Private equity vultures made Toys ‘R’ Us go bankrupt in 2017. All its U.S. stores closed in 2021. But the zombie brand is still around thanks to a licensing deal with Macy’s. Now it’s using generative AI to reanimate its corpse with an origin story ad that puts its 70-year history in a machine learning blender, just…
Mario 64 Player Makes History Thanks To Two Incredible Tricks
How many hours would you stand around in Super Mario 64 waiting to do something that’s never been done before? Five? Ten? A whole day? A speedrunner who goes by Marbler recently clocked in over 80 hours with the Nintendo classic to be the first ever player to beat it without pressing the jump button even once. This…
Fans Want This Pokémon X Animal Crossing Mashup To Be Real
As someone who mostly passes through Animal Crossing each time a game comes out, it’s easy to draw comparisons between why people love that series and the ways in which players connect to Pokémon. Sure, in Nintendo’s life sim you’re not “capturing” all the animal villagers, but people still collect their favorites and…
New Tool Will Soon Let People Instantly Port Any N64 Game To PC
A new fan-developed tool will soon let users easily port nearly any Nintendo 64 video game to PC, helping preserve the console’s library for future generations and allowing players to graphically improve even the most obscure N64 games. And you can already get a taste of what this new tool can do via a recently…
Delta’s Makers Want iPhone Emulation To Blow Up Retro Gaming
Riley Testut was about to hop on a rollercoaster in Copenhagen, Denmark when he got the news that Apple would finally be letting a retro emulator he’d been working on for 10 years onto its App Store. It was aboard The Demon in Tivoli Gardens, at 50 miles per hour across three loops, that he started processing the…
Xbox Console Sales Are Tanking As Microsoft Brings Games To PS5
After months of debate about Xbox’s future as some of its big console exclusives jumped ship to PlayStation 5, we have our clearest evidence yet of why Microsoft is experimenting with a new multiplatform approach: fewer and fewer people are buying Xboxes.
Unicorn Overlord: The Kotaku Review
There is a satisfaction that comes from being told you are too weak to face a challenge and then quickly handing your enemy their defeat on a silver platter regardless. Being the David to your enemy’s Goliath and leveraging not just physical but strategic power to overcome the odds is a thrill that never gets old.…
Nintendo Switch Online Adds Some Classic Games From Rare
During today’s Nintendo Partner Showcase, which confirmed that former Xbox exclusives Grounded and Pentiment will launch on the Switch this year, the company also announced that five Rare classics are downloadable right now for folks with an active Nintendo Switch Online membership. It’s a blast from the past, y’all,…
Nintendo Is Bringing Mother 3 to Switch, But Only In Japan
Nintendo Directs are often different across different regions. The order of games presented may be a bit rearranged, or there may even be wholly different titles announced in one region than another. Today’s Partner Showcase may have featured the single biggest such discrepancy of all time. Why? Because we did it,…
Celeste 64 Reimagines The Platformer As A Classic N64 3D Game
It’s been six years since the release of the wonderful platformer, Celeste. Six years since we all jump, jump, jumped for our mental health, and jumped for the love of strawberries. To celebrate the beloved games’ sixth birthday, developers Extremely OK Games have released Celeste 64, a Nintendo 64-style reimagining…