Sorry, the old Overwatch can’t come to the phone right now. She’s dead. Today, October 4 at 3 p.m. EST, Overwatch 2 will come to replace her, and the sun has long set on days of 6v6 and free-range characters not cloistered behind a battle pass.
Context is important. What happens in the lead-up to events provides insight into how and why they unfold as they do. But what if the context doesn’t come ‘til later? And what if there was zero warning for the traumatic event you were about to experience in a game? Questions like these, the line between artistic…
I recently found out about a rejected pitch for a Zelda game inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics, and I find myself mourning for what could have been. Heroes of Hyrule was conceptualized as a DS game that combined tactical combat with puzzle-based exploration. Unfortunately, Nintendo scrapped Retro Studios’ idea before…
Today, Nintendo revealed a first look at the upcoming Super Mario Bros. movie ahead of its official trailer release coming this week at New York Comic Con, and it’s glorious, save for the disenchanting washboard ass of its titular character, Mario.
We recently celebrated the extraordinary Pokémon TCG card art of Yuka Morii, and her immaculate clay models photographed in nature. But it would be remiss to stop there, and while pretty much every artist working on the cards deserves recognition, our attention is next drawn to Asako Ito and her 3D crochet Pokémon.…
Cyberpunk 2077's controversial history doesn’t seem to have dampened CD Projekt Red’s ambitions at all. The Polish development company announced a sequel is coming at some point, currently codenamed Project Orion. It also has three Witcher projects in the works, including an entire sequel trilogy planned to follow up…
YouTuber Summoning Salt’s videos on the history of speedrunning are some of the most popular in the hobby’s space and beyond, and now one of them has fallen prey to the Google platform’s notoriously confusing and opaque moderation process. “This video may be inappropriate for some users,” reads a warning before his …
The Resident Evil series is arguably the most successful and popular video game horror franchise of all time. It’s spawned more movies, spin-offs, and comics than I can count, and has easily cemented itself in mainstream pop culture as “those zombie games with dogs.” But not all Resident Evil games are amazing. So the…
A British media conglomerate, Sky, has just made a complete ass of itself on Twitter, after attempting to hang wiv da cool kidz while promoting its new partnership with David Beckham’s eSports company, Guild. Asking followers of the [checks notes] technical support account to tweet a screenshot of their “favourite…
If you thought last month’s chess grandmaster anal bead conspiracy saga was the worst thing that could happen to a competitive sporting event, I’ve got some bad news for you. The rollicking world of competitive sports fishing now has an oh-fish-ial controversy of its own after competitors at a tournament in Ohio were…
An admin on the official Discord servers for Kinetic Games’ extremely popular indie horror game Phasmophobia was recently removed after a Twitter user issued a public condemnation of the studio for not keeping its community safe from sexual harassment and racism.
I am now convinced that “female Call of Duty streamer” is the hardest job in the world. Nadia Amine is one of the fastest growing Call of Duty: Warzone streamers on Twitch, and there’s been a ton of controversy on social media about her meteoric rise. If you search her name on YouTube or Tiktok, the videos are filled…
I love almost everything about the Shovel Knight games. The retro-inspiration, bespoke pixel art animations, and pitch-perfect platforming—they are perfectly calibrated to make me go, “Yes, YES, more please!” Not so with Shovel Knight Dig, unfortunately. It’s the first release in Yacht Club’s lineup to leave me…
For any bystander looking at the worlds of professional wrestling and video games from the outside, what’s happening inside can look like a veritable circus. In 2022, each has had more than its fair share of ongoing legal litigation and backstage drama. Now, however, a new lawsuit has seen the two worlds and all their…
The 23-year-old Minecraft streamer and YouTuber with over 30 million subscribers, Dream, has only ever appeared to the public wearing a smooth, egg-colored smiley face mask.
Rumors of a PlayStation 5 remaster for Horizon Zero Dawn percolating online quickly became yet another thorn in the side of Bloodborne players who’ve been desperately wondering when it’s going to be their turn for Papa Sony to acknowledge their favorite game.
