Kotaku older than one year ago

#totalrecall Some game machines are killed long before they enter production. Others at least make it to market before dying, whether of old age or lack of demand. And then there's the Konix Multisystem. More »

#watchthis Drive up the volume for this user-created level from LittleBigPlanet 2, an homage to World 1-1 from Super Mario Land on the Game Boy. Creator Junkvxxl loaded the level three days ago; it became a developer favorite two days ago; it's been played more than 36,000 times in that span. If you have the game, perhaps you should try it for yourself. More »

#quotable During an interview with Fortune Magazine, SCEA's charming CEO Jack Tretton discussed the company's business strategies...and then indulged in some nasty smack talk. More »

#fanart It's one hell of a ride in demiurgic's hilarious new Pikachu / Pokemon piece. Gotta surf them all dude. More »

#hotflashes The Cartoon Network's Adult Swim flash games might not always be wonderful examples of gaming goodness, but they generally have pretty good names. Case in point, Lesbian Spider Queens of Mars. How can you not play that? More »

#dancethefightaway How the hell do you mix an RPG with a rhythm game? Iridium Studios' Jason Wishnov shows us how upcoming Xbox Live Indie Game Sequence works. More »

#education When his five-year-old daughter built a treehouse by herself in Minecraft, Joel Levin, a computer teacher at Manhattan's Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, got the idea to try incorporating the PC game into his lesson plan at school. He worried about numerous possibilities that the game would simply be incompatible with students that young, but he was relieved and gratified to discover he was wrong. More »

#flashback This week marks my third anniversary with Kotaku, spending all of that as the site's weekend editor. In April 2008, on my third weekend here, my brother Fletch and I unloaded this post - "Two Brothers Meditating Upon Questions of Pac-Man," originally published April 19, 2008. A hypothetical calculation of Pac-Man's, er, metabolic functions, it became one of Kotaku's all-time humor classics. It's re-presented here, updated for the site's current design, with a gallery now featuring two alternate, unpublished images. More »

#shinjimikami Shinji Mikami, the video game creator behind games like Resident Evil, God Hand and Vanquish, is finally getting his own action figure, now available for pre-order at the web site of Tango Gameworks, the developer's new studio. Featuring "real shaving action," 256 points of articulation and alternate zombie heads, it may be the best Shinji Mikami action figure of all time. More »

#nutpunch Game Informer has posted the debut trailer for THQ and Volition's Saints Row: The Third, consisting of some music, a few splash screens, and one second of actual gameplay footage. See for yourself. More »

#left4dead2 The pint-sized ceramic co-star of Valve's Left 4 Dead 2 may be deserving of his own video game, as evidenced by the trailer for the sadly nonexistent Gnome Chompski: The Game. More »

"...we used to give people 10 horseshoes when they start the game - then we did a little test of, 'Well, what if we gave 15?' We thought that maybe the would help them get over the hump of building the cabin because we noticed that people who make it to finishing the cabin were more likely to stick and keep coming back. We tried 15 horseshoes and sure enough we had a substantial uptick in early retention - in people getting to the cabin and therefore sticking as players. In that way, essentially, it made the game more fun." — That's the lead creator of FrontierVille, Brian Reynolds, telling Industry Gamers why caring about the metrics of how people play their games is a plus, not some anti-fun, accounting-as-game-design misery. More »

#cursesarenofun After months of quiet toil, Atlus and developer Kylotonn Entertainment step out of the smoky blacksmith shop with a handful of new screenshots for their co-op action-adventure outing The Cursed Crusades. Why does everyone look so glum? More »

#fanart Jon Defreest gives us a hilarious look at how the Mario Brothers franchise would be if it were based on French stereotypes instead of Italian. More »

#breaking The game was supposed to be out this May, but it's been pushed to June. More »

#humor When Team Fortress 2's mother-lovin' Spy meets teen pop anti-sensation Rebecca Black, nobody wins. More »

#3ds The Nintendo 3DS is not released in the United States until Saturday. So lining up on the street outside a Manhattan Best Buy seems...smart? No, that's not the word we're looking for... More »

#instructions This is the last printed manual you'll ever see for an EA Sports game. The publisher has joined Ubisoft in releasing games without an instruction booklet, and will instead include a version of instructions that gamers may page through from within the game. More »

#pc Minecraft's creator revealed on Friday that he's working on an achievement system for the PC gaming obsession. He didn't specify when that will be implemented, but he did say something new's coming in the game's next update: Wolves. More »

#opinion I have a dream. That when a big shooter is released, at least some of its downloadable content caters to the crowd that prefers to game alone. More »

#nsfw You may have heard of some of these fatalities before More »

#video You've been here before - pinned down by a sniper. But something about Battlefield feels fresh and immediate. This might be modern warfare, but that doesn't mean this is old hat, not by a damn sight. More »

#totalrecall Most video game movies are about actual video games. Unless you're talking about Tron, The Last Starfighter, or 1983 classic Joy Sticks, which is about little more than an arcade, kids and flimsy excuses to get some tits on the screen. More »

#recuts What do all indie films need? Melodrama, heartbreak, a struggle with purpose in life and drugs all wrapped up in a retro setting, of course. And that's exactly what Joe Nicolosi did here for a SXSW short. More »

#rumor Koushik Dutta, a noted hacker (and mobile developer), has posted what he claims is an email exchange between himself and an employee of Sony Computer Entertainment America. In which Sony offers the man a job. More »

#starcraft Proving that My Little Pony makes everything hilarious and StarCraft II makes everything awesome - at the same time - is this fantastic two-minute mashup that is simply not to be missed. More »

Nintendo's Japanese headquarters are in Kyoto, some 300 miles from the devastation of yesterday's tsunami. Still, many have asked if the 8.9 magnitude earthquake caused any damage. Nintendo tweets: "Thanks for your concern! During the earthquake no one at Nintendo in Japan was injured and there was no apparent structural damage." More »

#pc Boiles' work getting Garry's Mod to recognise Microsoft's Kinect isn't the most impressive video of its ilk we've seen. It is, however, the most entertaining. More »