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The Switch’s Joy-Con Is Getting A D-Pad From Hori

This July, Japanese peripheral maker Hori is releasing a Joy-Con with a proper D-pad. Thank goodness for that! You will, however, have to trade some standard features for it. The current left Joy-Con features face buttons as does the right one. But if you mostly play in handheld mode, a left-side D-pad might be more…

Why You Shouldn’t Always Trust Job Listing Sites For Video Game News

Recently, Japanese job site CareerIndex posted that game developer Cave was looking for staff for a Yakuza game. The listing was, apparently, a mistake. According to IT Media, Cave’s stock shot up 7.1 percent. Cave is famous for its bullet hell games, but these days, it mostly makes smartphone games. The listing said Cave was…

Tokyo Just Got A New Godzilla Statue 

While this statue isn’t life-sized, this is a fitting tribute to a giant of Japanese cinema. The Shin Godzilla statue went up in Tokyo’s Hibiya, where Toho Studios was born. The plaza was previously called “Godzilla and Toho Plaza” and featured a much smaller statue that was unveiled in 1995. The plaza is now called…

Matsumoto Castle and the North Alps. Matsumoto, Japan. By Joey Elam. Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

Surprise, Zelda Won Game Of The Year At The Game Developers Choice Awards

Nintendo’s latest Zelda adventure followed up its winat the 2017 Game Awards with GOTY honours at tonight’s Game Developers Choice Awards, held as part of the 2018 Game Developers Conference. It also won Best Audio and Best Design. Tim Schafer, meanwhile, was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award, and upon receiving it gave a lengthy,…

The shittiest kidnap van I’ve ever seen was doing laps around GDC all today. I guess if you want to kidnap kids you spray-paint “Free Candy” on the van but this is what you do if you want to lure in tech bros? When it fills up do they drive them straight to Burning Man?

Sonic’s Original Backstory Took Place In World War II

The backstory of Sonic the Hedgehog used to involve a fighter pilot with Sonic painted on the nose of his plane, the game’s designers said today. Game designer Hirokazu Yasuhara and character designer Naoto Oshima were on hand Wednesday at Game Developers Conference to present a “post-mortem” of the design of Sega’s classic 1991 mascot…

Why is Sonic blue? Because Sega’s logo is blue. A simple answer to one of life’s great mysteries. From the Sonic panel currently ongoing at GDC.

Tomb Raider LEGO Has Some Cool Moving Parts

This fan-made Tomb Raider piece is of course not an official LEGO product. There’s a bit too much going on for that. Less of a playset and more a mechanical diorama, it’s got a collapsing plane wing and, more impressively, a moving river/waterfall for Lara to navigate. It was made by Kevin Wanner, and you…

Harold Halibut is an adventure game where everything is handmade. “Almost every object you see in the game exists in real life,” one of the game’s developers told me during an Xbox event at GDC yesterday. The demo I played felt like a streamlined take on standard point-and-click adventuring (with some worrisomely clunky dialogue), but…

GTA Online’s Free New Update Is Like Nascar On Steroids

Rockstar’s latest free update for GTA Online, The Southern San Andreas Supersport Series, adds a racing mode that feels like NASCAR on steroids. It’s some of the most fun I’ve had in GTA Online in a long while. The new “Hotring Sabre” vehicle available in this update is inspired by the stock cars seen in…

Runescape’s 13-Year Pirate Quest Is Coming To An End

With the recent release of “Pieces of Hate,” the long-running MMO Runescape finishes up a quest line that’s lasted for 13 years. In 2005, Runescape started the Pirates series of quests with “Rum Deal.” Pirates is the story of the villainous, tentacle-armed Rabid Jack laying siege to the pirate base of Mos Le’Harmless, whose rum…

What’s Really Going On With All Those Hacked Fortnite Accounts

In small fits and spurts, a Fortnite hacker recently typed out some sentence fragments over Discord: “maybe tomorrow / i get a letter / from epic games / holy fuck / paying 25k for fraud.” What if, after a month of lucrative work, Epic Games shut him down with a firm letter from their lawyers?…

Afterparty now has a trailer giving us our first good look at the new game from the makers of Oxenfree. You play as two dead college kids who need to out drink Satan in order to return to earth and walk among the living. Afterparty’s due out sometime in 2019.

EA Finally Unlocks Every Hero In Star Wars Battlefront II

Star Wars Battlefront II’s new update overhauls the game’s loot box laden progression system. One of players’ biggest complaints since before the game was even officially out was how hard it was to unlock iconic characters like Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader. A new patch finally unlocks every hero character in the game. Prior to…

Sea of Thieves is made to play with friends, sailing the high seas in search of treasure and frantic ship-to-ship battles. But what if you want to play solo? Well, it turns out it can either be a calm journey of self reflection or just straight up boring. Here’s a look at what it’s like…

One Of The NES’s Weirdest Controllers Gets A Modern Update 

Remember the NES Max? It was a weird boomerang-shaped controller from 1988 that was, like so many things, ahead of its time. Decades later, a retro modder has given the peripheral a more modern feel—specifically, the feel of an Xbox One analog stick. Modder Nick Neitzel recently shared his creation on Reddit and YouTube, which…

Riot, Blizzard, And Twitch Are Teaming Up To Fight Toxic Gaming Behavior

For years now, gaming companies like Riot, Blizzard, and Twitch have been fighting online abuse and harassment in their own ways, to mixed results. Now they’re trying something different: Working together. The Fair Play Alliance is a coalition made up of over 30 different companies, including Riot, Blizzard, Twitch, CCP, and Epic, that aims to…

Splatoon Was Originally A Game About Rabbits

“You’re a rabbit now; you’re a kid now” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, but Splatoon almost went there. Nintendo’s stylish shooter once starred bunnies, and before that, tofu blocks. During a panel at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco today, Splatoon producer Hisashi Nogami gave a presentation on how he and…

Ark: Survival Evolved is coming to Switch this fall. According to Studio Wildcard, the Switch version will have the same features as on PS4 and Xbox One. No word yet on whether it will be cross-play with the PC version. Either way, you’ll soon be able to poach dinosaurs on the go.