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Weekend Talk Amongst Yourselves
Games. Know ’em, love ’em, live ’em. Talk about ’em here. Good morning, and welcome to Weekend Talk About Amongst Yourselves. Big thanks to Jamir, fresh off his triumph in yesterday’s ‘Shop Contest roundup, for supplying today’s TAYpic. Want a piece of the TAYpic action atop this six-day-a-week post? Grab the base image here, provide…
By Owen Good Published June 10, 2012 -
Neal Stephenson’s Very Special Guest Star Talks About His Appearance
If you have yet to watch Neal Stephenson’s pitch for CLANG, this story contains spoilers below. My first, briefly considered reaction at the 3:04 mark in Neal Stephenson’s excellent Kickstarter video, is that this celebrity guest star was an impersonator. That’s the nature of the Internet. I wasn’t aware these two had any kind of…
By Owen Good Published June 10, 2012 -
A Hell of a Cameo Helps Neal Stephenson Pitch His Sword-Fighting Video Game
A flood of video game projects on Kickstarter over the past four months has made it extremely difficult to rise out of the crowd or portray one’s concept as particularly unique or worth funding. But Neal Stephenson, the eminent science-fiction writer, has hauled off and done something next-level with this pitch video. Stephenson wants “to…
By Owen Good Published June 10, 2012 -
League of Legends Hacked, Names & Emails Stolen
League of Legends developers Riot Games have issued a statement detailing a recent breach of some of the company’s servers, resulting in the theft of player information. The EU West and EU Nordic & East databases were accessed in the intrusion, and Riot says that while no payment or billing info was taken, what was…
By Luke Plunkett Published June 10, 2012 -
Wonder Nin Powers: The Winners
An E3 that began so promisingly for Nintendo ended with a shoulder shrug—no price, no release date for Wii U, and no real news out of the 3DS, either. It sure looked a lot more awesome in our smart shoppers’ retelling of the week in L.A. for the company’s big three. We’ve got 20 hilarious…
By Owen Good Published June 9, 2012 -
Once Crysis 3 is Done, Crytek will be Working on Nothing but Free-to-Play Games
Crytek is building Warface, the studio’s first freemium shooter, shown recently at E3. It’s also going to deliver Crysis 3, a more traditional FPS, sometime in 2013. Whenever the studio finishes off its current committments, CEO Cevat Yerli told VideoGamer.com, it will be developing free-to-play games only. Yerli considers DLC and premium gaming services, both…
By Owen Good Published June 9, 2012 -
Valve is Working on a Movie—but It’s Not What You Think
Curious item out of Hollywood—Valve is licensing its intellectual property to a science-fiction film, but it has nothing to do with Portal, Half-Life or any other title familiar to the publisher. Instead, its Source engine is being used to help animate Deep, a movie about mankind’s struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. At the…
By Owen Good Published June 9, 2012 -
High Hope is Justified as Borderlands 2 Reopens Pandora
I loved Borderlands, the way you love memories of a summer or a semester when you first read a favorite book. Yet writing up impressions of a game like Borderlands 2 is quite difficult, actually. Where do you begin? “Hey, remember that game from October 2009 that inhaled 80 hours of your time? Well, get…
By Owen Good Published June 9, 2012 -
Strikingly Accurate Tipster Resurfaces with Info on Mass Effect 3‘s Alternate Ending DLC
While he offers no citation, the same Reddit tipster who absolutely nailed every detail of the Mass Effect: Rebellion Pack nearly three weeks before Sony’s Hong Kong website outed it, is back at it again with information on Mass Effect 3: Earth, the upcoming multiplayer extension and, more broadly, the “Extended Cut” DLC. Quoting derptemp6698:…
By Owen Good Published June 9, 2012 -
PSN Picked a Strange Weekend to Have an Outage [Update]
Good old Error 8071053D is back if you try to sign into PlayStation Network from your PlayStation 3. If you try to log in to a PlayStation web site, you get a page tells you the site is down for maintenance. These outages affect North American servers. Update: A Sony representative tells Kotaku that the…
By Owen Good Published June 9, 2012 -
Sega Gives Phantasy Star Universe Three Months to Live
Though its singleplayer functionality will, of course, remain, the six-year run of Phantasy Star Universe will come to an end Sept. 7 when Sega shuts off online support for the game for the Xbox 360. Sega announced the shutdown yesterday. “This was not an easy decision but there comes a time when we must consider…
By Owen Good Published June 9, 2012 -
Chinese Domain Squatter Won’t Own ‘XboxSmartGlass.com’ for Much Longer
Before E3, Microsoft registered every possible permutation of “XboxSmartGlass” and “MicrosoftSmartGlass,” tipping off Monday’s reveal of the technology that will connect the Xbox 360 to Android and iOS devices. Well, they got every possible combination except one: “XboxSmartGlass.com.” That’s owned by one Tang Haiyue of Guanghzhou, China, who bagged the domain on June 1, right…
By Owen Good Published June 9, 2012 -
Some Dude’s Trying to Play Q*Bert for a Ridiculously Long Time. Again.
