Kotaku
If you were a teenage girl in the early aughts, prone to lurking amongst the towering shelves of Hot Topic tchotchkes and flat-ironing your fringe until it was crispier than Darth Vader’s body, then you always understood the Star Wars prequels, and more specifically, Anakin Skywalker.
Kotaku
Kotaku
Escape rooms have gotten massively popular, and they’re a unique experience, standing out from outings at the movies or museums. They can be an amazing time, but the expectation that you’ll have to solve some puzzles can make them intimidating if you’ve never tried one before. And because the puzzles are meant to be…
Kotaku
The tumultuous digital age we find ourselves in has become a modern horror story for professional voice actors and artists witnessing “AI” machine-learning technologies go from being harmless-seeming fun to capitalist tools of extraction that copy and sell their voices and art without permission or compensation.…
Kotaku
This June’s animated sequel Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse will clock in at a substantial two hours and 16 minutes, its listing on AMC Theatres indicates. That is 136 minutes. That’s approximately how long it takes to escape a bad conversation. It’s 10 minutes longer than Disney’s 1940 epic Fantasia, and a little…
Kotaku
Hollywood writers have been on strike ever since media executives and the Writer’s Guild of America failed to come to an agreement at the bargaining table. Now, multiple video game writers are currently having public discussions about how their craft is undervalued by those looking in from the outside. One of them is…
Kotaku
I’m really captivated by Don’t Nod’s new mystery visual novel Harmony: The Fall of Reverie, but I can’t help feeling like it keeps getting in its own way. I’ve put about three hours into the game, and while it brings the Life Is Strange studio’s signature emotional, human dialogue, diversity, and a compelling story…
Kotaku
The three main C_all of Dut_y games available right now—Modern Warfare 2, Warzone 2.0, and Mobile—are gearing up for a new season of content, which will include all the usual additions: blueprints, skins, weapons, and the like. Tucked in this May 10 content drop, however, is a rather unique operator skin for the Phoenix…
Kotaku
Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer was contrite following the overwhelmingly negative response to Redfall this week. In a new interview with the Xbox podcast Xcast, the executive confessed to being disappointed with some quality issues and the critical reception of Arkane’s vampire shooter this week.
Kotaku
The PlayStation 5 has another special edition bundle thanks to the impending release of Kaiju battle simulator Final Fantasy XVI. The good news is it’ll save you $10. The bad news is the limited-edition design cover and DualSense controller are only coming to Japan.
Kotaku
The Star Wars universe is massive, filled with hundreds of books, games, TV shows, and more. And let’s not forget the movies, which started all of this wild nonsense back in 1978 with A New Hope. Throughout all of Star Wars, from all the fan fighting over Last Jedi to people going wild over Grogu, one thing has…
Kotaku
In 2021 Mythic Games, with the backing of Ubisoft, announced a Kickstarter campaign for an officially-licensed board game adaptation of Rainbow Six: Siege. Two years later, Mythic are asking people who already paid for the game to pay a bit—and in some cases a lot—more.
Kotaku
PSA to all my fellow true believers and web-heads around the world: the hotly-anticipated Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is getting a prequel comic on May 6, also known as Free Comic Book Day.
Kotaku
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom leaked earlier this week, and some players have been scrambling to try and play the Switch game ahead of its May 12 release date. While Nintendo hasn’t officially acknowledged the situation, someone who used to work there has, and probably not in the way you’d expect.
Kotaku
28-year-old Sunday Blombergh was a devoted mother from Florida who loved her siblings and, her family said with tenderness, her cell phone. In 2010, her body was found decomposing in the Georgia woods. Earlier that spring, a black-and-white poster created by her family showed Blombergh how she was before she went…
Kotaku
We’re barely one-twelfth of the way through 2023 and a surprising number of games are already about to get killed off, as devs have announced their impending deaths. Normally, we’d reserve this list for the end-of-the-year round-up, but we’re ringing the death knell early because, with 15 games already lined up for…
Kotaku
Street Fighter 6 feels like a shot in the arm for Capcom’s long-running fighting series after Street Fighter V’s middling reception, and a lot of that comes down to how much personality it injects into every frame. One of the best examples of that we’ve seen so far is in the character intros that take place before…
Kotaku
Cast your mind back to October 2012. Pokemon Black and White 2 had just been released. Resident Evil 6 launched and disappointed many. And Dishonored arrived on the scene, earning Arkane many accolades and awards. And also, a minor bug involving footsteps and blocks was introduced into Minecraft. And now, in May 2023,…
Kotaku
Folks: Never make a bet that you’re prepared to lose. Just ask this Old School Runescape community member who thought that his rival wouldn’t be able to get a coveted pet with a 1-in-9,779 drop rate and was so confident he bet against it. Unfortunately, his rival did the statistically improbable, and instead of going…
Kotaku
At this point, Netflix has become the Google of streaming services—its prevalence in modern culture transformed the streamer into a colloquial verb. As a noun, though, it still refers to a specific business, one with a sizable, increasingly conspicuous graveyard of canceled projects haunting its listings. Now, the…
Kotaku
I still haven’t gotten around to playing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order or its new (apparently fraught) sequel Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, but the more I see of the game’s extensive fashion and customization options for protagonist Cal Kestis, the more tempted I feel. However, one Jedi rebel hairstyle is getting a lot of…
Kotaku
“As world builders, our greatest responsibility is to inspire and invite joy,” Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said at the New York Game Awards in January. “It feels like today, seeking joy is an act of defiance.” In February, Microsoft lived up to that ideal with the stealth release of Hi-Fi Rush, a beautiful…
Kotaku
As journalists and editors know, cutting through the noise to deliver the news can be a tricky business. It’s even harder when you’re trying to report on the invasion of Ukraine, and your target audience is located in Russia. Since March 2022, the Russian president has made it a crime to call the invasion a “war.” So…
Kotaku
The Pokémon Company is officially migrating its online trading card ecosystem to its new app, Pokémon Trading Card Game Live,on June 8. This means if you’ve been playing the digital card game on Pokémon Trading Card Game Online, which has been the platform for official online play since 2011, you’ll have to make the…
Kotaku
Redfall, a vampire shooter out this week on Xbox and PC, was developed by Arkane Studios, the same team behind classics like Dishonored and Prey. It’s one of Microsoft’s first-party exclusives for 2023, a big release for the company’s Game Pass subscription service. And by most accounts, it sucks.
Kotaku
While we wait for Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, a troupe of modders known as Garden of Eyes is working on an overhaul mod to FromSoftware’s latest “You Died” open-world RPG, which will introduce new weapons, additional skins for Torrent, and Bloodborne-style gun parries to The Lands Between. As it continues…
Kotaku
The PlayStation 4 was the graphical shot in the arm console gaming needed after the very very lengthy PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 generation, which saw the consoles struggling to meet games’ increasing graphical demands by the early 2010s.
Kotaku
Game Pass PC is full of great games, and a new referral program now lets you invite friends to play them with you free for two weeks. The new benefit arrives alongside Redfall, Xbox’s latest co-op shooter featuring an eerie open world and lots of vampires.
Kotaku
In the spring of 2011, Japanese broadcasters declined to air two episodes from the Pokémon anime due to a catastrophic earthquake. While the networks originally promised to air them at a later date, these episodes never materialized. Now, thanks to the efforts of a fan who tracked down a copy of the script, we’re…
Kotaku
In most games, when a cheater gets caught in the act, they receive their just desserts in the form of a swift ban. Goodbye! But sometimes developers want to have a little more fun at the loser’s expense, go an extra mile to do something a little more memorable and elaborate. Maybe they disable the cheater’s guns in…