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Bummer: PS5 Entering 'The Latter Stage Of Its Life Cycle,' Sony Says

Sony announced its third-quarter earnings on February 14, and they weren’t exactly full of glad tidings for PlayStation fans. For starters, the company revealed it doesn’t plan to release any new titles in its major franchises for the remainder of 2024. Sony execs also said that its current-gen hardware, the PlayStatio…

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MLB The Show 24 Adds First Female Player In Series History

When MLB The Show 24 launches next month, it will include a female baseball player who made history in 1953. That inclusion will break new ground for the game series, too, as it’s never featured a playable woman character before.

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How To Destroy Scout Striders In Helldivers 2

Co-operative PvE extraction shooter Helldivers 2 features a number of different enemy types, many of which you may have to take out to complete specific challenges. A recent challenge requiring players to take out 20 Scout Striders is one such, and it might be giving you a bit of a hard time if you’re not too…

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New Destiny 2 Bundle Contains 5 Years Of Content For Just $40

Destiny 2 ain’t no spring chicken. Bungie’s popular intergalactic looter shooter has been around since 2017, and in that time, the game has received numerous updates and expansions. Now, a new deal collects almost all of those expansions and updates into one $40 Steam bundle making it easy for anyone to jump in and…

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How To Get The Heart Crosshair In Overwatch 2

Overwatch 2’s ninth season has begun, and while most players are talking about the reworks and sweeping changes Blizzard has made, there’s a small subset of people whose most anticipated part of the seasonal drop is a heart. No, not the heart-shaped balloon Reaper pops in his Valentine’s Day emote; the heart-shaped…

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Overwatch 2’s Latest Change Has The Community Shook

Overwatch 2’s ninth season is underway, and it’s bringing some sweeping changes to the hero shooter. On top of reworking Pharah and giving every hero both a health buff and a passive heal, Blizzard also increased the projectile size of most heroes’ weapons. In layperson’s terms, they made the bullets bigger. This…

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The Fantastic Four Cast Is Confirmed, Happy Valentine's Day

After months of speculation, the cast for the upcoming Marvel film The Fantastic Four has been announced by way of adorable Valentine’s Day-themed art. The art also revealed a release date: July 25, 2025.

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Everything We Know About Princess Peach: Showtime!

On March 22, Princess Peach: Showtime! will give us a standalone Peach game, rather than relegating the princess to the role of side character in yet another Super Mario Bros. title. We haven’t gotten a solo Peach game since 2005 (and that one was pretty shallow and insulting), so this is long overdue. The upcoming…

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The Mario vs. Donkey Kong Remake Sounds Like Simple, Good Fun

After the welcome reception of the Super Mario RPG remake just three months ago, Nintendo is back with another remake in the form of Mario vs. Donkey Kong. The original 2004 title on the Game Boy Advance was a charming puzzle platformer that pits the two titular stars and age-old rivals against each other once again.…

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PlayStation 5 Is About To Have A Quiet Year

If you were wondering what Sony’s up to after its latest State of Play presentation didn’t have much in the way of first-party games, it sounds like there was a reason for that. It looks like PlayStation 5’s 2024 will have a dearth of first-party games over the next year, as the company has confirmed it won’t be…

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The Industry Is Divided On How To Write Video Game Romance

In 2011, BioWare’s Dragon Age II portrayed its four main romantic conquests as bisexual, allowing them to be pursued by either the male or female version of main character Hawke. At the time, I was a young, mostly-but-not-completely out gay high school student, and I spent hours each week on the BioWare forums, hoping…

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Palworld Costumes Are Here And Oh God…Oh No…

Pokémon with guns (aka Palworld) is a massive hit and a lot of kids and teenagers are enjoying the open-world survival crafting game. It’s likely to be a popular source of inspiration for this year’s Halloween costumes and so, as expected, some companies are already producing unofficial merch that might end up on…

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Should You Butcher Your Pals In Palworld?

Palworld, the animal-catching survival game available on PC and Xbox (it’s free on Game Pass), tasks you with fighting and catching creatures called Pals. That’s on top of basic survival tasks like resource farming, and maintaining bodily needs like hunger. While you can issue a variety of tasks to your Pals once…

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The Video Game Characters That Made Us Gay

Whether it’s from Mass Effect, Final Fantasy, or an obscure party game from the aughts, you’ve had a crush on a video game character at some point in your life, right? And since it’s the season of love, we want to bring back our 2023 Pride piece to focus on the game characters we fell for during our combined decades…

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Ranking Mass Effect Boyfriends By Whether They'd Actually Be Good Partners

It’s pretty quiet in the Mass Effect universe these days. We’re approaching the seventh anniversary of Mass Effect: Andromeda, and while we got a teaser for the upcoming fifth game that included some exciting details, it sounds like whatever that game turns out to be is still several years away. But just because we’re…

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Tomb Raider I-III Remastered: The Kotaku Review

How you define “remastered” means will certainly color your experience of playing Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft—the full, extraordinarily silly title of this collection. It’s an ambiguous word, and one that in gaming can mean anything from new packaging to remade from scratch. In the case of Ms.…

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Diablo 4’s New Fast-Travel Portal Colors Cost $30

You know those portals that appear in Diablo IV when you teleport or fast-travel somewhere? Wouldn’t it be neat if you could change how they look? Maybe alter their colors? Yeah. Well, you’ll need to pay Blizzard $30 to do so.

