Culture

Rare Magic The Gathering Card Goes For Over $500,000

This week, an ultra-rare Magic The Gathering Alpha Black Lotus card with a signature by artist Christopher Rush sold for $511,100.00. Online auction seller PWCC called the gem mint card, graded at perfect PSA 10, “the single finest” Alpha Black Lotus it had ever brokered for sale. “The fragile black periphery is free of common…

Track: Suki, Suki, Suki (London) | Artist: Sadistic Mika Band | Album: Live in London 

Cyberpunk 2077 Removes Mod That Let You Bang Keanu Reeves

There was a mod available for Cyberpunk 2077 that let you have sex—or a very unsettling approximation of it—with Keanu Reeves’ character. That mod is gone now. As Eurogamer reports, the mod—really just a collection of skins that could be swapped with certain others in the game—let you transform a “Joytoy” sex robot into Reeves’…

Fallout Mod Pulled After Artist Allegedly Posts “Animated Pedophillic Content”

We only wrote about the big new Fallout: New Vegas mod The Frontierlast weekwhen it was released! And now we’re writing about it again, because the mod has been “hidden” (basically temporarily removed) from Nexus Mods and pulled from its own website after allegations that one of its artists posted “animated pedophillic content on their personal…

Give Me All The GameStop Jokes

I’m not even going to pretend to understand what’s going on with GameStop—I’ll leave that to the excellent reporting of fellow Kotaku writer Ethan Gach. No, as with most things in life, I’m just here for the jokes. And social media has produced no shortage of silliness in response to this absurd situation. As usual, Hard…

Discord Bans r/WallStreetBets Server For ‘Hateful’ Content [Update: Subreddit Briefly Taken Offline]

WallStreetBets, the subreddit behind engineering GameStop’s record-shattering stock price surge over the past week, has been banned from Discord for hate speech, The Verge reports GameStop’s stock doubled today, rising from the previous day’s record of over $150 to a new peak of over $300 a share, all because day traders on the WallStreetBets subreddit…

Tencent Buys Stake In Life Is Strange’s Creators

Tencent continued its massive expansion in the gaming world today after acquiring a minority stake in French developer Dontnod, maker of Life is Strange, Vampyr, and Tell Me Why. The Chinese conglomerate has been busy since the start of 2021, recently buying a majority stake in Klei Entertainment, which makes the indie survival game Don’t…

Too Fast Too Fantasy XV: Episode Gladio? More Like Episode Bad-io

When I sit down for my daily session of Final Fantasy XV I’m expecting one of two things: A happy-funtime road-trip adventure with my boys, or a sad, emotionally wrought meditation on the bonds of friendship. I am not expecting a horror-suspense thriller filled with stealth mechanics and jump-scares, yet that’s exactly what I got…

Mass Effect 2 Almost Had Another Gay Romance, With Jacob

Turns out Jack’s pansexuality wasn’t the only instance of BioWare scrubbing same-sex romance from Mass Effect 2 before it shipped. Jonathan Cooper, a former BioWare cinematic animator, revealed on Twitter this morning that his team also worked on a similar scene involving party member Jacob Taylor “We prevized Jacob as the male/male [relationship], matching shot-for-shot from…

Report: Activision Blizzard Calls Policy To Make Hiring More Diverse ‘Unworkable’

Earlier this month, Activision Blizzard was asked to institute some version of the Rooney Rule, a policy requiring employers to interview diverse candidates when hiring, according to a new report by Motherboard. Lawyers for the massive publisher behind Call of Duty and World of Warcraft responded that such a policy would be “an unworkable encroachment…

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Players Figured Out How To (Legitimately) Score That Secret Bow

Over the weekend, players of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla uncovered a secret bow (the laughably powerful Noden’s Arc) by…smacking a rock in the middle of a lake over and over again. The trick bounced around the web. Ubisoft’s Darby McDevitt even chimed in, describing it as a “clever brute force hack” before mentioning that some players…

Twitch Is Cracking Down On Small (But Not Big) Streamers Who Made Channels Before They Turned 13

AverageHarry, a 15 year-old aspiring Twitch streamer from the UK, was in spitting distance of his dream. He’d had a breakout 2020, amassing an audience of nearly 90,000 followers, somewhat ironically off the back of a viral clip in which randos in a hotel lobby made fun of him for streaming. Late last year, he…

Hitman Player Tries To Kill Every NPC In One Map With A Single Rubber Ducky

Twitch streamer RTGame (meatspace name: Daniel) had a dream: to kill every NPC in a single Hitman level. But while you can find dozens of videos on YouTube of people doing the same thing, Daniel’s plan was a bit more explosive, chiefly because he intended to take out everyone at the same time. Unfortunately, things…

Even the White House is getting questions about GameStop. “Our economic team, including [Treasury] Secretary Yellen and others are monitoring the situation,” Psaki said when asked about the gaming store’s unprecedented stock price surge during today’s daily press briefing

Here’s February 2021’s PlayStation Plus Lineup

February’s PlayStation Plus games are great. You get Destruction AllStars for PS5, and the storied Control: Ultimate Edition as either the PS4 version or PS5 version As always, these games are only “free” if you have an active PlayStation Plus membership. February’s PS Plus games are: PS5 Destruction AllStars PS4 Control: Ultimate Edition (also available…

For like the eight millionth time, Lara Croft is coming to the silver screen. Today, Netflix announced a new anime series based on Tomb Raider. According to Deadline, the show will follow and pick up after the recent reboot trilogy, which culminated with 2018’s terrific Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Also in the works: A series based…

GameStop Stock Drama Continues As Price Soars And Hedge Fund Blinks

GameStop’s stock price continued to soar in after-hours trading last night to over $300. While many are waiting for it to come crashing back down, it might be too late for some major hedge funds. With the stock still sitting at well over $250 a share (unthinkable just last year when it was trading at…

The 1950 Radio Series Dimension X Has The Science Fiction You’ve Been Looking For

Nine years before Rod Serling brought America The Twilight Zone, NBC had a science fiction anthology series that offered very similar dark tales of potential dystopia and future-set malarkey. It was called Dimension X, featuring stories by some of the most famous sci-fi writers of the 20th century, and the reason you’ve likely never heard…

Modding Breakthrough Allows Legend Of Zelda: Skyward Sword To Be Recreated In Breath Of The Wild

Breath of the Wild modder Waikuteru is on a roll. Last week, they salvaged the glorified storage unit that is Link’s house. Now they’ve taken full control of the giant house that houses Link’s house, by which I mean Hyrule. In a new video, Waikuteru demonstrates how a modding breakthrough allows them to edit Breath…

OutRun’s Composer Rewrote Sega’s Sound Drivers So Sword Of Vermilion Could Rock

Welcome to Morning Music, Kotaku’s ongoing hangout for folks who love video games and the cool-ass sounds they make. Today we’re diving into the sounds of Sword of Vermilion, a middling RPG for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive with music that is anything but. Upon the 16-bit Mega Drive’s 1988 debut, Sega of Japan redirected as…