Kotaku
One of the biggest Nintendo Switch piracy sites around has been taken down by the FBI as “part of a law enforcement operation” on Thursday. Nsw2u was one of the better-known repositories for Switch ROMs online, allowing people to play games on hacked Switches or emulators on PC without legally purchasing the games…
Kotaku
2018's online MMO Fallout 76 wasn’t a smash hit right out of the gate. In fact, it was a complete mess. But over the years, after updates added NPCs and new areas to explore, the game turned into something pretty cool. And now, the director behind Fallout 76 is teasing future plans involving the next season of…
Kotaku
Astro Bot, Team Asobi’s delightful PlayStation tribute platformer and Kotaku 2024 Game of the Year, is still getting free updates. Today, the team put out a handful of new levels and Special Bots, or little robot guys dressed up as different characters from PlayStation’s history. These updates have given Astro Bot more…
Kotaku
Pauline is gaming’s original damsel in distress, captured by Donkey Kong as a guy with a hammer dodges barrels and climbs scaffolding to save her. Now she’s returning to the DK universe with the Switch 2's Donkey Kong Bananaza, but this time as a kid. Some fans have wondered what the hell is going on with the timeline.…
Kotaku
Astro Bot, one of the best PlayStation 5 games around, is growing a bit bigger. Today, the wonderful platformer is getting five new and totally free levels via an update. And developers Team Asobi are teasing something special if you beat them all.
Kotaku
For nearly two decades, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been so prevalent in pop culture that their entire vibe has infected almost every facet of the creative output of Marvel as a larger comic-book and multimedia company. Projects like Crystal Dynamics’ ill-fated Avengers game forgo the source material’s comic…
Kotaku
While I occasionally work as a games critic and editor, my full-time job is telling people to watch Poker Face. Absolutely no one has heard of it, despite its being one of the best things on TV right now. So here I combine my roles into one. Season two of the Peacock show wraps this week, meaning right now is exactly…
Kotaku
394 P-Switch challenge missions might just be the biggest time sink in Mario Kart World’s Free Roam mode. These missions can involve anything from collecting a certain number of blue coins to navigating around an obstacle course using a particular item. Seven of these tasks that particularly stand out are the short…
Kotaku
Bungie has been paving the way for Destiny 2's upcoming The Edge of Fate expansion with a week of free loot for players. Once every day, fans can log in, visit the Emissary vendor, and claim an Infinite Nonary Engram, which drops all sorts of cosmetics players normally have to pay real money for. Not content with just…
Kotaku
Another great discount program bites the dust on Switch. Months after abandoning its gold coin cash-back program for digital game purchases on the eShop, game vouchers for Switch Online subscribers are also going away. Nintendo announced it won’t be officially killing the deal until January 2026 though, so fans have…
Kotaku
A nearly year-long battle between SAG-AFTRA game actors and the major publishers over AI protections for performances is set to end, after both sides reached a tentative agreement this week. Details of the deal haven’t yet been released, but the union says it includes “necessary AI guardrails” as companies adopt tools…
Kotaku
Earning first place in Mario Kart World‘s 150cc races depends on a lot of factors, ranging from shortcuts, knowing where to wall ride, and how to deal with the uncertainty of getting bombarded with shells. That hasn’t stopped players from figuring out the game’s unspoken meta, locking down which vehicles and…
Kotaku
Last month, during the excitement and chaos of the Nintendo Switch 2 launch, a story broke through the noise. At least one person’s Switch 2 was ruined by GameStop after someone at the store stapled a receipt to the box and punctured the screen. Now, a month later, the video game retailer is auctioning off the stapler…
Kotaku
Earlier this month, The Sims 4 released a new patch ahead of the July 10 release of Enchanted By Nature. As is often the case, this new patch broke some parts of the game. This time around, a lot of people are being marked as pregnant even though they aren’t, and this is having some weird side effects, which have…
Kotaku
Arrakis is an unforgiving planet, characterized by its vast desert and rocky terrain. Its only redeeming quality is in its spice, but that’s secondary to your need to survive. You require water. Without a constant supply of hydration, the massive sandworms roaming the dunes will be the least of your worries. The game…
