You Should Play Nuts

Nuts is a puzzle game where players must set up a series of surveillance cameras to hunt down a squirrel and find their hidden stash of food. Wandering through a hazy maze of trees to find the perfect space to drop a camera is a surprisingly tricky mind teaser that challenges memorization skills. The game’s…

EA CEO Defends The Publisher’s Recent Slate Of Games

From an outside perspective, the past half-decade has looked rocky for Electronic Arts. A string of flops and PR disasters like Star Wars Battlefront II and Mass Effect: Andromeda, combined with moves like the shutdown of Visceral Games, has led to a lot of outrage toward the mega-publisher. EA’s perspective, however, is a little different. Yesterday…

The First Third-Party Wireless PS4 Controller Is Missing A Few Things

Hori’s Onyx, available now in Europe, if the first officially-licensed third-party wireless controller for the PlayStation 4. It’s got its good points, like the Xbox-style staggered analog stick layout and one piece d-pad, but the lack of a headphone jack and other key DualShock 4 features might be a dealbreaker. I’ve been playing with the…

Gwent‘s Latest Card Art Continues To Look Beautiful

A new open PTR (Public Test Realm) has gone live for Gwent, CD Projekt Red’s card game based on The Witcher. Players have already collected some beautiful new artwork for potential cards from it. Gwent has some amazing artists working on it, and the latest batch of files culled from the PTR bear that out.…

GDC Pulls Award After Outcry Over Atari Co-founder Nolan Bushnell [Update]

A day after saying it would give Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell its 2018 Pioneer Award, the organizers of the Game Developers Conference have pulled the award, saying they will now award it to no one. The quick change followed 18 hours of outcry about Bushnell’s alleged unsavory behavior toward female Atari employees. Those stories have…

Here’s February’s PlayStation Plus Lineup

February’s PlayStation Plus lineup has you covered if you missed Rime or, like me, heard the jokes about Knack but never actually played it. As always, these games are only “free” if you have an active PlayStation Plus subscription. February’s PS Plus lineup is: PlayStation 4 Knack Rime PlayStation 3 Spelunker HD Mugen Souls Z…

Watch Us Play Yakuza 6: The Song of Life With One Of The People Behind It

Last year, Yakuza 0brought gaming’s best crime thriller and cabaret management series to a new group of fans. Yakuza 6: The Song of Life wants to be accessible to veterans and newbies alike. We took a closer look at the game alongside senior localization producer Sam Mullen to get a sense of what’s next for…

Nintendo’s Hardware Wizard Will Get Lifetime Achievement Honors

Genyo Takeda might not be a familiar name to Nintendo fans, but he’s been the driving force behind the company’s iconic game console hardware and revolutionary controllers, and a few classic games besides. And now, he’s getting a well-deserved lifetime achievement award. The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences has told Kotaku that it will…

BlazBlue Comeback Reversed In Stunning Fashion At Evo Japan

The Evolution Championship Series (colloquially “Evo”) wrapped up its first trip to Japan last weekend. It was full of incredible moments highlighting the best of competitive fighting games, including a mind-blowing moment during the BlazBlue: Central Fiction tournament that saw one entrant completely reverse his fortunes in an extremely dire circumstance. As the BlazBlue bracket…

Dissidia Final Fantasy NT‘s Mobile Spin-Off Is Pretty Chill

Dissidia Final Fantasy NT for the PlayStation 4 is a competitive real-time action game in which two teams of three players each do battle with an assortment of Final Fantasy characters. Dissida Final Fantasy Opera Omnia, NT’s mobile counterpart, is a just a regular old turn-based RPG. Characters from throughout Final Fantasy history converge in…

How To Use Chopsticks

Often foreigners in Japan are complimented on how they use chopsticks. Many, however, are not actually using them properly. Then again, neither are most Japanese people. Go figure. As Kotaku reported in 2012, only 30 percent of Japanese people in their 40s and 50s hold chopsticks correctly. Each year, that number gets smaller and smaller.…

More Anime Art Made In… Excel

Making art in Excel is a thing. Ditto for making anime art in it. Twitter user Maruaba specializes in creating anime drawings using Excel spreadsheets. Like so: Have a look at this work flow: Just doing an eye takes hours. Goodness. But here are the finished results: Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet…

Nintendo Printing Money, Profits Up 261 Percent

Nintendo released its earnings for the three months ending last December, and the Kyoto-based game company is doing extremely well. Revenue reached 482.97 billion yen ($4.44 billion) and surpassing forecasts of 407.86 billion yen. As CNBC points out, Nintendo’s operating profit also jumped 261 percent year-on-year. Nintendo has also increased its Switch sales projections to…

New Year’s Eve. Diver City Tokyo, Japan. By Nelson Diaz. 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! 

Overwatch Voice Actors Try, And Fail, To Name Every Hero In The Game Under Pressure

The test here, conducted by D Piddy at SacAnime a few weeks back, was simple: name all 26 Overwatch heroes. And do it in 20 seconds or less. A bunch of cosplayers present at the show were asked, but also many of the game’s voice actors, including Anjali Bhimani (Symmetra), Elise Zhang (Mei), Crispin Freeman…

Here Are Some Beautiful Space People

The Vaulters are coming (or coming back) to Endless Space 2, and in doing so they are looking very sharp. These new pieces for the expansion are all done by Thomas du Crest, whose work we’ve featured previously on a big Endless Legend/Space art showcase You can see more of Thomas’ stuff at his ArtStation…

The Last Player From NHL ’94 Has Left The League

In 2013, we were down to three active NHL players who had appeared in NHL 94, a video game released in 1993. It’s taken almost five more years, but we’re now finally down to zero. Just as Kevin Garnett’s retirement from the NBA closed the book on the 16-bit era with basketball games, Jaromir Jagr’s…