If The Simpsons Characters Were Otaku

Imagine that all The Simpsons characters were into anime, manga, and Japanese video games. They would probably say stuff like this. That’s the central premise of Twitter userWeebSimpsons, which has been churning out gems like these: Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China…

Osaka Court’s Ruling Helps Destroy Tattoos In Japan 

Today in Osaka, a District Court ruled that tattooer Taiki Masuda broke the law by tattooing without a medical license. Police raided Masuda’s studio in 2015, and he was told to pay a fine. Instead of coughing up the cash, Masuda took the police to courton the grounds that tattooing was an art and not…

Giant Gundam Statue Now In A Japanese Buddhist Temple

Diehard Gundam fans might view the anime with an almost religious fervour. Now, at a Buddhist temple in Nagoya, Japan, they can pray with a large Mobile Suit looking on. According to Asahi.com, the statue is located in Zuienji Temple and was created by 66-year-old Toshio Hattori, who lives nearby. Hattori, a former engineer, decided…

Learn Game Programming With A Japanese Maid

Want to learn Unity? What about make a game in VR? Recently, seminars were held in Japan that taught first-timers programming with the help of Japanese maids. Maids, of course, are iconic figures in Japanese nerd culture. There are maid cafes serving drinks and countless maid characters in manga, anime, and video games. Tokyo-based programming…

Gold and Snow. Kyoto, Japan. By Adam Solino. JPGs is a photo peek into wherever gamers might find interesting. If you’re a photographer and have images you want to share, drop us a line! 

Be Nice If A Star Wars Game Looked Like This

BIGO is an artist from Brazil working in both video games and books. I love this Star Wars stuff. It looks like the best iOS game Disney never bothered to make. An XCOM-y adventure game that looked like this would change the world. You can see more of BIGO’s art at their ArtStationand Behancepages. To…

Half-Life NPCs Can Smell Corpses

Hate to break it to you, but Half-Life really stinks. In an enlightening video, MarphitimusBlackimus digs deep into the original Half-Life’s code and discovers that characters don’t just remark on smells randomly or because of scripted events; there’s actually a whole AI system for it. In short, there are three scent categories: meat, carcass, and…

We’re starting up our playthrough of Deadly Premonition live now on Twitch. You’ll come and join the chat, won’t you Zach?

Striking Voice Actors Didn’t Get Everything They Wanted, But It Was A Start

After a year of striking, countless career sacrifices and some thorny negotiating, the video game voice actors of the Screen Actors Guild‐American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) finally came to a tentative agreementwith the 11 struck game game companies last night. Without some big demands met, it’s easy to consider the tentative agreement…

The Rarest Stuff We Found In Akihabara’s Game Shops

You can blow a lot of money in Akihabara, the Tokyo district that houses the world’s densest cluster of nerd-related storefronts. And if you have far more cash than sense, you can throw it down on some of these very rare and highly desired vintage games and related items. Here’s a look at the highest…

Atlus Files Copyright Strike Against PS3 Emulator That Advertised Persona 5

Atlus has filed a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown against the creators of the Playstation 3 emulator RPCS3, previously noted for running Persona 5. With the emulator, the game would be playable on PC, which doesn’t officially run the game. RPCS3 is an open source Playstation 3 emulator capable of smoothly emulating numerous games. Atlus…

Valve Pulls Nearly 200 Spam Games From Steam

Valve has removed games from Steam before, but never this many, especially not all at once. Today, Valve yanked 173 games from the Steam store, all of which were tied to Silent Echo Studios, a company that’s become notorious among Steam users for publishing heaps of cheaply made games, typically by slapping together assets from…

Player-Created Cemetery Honors Fallen EVE Online Friends

Not everything in EVE Online is dedicated to death, destruction and betrayal. A few landmarks are dedicated to calm, quiet reflection. There’s the boneyard of B-R5BR, where permanent wrecks of destroyed Titans drift through space, placed there by CCP Games to commemorate the largest video game battle in history. And the EVE Gate, an enormous…

Zelda: The Wand Of Gamelon: The Kotaku Review

In 1993, Nintendo made the inexplicable decision to license The Legend of Zelda to Phillips Media, creators of the CD-i. Among the resulting games is Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon. It’s known as one of the worst games ever made. Replaying it 24 years later reveals a game with interesting ideas marred by atrocious execution.…

Silent Hill Will Always Help Me Remember A Remarkable Friend

My friend Kit Reed died on Sunday. She was a prolific, award-winning writer of speculative fiction. Her cluttered yellow house is now empty. I will no longer stop by for tea or make dumplings in her kitchen for Thanksgiving. Kit insisted on no memorials, finding even the prospect of friends meeting for a drink after…