Culture

Twitch Is Cracking Down On Simp Emotes Over Harassment Fears

“Simp” is, to put it lightly, a divisive term. On Twitch, TikTok, and Twitter, people mostly use it to express hyper-exaggerated thirst, often to get laughs out of friends or communities. But the word also has more negative connotations, and even though it’s undeniably become part of the broader Twitch lexicon, Twitch itself doesn’t seem…

Final Fantasy III Designer Had His Own Head Canon About White Mage’s Iconic Red Sleeves

Square Enix recently published a super-insightful discussion with Final Fantasy III designer Hiromichi Tanaka, and recently did the same with Koichi Ishii, the man behind the game’s expanded job system. While he isn’t quite as indifferent to the Moogle species as his former co-worker, Ishii did share his differing interpretation of the white mage’s classic…

As Expected, Nintendo Is Taking Down That Unofficial Super Mario 64 PC Port

With the world in turmoil, it’s important to hold onto the few constants we have left. The sun still rises in the east, the sky is still (mostly) blue, and Nintendo is still devoted to taking down unofficial ports of its games. Earlier this month, a PC port of Super Mario 64 appeared that could…

New Apex Legends Trailer Shows Quests, Map Changes

Apex Legends developer Respawn has released a gameplay trailer for next week’s Season 5. It shows some more details about the new Quests mode, as well as some changes to King’s Canyon’s map. Quests were announced last week, but in the video we see a little bit of them in action. In the video, upcoming…

My Search To Find The True Meaning Behind Final Fantasy VII’s Loveless Poster

Video game fans are often defined by their obsessions. I used to think this was not true of me, until I found myself in a career where I frequently, without being forced to, wrote about them. We all tell on ourselves eventually, I suppose. So let me get ahead of things, and tell you about…

The Switch’s bubblegum-looking arena fighter Ninjala has been delayed a month due to the ongoing covid-19 pandemic. Originally set to come out May 28 it will now arrive on June 25 leaving this month’s release schedule feeling even more barren aside from some new ports of old games.

Yesterday a video on the official Star Wars Youtube page revealed an October 20 release date for LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. However, no social media accounts confirmed this date and we got no response from WB Games about the date. The video is now private, so it seems the date was revealed early…

What Are You Playing This Weekend?

The weekend is for trying to make my own seitan, a meat alternative I’ve enjoyed eating and think I’ll enjoy making, but there’s a lot of room for disaster there. The weekend is also for playing video games. There’s a concert in Fortnite’s new Party Royale mode tonight at 9pm Eastern. I’ll admit I don’t…

Indivisible‘s New DLC Puts Players’ Skills To The Test

Lab Zero Games’ delightful action RPG Indivisible has plenty of demanding platforming and combat, but a little more never hurts. The new Razmi’s Challenges DLC gives players 40 jumping, sliding, flying, and fighting tasks to complete, along with a heaping helping of everyone’s favorite curmudgeonly shaman. Available now for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4…

Detroit Lions Use Animal Crossing To Reveal 2020 Schedule, Throw Shade

Shouting out to New Horizons for “holding it down while we wait for football season,” the Detroit Lions revealed its 2020 schedule with an Animal Crossing video full of adorable swipes at its rival teams. We’ve got a bear being buried for Chicago, peaches being eaten for Atlanta, and a Green Bay fan brutally beaten…

Track: False Prophet | Artist: Bob Dylan | Album: Rough and Rowdy Ways

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night got a major update today, with the second playable character, Zangetsu, and a new game mode. In case you missed it, be sure to read Kotaku’s Bloodstained review right here.

The 2020 Tokyo Game Show Has Been Cancelled

The Tokyo Game Show, one of the biggest video game events on the planet—last year’s drew over 260,000 people—has been cancelled for 2020 amidst the covid-19 pandemic, and will now be replaced with an online showcase. A statement released by the show’s organisers sent to Kotaku reads: Due to the outbreak of novel coronavirus (COVID-19)…

A Cute Lil’ Akira Prequel Sounds Weirdly Tempting

Nilberto Tawata is a 3D artist from Brazil, and this is his lil’ Kaneda, who as a kid was learning all the important skills he would go on to need as a…bigger kid. I love how, since the whole model is including iconic Kaneda imagery like his bike (and stickers), jacket and hair, the brake…

Bungie Is Fixing Fashion In Destiny‘s Fourth Year

Destiny 2 is a game about grinding for loot, and one of the biggest motivators is how cool that loot looks. In recent seasons, a lot of these cosmetics have been locked behind the game’s microtransaction shop. Bungie says that will change come September. “In today’s Destiny 2, the balance of the game’s rewards is…

Tonight We Riot Devs Wanted To Make An ‘Unapologetically Leftist’ Game

“Politics” has become a dirty word in gaming, especially when angrily screamed—or, as is usually the case, frantically typed—by a vocal minority of reactionary video game fans. But for more progressive players, games often aren’t political enough. Or, when they do take a position, they push objectionable conservative concepts like capitalism, imperialism, and militarism. Tonight…

Video Games Are Full Of Weird Birds

Outside my current place of residence, there is a nest full of freshly hatched baby birds. They’re shapeless little blobs, embryonic amalgams of beaks and fluff. They do not look like birds. They are, in that sense, perhaps the closest living relatives of the polygonal mutant birds that appear in video game backgrounds, as highlighted…

Valorant Players Say Anti-Cheat Is Making Their PCs Overheat

There’s anti-cheat software, and then there’s the program Valorant’s got under its hood. When the game’s closed beta first launched, the clandestine anti-cheat was always running in the background. Now players can disable it when they’re not playing Riot’s 60 percent more wizard-y version of Counter-Strike, but it’s started to cause other issues. That is…

Destiny 2 is coming to next-gen consoles, Bungie announced today following Microsoft’s Xbox Series X event. The studio didn’t given any specifics about when, but said more details would be coming in the future. The game’s fourth year and annual expansion get underway this fall. 

Everything Microsoft Showed During Today’s Xbox Series X Event

Microsoft finally showed its next-gen Xbox Series X in action today during a special edition of Inside Xbox featuring a slew of trailers for upcoming games, including Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Dirt 5, and Yakuza: Like a Dragon Over a dozen games were shown during the roughly hour-long event and while many of them were from…