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Dogmeat, the Emotional Center of Fallout
Fallout originally did not plan on having NPC followers at all. But the original game’s designer figured out how to make a system work. Thus was born one of the franchise’s most iconic characters. Not only that, the original design of Fallout 3, by Black Isle, there were no plans to include Dogmeat. But Bethesda…
By Owen Good -
Insert Kopeks to Enjoy This Goat-Carcass Polo Game
Jason Torchinsky tried to import a Polish automobile; he got this instead, Ulak-Tartysh, a video game about the Central Asian sport of buzkashi, in which polo is played with the headless body of a goat. Torchinsky, the guy who built a gigantic functional Atari joystick for the I Am 8-Bit art expo, breaks down the…
By Owen Good -
South Park Tower Defense’s Working Titles Sucked
While South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense Play! is a long title for the upcoming Xbox Live Arcade game, some of the working titles were even more of a mouthful. Snowballing, anyone? At the “Save South Park One Snowball At A Time” panel at Comic-Con yesterday, South Park Digital’s Chris Brion explained how the tower…
By Mike Fahey -
Dragon Age “Ultimate Collector’s Edition” Features Night-Vision Sausage
This unboxing spoof of the Modern Warfare 2 Prestige Edition foofaraw shows you what you get if you pony up for Dragon Age’s “ultimate collector’s edition.” Like both the PC and 360 versions. And sausage. Specifically, it’s “from dwarven butcher shops.” Makes sense, don’t dwarves have infravision? I guess that’s why one bite bathes the…
By Owen Good -
Comic-Con Cosplay Stories
Why does Wonder Woman remind me of my mother? Does dressing as Starfox make you a furry? Isn’t being asked to pose every other minute annoying? These questions answered in my last Comic-Con cosplay post. My mother, a 5’11” tall former dance instructor with long, dark hair (it’s reddish now, but don’t let the dye…
By Mike Fahey -
Kotaku’s Top 5 List of Top 10 Lists
Another thing I want to do with our expanded weekends is this: The List of Lists. Each week throws off several new lists ranging from the humorous to the trivial – Top 6 Phallic Objects in Video Games; Top 12 Most Hated Non-Human NPCs from 1990s RPG, you get the idea. Rather than run one…
By Owen Good -
Bungie Says It’s ‘Close’ to Signing New IP Deal
Earlier this week, Bungie’s Lars Bakken strongly implied that Halo: Reach would be the last Bungie-made Halo title. Bakken now suggests that the studio is close to getting a publisher for its new, non-Halo IP. Says Bakken to Eurogamer: I think internally we’ll know sometime soon. I don’t handle these things, but I’d imagine we’re…
By Owen Good -
London, Mapped in Warcraft Style
A programmer showcasing the capabilities of an open-source, dynamic mapping framework has rendered the entire world – in a Warcraft II motif. You can head over to Cartagen, the mapping utility, and see for yourself. It runs in HTML5 and does not require Java or Flash. Punch in a landmark and off you go. (I…
By Owen Good -
Weekend Talk Amongst Yourselves
Enjoy a more standards-compliant Weekend TAY, now that we’ve got an image and dialogue that conforms to the one-and-only Kotaku open thread that runs midweek. P.S. No, you weren’t seeing things. Or not seeing them. My screwup this morning delayed your TAY. Rest assured everything is now fully on schedule. Confused about commenting on Kotaku?…
By Owen Good -
Two More Brütal Legend Gameplay Videos for You
Gametrailers TV’s latest episode threw out two WORLD EXCLUSIVE (natch) clips of Brütal Legend gameplay – filled with guitar powerslides, headbanging followers, and good old fashioned beat-em-up asskicking mayhem. For an original IP, Brütal Legend is going off with some uncanny expectations. Please be good. Please be good. OK, I think it will. Brütal Legend…
By Owen Good -
Custom Make “Any Game” as an NES Cart Necklace Charm
We do a lot of free ads for Etsy craftspersons, yeah, but this is pretty good: Old school NES carts are available as mini-sized necklace charms, in hypoallergenic silver if you want to upgrade. Artist Laura Swingle makes the charms; her page features Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt, Zelda, Zelda II, Super Mario Bros. 2 and…
By Owen Good -
Star Trek D-A-C Coming to PSN, PC
More than two months after the movie that everyone’s now forgotten about, Star Trek D-A-C will arrive on the PlayStation Network, promising a new ship class and “updated gameplay features.” That is according to a news release, but it couldn’t get any more specific about the release date than “late summer 2009.” The release also…
By Owen Good -
NECA’s Other Video Game Toys
Here’s a look at the video game toys NECA is producing or pitching when they aren’t recreating Rapture denizens or defying the laws of thigh physics. The main focus this year at the NECA booth seems to have been Street Fighter IV and Gears of War, the two great tastes that sounds great together when…
By Mike Fahey -
Valve’s User Forum Foreshadowed “Spitter” Months Ago
On May 31 – before anyone knew Left 4 Dead 2 was coming – user Walking_Target gave a detailed description of a special infected he and a friend wanted to develop with the L4D SDK. “After spending an hour chatting about it, we came up with the idea of ‘The Spitter’ ” Walking_Target writes. He…
By Owen Good