As the games industry continues to consolidate itself through a combination of developer acquisitions and studio closures, CD Projekt Red, the beloved studio behind Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher, wants to keep the independence it has had for almost 30 years now.
We’re now in the fourth year of the latest console generation, which means more new games are finally coming out and development on older Xbox One versions has all but wrapped up. So what’s the best that Microsoft’s current hardware has to offer?
It rather beggars belief that there hasn’t been a Minecraft movie already. The Microsoft-owned behemoth is one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time, and seems ripe for a guaranteed $1 billion+ box office. However, despite rumors dating back as far as 2014, it wasn’t until 2022 that details seemed to…
If you’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto V or GTA Online via Game Pass lately, you might need to pony up and buy a copy to sustain your criminal enterprise. Rockstar’s crime saga is expected to leave Xbox Game Pass in about two weeks.
It’s the first month of 2024, which means it’s time for a new crop of Xbox Game Pass titles to satiate your growing appetite for games. And January’s offerings are solid, serving up everything from hundred-hour-long RPGs to survival horror remakes to quaint action-adventures and more. If you’re a Game Pass member,…
Zack Snyder’s homage-a-thon Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire came out with a bang for Netflix, but as of today it’s barely clinging to the streamer’s top 10. If you’ve been holding out on watching (maybe you’re waiting for a binge when Part Two: The Scargiver releases April 19?), here are 10 other Netflix sci-fi…
Persona 3 Reload, the from-the-ground-up remake of Atlus’ beloved PlayStation 2 role-playing game, is coming out on February 2. But while the 2006 classic is getting a modern retouching very soon, it won’t include everything added to the original in the updated Persona 3 Portable and Persona 3 FES editions, the former…
The results of 2023’s Steam Awards are in. Each year, Steam turns to the community to vote on the year’s best games across a wide variety of categories. This year saw Larian Studios’ RPG Baldur’s Gate 3 grab game of the year, while Lethal Company, a first-person cooperative horror game, got the “Better With Friends…
If you haven’t heard, the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse is officially in the public domain, and Nightmare Forge Games wasted no time announcing a horror game starring that version of Disney’s mascot called Infestation 88. However, upon announcement, the team was met with immediate pushback regarding the…
Jujutsu Kaisen wrapped up earlier this week after a long and fairly grim season. You won’t be surprised to learn that it’s got another season in the works, once again courtesy of MAPPA.
Some of you may be surprised that a gay Call of Duty ship is in the top ten of fanfiction site Archive Of Our Own’s annual, unofficial roundup, but I’m not. Not long after the 2022 release of Modern Warfare II, a bevy of TikToks bimbofied Call of Duty character Simon “Ghost” Riley, who is only ever shown in-game…
Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft’s upcoming action-adventure game that follows scoundrel Kay Vess between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, previously had no release date beyond a very broad “2024” window. Today, however, a Disney Parks blog post quietly announced that it would launch in “late 2024.” This…
More than six years after its release, the Nintendo Switch is still dutifully chugging along, and still without the long-rumored Switch Pro. Compared to its supercomputer competitors, Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Sony’s PlayStation 5, it’s by no means the most powerful place to play games today. But it’s still the…
Classic puzzle game Tetris has been around for over three decades, and in that time, plenty of people have reached its various endings, usually by clearing four rows of bricks at once like a digital demolitioner. That’s a challenge in and of itself, but now, someone has taken the concept of “beating Tetris” to the…
According to France’s Autorité de la concurrence, a government body responsible for regulating competition, Sony hasn’t been playing nice with third-party controllers on PS4. The regulatory body has fined Sony 13.5 million euros (roughly 14.8 million USD) for deploying “technical countermeasures [...] which affected…
Steam is by far the most peculiar of online storefronts. Built on top of itself for the last twenty years, Valve’s behemothic PC game distributor is a clusterfuck of overlapping design choices, where algorithms rule over coherence, with 2023 seeing over 14,500 games released into the mayhem. Which is too many games.
2024 is starting off strong: The controversial Bobby Kotick, former CEO of Activision Blizzard King, is no longer heading up the Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Overwatch 2 publisher. We knew this was going to happen—shortly after Microsoft completed its massive $68 billion purchase of ActiBlizz, the company…
Leave it to modders to push the boundaries of what was once (and arguably still is) one of the most impressive visual showcases of modern gaming: Cyberpunk 2077. A skyrocketing post on Reddit shows off some pretty remarkable graphical feats that one enterprising player has achieved. Featuring a handful of mods that…
It’s just two days into 2024 and a major video game company is already talking about its big AI plans. If you thought we were leaving AI discourse behind in 2023, I’m sorry to tell you that you were very, very wrong. A New Year’s letter from the current Square Enix president details the Final Fantasy VII Rebirth…
The New Year brought the excellent news that Steamboat Willie-era Mickey Mouse has finally entered the public domain, after decades of Disney, er, convincing Congress to keep extending its copyrights. With that, derivative works that don’t directly contravene Disney’s trademarks are now allowed by law, and with that,…
First the price went up, and now, following the release of a newer headset from Meta, the very popular Meta Quest 2 has dropped to a new low of $250, making it a much easier buy for the VR-curious.
