Kotaku
Tera raids in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are a team-based affair, and part of that teamwork comes from using cheers, a set of commands exclusive to these four-player boss battles scattered across the games’ Paldea region. However, in my experience grouping up with randos online, I’ve often found myself being the sole…
Kotaku
Fortnite developer Epic Games announced today that it will no longer provide online service or servers for 17 older games, including six from the Unreal series dating back as far as 1998, and it will end access to some additional games entirely. The shutdowns are already starting to be enacted, but won’t be completed…
Kotaku
I’m not just a clown, I’m the entire circus. A week after I called him Genshin’s most annoying character, Scaramouche’s storyline crushed my heart into itty-bitty pieces and caused me to spend gacha currency on him. Ever since Genshin launched two years ago, players have been grumbling nonstop that the dialogue…
Kotaku
The Witcher 3 just got a big “next-gen upgrade” this week. The update includes a variety of graphical improvements to spruce up the now seven-ish year-old game to look a bit more relevant in our era of ray tracing and AI-based resolution techniques. While we felt that the updates made for a nice way to get into or…
Kotaku
It was another banner year for role-playing games. Even as the genre beloved for dialogue choices, skill trees, and making the numbers go up gets slowly subsumed into every major blockbuster from Dying Light 2 to God of War Ragnarök, there were still plenty of standouts, both big and small.
Kotaku
I like annoying-sounding things, like feedback loops on Discord calls, un-WD-40’d door hinges, and small dogs who are losing their shit over the existence of reality. But not everyone likes to be annoyed while playing video games, and that’s why the developers for recently-released first-person-shooter High on Life…
Kotaku
2022 may have been a year left somewhat fallow for AAA releases, but it had no shortage of fantastic games further down the financial scale. I’ve spent more time playing a card game on my phone than I have playing God of War on my couch, while I’ve been told some of the most interesting and evocative stories through…
Kotaku
Though it’s hard to say whether or not “Steam Deck” has become a household name yet, it certainly deserves such a status after an impressive introduction. Valve’s mini-PC has had a one-of-a-kind first year, one that might make other platforms envious. After various attempts at getting into the hardware game, from the…
Kotaku
Mario Kart 7 may be only one numerical entry behind the most recent game in the series, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t old as shit. In fact, it was first released on the Nintendo 3DS eleven years ago, in December 2011.
Kotaku
ArtStation is probably the most important website on the whole internet for professional artists, especially those working in entertainment fields like video games (most of our Fine Art links, for example, point there). Which is why the site’s continued allowance of AI-generated imagery has become a point of…
Kotaku
Anime NYC, held last month, is one of the few major events taking place this year that we haven’t had to welcome back, since it went ahead in 2021 and over 50,000 attendees went through the turnstiles. Of course it was also one of the earliest recorded cases of the spread of the Omicron Covid variant in the United…
Kotaku
I was only just saying this! How every publisher cramming their own launcher in front of PC games is a huge pain in the ass! And now we’ve got an example of a launcher not just being a pain in the ass, but directly—and in some cases significantly—affecting a game’s performance!
Kotaku
Crisis Core - Final Fantasy VII - Reunion was released today and is a solid remastering/remake of a beloved PSP title. But at least one painting in the new game contains a li’l something extra: a Getty Images watermark, implying that the in-game painting was created using an image preview taken directly from that…
Kotaku
Ixion is the latest release from Bulwark Studios, the developers perhaps best known for the dangerously underrated 40K: Mechanicus. Landing in December alongside some blockbusters it too threatens to fly under a lot of people’s radars, and I’m here today mostly to try and make sure that doesn’t happen.
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Popular free-to-play mobile game Brawl Stars is doing something a bit different. In an era where it seems every game is trying to nickel and dime you with more and more stuff to buy, instead it’s removing loot boxes and all random rewards entirely from the game. It’s yet another sign that loot boxes are likely to…
Kotaku
As a prequel to one of the most beloved video game stories of all time, It’s important that Crisis Core - Final Fantasy VII - Reunion tell its own prequel story without disrupting the thematic cohesion of the story that spawned it. Does it succeed? Mostly. Reunion excels at being a great RPG and a phenomenal remaster.…
Kotaku
If you own a PlayStation 4 or 5, you can view your yearly Wrap-Up starting from today. The PlayStation equivalent of Spotify Wrapped and other year-end summaries of user activity on a platform, the Wrap-Up lets Sony once again shame you for your gaming choices as it’s done in prior years. Simply go to this link and…
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Kotaku
Video game box art is like a visual handshake between the game and the player. If the art is tantamount to a limp handshake, gamers will forget about it and move on to a video game that seizes their attention with a firm grasp. While many have an uninspired Marvel Cinematic Universe-esque composite shot of its titular…
Kotaku
I always liked the idea of snow more than shoveling it or letting it fall into my boots. When I lived in Western New York state—one of the snowiest places in the U.S.—every snowdrift pressed against my front door or patch of slush I’d sink into on my walk to school would make me huff white clouds into the freezing…
Kotaku
True believers, I’ve got some good news for you: A brand new trailer for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is out now. And in this new look at the upcoming animated sequel to 2018’s fantastic Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, we get a bunch of quick and easy-to-miss cameos from other Spider-People, including…
Kotaku
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is bringing back its limited-time Charizard the Unrivaled tera raid this week on December 16. The event will last until December 18, and it’s the only way for players to catch the iconic dragon in these games as of this writing. So if you want to add Charizard to your team, you’ll have only…
Kotaku
I’m about four hours into High On Life and I have a migraine. It’s unfair to say that the game has given me one—I am, after all, notoriously prone to them—but it certainly isn’t helping. The brightly colored, gloopy, blobby alien worlds and incessant chatter from NPCs, enemies, and my weapons aren’t exactly a soothing…
Kotaku
Pokémon has a new meta contender in town, and it’s…a cute mouse family? That’s right. In addition to having unsettling in-game implications like how parents hatch out of a single egg, the Tandemaus line is also incredibly powerful: its signature move can exceed the base power of attacks such as Hyper Beam and…
Kotaku
Valve’s classic Portal was recently re-released on Steam with some very fancy new visuals, including ray-tracing and DLSS support. That was great news for Portal fans, but it’s also great news for fans of all kinds of old PC games.
Kotaku
Sam Bankman-Fried, the central figure in the collapse of crpyto exchange FTX, has just been arrested in The Bahamas and is likely to be quickly extradited to the United States to face criminal charges.
Kotaku
As Microsoft’s attempts to buy beleaguered publisher Activision Blizzard start to hit some serious roadblocks, the software giant is being forced to make some concessions in an attempt to seal the deal.
Kotaku
New ESRB ratings for Final Fantasy I through VI heavily suggest that Square Enix is bringing its Pixel Remaster line of classic Final Fantasy remakes to the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4.
Kotaku
Dungeons & Dragons is so synonymous with its hobby that I, like many people who play TTRPGs other than D&D, often just refer to such games as “D&D” for short. But apparently that kind of name recognition and dominance in the field isn’t enough for publisher Wizards of the Coast. Based on comments made during an…
Kotaku
Pop quiz for you PC nerds: A friend wants to build a gaming PC and wants to know how much ram they should get. What would you say? 16GB for gaming is a safe bet, right? Maybe you could even get by with 8, if you only want to play mostly indie games and perform daily computing tasks? Well, you better hope this…