Godzilla and his atomic breath are one of the most recognizable metaphors for the atomic bombings of WWII—and they're also icons of Japanese pop culture. With a steady supply of Kaiju movies, giant monsters nestled themselves comfortably in video games, creating a huge library of monster mayhem-based titles. We have selected some of them, both niche and well-known, featuring battles with these towering beasts.

Daikaijuu Deburas (NES - 1990)

Shadow Of The Colossus (PS2 - 2005)

Super Godzilla (SNES - 1993)

Cho Aniki (PC Engine - 1992)

Godzilla Generations (Sega Dreamcast - 1998)

Dark Souls (PS3/360/PC - 2011/2012)

Lost Planet 1-2 (PS3/360/PC - 2006/2010)

Ultraman: Towards The Future (SNES/Sega Genesis - 1991/1993)

King Of The Monsters 1-2 (SNES/Sega Genesis/NeoGeo - 1991/1992)

Do you know any other huge monsters from Japanese video games? Show us with visuals in the comments below.

sources: ObscureVideoGames, SaikyoMog's LP, HardcoreGaming101, dloredo01's LP, ClassicGameRoom, Fang Wolfox's LP, PrepareToDie

Rumors are swirling that Capcom Vancouver, the development studio behind Dead Rising 2, has laid off multiple people.

One source contacted Kotaku to tell us he knew several people who were laid off today. Multiple people also reported the layoffs both on Twitter and the gaming message board NeoGAF.

Yesterday on Twitter in response to news that BioWare Austin had laid off employees, a recruiter for Capcom Vancouver said they were hiring.

I've reached out to Capcom for comment and will update should they respond.

Update: Our source has just informed us that there is a company-wide meeting scheduled for 3pm Pacific Time.

Update 2: In response to Kotaku's request for comment, Capcom sent us the following statement: "Capcom Vancouver has laid off 20 staff as part of its regular periodic assessment of overall studio goals. The studio is actively hiring talented staff to support its goal of delivering high quality games."

The next Resident Evil game will have 255 minutes of cut-scenes, according to a filing by the British Board of Film Classification.

That's four hours and fifteen minutes. Hope you like cinematics, Resident Evil fans.

For comparison, the BBFC lists Resident Evil 5 at 65 minutes and 17 seconds. Resident Evil 4 is 127 minutes.

Metal Gear Solid 4? 545 minutes and 47 seconds.

RESIDENT EVIL 6 [BBFC via Electronic Theatre]

I've never played as a black video game character who's made me feel like he was cool. Worse yet, I've never played a black video game character who made me feel like I was cool. Instead, I've groaned and rolled my eyes at a parade of experiences that continue to tell me video games just don't get black people.

The faces that look like mine that I've encountered in video games have been, at best, too inconsequential to be memorable and offensively tone-deaf at worst. What about Barrett from Final Fantasy VII or Sazh from Final Fantasy XIII, you might ask? Or Cole Train from the Gears of War games? Wait, there's Sheva from Resident Evil 5, right? No, no and no. Too many elements of caricature in each, I'd say, and they're all sidekicks. Their stories aren't the focus of the adventure players go on.

But, hey, it's a given that video games tend to present exaggerated characters. Marcus Fenix isn't like any white guy I've ever met, after all. But he doesn't have to be. For every Marcus Fenix-type grunt hero, you can also get a witty Nathan Drake, a charming Ezio or a regretful John Marston. Enough white characters exist in video games for a variability of approach. That's simply not true of black characters.

In creating Half-Life 2's Alyx Vance, Valve gave players a woman who was feisty and fragile at the same time. Alyx ranks amongst the best black game characters of all time, but she's another sidekick. C.J. from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas comes closest to this pie-in-the-sky ideal I'm dreaming of. C.J. managed to hold a core contradiction inside of himself—an intense love of family balanced against the violence of thug life—that added depth to his characterization. And while he was the lead of the game he starred in, he was still a gang member. Rockstar found interesting things to do with him but C.J. still comes into being by virtue of another overused stereotype.

Does this stuff matter in video games? Yes. The thing to remember is that beneath all the comforting platitudes about a character's color not mattering lies a sticky web of stereotypes and cheap myths that can still insult and anger people playing a game. Even if I wanted to like Sam B from Dead Island, for example, I'm still running up against the fact that he's a hot-tempered thug rapper.

Stop leaning on this stereotype. Stop creating loud black soldiers who only know how to yell. Stop putting spear-carrying primitives in games.

