Kotaku
Apparently Video Game Characters Look Great In Drag

There are many gifts to be found on self-proclaimed “video game siren” Velvet Caveat’s TikTok, like gay Team Rocket and, most recently, an electric blue Gyrados puppet holding down Ariana Grande’s part of “Rain On Me” during a lip-sync performance.
Forspoken Actress Says She’s Isn’t Bothered By The Online Discourse, And More Power To Her

Square Enix’s new fantasy parkour game Forspoken has had a bit of a rocky launch in terms of public perception among gamers, who found its Joss Whedon-esque dialogue in advertisements cringe-inducing. However, Forspoken’s lead actress says she isn’t bothered by all the discourse the game’s dialogue has caused online,…
Twitter’s ‘Useless’ Dragon Age Facts Shed Some New Light On The Series

If you, like many others, have been stuck waiting nearly a decade for Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, you have also been living off crumbs for the series since Dragon Age: Inquisition launched in 2014. Well, thanks to the wonders of social media engagement farming, we got a few new glimpses into the development of Bioware’s…
Massive Pokémon Discord Owner Banned For Allegedly Sexually Preying On Minors

The r/Pokémon subreddit Discord is one of the bigger online meeting places for players and fans of the hit Nintendo series. It boasts over 300,000 users who use it to battle, trade, or just hang out in between work, classes, or whatever else is going on in their lives. And this week its owner was banned from the…
Twitch’s Mega Popular AI Streamer Now Pulling In Thousands Of Viewers With Reaction Content

Artificial Intelligence is everywhere these days, with technologies like ChatGPT and DALL-E encroaching on human artistic creativity and expression. Sometimes it yields interestingly absurdist results, such as that AI-generated Seinfeld-like show Nothing, Forever. Other times, it feigns humanity, like the…
In Overwatch, Healing Is The Real Gay Agenda

There’s a phenomenon in the Overwatch community that has persisted through the original game’s 2016 release, its gradual decline, and the launch of the sequel. This phenomenon is an interesting one, a sort of “IYKYK” situation that requires membership in a specific community in order to recognize its members: in …
Genshin Impact’s Queer Backlash, Explained

The Genshin Impact community can’t seem to stop harassing its voice actors. A few days ago, a queer Genshin voice actor made a negative tweet about “fujoshi,” a term most commonly attributed to straight women who consume anime media about gay men. The resulting firestorm of online harassment not only ensnared them and…
15+ Epic Games To Play After The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

So you’ve played, or re-played, the epic fantasy saga that is The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and its two critically acclaimed expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine. Now you’re on the hunt for your next fantasy epic, but which to choose?
Pedro Pascal Barely Remembers Getting Last Of Us Role Thanks To Ambien

Sometimes you get really excited or nervous and have trouble sleeping. So you take a sleeping aid to help you get some shuteye. I do it all the time, as my brain never lets me sleep peacefully. But after Pedro Pascal took his Ambien, he received a call confirming he got the job and would play Joel in The Last of Us on HBO
Real-Life Squid Game Contestants Claim ‘Rigged’ Reality Show Caused ‘Torment and Trauma’

Remember when we all thought the idea of turning Netflix’s Squid Game into a real-world reality show was a bad idea? Turns out we were right because a bunch of contestants are seeking legal action against the Netflix-produced reality show for unsafe working conditions, trauma, and participating in what they claim was…
Activision Did Nothing Wrong, Will Pay $35 Million Settlement

Activision Blizzard will pay the Securities Exchange Commission $35 million to settle charges that it violated workplace misconduct reporting rules and whistleblower protections. The Call of Duty publisher admits no wrongdoing in the case, which comes less than two years after a bombshell lawsuit by California…
Overwatch 2 Will Start Banning People Who Team Up With Cheaters

Blizzard announced in a February 1 update blog that it’s taking a new, more aggressive approach to Overwatch 2 cheating. The developer will no longer ban just cheaters themselves—though it boasts already wiping out “over 50,000 accounts that we found to be cheating since the launch of Overwatch 2”—but also anyone that…
Marvel Snap Players Think An Objectively Nice Emote Is Toxic

Fans of Marvel Snap, the hugely popular, free-to-play card game, have come to a conclusion: the Ms. Marvel emote, the one where she’s grinning cheerfully, winking a bit and throwing up a thumbs up, is actually toxic as hell. Ms. Marvel might as well be giving you the finger and stomping on your entrails after she…
Season: A Letter To The Future - The Kotaku Review

Season: A Letter to the Future is the disappointing evidence that beauty is only skin and texture deep. This slow-paced explore ‘em up, in which you must chronicle and journal the end of an era, is rigid-jawed with sincerity, though lacking in anything meaningful to say.
Yet Another Online Game Is Shutting Down, Devs Promise 'Private Server' PC Version

What a week. It was only Tuesday that we wrote about Rumbleverse, a battle royale game that was shutting down less than six months after launch. Now, on Thursday, we’ve got another, only this time it’s Knockout City.
It’s OK If A Game Wraps Up, They Don’t All Have To Be Fortnite

Earlier today the developer behind co-op shooter Back 4 Blood--released in 2021 on console and PC—announced that, having released multiple updates and three expansions, it was moving on. And the reaction to this was mostly negative, with players calling the game dead and suggesting the team was giving up on it. But…
The Story Of Nintendo's Favorite Football Team

If you’re a fan of both football and video games you’ll no doubt have all kinds of fond memories of the two coming together on a team’s shirt, from Arsenal’s classic Dreamcast kit to Fiorentina’s shirts in the 90s. As iconic as those kits were, though, they were but blips on the radar compared to Nintendo’s…
The World's Biggest Airplane, Destroyed In Ukraine, Is Coming To Flight Simulator

