Blog
Gaming

Starfield Controller Looks Real, Will Absolutely Take My Money

The saga of the Starfield Xbox controller has been going on for months, but we now have our best confirmation yet that the sleek retro-sci-fi-styled gamepad is potentially real and coming this summer. It might just be my favorite-looking Xbox Series X/S controller yet. Thank You, PS Plus, For Making My Backlog Even Bigger The

Read More
Gaming

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth On Track Despite Missing PS5 Showcase

Image: Square Enix Sony showed a ton of games during its long-awaited PlayStation 5 showcase, but one that was notably absent was Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Fans immediately assumed the worst, fearing the remake’s sequel might end up taking years longer to release than previously planned. A new message from the developers at Square Enix

Read More
Gaming

Fans Outsmart ‘Built For Rails’ Shrine

If you’ve sunk any amount of time into Tears of the Kingdom, then you certainly have come across a shrine or two that at first glance didn’t make much sense. You’ve Ultrahanded and fused to no avail and have thus turned to the internet for answers. The Jiukoum “Built For Rails Shrine” is one of

Read More
Gaming

Tears of the Kingdom’s Bosses Are Better Than BOTW’s

When we were putting together a list of the best boss fights in the Legend of Zelda series here at Kotaku, we all had a collective moment of accepting Breath of the Wild, widely regarded as a defining moment in the series’ long history, wouldn’t be represented. The Wii U/Switch game is an achievement in

Read More
Gaming

Street Fighter 6 Is Already Steam’s Most Played Fighting Game

The latest entry in Capcom’s fighting game franchise, Street Fighter 6, broke the all-time concurrent players record on Steam making it the most-played fighting game at launch on PC. I guess it’s safe to say that “CapGod” is so back. Hopefully Street Fighter 6’s New Open-World Won’t Mean Capcom Skimps On The Fighting Street Fighter

Read More
Gaming

The Psychologist Determined To Prove Video Games Are Good

Dr. Rachel Kowert is a busy woman. The video game research psychologist is currently in London, where she’s set to give a talk on the fostering of terrorist cells and extremist beliefs in digital game spaces, a project she’s working on with the Department of Homeland Security (no, she can’t really talk about it). She’s

Read More
Gaming

Meet The Brilliant Scholar Challenging Racism In Game Design

This article is part of our new women in gaming series Makers of Now. During her keynote speech at last year’s ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in New Orleans, Dr. Kishonna Gray shared a story about the game Pokémon Go. She’d just become a professor at the University of Illinois at

Read More
Gaming

Diablo IV Players Can’t Believe How Smooth Launch Is Going

On June 1, Diablo IV’s early access began and it just worked. No ubiquitous error codes. No server crashes. No major bugs. Some players on console are encountering a nasty license code issue with a bizarre workaround, but more broadly, and especially on PC, things appear to be going surprisingly smoothly. And after the debacle

Read More
Movie Reviews

Simulant movie review & film summary (2023)

These big moments aren’t impressive enough to make “Simulant” more than the bargain bin sci-fi pastiche it obviously is. But there’s some appreciable consideration shown to the movie’s Simulants, or Replicant-like synthetic humans, which gives a slight edge to this otherwise unconvincing robo-noir ripoff. Shameless and sleepy from scene one, “Simulant” begins with an Isaac

Read More
Movie Reviews

The Roundup: No Way Out movie review (2023)

In “The Roundup,” Ma Seok-do, Lee’s barrel-chested renegade cop, pummels his way through another pack of vicious baddies. A new sequel, “The Roundup: No Way Out,” delivers more episodic thrills, though, as in “The Roundup,” any scene without Lee feels like a waste of time. Both “The Roundup” movies are pretty generic, beyond an adequate

Read More