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If SimCity Were A Noir Film
With SimCity slowly stabilizing, more and more user-created content surfaces—which means we finally get to have some time to kick back and enjoy the beauty of our creations. YouTube user Calvin Chan put up this melancholic, noir-themed (the music from L.A. Noire fits right in) montage of his city at night. SimCity – My City…
By Gergo Vas Published March 11, 2013 -
Look At This Cool Journey Hoodie That You Can’t Have
I was browsing Reddit casually last night and stumbled on this seemingly well-made Journey hoodie by user volpinazzurra (you can only tell so much from pictures). “It’s reversible, too,” I excitedly proclaimed to myself and my cat. Quickly check the comments and…oh. Not for sale. Not on Etsy. Probably can’t bribe volpinazzurra with cookies and…
By Tina Amini Published March 11, 2013 -
Sister site io9 has pretty, new digs. Swing by and say hello!
By Brian Ashcraft Published March 11, 2013 -
You Can Download 700 Free Marvel Comics Right Now [UPDATE: Offer postponed]
Between now and 11pm ET on Tuesday, March 12, you can download some 700 first issues from Marvel Comics for free. And… it’s legal! The ComiXology Comics app for iOS and Android is offering 700 Marvel comics as part of a Marvel promotion announced at this weekend’s SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. You could probably…
By Stephen Totilo Published March 10, 2013 -
SimCity Makers Say Crashes Dramatically Reduced, No ‘All-Clear’ Yet
SimCity may have gotten more stable over the weekend as the game’s creators at Maxis have added more servers, but the game isn’t quite out of the woods yet. In a new update to the EA blog, Maxis head Lucy Bradshaw says that they’ve reduced game crashes by 92% since launch day, but that lingering…
By Kirk Hamilton Published March 10, 2013 -
Modders Keep MVP Baseball 2005 Alive With the World Baseball Classic
There is no game-action simulation of baseball on the PC this year, whatsoever. Management sims like Out of the Park Baseball or Sega’s MLB Manager are your only current options in a role that MLB 2K had filled—but the rush job it put in on MLB 2K13 left out that platform. At any rate, no…
By Owen Good Published March 10, 2013 -
Someone Put an Assassin’s Creed Screengrab In a TV Report on Syria
Ah, the dangers of Google image search. On Feb. 26, Denmark’s TV2 needed an over-the-shoulder shot for a report on the conflict in Syria, and some production assistant gave the control room a screengrab from the original Assassin’s Creed (which features Damascus prominently) Apparently it’s this one, from the game’s unofficial wiki site. That’s supposed…
By Owen Good Published March 10, 2013 -
The Best at Tecmo Super Bowl Settle a Claim Made by Everyone
MADISON, Wis.—Most of us are realistic about our shot. We are going to get our asses kicked, and then go to the bar. But we’re in March, we’re in a tournament, we’re all sports fans and if anybody in the 224-man field of Tecmo Madison, the largest Tecmo Super Bowl event in the nation, didn’t…
By Owen Good Published March 10, 2013 -
If you pick up God of War: Ascension, you can play the demo for The Last of Us early, on May 31.
By Owen Good Published March 10, 2013 -
Kotaku ‘Shop Contest: The Emperor Has No Pants
Though SimCity says it’s adding servers and stabilizing the situation, the game’s launch week will forever be remembered as a disasterbacle. That makes the image above of comedian Adam DeVine—a frame from this video advertisement—rather appropriate. The game was completely pantsed by its always-on DRM, and while I know a lot of you are upset…
By Owen Good Published March 10, 2013 -
Cool Dad Hacks Donkey Kong So His Daughter Can Play It as Pauline
This is pretty sweet. Mike Mika’s daughter is three years old, and the two of them play a lot of video games together. “She’s played as Peach in Super Mario Bros. 2 and naturally just assumed she could do the same in Donkey Kong,” he wrote. When it bummed her out to learn she couldn’t…
By Owen Good Published March 10, 2013 -
SimCity Gets Twice As Many People In The Game, “Improves Server Response Time By 40x”
Providing a little more detail than was briefly offered yesterday in a series of Twitter exchanges, Maxis’ Lucy Bradshaw has written a blog post outlining the progress that continues to be made fixing SimCity’s back-end woes. “Maxis continues to make huge progress in addressing the lag and server-capacity issues we experienced at launch”, she wrote.…
By Luke Plunkett Published March 10, 2013 -
The First Unofficial ‘Steam Box’ Will Launch This Holiday Season Starting At $1,000
Xi3’s Piston—the first unofficial Steam Box console—will launch this holiday at a starting price of $1,000, the hardware manufacturer announced today. If you preorder it before March 18, you’ll get a $100 discount. The Piston is the first PC designed specifically to play games in your living room using Steam’s Big Picture mode. Valve is…
By Jason Schreier Published March 9, 2013 -
SimCity Boss on Game’s Failure: ‘This is on Maxis. We Own It.’
After fielding some 1900 questions in a 45-minute Twitter Q&A, Maxis, the maker of SimCity, directly answered about eight regarding the game, which has been inaccessible to many since it released on Tuesday. “This is on Maxis,” said Lucy Bradshaw, the studio’s boss, in response to a customer’s allegation that publisher Electronic Arts required SimCity…
By Owen Good Published March 9, 2013 -
Reminder: Maxis studio boss Lucy Bradshaw is now taking questions on Twitter about the SimCity fiasco.
By Owen Good Published March 9, 2013 -
Someone, Quick, Send UN Election Monitors to Observe the NCAA Football Cover Voting
I’ve already had my say on the cynical, abusive b.s.. of running a Twitter or Facebook campaign to get folks to vote on a cover or a character or to pretend to give them some kind of influence over a video game publishing decision. In a nutshell, it’s garbage, and its true purpose is to…
By Owen Good Published March 9, 2013 -
It Would Take ‘Significant Engineering’ to Make SimCity an Offline Game
Later this afternoon, Lucy Bradshaw, the general manager of SimCity maker Maxis, is going to take over the studio’s official account to answer questions from gamers who, four days after the game’s release, are still unable to play the thing they purchased. She’s already given a preview answer to the question most of them likely…
By Owen Good Published March 9, 2013 -
The Best Of Kotaku, This Week
Welcome to the Best of Kotaku, where I round up all of this week’s best content. I’m back from vacation (with a slight tan and a cold) and ready to unleash this pretty, wooden Atari 2600 at you. It’s currently running for $1.2k on ebay. Or, if that’s too much for you, you can always…
By Tina Amini Published March 9, 2013
