Welcome to Exp. Share, Kotaku’s weekly Pokémon column in which we dive deep to explore notable characters, urban legends, communities, and just plain weird quirks from throughout the Pokémon franchise. This week, we’re looking at the history of Shiny Pokémon and how catching them became a huge pillar of the series’ fanbase. Catching Shiny Pokémon

Image: Microsoft Microsoft’s long-running introductory offer for its Xbox Game Pass subscription platform, which let users try the service out for $1 for the first month before moving onto more expensive payments, has finally come to a close. As The Verge report, the deal—which applied to both Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and the PC Game

The controversy surrounding Dark and Darker, an MMO that stands accused of stealing not just assets but also staff from Korean publishers Nexon, escalated over the weekend when the game was delisted from Steam. As we’ve reported previously, Dark and Darker—a fantasy MMO that was supposed to go into Early Access in April—is being developed

Image: Bungie Destiny 2 has gotten a bunch of hotfixes since the Lightfall expansion launched several weeks ago, but none like yesterday’s update. A fix not mentioned in the patch notes secretly changed the game’s newest Warlock armband armor to make it look less like a vagina. Bond of Detestation is a class item that

The Like a Dragon series (formerly known as the Yakuza series) is the most video game ever. This melodramatic crime drama series about a bunch of burly gangsters with the power to rip their suits clean off from their lapels has wacky plotlines where you hire a chicken as a real estate employee, manage a

The Last Ronin comic is being adapted into an action-focused single-player video game that will play similarly to God of War. The popular and gritty 2020 comic, a spin-off of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, stars the last remaining turtle in a war-ravaged wasteland. While most people think of TMNT as a cartoonish, family-friendly

“Back in 2013, my ex-husband and I played a game called TERA. He became obsessed with it, to the point where he brought my gaming laptop to the hospital so that he could play TERA while I recovered from giving birth (including during one of the first pictures he took with our son). “A couple

Brandon Sanderson is a fantasy author who nets tens of millions of dollars in book sales every year, which puts him in the same book-selling league as George R.R. Martin. However, his financial success has not really translated into a similar mainstream visibility outside of his specific fanbase—until this week. The tech magazine Wired published

Gif: Terri Vellmann / Doseone / Kotaku If you’re like me and feel life is entirely too short to spend on important, self-congratulatory games (or people, for that matter), might I recommend 2020’s Sludge Life? Once exclusive to the Epic Games Store, it arrived on Steam about a year later where you could buy it