Maybe you finally got Baldur’s Gate 3 this past week after pining for it for months and want some help tackling its tactical battles, or maybe you’re more interested in looking ahead to what early 2024 has to offer. Whatever the case, our roundup of tips and informative posts likely has something for you.
This week, we continued taking stock of 2023 with looks back at how the Switch and the Steam Deck fared, our picks for the cream of the crop among shooters and role-playing games, and more juicy commentary on everything the year had to offer.
I love the idea of annual top 10 lists until it comes time to actually make one. Then my perpetually indecisive brain freaks out about whether the game I spent 100 hours playing was actually any good, the tension between an interesting game and a fun one, and the cries of all the games I never finished or even got…
As we round out 2023, we asked you to chime in with your own Game of the Year picks, as well as your own memories of wonderful gaming gifts from holiday seasons past. We also give you the lowdown on a PS5 controller that promises never to raise the spectre of drift. Venture forth for this and more, and we’ll see you…
From a secret Santa at Valve making one user’s day to a look at what how an upcoming Star Wars game could fulfill our Han Solo dreams, here are some of the best news stories from the past week.
I’m a fairly recent convert to PC gaming. In 2016, I spontaneously picked up a Steam Machine, Valve’s early attempt to fuse Steam with a more console-like experience. It was my first real introduction to the breadth of the Steam library and performance that outpaced my PS4. I was hooked, so I got my hands on a Dell…
When you accomplish something big, like winning a major tournament, how do you celebrate? Maybe you jump around in excitement, salty rivulets streaming down your face in a rush of emotions. Maybe you pop a bottle of champagne and spray it around like an NFL player after the Super Bowl. Or, if you’re a 48-year-old…
Pokémon’s profit margins probably don’t reflect it, but the franchise had a rough year in 2023. Without a new mainline role-playing game to dominate the series’ headlines, Pikachu and friends were, instead, shrouded in controversies throughout the past 12 months. Between Pokémon Go angering swaths of its community,…
The design of the video game controller as we’ve known it has largely remained the same for the last 20 years: a d-pad, two analog sticks, four face buttons, and four shoulder buttons. It persists from the first PlayStation’s DualShock, all the way through to the modern PS5’s DualSense, as well as various Xbox and…
The last few years have been full of amazing RPGs, but 2023 took things to a whole new level. It was the year we got Final Fantasy XVI, Diablo 4, and Bethesda’s long awaited Starfield. It was also the year Baldur’s Gate 3 appeared and blew them all out of the water. Fans of stat-based combat, meandering side-quests,…
Earlier this week, I shared a story about my favorite Christmas gift. It was an Xbox 360 I had begged my late grandma for, which she bought alongside a copy of Gears of War and a second controller for my bestie and I. This gift would set the course for my life’s current trajectory, one neither I nor my family thought…
‘Tis the season to promote indie games with AI-generated junk, apparently. A Microsoft Twitter account recently posted low-effort, energy-intensive art promoting indie games on Xbox before later deleting it after getting roundly mocked by fans and developers alike.
2023 was yet another solid year for fans of shooty-shooty-bang-bang video games. While the Golden Era of shooters might be slowing down as the year wraps up, we still got some dang good ones, both in first-person and third-person variants, over these past 12 months.
A new month is nearly here, as well as a new year, and that means updates to the PlayStation Plus catalog. January kicks off 2024 with three new games available for Premium, Extra, and Essential members to download starting on January 2, as well as some goodies if you happen to be a space ninja.
I didn’t think it was still possible, but Twitter just served up my favorite crossover of the year: Lord of the Rings Moneyball. You see, you take the plot of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and then talk about it using Moneyball quotes. It’s simple, stupid, and so satisfying I can’t believe nobody thought of it before.
Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian Studios’ award-winning role-playing game (which you’ll find ranked rather high on Kotaku’s Game of The Year list), is known for its incredibly immersive world, its fantastic characters, and the tough choices you’ll have to make during its 50 to 100 hours of gameplay. But it’s also garnered…
2023 is nearly over, finally, but at least there were some great games to get us through it, right? This year was full of great releases, but marred by myriad layoffs across sectors (including the games industry), and larger, global issues that made it hard to find the light in the dark. But video games, with their…
The Switch is going out with a bang. Ahead of the likely reveal of the Nintendo handheld hybrid’s successor next year, the aging hardware continued receiving an amazing slate of new games in 2023, including The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, one of the best entries to date in the long-running fantasy adventure…
Valve introduced the world to the Steam Deck in 2022 and it was an instant hit with countless Steam users who jumped at the chance to take their games just about anywhere. As we close out 2023, the Steam Deck remains one of the best pieces of portable gaming hardware you can buy, both on the hardware and software side…