Kotaku
Subnautica 2 is one of the most wishlisted games on Steam, and it’s no longer coming out in 2025. According to a new report by Bloomberg, publisher Krafton has decided to delay the underwater survival sim until 2026 which would likely deny the developers making the game a $250 million payout. That’s despite Unknown…
Kotaku
There is nothing more dreadful in Mario Kart World than losing your lead because of a Spiny Shell, a.k.a. the dreaded Blue Shell. The potential threat of a power-up item that specifically targets the driver in first place ensures you never feel quite safe. Thankfully, avoiding them isn’t as impossible as their…
Kotaku
Queer messages, characters, and storylines being censored in media in certain territories is nothing new, but just because it’s a regular occurrence, that doesn’t make it any less disheartening when it happens. The latest offender is an Amazon Prime documentary, Level Up, which follows several subjects involved with…
Kotaku
There are many Mario Kart tracks. But one of them, Piranha Plant Pipeline, is only available in Nintendo’s mobile phone game Mario Kart Tour. However, it’s only ever made playable for a limited time. This makes it arguably the rarest and hardest-to-play Mario Kart track in the franchise. And this rare track is…
Kotaku
It’s taken a couple of weeks for the full extent of KPop Demon Hunters to enter my field of view. For a while, all I’d seen of the Netflix animated phenomenon was the extremely…uh, exuberant early scene of its main cast of KPop idols getting real excited about their dinner, and the gifs from it being used in some…
Kotaku
Destiny 2's next expansion, The Edge of Fate, goes live later this month. It will provide the foundation for the struggling live-service shooter for the foreseeable future, and Bungie is making everything currently in the game free for all players on every platform. It’s a pitch to get lapsed fans back into the fold…
Kotaku
It’s official: Iron Man loves Ironheart. While we didn’t get a crossover with the two heroes in the first season of the Disney+ limited series, we did recently get a nearly 14-minute conversation between Robert Downey Jr. and the show’s star, Dominique Thorne, in which the former gushed over how the show’s first…
Kotaku
If you’re like me, you might have booted up Mario Kart World and immediately started spamming Charge Jumps as soon as you learned how to do them. After all, they seem like a Drift that lets you keep moving straight, and Drifts are awesome! Charge Jumps generate Mini-Turbos just like drifting does too, and Mario Kart…
Kotaku
Did you know there are currently 74 playable operators (75 if you count Recruit) available in Rainbow Six Siege X? Back when I used to play daily on PS4, there were, like, twelve. It was manageable. Nowadays? Not so much. How is a new player supposed to sift through thIS broad assortment of characters, find one that…
Kotaku
PlayStation Plus just got a big boost: Cyberpunk 2077 is joining Sony’s subscription service and will be free for all paying members to play starting today, July 9. It feels like the 2020 sci-fi RPG is on its fourth or fifth wind right now, with new content on the way, a great Switch 2 port, and more Edgerunners in…
Kotaku
Lies of P impressed us in 2023 with its fun and innovative weapon assembly system, which resulted in some of the most bizarre weapon creations in the Soulslike genre. With Lies of P: Overture, the game’s first and only major DLC, that trend continues with even weirder weapons than ever before. However, not every…
Kotaku
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, one of 2025's biggest games, is getting a significant new update that is set to improve the game’s performance, fix a ton of bugs, and add more difficulty options, too.
Kotaku
I love when things start going off the rails in an MMO, and while Dune: Awakening’s ongoing Deep Desert troubles are frustrating for fans, they’re also a fascinating experiment in balancing competing player incentives. Developer Funcom recently nerfed the endgame area’s PVP potential, turning almost half of it into…
Kotaku
Star Wars Battlefront 2, released in 2017, sparked controversy at launch due to its use of loot boxes and allegations of a pay-to-win system. But that hasn’t stopped the aging shooter from becoming one of the biggest games this Summer.
Kotaku
On Tuesday July 8, X (néeTwitter) was forced to switch off the social media platform’s in-built AI, Grok, after it declared itself to be a robot version of Hitler, spewing antisemitic hate and racist conspiracy theories. This followed X owner Elon Musk’s declaration over the weekend that he was insisting Grok be less…