Kotaku
Pokémon games are not typically difficult. Because the RPGs are meant to be an all-ages affair, getting through them is usually just about knowing type advantages and striking an enemy’s weakness for a one-hit knockout. That’s why fan-made rules like the Nuzlocke came to be: Players have to find ways to make the game…
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Friday marks the theatrical release of both Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, two diametrically dissimilar films that have together drummed up an ungodly amount of what might be called organic online cross-promotion, with the mutually beneficial counter-programming clash between the…
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I started regularly playing competitive online games in 2007, with the launch of Halo 3. Back then, participating in in-game voice chat was harrowing for a 17-year-old girl whose voice betrayed her gender and her youth. I was subjected to such frequent and horrific hostility (rape threats, misogynist remarks, sexually…
Kotaku
Whether you’re making a character in the Seasonal or Eternal Realm, the Necromancer is wildly destructive and a beautifully grotesque character to build out. As you command the forces of the undead, you’ll bend death to your will, summoning corpses, monstrosities, and wicked weapons.
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AI’s ability to (usually) produce grammatically correct syntax sure is impressive, but there is no actual intelligence behind the text, meaning that the way you and I would suss out the validity of some statements, or come up with original thoughts in response to some detail or event, isn’t present in AI-generated…
Kotaku
The Epic Games Store is running a summer sale with some solid discounts on big games ranging from Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding to the just-released Dead Island 2, making the next few weeks a hot time to flesh out your PC backlog.
Kotaku
Summer weekends mean fresh air, sunny beaches, barbeque—oh, who am I kidding? This is “I’m locked inside all day bathed in air conditioning and glued to a video game” weather, and this weekend we’ve got some more games for you to consider adhering to. Our guide this week features some more retro delights, a neat way…
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1987 saw the start of something huge, though no one knew it at the time. Capcom’s Street Fighter seemed like just another arcade game. Nice graphics, sure, but no one could have guessed that just four years later its sequel would spark a revolution that transformed arcades as we knew them. Suddenly everyone and their…
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The ESL, a large Counter-Strike: Global Offensive esports league, announced all the changes it made to its rule book ahead of the upcoming IEM Cologne 2023 competition in Germany. And among the changes is a very important one: Crocs are banned.
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r/place, the Reddit-based collaborative art project, is back for its third incarnation since the 2017 original. And it couldn’t arrive at a better time for pissed-off Reddit users who have had enough of the message board management’s shit. With everyone able to place only a single pixel every few minutes, it’s some…
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Pikmin 4 is out tomorrow, July 21, and from the sound of it, the Switch game is pretty dope. Despite this, the series has only had four mainline games since the first entry launched on the GameCube in 2001. The games don’t perform as well as other first-party Nintendo games, with the best-selling entry, Pikmin 3 Deluxe…
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The Last of Us Part 1 is a brutal game that features a lot of murder and gore. But because the game is played from a third-person perspective, there is a bit of distance between players and its intense action. But that distance disappears when the game is modded into an action-packed first-person shooter.
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Megalithic game-thing Roblox doesn’t exactly have the best of reputations. Accusations of exploitation of children’s labor are hardly a good look, and this week also saw staff reporting that there has been little effort to address the lack of diversity at the studio. On top of all that, today it’s been revealed that a…
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SpongeBob SquarePants fans have been experiencing an influx of distress after NSFW drawings of the beloved characters hit their social media timelines. While many, like myself, dismissed the lewd drawings as Rule 34 content seeping into social media platforms, the drawings are apparently legit, according to the…
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If you’ve spent any time on TikTok or YouTube lately, you might’ve seen some short, strange videos of heads emerging from toilet bowls to sing a somewhat catchy song. The clips, built using the software behind some of Valve’s games like Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2, have been racking up millions of views on YouTube…
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According to a new report from Variety, Adult Swim has ordered a new anime series for Toonami by Shinichirō Watanabe, legendary director of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, and studio Mappa, the popular animation studio behind Chainsaw Man and the final seasons of the mega-popular anime series Attack on Titan.
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Quick, without looking it up (or I guess remembering the headline) what’s currently the bestselling game on Xbox? Elden Ring? Maybe a new Call of Duty? Perhaps that popular Diablo IV? Nope! It’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 for Xbox 360. And the rest of the top 10 is filled with other classic CoD games as players flock…
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Like many games these days, the highly anticipated Baldur’s Gate 3 comes in a few different editions at a few different price points. Obviously if you’re a D&D superfan, you might be interested in the most expensive one, but what, exactly, will shelling out that extra cash get you? And what of the other versions?…
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In a vacuum, Genesis: An Overwatch Mini-Series is great. The three-part anime is lovingly animated and well-acted, and finally expands upon the origins of Overwatch in a way that goes beyond voice lines and passing mentions in comics or short stories. But each time I finished one of the episodes, I was hit with the…
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As the summer sun once again sets Earth on fire, that means only one thing: sales! And so Sony launched its annual summer sale with a not unreasonable 3,081 games at cheaper prices. Rather crucially, that number includes some bigger names, such as Elden Ring down by a third, and many Sony first-party titles down to…
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While Nintendo loves a lawsuit and emulation is often a contentious issue for publishers, few situations have been quite as high-profile as the recent attempt to launch GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin on Steam. The 20-year-old emu engine has long been available online, but this attempt to become more “mainstream”…
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Overwatch 2 is in a rough spot as Blizzard prepares for one of its biggest content drops yet next month. After a collection of bad news since its October 2022 launch, including the gutting of PvE content and charging $15 for story missions, Overwatch 2’s engagement and money investment has declined—despite the promise…
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As a work of epic fantasy, I expected Final Fantasy XVI to dazzle me visually—especially on my expensive PlayStation 5. But while select scenes do delight visually, they are sadly infrequent. For whatever reason, about halfway through Square Enix’s latest mega-budget RPG the game decides that it’s mostly going to…
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On Wednesday, CD Projekt Red juiced up The Witcher 3 with yet another patch, giving the eight-year-old fantasy role-playing game improved cross-platform progression on consoles, new features for Nintendo Switch, and even better-looking grass for touching purposes.
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I love The Muppets and Sesame Street.With their loveable puppets and goofy characters, these shows are quintessential children’s TV. However, I also have this odd fear. What if the puppets in those shows were real? Like actually existed in our world? Would they all be immortal? Powerful? Controllable? Lucky (I guess)…
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In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, the creative director on Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 revealed that he was nervous about finding the right person to play the sequel’s notorious big bad, Venom. That is, until he heard the unmistakably awesome voice of Candyman actor Tony Todd.
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Things are looking dire for the Overwatch League (OWL), the competitive esports scene built around Blizzard’s popular hero shooter, as the company laid off some 50 employees on July 18.
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A lot of people never finish the video games they buy. We’re all guilty of it, and as a result, we’ve missed out some pretty memorable finales, both good and bad. For some games, an ending can be a great culmination of hours and hours of storytelling, design decisions, and and interacting with the world around you.…
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Diablo IV’s first season arrives on July 20. As was previously announced, players will make new characters with each fresh battle pass. Though it might seem a little unexpected, making new characters on a regular basis is common in the world of Diablo. Sadly, the latest patch might make those future characters of…