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Steam Client Update Pointedly Mentions Dota 2 is Coming ‘Soon’
Valve rolled out “all-new server and client code” supporting downloads over its Steam digital distribution service, intriguingly noting that, “soon, Dota 2 will be delivered using it.” Dota 2 as yet has no release date (late 2011 is the last we’ve heard), so it’s hard to say what “soon” actually means here. The new server…
By Owen Good -
Activision Seeks to Sieze Nettlesome ModernWarfare3.com Domain
It appears that Activision is fed up with the owner of ModernWarfare3.com. The publisher filed a complaint with a dispute board seeking to sieze control of the domain, after noticing this week that it was redirecting visitors to Battlefield 3‘s official site. Before that, ModernWarfare3.com had simply hosted anti-Call of Duty propaganda. When the redirect…
By Owen Good -
Unpaid Overtime
The record for overtimes in an NBA playoff game is four; in a regular-season game, it’s six. But when the Indianapolis Olympians and Rochester Royals hooked up for a four-hour contest, the final was only 75-71; the game pre-dated the introduction of a shot clock. When Kotaku commenter Frox and the Boston Celtics played a…
By Owen Good -
Metacritic Calls on Writers to Review More Shitty Games
Metacritic’s founder made a little bit of a stir earlier in the week when he went on the A Jumps B Shoots podcast to discuss a wide variety of topics, one of them being that game reviewers were obligated to “review all the shit,” not just good games or those expected to sell well. GamePro…
By Owen Good -
Raw Deals
I love that doo-doo line. That boy’s got TALENT! Never again will there be a comedian who defines the word “superstar” like Eddie Murphy did in the 1980s. The lengths we went to, as children, to hear the forbidden fruit of his filth-flarn-flarn-filth-flarn tree. In the summer of 1985, my friend Craig and I would…
By Owen Good -
Take a Hint, Tails
Pondering why Sonic’s fourth game paired him with Knuckles, and not Tails, Dorkly envisions this uncomfortable meeting with the hedgehog’s agent. The audience wants unlikely allies, right? Even as hated, as Jar-Jar-class loathed as Tails is, somehow, we can’t help but think this is where it all started to turn south for the series.
By Owen Good -
NCAA Football Fans, Your Real Rosters Have Arrived (for Xbox 360)
There’s always a race to publish the first complete, accurately named roster for NCAA Football 12, and this year it was available on the day of release. However, that doesn’t usually address depth chart placement, equipment details, or for some players, position changes and attribute re-ratings. For those Xbox 360 players waiting for truly accurate…
By Owen Good -
Still We Wonder Who’ll Stop Mortal Kombat‘s Rain
The story of Rain, the latest fighter coming to Mortal Kombat is a story of revenge. Furious that he would be denied the rank he felt he deserved, Rain joined the faction that orphaned him. I’m not sure how being second-in-command there is any better, but there you have the motivation for this character when…
By Owen Good -
Cliffy B’s First Game was a Sequel
“Just stumbled upon my first real game I made…on disk,” writes Epic Games’ design director and the creator of the Gears of War series. Weighing in at a whopping 1.44 megabytes is The Palace of Deceit II: The Dragon’s Plight. We’re awaiting a gameplay trailer, Cliff.
By Owen Good -
The Week in Gaming Apps
This week Kotaku‘s Gaming Apps of the Day are all over the place, from an arcade fighter to a card game to a … clock? It’s starting to look like the Nintendo Download up in here. What’s next, colored notepads? I suppose it’s okay when the clock in question is Fallout inspired, and it’s not…
By Mike Fahey -
StarCraft MMO Mod Releases Its Debut Gameplay Trailer
StarCraft Universe, the “World of Starcraft” MMO project that touched off a tense week for the StarCraft II modding community back in January, has released the first trailer of gameplay from its alpha version. You get a wide look at a lot of features of the game in that four-minute trailer, above. Ryan Winzen, the…
By Owen Good -
Facebook Games More Likely to Please a Woman than Sex
Hold your manhoods cheap, guys. Doritos, of all fuckin’ things, surveyed girl gamers and found that they’re more likely to get off on video games—worse yet, Facebook video games—than doing it with you. A survey of 2,052 lady gamers, commissioned to promote something called (adjusts glasses) “the Doritos Dip Desperado Facebook game,” found that women…
By Owen Good -
Why Sony and Microsoft Teaming Up on Their Next Console Makes a Lot of Sense
Microsoft has trouble making hardware. Sony has trouble running online services. What if the next Xbox and the next PlayStation are one and the same? A few months ago, while reporting about the then unannounced Wii U console for Nintendo, we stumbled on an interesting ancillary rumor: Microsoft and Sony were in active discussions regarding…
By Joel Johnson -
This Week in the Business
What’s happened in the business of video games this past week… QUOTE | “Playing a much bigger game.” – EA, fresh off its massive PopCap acquisition, is setting its sights higher than Zynga, noting that Facebook is “just one segment” to leverage. QUOTE | A new study commissioned by Doritos found that girls who enjoy…
By Joel Johnson -
Lana Del Rey Sings a Lonely Song Called “Video Games”
25-year-old Lana Del Rey certainly has a lot to be sad about: she’s gorgeous, talented, and has excellent taste in old Hollywood indulgence. But as a bald traffic cop once wandered by my car and told me, everybody hurts sometimes. And there’s something genuinely affecting in the picture she paints of a relationship that hits…
By Joel Johnson -
Now Make a Castlevania That Copies BloodRayne
Now that I’ve gotten past the shock of the initial reveal and the awe of the first trailer, I’m done referring to BloodRayne: Betrayal as a game that’s trying to be Castlevania. With each new screenshot I find myself wishing there was a Castlevania that looked this good. The screens don’t do the game justice,…
By Mike Fahey