Today on Highlight Reel we have terrifying No Man’s Sky scares, a Mordhau pan man, Red Dead kung fu, and much more! Watch the video then talk about your favorite highlight in the comments below. Be sure to check out, like, and share the original videos via the links below. Subscribe to Kotaku on YouTube for more! Catch up on all the episodes on the Highlight Reel Youtube playlist! Highlight Reel is Kotaku’s regular roundup of great plays, stunts, records and other great moments from around the gaming world. If you record an amazing feat while playing a game (here’s how to record a clip), send it to us with a message confirming that the clip is yours at highlightreel@kotaku.com. Or, if you see a great clip around that isn’t yours, encourage that person to send it in !
Posts
You really shouldn’t play Wolfenstein: Youngblood by yourself. The new first-person shooter, out on PC today and on consoles tomorrow, is designed from top to power-armored toe to be a cooperative experience. It’s a different kind of Wolfenstein game, full of the same dense, meaty Nazi-killing action you might recognize from MachineGames’ previous Wolfenstein entries, The New Order and The New Colossus, but built for two. Keep that in mind, and you’ll probably like it lots. We captured some video of the game to demonstrate.. In the footage atop this post, you’ll see Kotaku video producer Tim Rogers and me playing through Youngblood’s opening mission, which introduces you to the game’s premise: You and your co-op partner are Jessica and Sophia Blazkowicz, the twin teenage daughters of previous Wolfenstien protagonist B.J. “Terror Billy” Blazkowicz and his wife, Anya. After B.J. goes missing in Nazi-occupied 1980s Paris, Jess and Soph decide to steal some power armor and go find him, whi...
Gloomhaven, the biggest board game (both literally and figuratively) in years, is coming to the PC, and is currently playable in a limited form as part of an early access deal. With only a few options presently available to players (in terms of both gameplay and party composition), Gloomhaven is not really interested in making the most of the medium and venturing out into video game territory by radically changing any of its systems or design. Instead, this is mostly just a literal adaptation of the board game, only you’re moving a mouse around instead of cards, and you’ve got fancy on-screen characters instead of tabletop miniatures. This is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it ensures that the game is going to be faithful to the well-reviewed and insanely popular tabletop experience, so there won’t be too many surprises. “If you like Gloomhaven, you’ll love Gloomhaven” seems like the sales pitch here. Advertisement Which is fine, but it’s also a little disappointing. I’ve never bee...
Fine Art [Fine Art](https://kotaku.com/c/fine-art) is a celebration of the work of video game artists, showcasing the best of both their professional and personal portfolios. If you’re in the business and have some art you’d like to share, [get in touch!](mailto:plunkett@kotaku.com) Ladislas Gueros is an artist based in Canada, and this is his idea on how Horizon Zero Dawn’s Aloy would look as a guest-starring Overwatch character. Like Hanzo, basically, only less annoying. You can see more of Gueros’ stuff at his ArtStation page. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement
Kotaku Game Diary Daily thoughts from a Kotaku staffer about a game we're playing. For most of my life, I never quite understood escapism. I knew how powerful video games could be, how seductive and wonderful their worlds were, but I never quite understood the idea of wanting to melt through the screen and leave the real world behind. After I’ve had string of rotten luck and high stress, among the most intense in my life, that has changed. I get it now. I get why folks want to fade away into the digital and why it can be so tempting to lose yourself elsewhere. For example, I recently got very sick, and during that time, I buoyed myself with Final Fantasy XIV’s latest expansion, “Shadowbringers.” My reward was an RPG campaign that was one of the best I’ve played in a long time. That was my first real taste of how powerful it was to push real-life worries away with a game. Sure, at previous times in my life, I’ve done this type of thing in small bursts. Played Counter-Strike when...
Screenshot: Creative Assembly (Twitch) In his final public act as community manager for Creative Assembly, makers of the Total War strategy game series, Michael “Wheels” Whelan said this at the end of a livestream earlier this week: “Arch Warhammer is a dickhead. Goodbye.” Arch Warhammer, a gaming YouTuber who focuses mainly on Warhammer lore, has also been vocal in the Total War community over the years. Most recently, he criticized Creative Assembly for seeming to remove a mod from Steam that replaced character portraits with hypersexualized women. In a video responding to the mod’s removal, he accused Creative Assembly of a conspiracy to censor fan mods that sexualize women because of the supposed influence of SJWs. Advertisement “The Reason Why CA Hates Sexy Women REVEALED!” reads the title of Arch Warhammer’s July 9 video. In it, he specifically called out one of studio’s female moderators who had previously criticized a mod for Total War: Three Kingdoms that contained sexualize...
At about this time next year, we’ll have a pretty good idea of what the next generation of video games will look like. New consoles will likely be shown off, bold new streaming initiatives will begin to launch, and we’ll see all the wonderful kinds of games they will bring us. All these new things will come, and we’ll close the book on a generation that saw the industry that makes games come under greater scrutiny than ever before, as studios shuttered, developers burned out, and toxic work culture fostered environments hostile to marginalized people. These are not problems that have been resolved, but the wheels of the games industry keep turning, in spite of the strain. So how much bigger can video games get? Video games are only getting more costly, in more ways than one. And it doesn’t seem like they’re sustainable. There’s the human cost, which Kotaku has chronicled extensively. Contract workers are continually undervalued and taken advantage of, as Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 devel...