What I want, basically, is Black Cool. It's a kind of cool that improvises around all the random stereotypes and facile understandings of black people that have accrued over centuries and subverts them. Black Cool says "I know what you might think about me, but I'm going to flip it." Dave Chappelle's comedy is Black Cool. Donald Glover is Black Cool. Aisha Tyler is Black Cool. Marvel Comics's Black Panther character is Black Cool. Their creativity is the energy I want video games to tap into.

There's a book about it. In the anthology Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, author Rebecca Walker assembles a crop of personal essays that talk about how Black Cool manifested in their lives. One of those writers is Mat Johnson, a professor in the University of Houston's creative writing program. Johnson's like me, a lifelong comics-reading, game-loving geek who continues to bump into jarring, awful portrayals of black people in video games.

"I played Dead Island when it came out last year and there's a point when you get the Natives Camp area. I was like, ‘Oh, OK, we're going to have an African-style primitive out here,'" he told me. "The bizarre thing is that the stereotypes you encounter in the games don't even match up timewise with our current culture. That's what's so odd about it. The mainstream culture at large has moved beyond the trope of the black primitive. You can't get away with that kind of thing in a movie."

Johnson's written prose along with graphic novels and when he compares video games' racial awareness to comic and he says "comics had a much more concerted effort to change images of minorities in the work. And part of that was a market-driven concern." There's a difference of scale, too, he continues. "If comics can access another 5,000 or 10,000 in their possible audience, it has a huge impact. Whereas video games have become a mass market phenomenon that have an even bigger scope than movies. So they're not as worried about minority concerns as comics are."

The importance of seeing a face that looks like yours when stepping into a fictional universe can't be overstated. I'm a big Superman fan, but it was DC Comics' Black Lightning that piqued my interest when I was growing up. Every black superhero face I saw growing up was another signpost that said "Hey, you're welcome here. You can be larger-than-life, too." The absence of such characters doesn't make fictional constructs hostile; it makes them indifferent, which can be far worse.

"Another difference with games is that, as a medium, they're about invoking our fears so that we can overcome them," Johnson speculates. "I think that's what happens in both Resident Evil 5 and also Dead Island. They're not just invoking fear of zombies, they are invoking fear of blackness, and offering the gamer an opportunity to challenge their racial fears as well as their other fears. What you're seeing here is a subconscious action. And the reason it becomes clear because it's not in one game, it's in several different games."

"There have been exceptions in games like Left 4 Dead," Johnson observes, "where you have an actual black nerd character in the game." "I honestly think the move away from this going to be generational, when it's so easy to produce a 3D video game that it's the equivalent of shooting a movie today with a digital camera. But, until then, when I see a game that clearly walks right into a racial dead-end, I know I'm seeing a room of developers talking out a story with not one black person, not one Latino person of power in that room. So I think the single biggest thing that many of these companies could do to make sure that they are being representative of the larger culture's ethos, would be to hire in a diverse way."

"It's not a question of [developers and publishers] pushing culture forward," Johnson said. "It's a question of them catching up to mainstream culture. Part of it, I think again, is market success. They haven't had to worry about that at this point, because they're still going to sell a ton of games if the basic gameplay is good. But being better about black characters and characters of other races would make the overall quality better, too."

In other mediums and creative pursuits, there've been the black people who pivoted the conversations, expanded the possibilities and deepened the portrayals about what black people are. In jazz, it was Charlie Parker. In literature, it was Ralph Ellison. In comics, I'd argue that it was Christopher Priest, followed by Dwayne McDuffie. For me, the work of the deceased McDuffie managed to create characters that communicated an easily approachable vein of black cool.

Video games need this kind of paradigm-shifting figure. Not an exec, mind you—sorry, Reggie—but a creative face who steers the ethos of a game. For example, you know what kind of game a Warren Spector or a Jenova Chen is going to deliver. With Spector, it's a game that'll spawn consequences from player action. With Chen, you'll get experiences that try to expand the emotional palette of the video game medium. I want someone to carry that flag for blackness, to tap into it as a well of ideas.

Blackness can be a sort of performance, a lifetime role informed by the ideas of how people see you and how you want to be seen. One thing I've heard over the years is some variation of the colorblind testimonial: "I don't see a black guy when I look at you. I just see you." Well, if you're not seeing a black guy, then you're not seeing all of me. And if you're seeing just a black guy, you're not seeing all of me in that instance either.