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Helldivers 2 Feels Like A PS3 Game In A Very Good Way

Arrowhead Game Studios’ third-person co-op shooter Helldivers 2 has had a rough launch. It’s been plagued with server issues, progression problems, and more, and after several rapid fixes failed to fix things, studio CEO Johan Pilestedt issued an apology to players.

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The Essential Helldivers 2 Settings To Change Before Dropping In

Third-person cooperative shooter Helldivers 2 recently landed on PC and PS5. Featuring intense, chaotic gun fights against alien threats across the galaxy it’s proven pretty popular—so much so that you might be struggling to get into a match right now due to server load. Assuming you can get into one, I’ve rounded up…

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Immortals Of Aveum Proves It's A Grim Time For Single-Player Games

In 2024, AAA games are often built around the idea of continuous revenue streams with microtransactions and live-service elements. Perhaps it’s corporate delusion that makes leadership think a needlessly large budget makes for a better game, but making adequate money back on a big-budget blockbuster to satisfy the…

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Dungeons & Dragons' 50th Anniversary Brings Back Vecna

Dungeons & Dragons turns 50 this year, and as you’d expect, Wizards of the Coast is marking the anniversary with big announcements—some of which look to the tabletop roleplaying giant’s rich past. Announced today: six book releases, upcoming gaming events, and brand collaborations that run the gamut from “makes sense”…

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Six Months On, Starfield's Player Count Shouldn't Matter

2023 was a year of amazing games, but Starfield was not one of them. The spacefaring role-playing game from Bethesda was supposed to be the next Skyrim, but bigger. Garnering mixed reviews and player reactions, it quickly became clear that Starfield would not reach the heights of Bethesda’s best work. Now, less than…

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Deus Ex Owners To Adam Jensen Actor: Stop Talking About The Character

Actor Elias Toufexis is probably most famous for his role as the gravelly-voiced cyborg Adam Jensen, the protagonist in Eidos Montreal’s Deux Ex prequel games. He loves to talk about the character and his possible future, but according to Toufexis, the studio that owns the franchise would rather him not talk about…

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Spiritual Successor To SSX Was In The Works, But Not Anymore

There is one video game series that will forever loom large in my mind, and it is SSX. With no new entry in the extreme snowboarding franchise since its 2012 installment, it seems like there is little hope for it to ever make a comeback. Which makes it all the more depressing to hear that we could have seen the series…

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Overwatch 2 Just Killed One Of Its Most Famous Hero Combos

Overwatch 2 is bringing a lot of sweeping changes in its season nine balance patch, and some of them are controversial. Between giving every hero a passive self-heal and every character getting a health buff across the board, Overwatch 2 feels like it’s shifting from a team-based shooter into one that values hero…

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New Report Suggests The Games Industry Is Failing LGBTQ Players

I’ve known that representation in games mattered ever since that day in 1987 when I finished Metroid and discovered that intergalactic bounty hunter Samus Aran was that rarest of things (for the time): a cool female video-game protagonist. I loved playing as Mario, or Link, or any intrepid hero, but I was particularly…

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Someone's Playing Doom On Sound Waves

Welcome to another installment of “What Weird Thing Has Someone Ported Doom To This Week?” This time, it’s a user on Reddit who has translated the game into an audio signal that can be displayed by a spectrogram.

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Upcoming Game Delays Release To Avoid 'Busy' February

The Thaumaturge, an upcoming narrative-focused, turn-based RPG, was planned to launch in just a few days on February 20. However, the game has now been delayed until March as the developers and publishers hope to avoid a “busy” February and give the game more “breathing room.”

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Twisters Is A Sequel To The Best Movie Of All Time, Not A Remake Of It

During Super Bowl LVIII, a teaser trailer dropped that baffled a lot of viewers—it wasn’t the Despicable Me 4 one making fun of AI, but an action-packed Twister teaser. The trailer showcased the July 2024 movie starring Normal People’s Daisy Edgar Jones and Top Gun: Maverick’s Glen Powell as storm chasers. It featured…

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Yellow Paint Is Once Again Breaking People’s Brains

Last week, thanks to the Final Fantasy VII Rebirth demo, some old video game discourse returned and overtook social media: The use of yellow paint to mark certain in-game objects or ledges. All it took was a now-viral tweet of Cloud climbing some yellow rocks in the new demo and a comment about how yellow paint was a…

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