Kotaku
If you’ve checked out Twitter anytime recently, you might’ve caught a glimpse of Project Voltage, The Pokémon Company’s ongoing art and music collaboration with the Vocaloid teen idol Hatsune Miku. So far Voltage has released 18 illustrations (one for every type of Pokémon) imagining Miku as different kinds of trainers
Kotaku
A newly unsealed FBI indictment accuses a former analyst at Goldman Sachs of insider trading, including allegedly using an Xbox to pass tips onto his close friends. The friend group earned over $400,000 in ill-gotten gains as a result, federal prosecutors claim. “There’s no tracing [Xbox 360 chat],” the analyst…
Kotaku
As September draws to a rainy close (seriously, New York is practically underwater at this point), we look forward to nicer, breezier, hopefully drier October days. But given all of the precipitation, maybe you’re looking for something to do while stuck inside this weekend?
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On September 28, Bethesda shadow-dropped a new spin-off in its popular RPG series, The Elder Scrolls, with absolutely no fanfare. We didn’t even know it was coming, as there was no announcement for Elder Scrolls: Castles, a mobile game where you aren’t playing as one brave adventurer exploring dungeons and killing…
Kotaku
Cyberpunk 2077’s 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty DLC expansion has completely revived the open-world RPG, and, for many, finally turned it into the immersive sci-fi blockbuster they’d been dreaming of based on all those E3 trailers. But more fixes are still on the way. An upcoming 2.01 patch will address corrupted…
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If you get really invested in your RPG decisions, you might have played one of Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty routes and then put the expansion down. It’s your way of saying “this was my story and that’s how it played out.” In most cases, I’m all about playing RPGs just like this—sometimes the mystery of what could…
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Have you ever caught yourself doing something mundane, like picking at a blade of grass or walking on the sidewalk’s curb, only to be hit with the intrusive thought that your group of friends won’t be able to attend each other’s funerals? Heavy stuff, right? Well, the new fantasy anime Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End…
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She’s watching me, I think. Her eyes, like her wrists, are obscured by gauze wraps, but I pickpocketed a corpse while exploring Bloodborne’s ruthless, forsaken Cainhurst Castle, and now she’s floating toward me.
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A teaser for a Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake coming to PlayStation 5 nearly stole the show at Sony’s September 2021 showcase. But reports surfaced last year that the project was already in trouble. Now Star Wars fans have noticed that Sony recently deleted tweets about the game and has hidden the…
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After years of pulling the strings from behind the scenes, GameStop chairman and billionaire Chewy founder Ryan Cohen appointed himself CEO of the ailing video game store on Thursday. His first email to staff, obtained by Kotaku, called for “extreme frugality” and said “time wasters” would not be tolerated as the meme…
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Released earlier this month, Starfield is Bethesda’s long-in-development and much-hyped open-world space RPG. And while the hundreds of planets and spaceship building are cool and all, I particularly enjoy Starfield’s fantastic lockpicking minigame. Apparently I’m not alone, because someone out there has taken the…
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Epic Games acquired Mediatonic in 2021 after its colorful battle royale, Fall Guys, became a multiplayer sensation early in the covid-19 pandemic. Now, it’s laying off tons of developers at the UK-based studio as part massive cost cutting at the Fortnite maker.
