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Gaze Upon The Various Shapes Jake Will Take In The 3DS Adventure Time Game

Man, I didn’t realize today was going to be Tina-posting-about-Adventure Time day when I got into the office. If I knew I would have brought in a bunch of candy to eat ferociously while pretending I was eating citizens of the Candy Kingdom. (Cause why not? I don’t know why!) Jake’s stretching into various forms…

This List of Video Games Sampled by Hip-Hop Artists Said Knock You Out

Rappers love Pac-Man. I mean, everyone loves Pac-Man. But this list at Spin’s website—which catalogs 50 rap songs that have sampled game music for their beats—testifies to the abiding love affair MCs have for the hungry video game icon. There have been a lot of Super Mario samples and some genuine surprises—who sampled Actraiser?!—lurk in…

Old Is New: This Year’s Best Games Are All About The Classics

This fall, we’ve been getting the best sort of déja vu. From Dishonored to XCOM, many of the best games of the fall have learned from past classics and reworked them into smart, satisfying, fresh-feeling games. Is this new appreciation for 90’s classics a trend, or an anomaly? What exactly does “old-school” mean? Does the…

Only In Adventure Time Is Kicking Your Friend’s Butt Okay

There are more than a few Adventure Time games out there, including the as of yet unreleased 3DS game (which is shaping up pretty nicely). But of the iOS games out there, this one is actually fun and riffs on the delightfully silly humor that makes the show so great. Jumping Finn Turbo is a…

Avast, you Apple-owning whoresons! The Witcher 2 is now available for Mac

It’s Like Dungeon Keeper, But Uglier

Okay, I have mixed feelings about A Game of Dwarves, a new strategy-sim game that the folks at Paradox will release on Steam next week. On one hand, it looks like a lot of fun! You run a dungeon full of dwarves, sending them off to train and defend and research and mine and do…

Rockstar is hoping to hear your ideas about Grand Theft Auto V‘s multiplayer.

I’m Sure I’d Love Dishonored… If It Didn’t Make Me Sick.

I really want to keep playing Dishonored I have a digital copy, all neatly installed via Steam. It works perfectly well. I’ve loaded it and started playing, more than once. The controls are nothing I can’t handle, and I have the long patience for a game full of stealth. I play nearly every game slowly…

Chapter Nine Brings the Prince of Power to Avengers Alliance

Marvel’s mighty Facebook game just got a fair bit mightier with the launch of Chapter Nine, the challenge of Excelsior Mode, and the one and only (give or take a couple dozen) son of Zeus—the incredible Herc. You can call him Hercules. One of Marvel’s more down-to-Earth demigods is now available to join the ranks…

What I Learned From In-Game Ads: Dunkin’ Donuts is Way Better Than Century 21

Seventeen days ago, I told the world how happy I was to build a virtual Dunkin’ Donuts in my virtual city in the Facebook game SimCity Social World, I have an update regarding another famous brand. Century 21? The real estate people? Their virtual storefront stinks. This is not an opinion. This is math. In…

Aveline’s Backstory And Ass-Kicking Ability Shine In This Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation Story Trailer

Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation stars Aveline, a woman who winds her way through every social stratum in colonial New Orleans. She is, from everything we’ve seen so far, a devastatingly effective Assassin. But what brought her to the Assassins in the first place? This trailer teases out her story, wrapped in the dark side of…

The Power to Shape Entire Planets, Now Only $.99

It used to be if a guy wanted the ability the mold an entire celestial sphere to suit his fancy he’d need to make a pact with some sort of all-powerful otherworldly being. Today all one must do is drop $.99 on Topia World Builder More of a toy than a proper game, Crescent Moon…

You Can Voice-Chat On the Wii U While Gaming, But There’s a Catch [UPDATE 2]

The Wii U will support in-game voice chat, but you’ll be forgiven if you’re not sure exactly how that will work. Nintendo hasn’t shown an official headset for the Wii U and the Wii U’s Pro Controller—the one that looks a lot like an Xbox 360 controller—doesn’t even have a port to connect one. So…

Quite Possibly the Most Refined Video Game Artwork You Will Ever See

There’s something about a classically styled silhouette that just screams “high-class.” You can picture the shadow-etched profiles on the brooches of moneyed dowagers or hanging on the walls of old-money mansions. In fact, if I had a mansion, I’d have Olly Moss‘ fantastic silhouettes all over the place. I don’t have a mansion. Thankfully, a…

An Extremely Clever Way to Revisit a Ten-Year-Old Adventure Classic

Runaway: A Road Adventure is a classic point-and-click adventure game from 2001, one of the most beloved games in the genre. For its (slightly late) tenth anniversary, developer Pendulo Studios delivers a retelling of the tale through the eyes of its love-struck heroes, years after the flames of passion have died. In Hidden Runaway, available…

Bravely Default Is Killing It In Japan. Hey Square Enix, Time To Bring It Here.

People in Japan like Bravely Default. They really like Bravely Default According to new numbers from Japanese sales tracker Media Create (as reported by Siliconera), Square Enix’s latest 3DS RPG moved 141,529 copies during its first week on the marketplace. There’s even talk of a sequel As Siliconera points out, Bravely Default beat out its…

This Week’s Windows Phone Charts: Gold Coins and the Flow Free Conspiracy

Bring the mobile game ranking charts back to Kotaku this week has taught me a lot about the various mobile platforms. The iPhone and Android players have similar tastes. Windows Phone players can’t get many of the games from those other platforms, so they go insane. Oh, and everybody loves Flow Free exactly the same…

The 3DS’ Biggest Hits Can Be Pulled Straight from the Interwebs in This Week’s Nintendo Download

In the continuing saga of Nintendo getting a clue about how gamers want to get their experiences, the House of Mario is making Super Mario 3D Land, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Mario Kart 7 and Starfox 64 3D available from their eShop storefront. These downloadable versions will cost $39.99 each, just like…

Do Doom 3’s Graphics Hold Up?

I’ve always felt strangely about Doom 3. On the one hand, it was a fairly revolutionary game, graphically. The lighting was striking. On the other hand, it looked kind of gross: humans in the game were starkly lit with strange, bump-mapped faces and odd, robotic movements. But is that a bad thing or does it…

Behold the Old-Timey Glory of BioShock Infinite’s Collector’s Editions

Collector’s editions come and go all the damn time in video games. But it’s not every day that one of a game’s principal creators makes like a carnival barker trying to lure folks into opening up their wallets. That’s what Irrational Games’ Ken Levine is doing for the two limited editions of BioShock Infinite: “So,…