Kotaku
Twitch just can’t seem to scrub porn off its platform. Thanks to the “Boost This Stream” feature the Amazon-owned company introduced last October, viewers are paying to promote, or “boost,” sexually explicit content onto the platform’s front page. Unsurprisingly, Twitch has paused the boosting feature indefinitely.
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If you’ve played Borderlands, you’ve played Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. Gearbox’s latest, a fantasy twist on the loot-shooting series for which the studio is known, feels a lot like the previous four games—and 400 expansions and events—in the series. You shoot a bazillion guns. You find a bazillion more.
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April Fools’ is finally upon us, or as our UK editor John Walker likes to call it: “International Lying Day.” Never fear, readers. We Kotaku bloggers are vigilantly keeping alert for any announcements that seem a little bit too good or too weird to be true. Not me, though. Some April Fools’ jokes are too good to not…
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People have been waiting for the GameStop bubble to pop for over a year now. Instead, the ailing brick and mortar video game retailer just posted another record week on Wall Street. Earnings are down. Employee morale is in the pits. But the company’s stock went from $78 per share last month to over $185 in early…
Kotaku
It seems an extraordinary thing for it to be a news story that, one-and-a-half years after release, you can buy an Xbox. But we live in extraordinary times, and right now is the first time the Xbox Series X has ever been easily available. You can just buy one! You know, if you have a spare $500.
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YouTuber Ayato has a big project on his hands: making a DIY Kaneda bike from Akira. The Kaneda bike is one of the most iconic bikes in anime—no, make that popular culture writ large. There are numerous Kaneda bike projects on YouTube, but in my opinion, this one is the best.
In a series of clips, Ayato has been…
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For one brief, shining moment in time over 20 years ago, _Pokémon_ascended from the anime/video games plane where it normally resides and became something more. Something fancier, something jauntier. And then, just as quickly as it rose, it slipped right back down again, and most folks now forget it ever happened at…
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Activision Blizzard Chief Administrative Officer Brian Bulatao (above) emailed all employees of the company earlier today, informing them that “effective immediately” the publisher was removing the mandate for employees working from offices to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19, and hopes to have everyone working…
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Let’s imagine it’s Saturday morning. You drive up to your local Aldi parking lot, you get out of your car, you walk inside. Mostly to get some cheap groceries, but also partially so you can saunter up and down the middle aisles, perusing the special buys that are currently on rotation. Maybe you’ll see some house…
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Sony is cutting up to 90 jobs from its “merchandiser” and retail marketing teams as part of a “global transformation,” according to a new report by Axios. The layoffs come despite the continued growth of PlayStation thanks to the success of the PS5, and some employees were caught off guard by the move.
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We’re one month removed from Elden Ring’s launch, probably FromSoftware’s biggest Souls-like release thus far, and the action-RPG is still top of folks’ minds. It’s still on mine, even if I managed to leave the Lands Between briefly to play Ghostwire: Tokyo. I love the characters and world of Elden Ring, but I never…
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According to a new report, it might get a lot easier—and cheaper—to provide the entire family with Xbox Game Pass as Microsoft plans to launch a five-person option later this year.
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Pour one out for the “world reveals” and “world exclusives.” E3 won’t happen at all this summer, IGN reports.
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The first thing you’ll notice when playing Shredders is how real it feels. When riding down its slopes, you don’t turn. You carve. You don’t jump. You pop. In fact, the hot new snowboarding game feels so realistic that its creators say players who snowboard in real life have a way easier time picking it up than those…
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Nearly a decade later, Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto V remains incredibly popular. Its multiplayer mode,GTA Online, is still one of the most-played games in the world. And it just launched on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. So one way or another, it’s very likely you’ve played GTA V. In fact, it’s very likely you’ve…
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Ghostwire: Tokyo, Tango Gameworks’ new action-adventure game with immersive sim-like elements, is a frustrating juxtaposition of highs and lows. It’s at once a compelling narrative about loss and the lengths we go to recover that which is gone, and a plodding first-person shooter with seriously underwhelming enemy AI.…
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The most fascinating aspect of Weird West’s design is how friendly the game is to my fuck-ups. Have you ever thought to yourself: “I would like to play a top-down Dishonored game, but as a western?” Say no more. Even if that’s not a thought you’ve ever had, you should consider it. Weird West, which came out today for…
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The video game industry faces a long-overdue reckoning. The average game developer is underpaid relative to the generous bonuses and shareholder payouts enjoyed by the CEOs above them, and recent reports and lawsuits have uncovered a wide range of mistreatment across companies big and small. Many feel that something…
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When it was announced that Nintendo’s former headquarters was going to be turned into a hotel, I imagined the worse case scenario: a cheesy cash-in to make some quick yen. That certainly doesn’t appear to be the end result. The hotel looks to be a stunning celebration of Nintendo’s heritage.
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Remember how hard it used to be to watch anime? Depending on where you called home, it was once difficult, if not impossible, to check out the latest shows. It was only a few decades ago that people were trading DVDs (and before that, VHS tapes!), and the idea of a simultaneous release seemed like a far-fetched…
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Anyone still playing Marvel’s Avengers on PS5 over the last few days may have run into an issue where the game crashes. If that’s you, as of today there is a “workaround”. It’s just a rather drastic one.
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In a recent tournament match, a Call of Duty: Vanguard player was accused of cheating. In an attempt to clear his name, the player shared off-screen footage of his gameplay, in which you could clearly see...that he was cheating.
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FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki’s love for the late Kentaro Miura’s manga and anime series Berserk is the worst kept secret in the gaming industry. While he avoids explicitly discussing the connections between his games and Berserk, it’s clear that every Miyazaki-helmed project since 2009’s Demon’s Souls has…
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Twitch can often be a cesspit of awfulness. If it’s not one streamer getting swatted or another streamer getting accused of misogyny, then it’s potential litigation between big-name broadcasters (that ultimately fizzled into nothing). But there is some good on the platform, too. One such example is WowGrandma78, a…
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Borderlands games aren’t exactly known for being challenging. Even if you turned up the heat, you wouldn’t get a tougher game. You’d just get a more arduous one, the many bullet sponges simply becoming bullet-spongier. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands does away with all that by including an actually interesting wrinkle to its…
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On March 29, lawyers representing choreographer Kyle Hanagami sued Epic Games for copyright infringement over the “It’s Complicated” dance emote in Fortnite. The in-game emote begins with movements which Hanagami’s lawyers allege are lifted from copyrighted dance moves created by the choreographer. The lawsuit was…
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The unnerving tone of Geography Of Robot’s Southern Gothic point-n-click adventure Norco fascinates me. Its conflation of a recognisable 21st-century Louisiana, and dystopian science fiction, creates an oppressive darkness that weighs on my mind as I click through the game’s “mind-map” menu, where memories and ideas…
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Developer Guerrilla Games has rolled out a massive patch for Horizon Forbidden West, purporting to fix more than a dozen quests, plus a litany of minor hiccups. It also aims to make the game less shimmery. Those who made it through the era of puddlegateunscathed should rejoice.
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Anno: Mutationem is an overly ambitious love letter with one too many recipients. While the game has an interesting gumbo of ideas, its story buckles under the weight of living up to the very properties it attempts to pay tribute to. Ultimately, Mutationem’s ending fails to deliver a satisfying or cohesive pursuit of…