Chris Kohler

Paper Mario: The Origami King: The Kotaku Review

What do Red Koopa Troopas think about as they’re shuffling back and forth all day on top of platforms? Where do Shy Guys go on their days off? Paper Mario is the only series brave enough to answer these burning questions about the inner lives of Mario characters, and it answers them with humor, style,…

How Paper Mario: Origami King‘s Puzzle Battles Work

Nintendo’s next big Switch game is Paper Mario: The Origami King, announced less than two months ago via a humble tweet and arriving on July 17. The Paper Mario series’ reputation has been a bit spotty as of late, but Origami King has by and large gotten rid of the more annoying parts of the…

The live album of last year’s Chrono Cross live tour is available now on iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play. I’ve been listening and it’s just beautiful, a stellar live rendition of one of the all-time great game soundtracks, performed by composer Yasunori Mitsuda and his hand-picked band.

Can You Identify These Badly Described Classic Games?

Atari collectors all know about the so-called “Taiwan Cooper” line of bootleg cartridges that were sold around the world back in the ‘80s. They were knock-off copies of Atari 2600 games both popular (Space Invaders) and obscure (Bobby Is Going Home), with weird cover art and bizarre descriptions on the backs of the boxes. Nobody…

Everything Announced At EA Play Live 2020

Electronic Arts had a small slate of announcements for its not-E3 presentation today, including a new Skate game that is very early in development, Apex Legends coming to Switch, and more details on Star Wars: Squadrons. Here’s the complete rundown. Skate is coming back—eventually. They have “a long way to go” and this is “just…

Persona 4 Golden Just Launched On Steam

Persona 4 Golden, the formerly Vita-exclusive enhanced version of Atlus’ classic role-playing game, launched today on Steam. It is available in a standard $20 version or a $25 “digital deluxe” edition that includes an art book and soundtrack. It allows you to choose between English and Japanese voiceover.

The Hits And Misses Of The PS5 Reveal Event

What were Sony’s big hits and misses in today’s PlayStation 5 reveal event? Ethan Gach and I pick the biggest reveals and point out what we’re still waiting to hear about in this video discussion. Check out the rest of Kotaku’s PlayStation 5 coverage to see what else happened in today’s big reveal.

Everything Sony Announced In Today’s PS5 Event

The sequel to Horizon: Zero Dawn, the eighth Resident Evil, a new Spider-Man starring Miles Morales, and a bold design for the PlayStation 5 were all on tap for Sony’s big not-E3 reveal event Thursday afternoon. Here are all the announcements. PlayStation 5 will be available in disc-based and all-digital editions when it launches this…

Anybody else still playing Super Mario Maker 2? My kid started playing it so I guess I’m playing it again. Somewhere in the experimentation, this level showed up. Are you a bad enough dude to save this frog?

The TurboGrafx-16 Mini Is Awesome (If You Love Shooters)

I forgive you if you didn’t even notice that the TurboGrafx-16 Mini was officially released last week. Who could know? I don’t see so much as a press release in my inbox about it. The extent of the marketing for it seems to be Konami’s official Twitter account sporadically retweeting people who bought one. But…

PlayStation 5’s Backward Compatibility Won’t Arrive All At Once

PlayStation 5 will be backward compatible with PlayStation 4 games, but Sony said today to expect it to be a gradual rollout that needs to be tested on a per-game basis. “We recently took a look at the top 100 PS4 titles as ranked by play time, and we’re expecting almost all of them to…

‘Nintendo Play Station’ Sells At Auction For $360,000

A prototype of a never-produced video game machine colloquially known as the “Nintendo Play Station” has sold at auction for $360,000, setting a new record for the most expensive item of video game memorabilia ever publicly sold. Pop-culture auction house Heritage Auctions offered the device, the product of a short-lived collaboration between Nintendo and Sony,…

Nintendo’s Japanese store will start taking preorders for the Animal Crossing Switch dock and Joy-Cons on March 7. Check out our story about how to import them if you want to buy either one of them separately without having to buy the whole bundle.

Space Channel 5 VR: The Kotaku Review

How badly do you want to play another Space Channel 5 game? Your personal level of yearning to see Sega’s long-dormant rhythm game series make a comeback is likely to be proportional to the amount of fun you have with this week’s Space Channel 5 VR Kinda Funky News Flash for PlayStation VR. At its…

The ‘Nintendo Play Station’ Will Sell For Over $400,000

Bidding on the so-called ‘Nintendo Play Station,’ a prototype of a doomed collaboration between Nintendo and Sony, has reached $350,000 as deep-pocketed collectors put up ever-increasing amounts of money in hopes of owning the rare device. The console, which is essentially a Super Nintendo Entertainment System paired with a CD-ROM drive and manufactured by Sony,…

Bidding has begun on the “Nintendo Play Station” prototype at Heritage Auctions This extremely rare and valuable piece of gaming history will go to the highest bidder when the gavel falls on March 6. Read Kotaku’s previous story on the auction for more.

The next batch of NES and SNES games hits Switch Online on February 19. On SNES, it’s Pop’n Twinbee and Smash Tennis; on NES it’s Shadow of the Ninja and Eliminator Boat Duel.

A new documentary released today looks at the ongoing tension between physical and digital video game releases. Not For Resale attempts to capture all facets of the conversation, like the fate of independent game stores, the struggle over preservation, or the problems with today’s digital marketplaces.

If You Like Phoenix Wright And Animal Puns, Don’t Skip Aviary Attorney

Do you like Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney? Do you like animals? Do you enjoy laughing? You seem like the perfect audience for Aviary Attorney, then. Perhaps you remember when this game debuted on Steam a few years back. Maybe, like me, you noticed it but didn’t end up playing it. Well, now it’s on Switch,…

40 years ago today: Olympic athlete Valerij Yakushin, luge competitor for the Soviet Union, crouches down to look into the eyepiece of Midway’s Submarine arcade cabinet in the game room at the Olympic Village in Lake Placid, New York on February 7, 1980.