Gaming

The bright colors, stuffed animals, fried Oreos, and roaring rides of a carnival or amusement park midway call out to the dreamer in us all.

We’ve added new recommendations to reflect the state of gaming hardware in the first half of 2022. Cheaper laptops are being built with more powerful processors and GPUs all the time, but games are also getting more demanding.

“...no, you can have some water in the afternoon if you’re quiet.” I’m sorry, you’ve caught me just cramming the last of the Kotaku team in the Holiday Closet.

In 1972, the first-ever commercially available home video game console hit the market—the Magnavox Odyssey. Players of the Odyssey had a choice between two built-in games that were stored directly in the device, and would use a joystick and dials as a controller.

Game publisher Bethesda announced Starfield back in 2018, but this week they opened the info-taps and dropped a ton of new details—and a 15 minute video of the open-world sci-fi RPG in action.

Peglin, as a pachinko roguelike starring a cute goblin, is one of the 5,512 games released on Steam this year. And crucially, it’s a game that’s broken through the noise and become a surprise hit.

Video game marketing season is an exercise in duality. For every Sony State of Play or Geoff Keigh3, there’s a lower key event—a Day of the Devs, say, or a Devolver Digital showcase. Today’s big one is the annual Guerrilla Collective livestream.

Many of the most popular tabletop board games are designed for big groups—that’s what game nights are about, after all.

He tries his best to forget about the safe. But when he has a few free minutes and is cleaning the pins of old Nintendo cartridges with rubbing alcohol and Q-tips, a little piece of him dies every time he thinks about how he could’ve been so naive.

Friends, I just finished a 140 hour platinum trophy playthrough of Elden Ring—the latest masterpiece from creator Hidetaka Miyazaki, of Dark Souls and Bloodborne fame—and I am tired. Wrung out. Depleted. I love a massive game that takes me weeks to complete.

The Steam Deck has unquestionably revitalized people’s interests in handheld gaming on anything other than a Switch. But had it never happened, 2022 would still have been a year packed with Switch-sized gaming devices, primarily thanks to evolutions in the world of emulation.

Your guide to getting started with chess, and the New York Times chess puzzle. Chess is an ancient game that traces its roots back to India.

The best thing about Diablo Immortal is that it's a fun, professionally crafted action RPG befitting the Diablo name.

We all remember the announcement of Diablo Immortal at BlizzCon in 2018. The screaming, the crying, the foaming at the mouth at the very idea that the next installment of the hardcore RPG series would be a mobile game. That was how I felt when I heard the announcement.

Back in February, Gary Bowser—who in most media reports has been described as a ‘hacker’—was sentenced to 40 months in prison for his role in selling cheat and modification devices for Nintendo hardware.