OK, well, not just “some dude.” The record-seeker is Ed Heemskerk, who set the marathon record for Q*Bert at 68.5 hours back in March, and now is bidding for a 100-hour stretch on a single quarter. He started yesterday morning at 8 a.m. EDT, meaning that, by now, he’s a little more than a quarter…
By Owen Good Published June 9, 2012 -
Pay Less for Your Guild Dues
The occasion of Guild Wars 2‘s second beta weekend is good enough to put the game on pre-order discount from one e-tailer. That, plus some preoders from heavily anticipated big hits this fall, and a couple of unusual combo sales, highlight the first post-E3 edition of The Moneysaver. More than 60 savings are below. Dig…
By Owen Good Published June 9, 2012 -
The Best of Kotaku, This Week
If I find anything Adventure Time related, you can rest assured that I will post it. Or buy it. Or at the very least light up in response to seeing it. I even have Adventure Time earrings. One is Jake and one is Finn So this week’s best image is an ode to The Avengers,…
By Tina Amini Published June 9, 2012 -
The Many Throat-Stabbings of E3 2012
E3 2012 wasn’t just a banner year for bows and helicopters, it was also quite the year for throat-trauma. From Splinter Cell to Resident Evil to Far Cry 3, game after game featured resplendent, flinch-inducing throat violence. Chris pulled together some gifs for you, in case you’re you’re into this sort of thing, or in…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 9, 2012 -
Batter Up! Watch This Kids-Vs-Zombies Game In Action
Hopefully you’ve already heard about Zombie Playground, the art-turned-kickstarter-turned-game featuring yet another fresh take on the zombie apocalypse that actually feels fresh. Massive Black’s game will pit grade-school kids against the shambling dead. This gameplay is… well, it’s rough, but it’s also pre-alpha, and mostly intended to give a sense of the basic game. Unclear…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 8, 2012 -
Why The Walking Dead Game Isn’t in Black and White
Telltale’s Walking Dead video game has been great so far; better and truer to the source material than the less-than-great TV show. But when I first started it up, I couldn’t help but wonder why it was in color. The game is cell-shaded and looks for all the world like a moving comic book, but…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 8, 2012 -
The Roots Offer a New Take on the Unofficial Theme Song of E3 2012
My, what a week it’s been. Almost every member of team Kotaku convened in Los Angeles to bust our legs running around getting all the best video game news we could grab, and we are all bushed. If there was one trend I noticed at E3 2012 (beyond the guns and bows and helicopters and…
By Kirk Hamilton Published June 8, 2012 -
This Guy’s Halo 4 Mohawk Should Win ‘Best Hair of E3’
Meet Ryan Hakik, freelance video game tester and Halo fan. He’s got something on his head. I shot this quick interview with him yesterday at E3, just outside of the Halo 4 part of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 booth. It’s a little hard to tell in the video, but that 4 lights up. Best hair-do of…
By Stephen Totilo Published June 8, 2012