Hackers have been circling the PS5 for almost a year now, and it appears they may have finally managed to jailbreak the 2020 hardware with a new kernel-level exploit first discovered on the PS4. While it doesn’t allow access to execute certain types of code, the exploit has made it possible for at least one person to…
Accusations of cheating in live games are quite the thing at the moment. While chess is embroiled in the most peculiar of cheating allegations, it now seems the world of poker is having a turn. After an extraordinary moment in a live-broadcast high-stakes cash game, people are accusing poker pro Robbi Jade Lew of…
Some of the core developers behind beloved 2019 indie RPG Disco Elysium, including the author of the novel it’s based on, are no longer working at the studio that created it. The news was revealed in a blog post written by an editor on the game, Martin Luiga, who claims studio leadership at ZA/UM forced out the lead…
The gaming press world has been in quite some turmoil of late. Tencent just gutted Fanbyte, G4TV just fired a bunch of its staff, and Future Publishing just let go a swathe of writers and editors, despite making hundreds of millions of dollars last year. So it’s with perhaps some trepidation we report the news that…
As of last week, a long-held dream of playing Valve’s landmark 2004 shooter Half-Life 2 in virtual reality has finally come to fruition. The journey began nearly 10 years ago, when a man named Nathan Andrews managed to hack together a functioning version of the all-time classic in VR. This was before any Vives,…
In a past life, Frances Townsend defended the legal basis for the torture method called waterboarding during George W. Bush’s war on terror. In a more recent one, she helped lead Activision Blizzard’s initially tone-deaf response to a major sexual harassment lawsuit by the state of California. Now she’s stepping down…
Today, Activision Blizzard announced three programs coming to Overwatch 2’s competitive and casual scene. These aim to foster a healthy environment, with a focus on its new and returning LGBTQ+ player base.
MultiVersus has been getting tons of new characters, with drunk scientist Rick Sanchez from the time-hopping adult cartoon Rick & Morty being the latest addition to the Warner Bros. crossover fighter. The roster’s expansion won’t stop there, though, as datamining has suggested for some time that characters including…
It feels like it was only yesterday when Shigeru Miyamoto pulled the goomba rug out from under our collective gamer asses with the surprise announcement of the bizarre Hollywood cast of the upcoming Super Mario Bros. movie. While the casting of Chris Pratt in the starring role horrified many, it served as the…
Outside of the 2019 Game Developers Conference, before anyone had ever heard the phrase “Google Stadia,” sat a small display outlining the history of gaming. Dates and bullet points marked some of the major events, and on three pedestals sat a few of the industry’s most notorious flops: Atari’s E.T., Mattel’s NES…
Chess can be sexy. Anya Taylor-Joy in the hit Netflix show The Queen’s Gambit taught me that. Chess can also be evil and stupid. A viral (and unfounded) claim that a 19-year-old chess champion beat the best chess player in the world, Norwegian pro Magnus Carlsen, by using smart tech anal beads to help him cheat, as…
In the latest example of not letting your memes be dreams, McDonald’s announced that adults can get back in touch with their inner child by opening up a Happy Meal and discovering a toy of their own. Yes, Happy Meal toys for adults are gonna be a thing, at least for a limited time.
“Is there anything you want to pre-order?” Almost nobody walks in and out of a GameStop without hearing those words. Employees are measured against how many pre-orders they can rack up while GameStop rakes in the cash months ahead of a game’s actual release. But lately, the strategy has been sabotaged by a system…
Over the years, the Pokémon Trading Card Game has seen a huge number of artists come and go. Approximately 175 different people have contributed art to the cards, some only ever designing one, others contributing hundreds. Heck, Ken Sugimori has created 966 of them, beginning with the very first set of Pokémon cards,…
My Nintendo Switch largely sat unplayed for the duration of the pandemic. I purchased it in the Before Times thinking it’d make for a great subway companion. But between the short battery life and it being uncomfortable to hold for long periods, I just didn’t ever want to play it much. But there might finally be some…
Overwatch 2 is almost here, arriving as a free-to-play game on October 4 that will totally supplant the OG hero shooter. While it isn’t playable to the general public yet, a handful of gaming outlets got early access to Blizzard’s upcoming sequel, publishing prereviews just in time for launch day. We here at Kotaku…
The Steam Deck, Valve’s mini PC, is a wonderful gaming device with plenty of excellent titles to choose from. But as a straight-up handheld computer, the Deck isn’t too shabby for non-gaming computing needs. Whether it’s using the Deck as a dockable desktop computer, a portable coding station, or even a tool for game…
Few thought Google’s troubled streaming service, Stadia, might ever become a dominant player in the gaming industry, but almost no one expected it to shut down so abruptly, including the company’s own employees. Stadia VP Phil Harrison, fast becoming the grim reaper of new gaming initiatives, informed staff of the…
2022 is a great year to be an RPG fan, particularly of Japanese games. The holiday season is usually crowded with new game releases, but this year Square Enix appears to be releasing games like it’s Christmas all year round. With so many out already, and so many more to come, are SE’s profligate ways good or bad for…
Almost a year after it came to every other platform, Skyrim: Anniversary Edition surprise-launched on the Nintendo Switch today. The newest version of the beloved 2011 open-world RPG includes a bunch of DLC, mod content, and fishing. It’s also $70 on Nintendo’s handheld hybrid. Gotham Knights and Callisto Protocol…
Earlier today, Google confirmed that its shutting down Stadia, its short-lived cloud gaming service. While the company plans on refunding all software and hardware purchases related to Stadia, the future of the few remaining exclusives on the service is less clear. And if they don’t get ported to other platforms…
