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Rockstar Delivers With Custom GTA: Chinatown Wars Styli

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for the Nintendo DS arrived this weekend at Kotaku Towers West in a swag-filled box, including a pair of brilliant DS styli that make playing the game much harder. Actually, playing Chinatown Wars is challenging enough with the stock stylus. I opted to get smudgy, using nimble finger pokes to…

Metal Gear Online SCENE’s Charming New Skills

The Metal Gear Online SCENE expansion comes out tomorrow, bringing with it some charming new skills and fishy emblems for players to strive for. Three new skills drop with tomorrow’s expansion. Close Quarters Combat EX automatically counters any CQC attack on your character, while Toughness allows you to endure knockback moves, lessening your recovery time.…

Dark Void Setting Concept Art Explained

Capcom dumped a few pieces of concept art for their upcoming Dark Void title over on their Unity site, and walked through some of the ideas they were going for in creating the different settings. In Dark Void, they say, they want players to be able to move from “lush jungle, to alien canyons floating…

Alpha Protocol Brings On The Job Training To The Spy Game

If you caught this weekend’s GameTrailers TV, you’re probably well-schooled in Sega and Obsidian Entertainment‘s Alpha Protocol, the "first modern-day spy role-playing game." If not here’s two minutes worth of introduction. Making RPG-style character progression work in a realistic setting—more realistic than, say, Mass Effect or Final Fantasy, for example—always seems like a challenging thing…

Valykyria Chronicles Getting Triple Deployment Of DLC

Sega’s PlayStation 3 exclusive tactical role-playing game Valkyria Chronicles is calling in reinforcements soon, with three separate packs of downloadble content soon bolstering the ranks. Two entirely new missions and a Hard EX mode add new life one of the most under appreciated titles on the PlayStation 3. Edy’s Mission “Enter The Edy Detachment” follows…

Capcom Calls “BS” On Resident Evil 5 DLC Complaints

Capcom received some backlash last week when they announced that they would be selling downloadable content for Resident Evil 5 which would add multiplayer modes to the game. Most of the Internet angst seems to surround the timing of the release and questions why it wasn’t just included on the disc. But Christian Svensson, vice…

Solid Snake Gets Squared By Michael Lau

Seminal urban vinyl toy designer Michael Lau riffs on Hideo Kojima’s Solid Snake with his upcoming collection of Gardener figures, planned for a release later this month at the CS Booth 16 event in Hong Kong. Lau’s Snake Square nods not so subtly to the Snake of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, packing geometric…

Polishing The Chronicles Of Riddick: Assault On Dark Athena

In this second developer diary for The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, developer Starbreeze talks about what goes into making the most polished game they’ve ever created. Starbreeze is big on polish, a fact they’ve readily demonstrated in their two previous outings, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and The Darkness.…

Plant Your Seeds In Gardening Mama This Month

Be prepared to plant your seed, sow the fields, and work that hoe, as Majesco announces a late-March release date for Gardening Mama on the Nintendo DS. Yes, the handling of meat and icing the cake of the Majesco’s Cooking Mama series gives way to an all new set of sexual euphemisms come March 31st,…

What Guitar Hero and Rock Band Can Teach Us

Contrary to your assumptions, Guitar Hero and Rock Band are not sneered at by all serious musicians. By themselves they may not teach you how to be a part of a bona fide rock band, but two instructors whose job it is to do so say the games have some qualities that make them a…

Epic Unveiling New Unreal Engine 3 Goodies At GDC

Epic is making it even easier for everyone and their grandmother to develop video games, showing off a slew of new features for their wildly popular Unreal Engine 3 at this year’s Game Developers Conference. Now that they’ve managed to license their engine to just about everyone in the gaming industry, Epic is ready to…

Get Guitar Hero World Tour On The Cheap

If you’ve been toying with the idea of purchasing Guitar Hero World Tour, yet worried about spending nearly $200 on another band game, Amazon’s video game Deal of the Day is here to help. Today and today only, Amazon has discounted Guitar Hero World Tour across all platforms as part of their video game Deal…

House of the Dead: Overkill Breaks F-ing Record

Continuing in it’s tradition of listing bizarre video game world record breakers, Guinness today announced the game with the most swearing in it. Weighing in with 189 uses of the F-bomb is The House of the Dead: Overkill. That works out to more than one rhymes with duck per a minute, or three percent of…

The ESA Harvests Natsume

The Entertainment Software Association continues to regrow after last year’s exodus, with Harvest Moon publisher Natsume casting their lot with the industry trade organization. Natsume is the second publisher to sign with the ESA this year, after SouthPeak signed up earlier this month. This follows a string of companies leaving the organization last year, perhaps…

Velvet Assassin Trailer Evokes Disturbing Mental Picture

What was presumably meant to be a sexy and inspiring trailer for Replay Studio’s Velvet Assassin instead manages to bring to mind the disturbing image of Sir Winston Churchill in a bloody nightie. Sir Winston Churchill’s famous June 4th, 1940 speech, commonly referred to as “We will fight on the beaches”, was one of the…

Weekly Wii Update: The BIT.TRIP Begins

A new game made to look old and a newly re-released old game join the Nintendo Wii line up this week, with BIT.TRIP BEAT and Summer Games II available for purchase today. BIT.TRIP BEAT(WiiWare 600 Wii points) is one part Pong, on part rhythm game, where they player controls a paddle with their Wii remote,…

New York Times on RE5: The Truth About African Zombies

The New York Times’ resident game writer Seth Schiesel kicks off his review of Resident Evil 5 with a lengthy discourse on the racism controversy, invoking the one truism about zombies everyone keeps forgetting. Seth brings the whole Resident Evil racism debate to a close by reminding us that anyone can become a zombie, and…

UK Gets Halo 3, PGR4, Mass Effect Price Drops

Halo 3, Mass Effect and Project Gotham Racing 4 all get price drops in the UK this month as they are added to the Classics collection on March 20. “We are delighted to add three of our finest titles to the Classics range, adding to the exceptional entertainment offering available on the Xbox 360 at…

Kotaku Podcast: Guerrilla Games Kills in Killzone 2

In our March podcast we play and talk with Guerrilla Games about their Playstation 3 master piece Killzone 2. Eric Boltjes, senior game designer for Guerrilla Games, talked to use about the studio’s in-game clan, the design goals for the game’s multiplayer, how World of Warcraft influenced some of their decisions and the game’s controversial…

Shopping For Furniture, With Added Cosplayers

To: Crecente From: Ashcraft Went down to Osaka Port over the weekend to look at furniture. (Furniture can be expensive!) The store we went to is in the Asia Trade Center, which is dead as dead. Oddly, on the Sunday we went down, it was crawling with women that were cosplaying outside the store by…