Uncategorized

Silent Hill Will Always Help Me Remember A Remarkable Friend

My friend Kit Reed died on Sunday. She was a prolific, award-winning writer of speculative fiction. Her cluttered yellow house is now empty. I will no longer stop by for tea or make dumplings in her kitchen for Thanksgiving. Kit insisted on no memorials, finding even the prospect of friends meeting for a drink after…

Fortnite‘s Battle Royale Is A Delight (And A Whole Lot Like Battlegrounds)

The prospect of besting 99 other gamers through sheer resourcefulness and daredevilry is why the battle royale genre has become so compelling to millions of gamers. Survival shooter Battlegrounds now has the second all-time highest concurrent player count on Steam, and today, Fortnite, a multiplayer game about building forts and defending against zombie swarms, just…

The Best Game About Japanese School Girls Released Today

Released today for the PlayStation 4 and PC, Blue Reflection is an exploration of the relationships young women forge and the personal growth that comes from sharing experiences with friends, all in the form of a stylish magical girl role-playing game. Beats the hell of ninjas in bikinis with water guns. It’s a very strange…

EA Has Charts To Show That This Year’s Star Wars Battlefront Is An Actual Full Game

EA, a company willing to level with you about the deficiencies of last year’s sports games when it is time to sell you this year’s, is coming clean about the inadequacies of 2015’s Star Wars Battlefront. A new trailer for the game’s November sequel makes clear that, yeah, that last game was more short on…

World’s First Official Godzilla Store Opening In Tokyo Next Month

On October 30, the world’s first official Godzilla retail shop will open in Japan. It’s called Godzilla Store Tokyo and will be located in Shinjuku. According to Moviche, the store will feature around 500 items for sale, some of them unique to the store. The store will be located on the first floor of the…

A Life-Sized Mega Man Plush Toy For $290

Who needs a new Mega Man game when there is a life-sized Mega Man you can hold while wondering what the heck Capcom is up to? Okay, maybe we need a new Mega Man game. But this is pretty neat! The plush toy measures 4.3 feet and is priced at 32,400 yen ($290). According to…

Madhouse Isn’t Doing One Punch Man Season 2

When hit anime One Punch Man comes back for its second season, the studio that handled it the first time around won’t be returning. Madhouse did season one, which debuted in 2015. That studio has an impressive resume, animating some of the most iconic modern anime, such as Perfect Blue, Death Note, and Paprika. Season…

Philosophers Path. Kyoto, Japan. By Timothy Shill. JPGs is a photo peek into wherever gamers might find interesting. If you’re a photographer and have images you want to share, drop us a line! 

Video Game Companies Reach ‘Tentative’ Agreement To End Voice Actor Strike

After nearly a year striking, unionized video game voice actors just tentatively agreed to end their boycott against 11 games companies, a new Screen Actors’ Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) press release said today. Voice actors had demanded residual payments, better protections for their voices and more transparency about what projects they…

The Company That Wants To Replace Textbooks With Video Games

On any given day, CEO André Thomas arrives at his company Triseum’s office in Bryan, Texas at nine in the morning. While this is when Thomas gets in, his work day usually starts hours before by checking sales on the company’s educational video games. On one of the days that Thomas and I spoke, he…

Not Everyone Should Be The Driver In Battlegrounds

Anyone asking me to chauffer them around PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds had better be prepared to kiss any of the following things: a large tree, the ground, a wall or a puddle of their own blood. Thankfully, somebody has outclassed my worst Battlegrounds driving moments, and watching them royally blow it in a recent video made me…

New Call of Duty Mode Let Players Squash Enemies With Their Fingers

I was skeptical this past weekend when I saw ‘Gesture Warfare’ listed in the featured playlist on Infinite Warfare. Killing players with the finger gun? A flick of the wrist? It all sounded completely ridiculous, but then I remembered how much I enjoy Modern Warfare Remastered’s hide-n-seek ‘Prop Hunt’ mode. I literally play as trash…

Zelda’s Hyrule Historia Gets A Follow-Up Encyclopedia

Nintendo’s partnership with publisher Dark Horse has already brought us two outstanding volumes, Hyrule Historia and Art & Artifacts. Next April the “Goddess Collection” gets its third and final volume in The Legend of Zelda Encyclopedia, a comprehensive guide to the series from the first game to Twilight Princess HD. Hyrule Historia and Art &…

I Tried Remaking My D&D Adventure In Divinity: Original Sin 2, And It (Mostly) Worked

Divinity: Original Sin 2 has a mode that lets players design their own Dungeons & Dragons-esque adventure inside the role-playing game, and in case you were wondering what kind of dweeb would port their homebrew D&D game into DoS: 2, the answer is me. My experiment was instructive and, I think, says a lot about…

Game Designer Says Developers Would Be More Candid If Gamer Culture Wasn’t So Toxic

Video game enthusiasts often muse about the secrecy surrounding game development, which is at times treated as if it were operated by the NSA. Over the weekend, one developer offered an interesting take: Game developers are secretive because being open can lead to too much toxicity. Designer and programmer Charles Randall, who has worked for…

How An NFL Joke Slips Into A Japanese Game

Danganronpa V3, like previous entries in the excellent humor-horror series, is full of pop culture references. But how did an NFL joke get stuck in there? As a longtime New York Jets fan who has nothing but bile for the New England Patriots, I very much enjoyed seeing the above line, a non sequitur delivered…

This Is A $2,200 Retro Gaming Machine

This is the Zette System, handcrafted from wood by Swedish artist Love Hultén. In its resting state it resembles a stylized wooden boombox, but it’s actually a retro gaming machine with a pair of wireless gamepads and a built-in projector. Only 25 of them are being made, and they are not cheap. From boombox mode,…

Japan’s Newest Giant Gundam Is Finished And So Awesome

This weekend, the one-to-one scale Unicorn Gundam was officially unveiled in Tokyo. It looks fantastic. The 64.6-foot statue replaced a previous giant Gundam that went up in 2012 and came down this past March. The newest life-sized Gundam is the most impressive one yet as the tweets uploaded on Barukan Log show. Kotaku East is…

First Permanent Sailor Moon Store Opens In Japan

Until now, the only Sailor Moon stores in Japan have been temporary pop-up shops. That’s changed with the country’s first permanent Sailor Moon store opening in Tokyo’s Harajuku. According to The Japan Times (full disclosure: I am a columnist there), the store opened this weekend, selling an array of Sailor Moon goodies. “Because more goods…

It Sucks When Ultraman Lands In Your City

In Japanese superhero and monster movies, massive battles lay waste to cities. We rarely get to see what it’s like to experience that from the point of view of a regular citizen, but that’s exactly what City Shrouded in Shadow offers.  Developed by Granzella, City Shrouded in Shadow is the spiritual successor to the Disaster…