Kotaku
A championship on the line. A move so cold and calculated it has to be a troll (probably). A vitriolic fanbase armed with keyboards and anonymous screen names. And you thought these sorts of things only happened in video games. But even chess, a turn-based strategy game first released for wooden boards some 1,500…
Kotaku
Sony has responded to Microsoft’s record-shattering deal to buy Activision Blizzard with acquisition news of its own, announcing today it plans to buy Destiny 2-maker Bungie for $3.6 billion.
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Pokémon do not mess around in the ancient Hisui region. Life might not be nasty, brutish, and short, but it’s far from breezy in Pokémon Legends: Arceus. That’s especially evident in some of its more RNG-based side-quests, where hard work and determination can’t overcome bad luck. Arceus does a lot right, but forcing…
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In 1994, Andy Davidson had an idea. That idea was to take the infinitely copied mid-70s Tektronix 4051 game, Artillery, but do it with cartoon worms. Then-developer Team17 snapped it up, called it Worms, and have since wrung out every last drop of miserable profit from the mediocre idea ever since. So of course…
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I’ve found my mortal enemy in Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and no, it’s not the surly-faced captain who threatened to leave me to die in the wilds. It’s the guy standing right outside of her office. You know who I’m talking about. It’s Bagin, the guy who offers to expand your inventory–for a price.
Kotaku
YouTuber Handy Geng noticed that all his buddies had bigger power banks than his. “I’m not so happy with that,” he writes. It bothered him! He could not sleep. So Handy Geng decided to change that by building the biggest power bank of all.
Handy Geng put his D.I.Y. skills to the test, welding a metal frame and making…
Kotaku
Japan’s pachinko industry, a bulwark in the country’s amusement industry, has been hit hard during the pandemic.
According to pachinko news site Green Belt, nearly 640 pachinko parlors closed in 2021. As of December 2021, there were 7,637 pachinko parlors affiliated with the Japan Amusement Business Cooperation.
Kotaku
In November 2021 a team of fans at Zelda 64 Reverse Engineering—having spent two years on the project—revealed that they’d painstakingly recreated the entirety of The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time. Now, only a few months later, we’re getting a good look at one of the main goals of that project: a proper PC port of…
Kotaku
Zombies! Love or hate ‘em, they are still a big part of pop culture. And later this week the next big zombie game, Dying Light 2, releases for Xbox, PlayStation, and PC.
Kotaku
If I dumped 25,000 Lego bricks and pieces in front of you and gave you a few months to build something with them, what would you make? You’d probably be more concerned that I dumped all that plastic on you. But one _Zelda_fan and Lego builder took all those blocks and created a marvelous looking recreation of the…
KotakuWhile it was teased in December, the first full trailer for the upcoming _Halo_TV series was just released and it looks, if nothing else, _very_expensive.
Kotaku
A YouTube channel that uploads video game soundtracks has reportedly been sent over 1300 copyright blocks in one day. This news isn’t shocking if you know Nintendo’s track record when it comes to fan creations and communities, but it’s still a frustrating situation as much of the music that is removed from YouTube is…
Kotaku
Hello! It’s time for Kotaku’s Sunday Comics, your weekly roundup of the best webcomics. The images enlarge if you click on the magnifying glass icon.
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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: An NFT project sells a ton of tokens, making a shit ton of cash in the process for a thing that _probably_will exist in the future. Then the project and folks involved disappear with the money, leaving those who bought into it screwed. Well, it’s reportedly happened again, this…
Kotaku
You might think you are good at Wordle, with your favorite starting word and all that. But a real _Wordle_expert can complete puzzles using the worst starting word as determined recently by a computer and TikTok user.
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The internet’s favorite _Simpsons_scene, often referred to as “Steamed Hams,” has been recreated in hundreds of strange ways over the years. Now someone has turned the whole thing into a playable point-and-click adventure game, not unlike classics like Monkey Island.
Kotaku
Thanks to an investigation into online gaming subscriptions by the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), Microsoft will soon improve the ways in which its Xbox Game Pass service handles auto-renewal, refunds, and inactive memberships. (h/tPC Gamer)
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If you’ve frequented Félix “xQc” Lengyel’s Twitch channel recently, you’ll have noticed he’s doing a lot of Grand Theft Auto Online role-play and reactions to video content. That’s fine. It’s his channel, so he can do whatever he wants with it…or maybe not? A small but vocal portion of his millions-strong community…
Kotaku
We are less than a month out from the release of Elden Ring. Some are already planning to take off from work to play it. Others are planning to take off from the internet to avoid what will likely be another round of game difficulty discourse. Director Hidetaka Miyazaki has broached the subject in a new interview,…
Kotaku
The best Uncharted game doesn’t open in media res with hero Nathan Drake hanging, gutshot, off a derailed train in the Himalayas. It doesn’t start with him tearing through 12-foot Pacific swells in a speedboat on a stormy night. No, it kicks off with a focus on his sporadic companion Chloe Frazer perusing a market in…
Kotaku
The ongoing demand for rare and valuable Pokémon cards has led to a frenzy out there, as people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on unopened boxes and rare cards. Celebrities and popular influencers have got involved over the last two years too, blowing up the situation further. It’s gotten to the point where…
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Hello Kotaku,
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Any number of things can serve as personal distractions in Pokémon Legends: Arceus, but one I’m sure a lot of folks will enjoy is shiny hunting. Searching out with these alternately colored pocket monsters is half the fun of these games for many hardcore fans, and Arceus offers up an interesting way to do so with its…
Kotaku
While trotting about the first free-roaming area of Pokémon Legends: Arceus, it would behoove you to visit the massive, angry Rapidash roaming the Horseshoe Plains. You’re sure to get on like a house-sized horse on fire.
Kotaku
A new Pokémon game means, well, new Pokémon, and Pokémon Legends: Arceus is no exception. And while the latest installment in Nintendo’s flagship role-playing franchise may skew from the series’ foundational elements in interesting ways with its fluid, open-world gameplay, some of these debuting Pokémon still come…
Kotaku
Pokémon Legends: Arceus does a lot of things differently from the mainline Pokémon games, and that includes completing your Pokédex. Where before the games tasked you with collecting the entire monster compendium to fill out the encyclopedia within the device, _Arceus_takes place in the past, presumably before Bill…
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In the 1970s Will Shortz submitted a crossword to the _New York Times_with a word so scandalous that the editor rejected it. The word: bellybutton. Fast forward over four decades and Shortz himself is the _Times_crossword editor who is now the gatekeeper, selecting puzzles from the nearly 200 submissions he gets a week.…
Kotaku
Destiny 2’s longest season still has a month to go. That’s bad news for everyone eagerly awaiting the game’s massive upcoming _Witch Queen_expansion, but good news for those who still need time to tie up a few loose ends. That’s especially true for newer players who may be a bit behind on the four-year old live service…
Kotaku
Face it, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End isn’t exactly a nail-bitingly difficult game. In fact, the debatably toughest moment of Naughty Dog’s modern classic comes in the form of a game-within-a-game: Crash flippin’ Bandicoot.
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Even if shiny hunting in Pokémon games isn’t your cup of tea, it’s always exciting to randomly happen upon one of these uber-rare, alternately colored pocket monsters. Fortunately, Pokémon Legends: Arceus makes achieving this feat easy by reviving an old series tradition and giving players one guaranteed shiny by way…