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Starfield Planet Schrodinger III Is The XP Farm You’ve Been Dreaming Of

A Starfield player on Reddit noticed recently that the temperate, agreeable planet Schrodinger III is “made of XP,” something the sci-fi role playing game’s players are increasingly stumbling upon on their own. The planet—and the entire Schrodinger system it belongs to—is heavy with resources, making it a great place…

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Microsoft And Activision Just Revealed Their Biggest Weakness

If you haven’t heard the news already, Xbox finally closed its Activision Blizzard acquisition deal to the tune of $69 billion. With this move, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick is getting ousted at the beginning of the year, all while getting a golden parachute of $400 million. Well, at least the silver lining in all this…

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Sonic Superstars’ Early Reviews Wish It Would Pick Up The Pace

Sonic Superstars has developer Sega journeying all the way back to the beginning of the Sonic franchise, remembering when it was born in 1991 in the 2D tropics. Like nostalgic platformer Sonic Mania did in 2017, Superstars devoutly walks the same path as Sonic the Hedgehog and its early ‘90s sequels. But unlike Mania,…

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Hands On With Halo Infinite’s New Forge AI Toolkit (It’s Awesome)

Forge, Halo’s in-game map creator, has appeared in every mainline Halo game since Halo 3, allowing fans to bring back beloved older maps, fashion creations of their own, or just create unique, quirky experiences within Halo’s timeless and tweakable sandbox. Once season five of Halo Infinite launches, however, players…

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The 9 Best Pokémon TCG YouTubers To Follow

Anyone surprised by what manages to become popular on YouTube clearly hasn’t been paying attention. From magnet fishing for trash, to trampolining off high platforms, there’s a channel with over a million subscribers for everything. So it shouldn’t shock anyone that when it comes to watching other people open Pokémon…

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Microsoft Asks Controversial Activision CEO Bobby Kotick To Stay For Two More Months

Longtime Activision Blizzard CEO, Bobby Kotick, is almost gone, but not quite yet. Nearly two years after over 1,000 of his employees called on the controversial executive to resign, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer confirmed that Kotick will remain the head of the Call of Duty publisher until the end of 2023, to…

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Kotaku’s Weekend Guide: 6 Games To Escape From Reality With

Another weekend draws near, this time preceded by a Friday the 13th, in October of all months. Spooky vibes for sure, but if you’re looking to ward off some bad luck, might I suggest playing some video games?

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Kotaku

Microsoft Closes Activision Blizzard Acquisition, Making Call Of Duty Officially Part Of Xbox Now

The video game industry just got a lot smaller. The long and winding saga of Microsoft’s $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard has finally come to a close with the companies announcing the completed merger today following one last greenlight from regulators in the UK. Call of Duty is now part of Xbox and the…

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Hold Onto Your Butts, Microsoft's Massive Activision Blizzard Deal Is Finally Happening [Update]

Twenty months after it was first announced, Microsoft’s unprecedented deal to buy Call of Duty and Candy Crush publisher Activision Blizzard for $69 billion appears to have beaten its final boss. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority revealed on Friday that it has provisionally approved the tech giant’s latest…

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EA’s Next Soccer Game Is Turn-Based And Looks Like An RPG

EA’s next soccer game is going to be a bit different than most of its countless sports releases. That’s because, unlike FIFA or Madden, its upcoming FC Tactical is a turn-based RPG-like soccer game featuring magical-seeming special moves. Weird, but intriguing!

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Take A Tour Through Halo Infinite's Newest Arena Maps

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Diablo IV’s Season 2 Patch Notes Are Over 10,000 Words Long

Diablo IV’s second season, the “Season of Blood,” is set to go live next week, bringing with it some big changes that Blizzard hopes will improve the action-RPG and bring back players. And while we’ll have to wait to see if Patch 1.2.0 can pull that off, I can at least tell you that, yes, update 1.2 is massive, with…

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Dragon Ball Daima Is The Newest DBZ Series And Toriyama Is Back

Today at New York Comic Con, Toei Animation announced a brand-new Dragon Ball anime series coming next fall.

