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Being An Otaku Has Gotten Easier, Says Shoko Nakagawa

Shoko Nakagawa is a Japanese pop star, actress, illustrator and TV personality. She’s found mainstream success in Japan. She is also a proud otaku. “I knew I was an otaku from a very early age,” Nakagawa recently told Kotaku via an email interview. As a child, she says video games and manga taught her so…

Open For Business. Nakagyo, Kyoto. By Jim Sheppard. JPGs is a photo peek into wherever gamers might find interesting. If you’re a photographer and have images you want to share, drop us a line! 

Nintendo And Microsoft Are Rubbing Sony’s Face In It

We’re conditioned to expect console manufacturers to be bitter rivals, constantly at each other’s throats in a battle for market supremacy. But sometimes, the enemy of an enemy can be a friend. We got a reminder during E3 that the PS4, unlike most other platforms on Earth, does not support crossplay between consoles. That means…

Proposed EU Copyright Law Could Cause Problems For Fan Content In Games

Yesterday, the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs voted to approve a controversial new copyright directive that, if made into law, could change the internet as we know it. Just one of the many potential terrible results of the directive, which tasks companies to monitor user-submitted content for copyright infringement, could be a radical alteration…

Alliteration Algorithm Generates Genius Fortnite Frivolity

From recipes to paint color names to Hearthstone cards, everything is better when you make a bot do it. Check out how this machine-learning algorithm named locations on the Fortnite map. Fortnite only has one map, so the people over at Botnik Studios took it upon themselves to use their machine-learning tools to make an…

Which games had the best E3? The data folks over at Thinknum (a site, full disclosure, run by my friend Josh Fruhlinger) have some charts showing how game companies and their games did. The biggest trailers were for Cyberpunk, Fallout and The Last Of Us; the worst backlash was to Command & Conquer.

Discord’s New Games Tab Is A Lot Like Steam

Last week, Steam added new chat features that took a page from Discord’s book—pretty much the entire book, actually. Now, Discord has added a “games” tab that replicates some of Steam’s most pervasive features. And thus, the circle is complete. Discord’s games tab pulls together game-specific information from across multiple channels, distilling it into a…

People Keep Trying To Win Fortnite Without Weapons

Winning a game of Fortnite is impressive on its own. Winning a game of Fortnite with no weapons is bonkers. The last person standing in the 100-person survival shooter wins it all. Most of the time, this takes a combination of gun skill, fort-building finesse and tactics. It’s not a thing a lot of people…

Every Big Game Coming Out In Summer 2018

Summer is here. Time to chill by the pool, hang out in the park, or post up on the beach for a nice breezy afternoon. Whatever you do don’t stay home because there won’t be many games there, unless you have a Switch, which is getting a surge of ports. I kid. Mostly. There are…

The Sims 4 Seasons Makes Your Sims Feel More Real

The Sims 4‘s latest expansion, Seasons, gives the game the rhythms of a passing year. While it might seem like a decorative change, after playing it, Seasons feel essential. Fans have clamored for Seasons since The Sims 4‘s release. Each game has gotten the expansion since The Sims 2, and getting to see spring, summer,…

Battle Passes Are So Hot Right Now

Pay-to-win games are garbage. Loot boxes are passe. Cosmetics are cute, but not a great incentive to keep playing. Game publishers have cycled through a bevy of monetization gimmicks aimed at keeping gamers putting cash into their games, some more successful than others. Now, more and more of them seem to be coalescing around a…

Final Fantasy XIV‘s Director Talks Housing Shortage, PS4 Cross-Play, And Much More

Naoki Yoshida has become an icon to Final Fantasy XIV fans. When he logs into the game, his character gets mobbed. One of the reasons for his popularity is his willingness to get candid about all of the issues his game faces. Last week at E3 in Los Angeles, I spoke to Yoshida about some…

Video Game Becomes Popular, World Panics

In the past few months, a video game has become popular among young people, prompting experts and commentators around the world to decide that there must be something dangerous about it. Newspaper columnists, education commentators and politicians are variously claiming that the Popular Video Game is having a detrimental effect on children; that it’s encouraging…

I Don’t Know If Nintendo Won E3, But They Are Winning June

The traditional way to view game companies when it’s E3 season is to look at what they announce for the future. In that regard, Nintendo had a so-so E3. During its pre-recorded presentation, Nintendo announced relatively few games, most of them safe sequels and a line-up for the remainder of the year that’s a little…

Watch Us Play Mario Tennis Aces

With Mario Tennis Aces coming to the Switch this Friday, I asked our resident tennis aficionado Tim Rogers to play me in a “best of three” series. Mario Tennis Aces introduces an interesting lineup of characters that somehow includes Chain Chomp, cool acrobatic trick shots, and super shots that let you aim exactly where you…

My Most Embarrassing E3 Encounter With A Gaming Celebrity

I would like to tell you about a mortifying encounter I recently had with a very well known figure in video games. It’s a better story if you don’t know who it is until the end I was hanging around the Ubisoft booth at E3 this year, waiting for a private demo of Transference, the…

Model Japanese Arcade Cabinets Are Gloriously Cute

Look at these! Japan’s Wave Corporation has been releasing several different miniature arcade cabinets (hereand here, for example). These Astro City cabinets, however, are my favorite. The level of detail in these 1/12 scale models is incredible. *applause* The Astro City cabinets are priced at 3,200 yen ($29) each and will go on sale in…

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 5 Anime Revealed 

Earlier today, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure creator Hirohiko Araki announced that the manga’s fifth story arch is getting an anime. The announcement was made at the end of a Jojo art exhibition press conference. Araki said that part five, Ougon no Kaze (Golden Wind in English), of the Jojo anime will start airing this fall. Above…

Through The Gates. Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto, Japan. By Michael Shaffer. JPGs is a photo peek into wherever gamers might find interesting. If you’re a photographer and have images you want to share, drop us a line! 

We’re returning to our playthrough of Nier: Automata right now on Kotaku’s Twitch channel It’s a game about happy androids, where nothing goes wrong.