I'm not naïve: no one's going to buy a video game because it's less wince-worthy on matters of race or diversity. But, maybe if Black Cool found its way into video games, I wouldn't have to hear the word "nigger" during online multiplayer sessions so much. Or maybe I wouldn't have to listen to characters that sound like 18th-Century minstrels in cyberpunk games.

While I'm sick of video games stumbling around the same ol' stereotypes and being afraid of black lead characters—"they won't sell!," cries the panicked logic— I'm not going to love Starhawk or Prototype 2 more because they have black lead characters. But if Emmett Graves and James Heller tap into some kind of deeper, more surprising portrayal than Standard Gruff Black Guy #29 and feel more human as a result, I'd feel better about the creative possibilities of video games.

Any mode of creativity that wants to be called mature needs to grapple with the sociopolitical issues of its time and place, especially if it wants to hold onto future generations. If it doesn't, then said medium just remains stuck in its own adolescence. When it comes to the examining the realities of how race can be lived in the world, movies, books and TV all do it. I'm not saying video games won't or can't, but damn if it's not a long time coming. Getting black characters who don't make me grit my teeth would be a great sign that video games are growing up.

In Street Fighter's famous bonus stage, the goal is to smash cars. That's the same goal in Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition Ver. 2012—even if it looks like the goal of SF character is something else entirely.

The glitch appears to happen after Ryu unleashes a shoryuken on the car.

Even when time runs out, Ryu just keeps going and going and going...

This was a bug discovered by a Japanese gamer while playing the title at the arcade, and it was posted to YouTube as a warning to those players who use the character.

As Kotaku commenter lgboix pointed out, Street Fighter saw a simliar bug in the Street Fighter II: Championship Edition—minus the humping.

SSF4AE.ver2012バグ [YouTube]

Capcom has teamed up with those magical people at Gaikai to deliver a 30 minute timed demo of Dead Rising 2 that runs in your Java-enabled web browser. Ain't technology a thing?

Gaikai works by running the games you want to play on its own server, streaming the game via video to your browser, giving you control in the process. As we've seen previously with games like Dead Space 2, Bulletstorm, and The Witcher 2, gameplay is pretty much lag free, and you don't have to worry about downloading and installing anything.

Check out Dead Rising 2 and other fine Gaikai powered games by clicking on the text in this sentence secretly moonlighting as a link.

Announcing Dead Rising 2, Right in Your Browser [Capcom Unity]

For the past 15 years, Sweden's Yami has been cosplaying. While others might favor cool or cute characters, Yami specializes in zombies, gore, and the stuff of nightmares.

In these images, she cosplays as characters and zombies from Resident Evil, RE5, Left 4 Dead, and The Walking Dead.

"I love to cheer my love for zombies to the world," Yami told Kotaku.

Yami's currently planning a series of new cosplays that range from Left 4 Dead 2's Ellis to Mass Effect's Female Shepard.

For more photos and more zombie love, check out Yami's site in the link below.

YAMI_NO_COSMOS WEBSITE! [Official Site]

On Dec. 2, the free update will hit Japanese arcades first, and then it will be available for home console download on Dec. 13. The patch rebalances SSFIV:AE and adds a "Ver.2012" below the title screen's logo. [Capcom]

The original Dead Rising featured a full set of Mega Man armor and a functional Mega Buster. Well, if Capcom's bringing back Frank West, why not bring back a Mega Man costume? So they did, with a twist.

This time you get Protoman armor, with a functioning arm cannon, of course. It takes some doing to assemble the suit, according to this GameFAQs user. You get the boots free; the shield and blaster are awarded for completing the game and getting the S ending. You gotta medal in all 30 challenges, save Jack and play poker with him, or defeat him in Sandbox mode.

Then you have to start another game with that save file—but not under New Game Plus. The blaster holds only 50 ammo.

Dead Rising 2: Off The Record Has An Easter Egg For Mega Man Fans
[Siliconera]

We've got another Massive Black artist for you today, which is always a treat. Coro Kaufman is one of the studio's co-founders, and also serves as its art director. Needless to say, his stuff is great.

In this gallery you'll see examples from many of the games he's worked on over the past few years, including Red Faction, Army of Two, Lost Planet 2, Silent Hill and even Golden Axe.

In addition to his video game work, Kaufman has also whipped up concepts for commercials, toys, TV, movies, clothes and even album covers. He's also putting the finishing touches on a graphic novel called Transient Man, which is about a hobo who may or may not be "an inter-dimensional savior of humanity, on a mission to save the universe".

You can check out the comic here, and if you like what you see, hit up the Kickstarter page and help get it printed!