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PlayStation Store Update, Now With HD Extract

Shoot, this is some week on the North American PlayStation Store. While the list of games and demos may be short, they’re games of quality, games with big, stompin’ boots. Dead Space Extraction, the port of the Wii game of the same name, is now available for digital download on the PlayStation 3, as is…

Battling Post Traumatic Stress Disorder With A Virtual Suicide Bombing

The Humvee drives down a crowded street in a foreign land. A child waves. Merchants display their wares. Suddenly soldiers raise their rifles as a suicide bomber runs into the street, detonating his lethal package. This is virtual PTSD therapy. This graphic simulation of a suicide bombing is part of a program launched earlier this…

It’s Like Uncharted With A Fat Guy

There will be spoilers in the video here, featuring one of the best scenes in the surprisingly excellent expansion to Enslaved: Odyssey To The West. But, really, this is just beautiful (and I’m not giving plot details away.) Pigsy’s Perfect 10 is a $10 single-player expansion to one of 2010’s more quietly superb games, Enslaved.…

The Music Of Silent Hill: Downpour Sounds Familiar

The next Silent Hill won’t feature the musical stylings of series mainstay Akira Yamaoka. Dexter composer Daniel Licht is filling the void in Silent Hill: Downpour… and doing a pretty good job of delivering the same musical vibe. Konami has released a sample of Licht’s contribution to Silent Hill: Downpour, about 90 seconds of moodiness,…

PS3 Black Ops Patched Massively

Early this morning Treyarch unleashed a major patch for the PlayStation 3 version of Call of Duty: Black Ops, fixing freezing issues, stability problems, and various other annoying issues. Check out the official forums for full patch notes.

The Truth About Video Game Motorcycles

A few years ago, I unlocked a real-life achievement: Obtained motorcycle license. If my life were an Xbox title, this would be one of those rare, satisfying, 200-point achievements, like when you acquire all weapons in Earth Defense Force, despite them being mostly worthless. Passing my motorcycle test required, surprisingly, more dexterity than maneuvering the…

Enjoy The Chaos And Din Of Killzone 3’s Bilgarsk Boulevard

We’re just a month away from Killzone 3, the next big thing for the PlayStation 3, potentially the system’s next great multiplayer hit. For those who care not for grand spectacle and story, here’s some online multiplayer carnage. Killzone 3’s open “beta”—a limited time multiplayer demo, really—will hit North America early next month. Who’s up…

The Rise Of Egypt And How You’ll Pay For Age Of Empires Online

Age of Empires Online is a free-to-play online game, but every free-to-play game needs to make money somehow. Kotaku spoke to members of the game’s development team about the newly-unveiled Egyptian civilization and how gamers can pay to play. Age of Empires, released in 1997 for the PC, was one of the first real-time strategy…

Did This Student Improve This PS3 Game’s Sound Effects?

Jim McGowan studies sound and music for video games at a school in England. He figured he’d test his skills by trying to improve the sound effects in WipEout HD. Listen to the results. First, we’ve got Jim’s version of the sound effects in the PlayStation 3 racing game. He recommends that you listen with…

Russian TV Links Modern Warfare 2 To Russian Massacre

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 may have influenced the deadly attack on Russia’s busiest airport earlier this week, state run news network Russia Today suggests. RT points out what they say are similarities between the bloody scenes depicted in the No Russian level of 2009’s game with the gruesome reality of yesterday’s attack at…

Witness The Awesome Power Of A Runaway Star

NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer captured this amazing image of the star Zeta Ophiuchi plowing through a radiant dust cloud at 54,000 miles per hour. Why is Zeta Ophiuchi on the run? We like to think of stars as fixed objects hanging in the sky, but as we’ve seen before in Kotaku’s daily science post,…

Giggling My Way Through The Bloody Bulletstorm Demo

Epic’s demo of its upcoming over-the-top first-person shooter Bulletstorm urges players to kill with skill. Lacking any real skill myself, fits of childish giggling will have to do. Keep in mind this is the first time I’ve gotten my hands on Bulletstorm, and I did sort of skip the tutorial for brevity’s sake, so my…

A Look at the Maps And Zombies of Black Ops First Strike

Call of Duty: Black Ops isn’t just getting four new maps when First Strike hits the Xbox 360 next month, it’s also getting more zombies. While we have already seen a bit of the four multiplayer maps included in First Strike, due to hit the Xbox 360 on Feb. 1 for 1,200 Microsoft points, or…

Dead Space 2: Severed DLC Reunites Players With Some Old Friends

Visceral Games’ first batch of downloadable content for Dead Space 2 is Severed, a single-player add-on starring Gabe Weller and Lexine Murdock from Dead Space Extraction. Severed will hit the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live in the coming weeks.

Killzone 3 Lays Waste To PlayStation Home

The Central Plaza of Sony’s PlayStation 3 virtual playground PlayStation Home has never looked quite as attractive as it will this Thursday. To think all it needed was an alien invasion. Killzone 3 is coming on February 22, but the Helghast are touching down in PlayStation Home a little bit earlier than that. Starting Thursday,…

Age of Empires Online Egypt Gallery

Spell Check: 5 Mistakes To Avoid In Magicka

Co-op wizardly action extravaganza Magicka comes out today, making this the perfect time for the following public service announcement. You will suck at Magicka. You will be so terrible. You’ll be introduced to its innovative element-mixing system, you’ll nod, smile at the power at your disposal, and then proceed to screw up in a thousand…

Crysis 2 and Bulletstorm Demos Are Live

Free demos for Bulletstorm (single-player) and Crysis 2 (multiplayer demo) are now on Xbox Live. That’s demos of two upcoming first-person shooters for the price of none. The Bulletstorm demo should be downloadable today for PlayStation 3 as well.

This Is What Super Meat Boy Success Feels Like

Super Meat Boy is a 2D game with relatively simple graphics. That’s what it looks like, at least. This action-packed fan film by Joseph Manalaysay captures what beating one of the game’s brutal levels feels like. As anyone that’s been playing games since the Atari age will tell you, video games don’t need elaborate visuals…

Mammoth Sale on Xbox Live

There’s a big sale running now through the end of the month on Xbox Live on 2K and Rockstar content. The deals include loads of Borderlands, GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption DLC. Full list here.