For over 30 years the Antonov An-225 Mriya was the world’s biggest airplane, a colossal vehicle that was 84 m (275 feet) long and weighed 190 tonnes, but which could still somehow not just get itself into the air, but carry loads of other stuff inside it while doing it.
T-Pain Changed Music Forever, Now He's Coming For Twitch

2016 was T-Pain’s Twitch channel’s inaugural year, and it’s also the first time Pain remembers getting trolled. “At the time, my music career was kind of on a downward spiral,” he says during our Zoom call this Monday. “People were coming into my chat and telling me stuff like, ‘You’re only streaming because you don’t…
14 Anime Couples Who Were Better Off Without Each Other

Valentine’s day, the corporate holiday of love, has a lot of folks fiending to get with the person they adore. However, oftentimes cupid’s arrow happens to land on people who just make each other worse (and not in the fun kinky way). No medium serves up a hearty helping of such toxic couples quite like anime.
Resident Evil 4 Remake’s Rain Is Setting People Off

First, there was Spider-Man’s infamous Puddlegate. Then there were the not-so-watery streets of Cyberpunk 2077. Now it seems video game fans’ next watery, pre-release controversy involves the heavy rain seen in some early gameplay of the Resident Evil 4 remake. Some think it looks as bad as the awful-looking rain the GTA Trilogy remasters
The 25 Best Games On Xbox Game Pass

With over 400 games included, Xbox Game Pass continues to be one of the best deals in gaming. Defining the industry, last year Game Pass pushed Sony to finally capitulate and relaunch PlayStation Now as a competitive service, yet one that still feels a few steps behind. For $10 a month, Game Pass gives you access to a…
Homophobes Are Review Bombing The Last Of Us Show

Every day, I am begging the straights to be normal about men who kiss each other. The latest episode of The Last of Us seems to have caused many of them to lose their goddamn minds. The cause of their mass dissatisfaction? Two men having a loving relationship on an HBO show. As of the time of writing, one fourth of…
GameStop Manager Fired After $5,000 PS5 Robbery

Only one person was on shift at the GameStop in Easton, PA when two men tried to rob it last month. Outnumbered and told to put his hands up, a newer employee backed off as the thieves unloaded $5,000 worth of PlayStation 5s from the back room. A week later, GameStop allegedly fired the 13-year veteran manager of the…
A Massive Legend of Zelda Lego Set Might’ve Leaked

For years, Lego and Nintendo fans alike have dreamed of a Legend of Zelda-themed set being released. And for years that seemed unlikely to ever happen, until Lego and Nintendo started working together on Mario sets and people wondered if maybe, just maybe, Zelda was next. Now, after last year’s evidence that such a…
The Last Of Us Star Was Afraid This N64 Classic Would Ruin His Life

Nick Offerman, the actor who portrayed survivalist Bill in the knockout third episode of HBO’s post-apocalyptic drama The Last of Us, has revealed that not only has he not played the game the show is based on, he also hasn’t played any video game in a quarter century because he “lost a couple of weeks” to a particular…
Sony Is Adding Discord Voice Integration To The PlayStation 5

Sony just announced a ton of new features currently under development. Features such as support for 1440p output have been teased for some time while others, such as the ability to join a Discord voice chat natively, feel like they should have been announced sooner than several years into the console’s life cycle.
The Truth Behind Those Wild TikTok Videos Meant To Hack Your Attention

If you spend any time on TikTok, you may have noticed that a certain kind of video collage is popping up all over your For You page. Maybe it has a clip of the adult cartoon Family Guy in there, or socialist Twitch streamer Hasan “Hasanabi” Piker talking about Black Lives Matter. But no matter the footage, it’s likely…
The Pokémon Spin-off Games Ranked From Worst To Best

If you’re a Pokémon fan, you have no doubt experienced the mainline games with all their catching, battling, and being the very best like no one ever was. But the series has a wide selection of spin-off games that span different genres and subject matter. Even if you’ve only ever played the RPGs, there’s probably…
Facebook's VR Division Lost $13.72 Billion In 2022

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is having a decent day today after beating revenue and user activity forecasts for its final fiscal quarter of 2022. But its VR division isn’t helping the company make money. In fact, it’s costing the company billions in losses.
Tom Brady's Video Game Career Dates Back To The 20th Century

You can hear someone tell you Tom Brady’s age (45!) and it doesn’t really hit you, because the guy still looks pretty fit and healthy. To fully grasp the length of Brady’s tenure on this Earth, then, you need to realise that the man has appeared in a video game for the PlayStation. Like, the original PlayStation.
One Of The Lowkey Best Nintendo Switch Deals Is Back

Nintendo has brought back its voucher program just in time for decent savings on some of the Switch’s biggest games. Missed out on Splatoon 3 or Bayonetta 3 last year? Now you can grab both for over $20 off.
Resident Evil 4 Remake Removes Ashley’s Health Bar, Adds Side-Quests

In a new Game Informer cover story, Capcom detailed some of the changes that the hotly anticipated remake of Resident Evil 4 is making to the original, hugely influential horror game.
Netflix’s AI Anime Gets Roasted For Crediting Artist As ‘Human’

The anime community has been rife with controversy over AI-generated images. Today, Netflix joined the hot new trend of being ratioed online for terrible AI takes. The streaming platform not only produced a commercial project with AI, it tried to justify doing so by citing the “labor shortage” in the anime industry.…
It's Time For This Great, Forgotten Dead Space Game To Return

The recently released Dead Space remake is a triumph among video game remakes, many of which haven’t been very well received by fans over the last few years. And as a massive Dead Space fan, I’m so damn happy to see EA spending money on the franchise again—with great results. But, I can’t help but think about a Dead…