what’s allowed and when, what to play together, which gems from the past to share with an excited five-year-old. Then a little more time passes, and suddenly the situation is completely different. There comes a point where kids are…

Today is the western mobile debut of Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, a puzzle game that originally came out in the U.S. in August, 2009. 

Tokyo’s Halloween Crackdown Includes Plans For Banning Public Drinking [Update]

Last year, Halloween in Tokyo’s Shibuya descended into chaos. According to News 24, Shibuya is moving towards regulating the area’s Halloween celebrations by banning public drinking in the roads around the station as well as in public parks. [Update June 20 – 6:00 am: Shibuya has banned drinking on the streets during Halloween and New…

You Can Now Play Mass Effect 2 In First-Person

The Mass Effect games are third-person by design, but that hasn’t stopped LordEmil1 from creating a mod that lets PC gamers play the best of them—Mass Effect 2—from a first-person perspective. You can’t play the whole game like this, as combat isn’t working properly due to clipping issues, but everything else, from wandering to conversations,…

Fake Magic: The Gathering Card Names Are Fantastic

Jason Rohrer (Passage, Sleep Is Death) thought it’d be fun to train an AI to create fake Magic: The Gathering card names. It was a good hunch. To do it, he created a database of 18,978 card names, which the AI would then use to jumble all the words up and come up with new…

Fan-Made Half-Life 3 Is Coming Along Nicely

Last year, a group of Half-Life fans announced that they were going to be taking former Valve writer Marc Laidlaw’s Episode 3 synopsis and turning it into an actual game. A year later and things are looking good! The team behind Project Borealis have released this update video that shows all the work they’ve been…

EA: Our Loot Boxes Are Actually ‘Surprise Mechanics’ That Are ‘Quite Ethical’

Given that 2017’s Star Wars Battlefront II is broadly considered the tipping point in an anti-loot-box conversation that has recently led to a loot box bill in the United States senate, you might be forgiven for thinking that Electronics Arts games have loot boxes. Not so, says its VP of legal and government affairs; they…

Isabelle Player Proves She Can Take Solid Snake In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Upset

In fighting games, appearances can often be deceiving, but one Super Smash Bros. Ultimate matchup is exactly what it looks like. Solid Snake, the rugged protagonist of “tactical espionage action” franchise Metal Gear, has a clear advantage in many fights, especially when facing the cute Animal Crossing secretary Isabelle. But this lopsided matchup didn’t stop…

Apex Legends Has Dragons Now

There are dragons in Apex Legends. I don’t know why they’re in the game, but they’re pretty cool. As pointed out by PCGamer, dataminers previously found mention of flying enemies in the game’s code. Dragons were also seen at the end of Apex Legends’ Season 2 teaser during EA Play at E3. We’re still a…

We Quiz Borderlands 3‘s Art Director On Video Game Screenshots

Here’s another dispatch from Tim Rogers at E3 2019. This time, Tim sat down (or kneeled down in this case) with Borderlands 3 art director Scott Kester and tested out just how many games he could identify by their screenshots alone. For more of Tim Rogers at E3, check out this handy YouTube playlist

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Players Are Creating Custom Quests To Level Up By Doing Nothing

Earlier this month, Ubisoft released a free new Story Creator mode for players of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. It’s a simple tool that lets you stitch together your own original quests in Odyssey using a limited set of options and assets. Yet even in its rudimentary state, you can still add experience and monetary rewards to…

The smart moves for Destiny 2 continue. Starting this fall, Bungie will be converting all of the Eververse armor (the stuff you buy with real money) into Universal Ornaments that can be added to the armor you earn, allowing you to customize gear without worrying about Eververse perks. More on that (and other Eververse changes)…