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Bayonetta Creator 'Over' PlatinumGames, Starts YouTube Channel Instead

After announcing that he would do so late last month, Bayonetta director Hideki Kamiya left his job as vice president at PlatinumGames on October 12. And the very same day he became free of the studio he’d co-founded, he also hard-launched a new YouTube channel, “Hideki Kamiya Channel.” Its first and only video (which…

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Xbox Series S Starter Bundle Might Be Best Gaming Deal Of 2023

Microsoft’s getting ready for the holiday shopping season with a new Xbox Series S bundle that includes three months of Game Pass Ultimate at no additional cost. When you consider how many great games are available on Game Pass and how solid the tinier Xbox Series S is as a console, this new starter bundle might be…

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Hackers Think They’ve Found Mario’s New Wonder Voice Actor

Fans believe they might have discovered who the new actor for Mario is in Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

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Mortal Kombat 1 Switch Patch Attempts To Fix The Disastrous Port

The Switch version of Mortal Kombat 1 released in an absolute state. It’s one of the widest gaps in quality we’ve seen between Nintendo’s device and its console contemporaries. But for better or worse, NetherRealm Studios and the port teams at Shiver Entertainment and Saber Interactive are still supporting it, and…

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Lords Of The Fallen Sounds Like 2023’s Most Divisive Soulsborne

Lords of the Fallen sounds like the best and worst parts of the Soulsborne genre all rolled into one. Hexworks’ grim action-RPG arrives in a year full of homages to FromSoftware’s Dark Souls, and so far critical assessments run the gamut from high praise to exhausted disappointment.

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This ‘Playable Documentary’ About A 1984 Classic Is One Of The Year’s Best Games

When you first fire up The Making of Karateka, Digital Eclipse’s excellent interactive retrospective about Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner’s 1984 masterpiece, you’re greeted with this quote from his journals, written when he was just 18 years old:

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Nintendo Reveals Bowser Likes 'Em Thicc

Bowser is attracted to Princess Peach. We didn’t need Jack Black singing about it in the massively successful Mario movie to figure that out. However, according to official Nintendo marketing materials, it seems Bowser prefers his Princesses bigger and thicker.

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PS5 Finally Gets Cloud Gaming Later This Month

Sony’s cloud gaming efforts are starting to ramp up. PS Plus subscribers will be able to start streaming big-name games like Spider-Man: Miles Morales and the Resident Evil 4 remake directly to their PlayStation 5s in the coming weeks. The company also hints that PS5 cloud gaming might be coming to other devices, like…

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PS Plus October Lineup Includes Disco Elysium And Gotham Knights

Halloween is fast approaching, and with it comes a new medley of games for PlayStation Plus subscribers that’ll become available Tuesday, October 17.

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Excuse Me, They Gave The Overwatch Hamster Nipple Rings

Overwatch 2’s newest season is now live and suitably spooky, featuring demons, monsters, Diablo characters, and nipple rings on a hamster. Wait, what?

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Baldur’s Gate 2’s Characters Were ‘Cardboard Cutouts’ Until Devs Played Final Fantasy VII

Lauded for its story, characters, and density of quality fantasy narrative, BioWare’s 2000 RPG Baldur’s Gate II is one of the most celebrated computer games of all time. An adaptation of the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, it aspired to digitize the rich experience of playing at a table among friends,…

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New Shooter Is The Duke Nukem Sequel We Deserve

The Last Exterminator might not be an official Duke Nukem 3D sequel, but its crunchy combat, interactive environments, and retro visuals provide a much better alternative to the actual Duke Nukem sequel we got back in 2011.

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Overwatch 2 Players Raise Hell Over Moira's Pricey Lilith Skin

Overwatch 2’s Halloween-infused seventh season, Rise of Darkness, went live on Monday, bringing with it a swath of creepy new skins for its heroes, including a hotly anticipated skin based on Diablo IV’s Lilith for sardonic healer Moira. Unfortunately, players who eagerly dived into the season for a chance to acquire…

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Baldur’s Gate 3 Players Found An Incredible Way To Keep Minthara Alive In A ‘Good’ Playthrough

Baldur’s Gate 3’s accommodation of players’ more esoteric choices continues to astound me, two months after it launched. Players have recently found a way to rescue and recruit Minthara—a secret companion character who you can normally only team up with by murdering a group of Tieflings and going down the “evil” path—w…

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Someone Used A Modded Game Boy To Play A Church Organ, And It’s Awesome

Modded consoles are pretty awesome, letting people tap into the raw computational power of gaming machines to run emulators, custom software, and more. But what if you combine a modded console with a modded musical instrument? And not just any musical instrument, but a modded pipe organ? Well, that’s what someone just…

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Destiny 2 Offers Players $45 Credit After Banning Them By Mistake

Destiny 2 has been cracking down on cheating in recent years, and the sci-fi shooter is now riddled with players who claim they were banned by mistake. However, it seems at least some of them may have been telling the truth: Bungie recently contacted a few players to apologize for banning them by mistake, offering…

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Let’s Fix Starfield’s Terrible Temples With Mods

Early on in Starfield you start becoming a galactic superhero, unlocking stellar abilities like suspending gravity, slowing down time, and peering into the future (though there isn’t one to make Chunks tastier, sadly). Less cool, unfortunately, is that the repetitive process of gathering all your superpowers can…

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