Culture

Final Fantasy VII Remake’s Brand-New Tracks Kick Ass, Too

Welcome to Morning Music, Kotaku’s ongoing hangout for folks who love video games and the cool-ass sounds they make. Today I’m going to gush about just how amazing Final Fantasy VII Remake’s music is, and specifically a few of its new tracks that weren’t in the original. It took me a while to get into…

McDonald’s Pokémon Card Packs Are Selling Out

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Pocket Monsters, McDonald’s is including Pokémon card packs in Happy Meals. It seemed like a good idea! Others thought so, too. Included are four random cards out of a 50-card set, Inven reports. The rarest or most valuable cards are, as ever, the shiny versions. Some collectors and YouTubers…

Track: Shimanchu nu Takara | Artist: Begin | Album: Begin no Shimauta: Omoto Takeo 2 

Homicidal Hitman 3 Mastermind Crushes Every Single Person In The Grape Press

If you’ve played Hitman 3 and got to the Mendoza stage, you’ll know the grape press. A centrepiece murder machine, it has been designed to help you off one of the level’s main targets in spectacular fashion. In this video, Teallen96 is not offing one person. He is crushing every single person in the level,…

Beavis & Butthead x The Legend Of Zelda Is Animated Perfection

You might think these two cartoons, one released in the 80s about a video game, the other in the 90s about…stuff, have little to do with each other. I am here to tell you they were made for each other This is a joke that could have worked in a 30-second clip. The fact this…

China’s Steam Only Has 53 Games

Steam is now available in China, and if you thought that would give Chinese gamers instant access to the weird, wonderful and sometimes deeply offensive depths of the service’s catalogue, well lol, no, of course it doesn’t. At time of posting this custom, localised version of Valve’s shopfront only has 53 games available, with the…

Bloodborne Modder Releases Long-Awaited 60 FPS Hack

Bloodborne can now be played with smooth 60 frames-per-second visuals thanks to the long-anticipated release of an unofficial patch. You will need a modded PlayStation 4 to try it out, however, preferably a PS4 Pro. The patch’s creator, Lance McDonald, is something of a video game archaeologist, with cool stuff on his resume like discovering…

17 Years Later And I Still Can’t Beat Hannibal In Age Of Empires

Xbox Game Pass has once again proven its worth by allowing me to confront a bully of my past: the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca. Yes, I’m serious. Every night for the last two weeks, when normal people would wind down for bed with a nice hot mug of tea and their favorite background noise show,…

Riot’s CEO Is Being Sued For Sexual Harassment

Riot Games CEO Nicolo Laurent is being sued by former employee Sharon O’Donnell, who is alleging Laurent committed repeated acts of sexual harassment over a number of years, including asking her to “cum” to his house while his wife was away. O’Donnell, who was Laurent’s executive assistant, alleges that the CEO, “began a pattern of…

PS5 Controllers Are Drifting, And The Repairs Are A Hassle

Few things about the PlayStation 5 are better than the DualSense controller. It feels terrific to hold, somehow just as solid as it is light. The haptics are truly dynamic, at least for games that offer such support. It’s beautiful. But even the mighty DualSense reportedly isn’t immune to the Achilles’ heel of modern video…

I Hope This Final Fantasy XIV NPC Finally Got To Take A Dump

One meets a variety of NPCs while playing Final Fantasy XIV. Some can be pretty annoying—looking at you, Thancred—while others are instantly memorable. A poor Ishgardian sentry who desperately needs to find a bathroom while her country is being invaded by dragons falls into the latter category. At the beginning of Final Fantasy XIV’s patch…

Pokémon World Championships Skip 2021 Over Covid-19 Concerns

After canceling in-person competition in 2020 due to the rise of the covid-19 pandemic, The Pokémon Company announced it will skip official tournaments through 2021 as well. “The safety and well-being of our competitors, organizers, employees, local communities, and partners [continue] to be our top priority and is the primary consideration with every decision we…

What We Loved About Hitman 3

If there’s one thing Kotaku can’t get enough of, it’s Hitman 3. Between the wide-open levels, rapid-fire costume changes, and throwable bananas, IO Interactive’s latest stealth sandbox has enraptured many of us. Three of us (staff writer Ari Notis, staff editor Lisa Marie Segarra, and weekend editor Zack Zweizen) snuck into one of Kotaku’s many…

Crash Bandicoot 4 Comes To PS5, Xbox Series X/S And Switch March 12

The excellent if a bit sadistic Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time is about to get two upgrades and hopefully not too much of a downgrade on March 12, when the game launches for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Nintendo Switch. Activision announced the next-gen and friend releases this morning, along with a PC…

For Nine Years, I Have Somehow Avoided Finding Out How Mass Effect 3 Ends

It didn’t start out as something I tried to do. It just happened. The year was 2012. I’d reached the point in Mass Effect 3 where it felt like I was one or two loose ends away from heading into the grand finale. Then, for various reasons, I stopped. It has been nearly a decade…

EA Buys Glu Mobile For $2.1 Billion

EA adds a massive amount of mobile gaming power to its portfolio with the $2.1 billion acquisition of San Francisco-based Glu Mobile, makers of Diner Dash, Cooking Dash, Restaurant Dash: Gordon Ramsay, and Kim Kardashian: Hollywood … Dash. Nothing accelerates the growth of a company’s mobile business like acquiring an already massively successful mobile business.…

CD Projekt Red Hit By Cyber Attack, Source Code For Cyberpunk 2077 And Witcher 3 Held For Ransom

CD Projekt Red is the latest game company to be hit by a cyber attack. The company released a statement on Twitter this morning saying an “unidentified actor” has hacked some of its systems, and included a screenshot of the ransom note. Accessed data includes source code for some of the studio’s games, alongside internal…

Track: Mitainakoto | Artist: Yonige | Album: Kenzen Na Shakai

It’s 2021, And Super Mario 64 Now Has Ray Tracing

You might think that marrying mid-90s textures to 21st-century lighting tricks would look hideous, but this video of the Super Mario 64 PC port is looking very nice. Announced late last year, this video by Dario gives us a really good look at the modding community’s still-in-progress effort—among others—to add some modern touches to the 1996…

Horizon Zero Dawn Can Run In 72p And It Looks Beautiful

While most folks will gravitate towards the top end of the graphics settings for a game, there’s something to be said for heading for the bottom, just to see what it looks like. Especially when a modern blockbuster 4K game can be played at a resolution of just 256×144. Via The Verge, here’s zWORMz Gaming…