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I’m seeing Saw X tonight. The ever-wearier death game horror movie franchise has been toying with soft reboots since 2017’s Jigsaw and 2021’s Chris Rock-led Spiral, but neither really got the series back off the ground. Saw X is a prequel injected between the 2004 original and its 2005 sequel, and marks the first time…
Kotaku
As my spaceship emerges from interstellar travel to orbit a once-distant alien world, I know that once I’m down on its surface, it won’t feel like a world at all. Instead, what Starfield will give me is a series of zones, awkwardly stitched together in a way that makes it hard to pretend they make up a planet. This…
Kotaku
Pro Mortal Kombat player Jarrad Gooden, or NinjaKilla212, demonstrated how absurd Mortal Kombat 1 combos can get by throwing demon warrior Baraka for nearly a full minute. Though the game was only just globally released on September 19, Gooden represents a committed number of players already trying to find the most…
Kotaku
There was a moment near the end of Cocoon when my brain could not keep up with the game. Like being curled up in a wave and then flipped head over heels against the surf, my mind sluggishly tried to work backwards what precisely had just occurred. Where did I just come from? How did I get here? Cocoon’s strange, alien…
Kotaku
A video game-themed collectible storefront claims Sony ordered it to destroy all of its licensed PlayStation-themed merchandise, chief among them being statues based on The Last Of Us Part II, God of War, and Bloodborne.
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Sega has canceled the yet-to-be-released Hyenas, an extraction shooter set in space that was in development at Total War and Alien Isolation studio Creative Assembly. The publisher also canceled several other, unannounced games as part of “structural reforms” across its European operations.
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Epic Games Inc., the company behind global megahit Fortnite, the Epic Games Store, and the wildly popular Unreal Engine, is laying off 16 percent of its current workforce. This report, first coming from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, sees almost 900 employees losing their jobs.
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Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a suite of AI-based chatbots, including one that portrays rapper Snoop Dogg as a role-playing game Dungeon Master, during the Meta Connect 2023 Keynote on September 27. Each of Meta’s 28 new bots (which are not yet available to the public) is a curated character represented by a celebrity,…
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A collaboration between a Dutch Van Gogh Museum and Pokémon seemed like a lovely, if unlikely, crossover. Pikachu depicted as if painted by the Post-Impressionist artist—what’s not to love? Well, as is so often the case, the answer is: other people. Scalpers have descended upon the Amsterdam exhibit and are ruining it…
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Sometimes I forget I live in New York City. Sure, I’m hit with a battering ram of a reminder when my enormous rent bill shows up, but even when I ride the subway to Manhattan or see some of my best friends who have lived here their whole lives, it often feels like I’m just visiting.
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Castlevania: Nocturne, the sequel series to Konami’s popular animated vampire saga, Castlevania, recaptures the magic that its predecessor brought to the dance back in 2017. A tightly written show with multifaceted heroes and villains, outstanding action sequences, and imaginative monster designs, its meticulously…
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The head of PlayStation is stepping down, Sony announced in a press release today. Jim Ryan, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s CEO, is retiring after just four years on the job. The massive shakeup in leadership comes as the PlayStation 5 breaks sales records and as Sony has doubled-down on prestige blockbuster games…
Kotaku
Cyberpunk 2077 often rewards players for exploring Night City off the beaten path, but not so early in its just-launched Phantom Liberty expansion. Failing one of the DLC’s early objectives won’t just lead to a game over, it will fail the expansion’s entire questline for you.
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We all feel it before we know it—orange leaves stumbling into our jackets, cold wind holding our hands down the sidewalk. These signs and more tell us that October is almost here. To commemorate the season and all it offers, I decided to put together a list of (mostly) spooky game recommendations, each one redolent…
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Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft has been experiencing a bit of a renaissance recently. Just last month, the dual pistol-wielding explorer featured as a guest character in Call of Duty: Warzone alongside the likes of pop star Nicki Minaj and ‘90s superhero Spawn. Snap to today and now we’ve got our first official look at her…
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Tired of all those fast-travel menus in Starfield? Good news: If you’re playing on PC, you can grab a mod that’ll dramatically ramp up your ship’s speed in space so that you can actually fly in between nearby planets within a reasonable timespan.
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“Starfield Upscaler” is the second-most popular mod for Bethesda’s open-world RPG, but its creator sparked controversy earlier this month because the best version of it was locked behind a $5 Patreon subscription paywall. In a new interview with IGN he defends the practice, and threatens users who try to pirate his…