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Hate Map Packs? You’ve Got Nobody to Blame But Yourselves (Or Your Friends)

Whenever a multiplayer game’s map packs are revealed- and Call of Duty is often the worst offender in this regard – people on the internet wail and gnash their teeth. And rightly so, in many respects, since you’re rarely getting much value for your dollar. All that wailing counts for naught, though, because as far…

These Japanese Schoolgirls Hate Nuclear Power with a Cute Song

If you’ve played a Japanese video game, watched an anime, or read a manga, you’ve seen them: schoolgirls. Idols, in particular, are the lighter, fluffy end of the spectrum. They stand for the fantasies of their fans. Not idol collective Seifuku Kojo Iinkai (School Uniform Improvement Committee), or SKi. Those girls are standing up to…

Red Dead Redemption Cast Members Reunite For a Live-Action Horror Movie

A whole bunch of the stars of Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption are getting back together to shoot a live-action horror movie set in the Wild West. In a brothel. With zombies. The movie’s called From the Trailer to the Grave, and is directed by K. Harrison Sweeney. It stars, among others, Steve J. Palmer and…

Co-Op Comes Very, Very Late to the 40K: Space Marine Party

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine is out next week. And developers Relic have only today revealed the fact the game will have a co-op mode. It’s a late addition to the game; so late, in fact, it won’t be available until next month. The co-op mode, called Exterminatus, has two maps, and lets up to four…

Star Trek Online Goes Free to Play by the End of 2011

Star Trek Online, the MMO picked up by new owner Perfect World when it acquired Cryptic Studios back in May, will be taken to a free-to-play format by the end of 2011, says the new ownership. Perfect World’s chief financial officer told investors during a call today that it’s looking to a free-to-play Star Trek…

The Best Gears of War Book You’ll Ever Read

In anticipation of the upcoming Gears of War 3, Microsoft and Epic contracted novelist and Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter author Tom Bissell to take a deeper look into the design and history of the Gears franchise. Titled “The Art and Design of Gears of War,” it covers most every aspect of the Gears…

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations Gets a Multiplayer Beta This Saturday

In preparation for the November 15th launch of Ubisoft’s upcoming open-world stealth/action/swarthiness-simulator Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, the publisher will be running a multiplayer beta for the game from September 3-11th. However, the beta is exclusive to Playstation Plus members as well as “select Playstation 3 Uplay members.” Multiplayer in the new title will be much the…

You Probably Won’t Play This PSP Game

Unless you live in Japan or import it, that is. The last Yakuza spin-off PSP title, Black Panther: Like a Dragon New Chapter, wasn’t localized for the West. With the PS Vita coming out, smart money says this one won’t be either. If there’s one thing that makes me happy about a new Black Panther…

Checking the Pipes at Dragon Con 2011

It’s not every day you find a Kotaku editor in downtown Atlanta. Normally I’m about 10 miles north, but for Dragon Con 2011 I’m making an exception. I’ll be hanging out at one of the world’s largest science fiction and fantasy conventions this weekend, taking photos, taking names, and taking whatever gaming news might pop…

Sony Says PSN has Added 3 Million Users Since Attack

Howard Stringer, the chief executive of Sony, said at a Berlin electronics show that the PlayStation Network has recovered from this spring’s attack and 23-day outage by adding 3 million new users in the three months since. “This year, we at Sony have been flooded, we’ve been flattened, we’ve been hacked, we’ve been singed,” Stringer…

EA Sports Seeks Ex-Football Players for Games Development Fellowship

EA Sports, in collaboration with NCAA Football, will this winter begin offering paid fellowships to former college football players seeking experience in a games development or sports entertainment career. The players will work in the EA Tiburon studio, where the NCAA Football and Madden series are developed. The fellowships begin in January and will be…

Riddles and Penguins and Cats and Bats: Just Another Night in Arkham City

Of all the things that Batman: Arkham Asylum had going for it—and there were a lot of them—my favorite thing was the Riddler challenges. Placed throughout the game, these optional side-challenges ran the gamut from extremely easy to borderline impossible, and provided a welcome incentive to go off the path and explore. Last weekend at…

Retro Game Master Episode 11: The Wing of Madoola

This week on Retro Game Master the Kacho takes on The Wing of Madoola Released in 1986 for the Nintendo Famicom,The Wing of Madoola is a side-scrolling action adventure tale of the Kingdom of Badham (nothing more dangerous than bad ham) and a magical statue that can bring peace to the world. So of course…

Create Your Own Dragon Ball Z Character That Looks Like Every Other Dragon Ball Z Character

For the first time in any Dragon Ball franchise game, Dragon Ball Z Ultimate Tenkaichi lets players build their own custom fighters to battle online and off, proving once and for all that every Akira Toriyama character is the same guy with different hair and accessories. This is why I could never get into Dragon…

Rings and Coins

COLOGNE, GERMANY – Sonic the Hedgehog and Mario hash a few things out at Nintendo’s Gamescom booth. (Photo by Michael McWhertor) Contre Jour: It’s Unlike Anything You Haven’t Seen Contre Jour came home from E3 with a chest full of ribbons from major league critics and became a lot of people’s most anticipated indie game…

Official Portal Socks Are Awesome, Not For Long Falls

Is this the best summer for video game-themed socks… ever? It’s looking that way, now that J!NX has released officially licensed Portal 2 knee socks, footwear based on the Aperture Science Long Fall Boots from Valve’s first-person puzzler. While your sock drawer may already be over-encumbered with excellent Minecraft-inspired socks, I don’t know how any…

The Jamestown Video Game Set on Mars Seems Historically Inaccurate

They grew corn and tobacco in colonial Jamestown on Mars back in the 1600s. Sir Walter Raleigh took up arms, via a spaceship, to fight the Spanish-Martian alliance. I don’t think any of this is true, but this was history as described to me by Tim Ambrogi, one of the developers of the four-player shoot-em-up…

That Weirdly Racist NPC in Deus Ex: Human Revolution

For the most part, the characters in Deus Ex: Human Revolution stick to the middle of the road. There’s the tortured, hard-to read protagonist, the brilliant woman with a secret, the sassy British tech guy, and so on. But among them, one character sticks out—Letitia, a street informant that Adam Jensen meets in Detroit. Letitia…

The Splatters is About the Cheerful Suicide of Blobs (But You May Have Known That Already)

Before I saw The Splatters this month at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle, our own Brian Crecente saw the game, then called Confetti Carnival, at the DICE convention in Las Vegas back in February. We don’t quite have the situation here as described in the great Jorge Luis Borges story about the man he…

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Screen Shots