Kotaku
When you accomplish something big, like winning a major tournament, how do you celebrate? Maybe you jump around in excitement, salty rivulets streaming down your face in a rush of emotions. Maybe you pop a bottle of champagne and spray it around like an NFL player after the Super Bowl. Or, if you’re a 48-year-old…
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Pokémon’s profit margins probably don’t reflect it, but the franchise had a rough year in 2023. Without a new mainline role-playing game to dominate the series’ headlines, Pikachu and friends were, instead, shrouded in controversies throughout the past 12 months. Between Pokémon Go angering swaths of its community,…
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The design of the video game controller as we’ve known it has largely remained the same for the last 20 years: a d-pad, two analog sticks, four face buttons, and four shoulder buttons. It persists from the first PlayStation’s DualShock, all the way through to the modern PS5’s DualSense, as well as various Xbox and…
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The last few years have been full of amazing RPGs, but 2023 took things to a whole new level. It was the year we got Final Fantasy XVI, Diablo 4, and Bethesda’s long awaited Starfield. It was also the year Baldur’s Gate 3 appeared and blew them all out of the water. Fans of stat-based combat, meandering side-quests,…
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Earlier this week, I shared a story about my favorite Christmas gift. It was an Xbox 360 I had begged my late grandma for, which she bought alongside a copy of Gears of War and a second controller for my bestie and I. This gift would set the course for my life’s current trajectory, one neither I nor my family thought…
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‘Tis the season to promote indie games with AI-generated junk, apparently. A Microsoft Twitter account recently posted low-effort, energy-intensive art promoting indie games on Xbox before later deleting it after getting roundly mocked by fans and developers alike.
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2023 was yet another solid year for fans of shooty-shooty-bang-bang video games. While the Golden Era of shooters might be slowing down as the year wraps up, we still got some dang good ones, both in first-person and third-person variants, over these past 12 months.
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A new month is nearly here, as well as a new year, and that means updates to the PlayStation Plus catalog. January kicks off 2024 with three new games available for Premium, Extra, and Essential members to download starting on January 2, as well as some goodies if you happen to be a space ninja.
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I didn’t think it was still possible, but Twitter just served up my favorite crossover of the year: Lord of the Rings Moneyball. You see, you take the plot of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and then talk about it using Moneyball quotes. It’s simple, stupid, and so satisfying I can’t believe nobody thought of it before.
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Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian Studios’ award-winning role-playing game (which you’ll find ranked rather high on Kotaku’s Game of The Year list), is known for its incredibly immersive world, its fantastic characters, and the tough choices you’ll have to make during its 50 to 100 hours of gameplay. But it’s also garnered…
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2023 is nearly over, finally, but at least there were some great games to get us through it, right? This year was full of great releases, but marred by myriad layoffs across sectors (including the games industry), and larger, global issues that made it hard to find the light in the dark. But video games, with their…
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The Switch is going out with a bang. Ahead of the likely reveal of the Nintendo handheld hybrid’s successor next year, the aging hardware continued receiving an amazing slate of new games in 2023, including The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, one of the best entries to date in the long-running fantasy adventure…
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Valve introduced the world to the Steam Deck in 2022 and it was an instant hit with countless Steam users who jumped at the chance to take their games just about anywhere. As we close out 2023, the Steam Deck remains one of the best pieces of portable gaming hardware you can buy, both on the hardware and software side…
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2023 was a messy and horrible year that, despite itself, gave us some excellent games. You could even argue that this year gave us too many games! If you were looking for a break to catch up on what you missed, well, next year doesn’t seem to be offering much of a reprieve—at least not at the outset. Big titles like Fi…
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I know you all were worried and losing sleep about this, so I’m happy to be the one to bring you this very important news: Kuma the bear will be in Tekken 8.
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Last year, I said 2022 was an odd year for games, with some feeling that it was largely devoid of great releases and others, myself included, finding them plentiful. But this year was even stranger, as it was better than ever while simultaneously being the worst in a long time.
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Happy New Year! Well, almost. 2023 will soon be behind us, and that means a whole calendar year of new releases to look forward to lies ahead. January might arrive with a brisk selection of titles, but it’s a pretty sweet way to kick off 2024.
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A Steam user on Christmas Eve had a question: How do you earn just one measly little Steam Point? They were at 68,999 points and wanted to hit 69,000 because, you know, it’s a nice number and all that. However, because of how Steam Points are earned, there seemed no simple way to get that one measly point. But then a…
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Starfield is finally here and it is big, complex, and often overwhelming. There’s a lot of stuff in this game and it’s easy to get lost trying to do it all and see everything the game has to offer. So to help you avoid getting lost in space, we’ve collected over two dozen tips and tricks to help you get started in…
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Now that we’ve reached the end of 2023, we can comfortably say that Sony has given the PlayStation 5 a solid three years of game releases. That’s good news if you’re new to the console, or if you’re just wondering about which games to pick up to fill out your PS5 library. Whatever the case, we’re here to help with our…
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After years of hype and numerous teasers, Spider-Man 2 is finally here. And lucky for all of us, it’s really good! If you are just hopping into the game now and want some useful tips, we have some! These 19 tips and tricks should help make saving NYC as either Miles Morales or Peter Parker just a bit easier.
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To some, 2023 was one of the best years for video games in a long time. It didn’t quite land that way for me, but that’s okay. Even if I don’t rank the likes of Super Mario Bros. Wonder and Baldur’s Gate 3 among the year’s best, I still admire the impulse they exhibit to try something fresh and new, or to make the…
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Good parenting is a lot like being a solid player two. You want to be supportive, curious, and competent. You’re there to have a good time, and understand going with the flow is key to harmony. This can be a challenge with kids and video games when you’re actually, literally, player two, especially if you’re a gamer…
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On Christmas Day, a big GTA 5 leak revealed that Rockstar Games had some single-player DLC planned for the open-world crime sim. Though none of them were released, what was uncovered by online sleuths is interesting all the same.
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Cyberpunk 2077’s one-and-done expansion, Phantom Liberty, arrived on September 26, 2023, bringing with it a new story and a new location to explore. But fans have found another unique addition the expansion introduces: a subtle reference to another open-world game also set in a fictional take on California.
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We’re just a few short days away from the ball dropping and ushering in a new year. Kotaku put out our own Game of the Year list, but last week we also asked you, the Kotaku readers, about your favorite games from the year of our lord 2023. While there were a few obvious frontrunners, folks did come through with some…
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Hope you had a nice holiday, because a certain open-world space RPG certainly did not. As of right around December 25, 2023, Starfield had received enough thumbs-downs on Steam to push its user rating status into “Mostly Negative” territory. It’s an upsetting fall for such a hyped title from one of the most celebrated…
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Christmas and Hanukkah are both over, which means folks are probably still cleaning their homes and fridges of all the festivities. (I know I am.) But before you go back to playing with your new goodies, though, Kotaku has a question for you, dear reader: what was your fave gift ever?
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We’ve already recommended the very best ways to dress up Peter Parker in Spider-Man 2, and now, we’re here to focus on this partner-in-crime-fighting, Miles Morales. Miles has had to shoulder a lot of weight over the course of Spider-Man and Miles Morales. Most notably, he’s grieving the death of his father at the…