Screenshot: Natalia Mogollon (Twitter) Natalia Mogollon, who streams under the name “Alinity Divine” on Twitch, was playing Apex Legends on camera on July 18 when she took her cat from off her desk and threw it behind her, a clip that soon went viral. Mogollon has since apologized for it, while others, including from inside Twitch, are calling for her to temporarily be banned from the platform. The incident blew up on social media Friday, where it was eventually picked up by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which shared a clip of it on Twitter to its over 1 million followers. “Take a stand for cats & please remove Alinity from @Twitch immediately,” PETA wrote. “She is using the platform to post animal abuse, which sends a dangerous message to anyone watching her videos. Cats are not props to abuse for more views.” PETA hasn’t always been known for engaging in debates around the humane treatment of animals in good faith, and there’s no evidence that Mogollon threw her c...
Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF Things have mostly improved in recent years, but there was a while there 3-5 years back where the developers of NBA2K were more interested in getting NBA players into the recording studio than in checking whether they were actually any good at voice acting first. As an example, here’s how excited everyone was at getting Dion Waiters into the game back in NBA 2K13, to the point 2K made a whole trailer about it: Two years later, here’s Waiter’s now-infamous in-game performance: Oh dear. That clip’s infamy is a little unfair on Waiters, a man who is paid millions to ball, not act, and who was neither the first nor the last NBA player to discover voice acting was not their calling in life. To help spread the burden, then, Slam put together a montage video showing other players like Eric Gordon and Markieff Morris doing their best to also collect an easy paycheck.
Screenshot: Sony Video game characters love their bows and arrows, but I hate to be the bearer of bad news—almost all of them are terrible at archery. As an archer myself, I’ve had to spend a lot of time teaching and observing the sport, so I thought it might be appropriate to explain why, in real life, some of your favorite arrow-shooting characters at best wouldn’t be able to shoot straight and at worst would severely injure themselves. Link, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Illustration: Nintendo One of the cardinal sins of archery is dry-firing a bow. A dry fire is the process of drawing the bow’s string back and then letting go without an arrow in place. A normal bow draws back to a conservative estimate of 30 to 40 pounds of tension created by the bending of the bow. As such you’re holding those pounds on your fingers. If you let that go without an arrow on it, all that energy comes rushing back into the bow, which could potentially shatter its limbs (the long ends of the bo...
Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF GIF: Desk Desk, one of the most creative and technically gifted combo video creators in the fighting game community, has outdone himself with his latest project. Controlling both Ryu and Ken in Street Fighter Alpha’s Dramatic Battle mode, using one hand for each character, he beats the snot out of devilish dictator M. Bison and defeats the two-player cooperative mode by himself. In addition to regular versus and story modes, the Street Fighter Alpha series is unique in that it allows two players to team up via the Dramatic Battle mode to take on a computer-controlled opponent. While it would expand in future games, allowing players to use every character in the game, the mode’s first iteration in the original Street Fighter Alpha was limited to Ryu and Ken as an homage to their final fight with M. Bison in Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie. Unlike in the movie, however, M. Bison doesn’t even get a chance...
Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF BeamNG, a very fun driving game that’s mostly about destroying cars in the best way possible, now lets you smash stuff up on the streets of Grand Theft Auto 3's Liberty City, without any hassles like health meters or police intervention. Put together by Swift502, it’s a literal port of GTA 3's map, which means you can’t install it via the game’s official mod repository. Instead, you can just download it here and do it manually.
Out of every single video game purchase I’ve ever made in my life, across games, consoles and accessories, I don’t think I’ve made a more sensible purchase than Microsoft’s Xbox Elite controller. First released in 2015, it was—and remains, even with a successor on the way!—expensive as hell. As Phil Spencer said at the time, it was “an elite controller for the elite gamer”. Back then, based on just Microsoft’s original pitch, I saw the price and got ready to ignore the entire project, saw the customisation options I would never use and figured the controller to be a luxury, and figured the whole idea was just something for rich kids and people who are sponsored to sit in Gamer Chairs. It was being sold as an indulgence, targeted at a niche, implied it was something fancy, something optional. It was wrong, though, to think of the Elite controller in those terms. It was more like a good pair of boots. You wouldn’t think twice about spending $150 on a pair of well-made winter boots if you...
Sigma, Overwatch’s newest hero, has descended onto the PC public test server, and already, he’s making a craterous impact. The gravity-manipulating tank has an ult of otherworldly power, but ultimately, it hinges on a simple principle: What goes up must come down. Players are using it to pull off some absolutely devious plays. When people first saw Sigma’s ult in action, many a tooth was revealed in a sudden spread of malicious grins. The ult lifts both Sigma and a selection of foes into the air, and then those foes get slammed into the ground and lose 50 percent of their maximum HP. Longtime players realized that Sigma could be a perfect solution to overtime stalemates where one team just can’t quite peel the other off the point. Here’s that idea in action, as demonstrated by Holajz. Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF One moment, the team is hunkered down. The next, they’re hunkered significantly less down. During this time, the overtime time...