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Microsoft doing a new live show focusing on Sea of Thieves and Xbox Game Pass news? Cool. Doing it at 3pm ET on a Saturday (March 10)? Weird. Microsoft tells Kotaku: “Looking ahead, we’re aiming to do the show on weekdays and will have more to share in the future.” Ok!

Rave on! Staff Writer Heather Alexandra is streaming Killer7 live now on Kotaku’s Twitch channel. Finally, that Framemeister has come in handy.

No Man’s Sky Fans Rejoice After Finally Finding Rare Beetle

In the universe of No Man’s Sky there’s an animal that’s only been spotted a few times. Called the Greater Mushroom Beetle, these are creatures that No Man’s Sky players tried to locate for months on end. Yesterday, another specimen was finally discovered in the player-created Galactic Hub, and the community is hyped. I first…

The White House has finally sent out invitations to the video game industry for a meeting on Thursday, and the ESA says it will attend. “Video games are plainly not the issue: entertainment is distributed and consumed globally, but the US has an exponentially higher level of gun violence than any other nation,” said a…

Final Fantasy XV: Royal Edition Adds A Big New Scene To The Final Act

Final Fantasy XV may be one of the strangest video games ever created, in large part because the developers have spent the past year and a half updating, changing, and adding new features to the game. And as of tomorrow, there’ll be a whole new story in the final act. We already knew that the…

Some Overwatch Players Think Brigitte’s Face Looks Too Much Like Mercy’s

Ever taken a long, hard look in the mirror and seen a face that doesn’t feel like your own? Overwatch’s latest hero, flail-slinging support Briggite, is having that problem in a very literal sense. For the past few days, Overwatch fans have been passing around images and videos showing how similar Brigitte’s in-game face is…

In UFO STI WTF, Even Aliens Need STI Checkups

UFO STI WTF is a short, visual novel browser game, built by a team as part of a game jam during the sex, love, and relationship-focused Australian games festival Heartbeat. The game attempts to remove the shame and fear that come with the process of getting tested by walking the player through a dialogue-based STI…

For Years, PlayStation Plus Kept The Vita Alive

Last week, Sony announced that the Vita, along with PS3, will stop getting monthly games through the PlayStation Plus subscription service in March 2019. In the wake of that news, it’s worth remembering: Vita owners never had an easy go of things, but it would have been a whole lot worse without PlayStation Plus. Vita…

Fortnite Battle Royale’s $10 Battle Pass Is Nice But Not Essential [Correction]

Games aren’t made for free, so when they’re sold for free, something’s got to give, and a lot of the time, developers’ solutions come off as skeezy or predatory. Loot boxes are passe. And don’t even get gamers started on pay-to-win buffs. Free-to-play survival shooter Fortnite Battle Royale is doing something different, using a crowd-pleasing…

The $80 limited edition of the Super Mario Encyclopedia comes in a surprise block slipcase with an actual surprise inside. There are four different holofoil covers—Super Mushroom, Fire Flower, Super Star, or 1-Up—and there’s no way of telling which one’s inside before purchase. How evil is that? At least medium evil.

Tekken Feels Weird As A Free-To-Play Mobile Game

Calling this game Tekken Mobile instead of Tekken Tap Tournament is a missed opportunity, but that’s besides the point. Tapping on a touchscreen and using cards for special moves is weird. Officially launched in North America last week for iOS and Android, Tekken Mobile is a very mobile fighting game. The technical complexity of the…

Drag Race Contestant’s Music Video Is Like A Rad New Fighting Game

Although she’s no longer on RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, this contestant’s new fighting game-themed single really shows her charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent. Aja was a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 9 and the All Stars Season 3. She was recently eliminated from All Stars, which made me super sad. I loved every…

Shadow Of War Was A Dreary Mess, But Its Expansion Is Good

It’s not the loot boxes that bummed me out about October’s Shadow of War. When playing the game, you can easily ignore them. I had a harder time ignoring the game’s bummer mood, ugly scenery, trite and tedious quests and mechanical messiness. I liked its predecessor. I wanted to like this game. I bailed halfway…

Ubisoft Cracks Down On Hate Speech In Rainbow Six Siege

Starting this week, Ubisoft plans to issue permanent bans for Rainbow Six Siege’s most toxic players, according to a recent announcement on the game’s subreddit “We will be implementing an improvement on the system we have been using to ban players that use racial and homophobic slurs, or hate speech, in game,” Craig Robinson, one…

GameStop said today that Paul Raines, who served as CEO of the retailer from 2010 to 2017, has died. He had stepped down from his position in November 2017 due to a brain tumor.

Fan Creates Beautiful Fire Emblem Board Game

Fire Emblem Heroes is a successful money sink/mobile video game for Nintendo. It’s not available as an official board game, though, which is where fan Brother Ming decided to step in. A budding board game designer, he says his Fire Emblem Heroes adaptation is “inspired by the board game design philosophy of quick, fast, but…

Plop Is The Most Important Element In A City-Builder

For me, the most important part of city-builders is the plop. Plop is that feeling when a prefabricated building hits the ground, and it takes a great animation design to really sell the feeling of a godlike hand descending to drop a building onto the ground. Kingdoms and Castles really sells that plop. Plop isn’t…

Siege of Dragonspear Is Coming To Mobile As A Standalone Release

On Friday, Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition developers Beamdog announced on a livestream that Siege of Dragonspear, their follow-up to the original Baldur’s Gate that they released back in March of 2016, is coming to the iOS and Android platforms on March 10th. Siege of Dragonspear takes place immediately after the events of Baldur’s Gate, and…

Hunters Plan To Repopulate Bloodborne With A Return To Yharnam

From Software’s Souls games and Bloodborne have online co-operation, but some areas become more abandoned as time goes on. Return To Yharnam is a community event set to start on March 10th that’s working to revitalize Bloodborne’s online world of bell-ringing hunters. Demon’s Souls, the Dark Souls franchise, and Bloodborne all have the same general…

Battlefield 1‘s New Dog Tags Are Almost Impossible To Get

Battlefield 1’s final expansion, fittingly called Apocalypse, released during the last week of February. Alongside new guns and maps, the content pack also contains some very difficult unlockable dog tags. Reading over them, I wondered what it would take to get them. For the most part, the tasks that you have to do to unlock…