What's this, a new, more angular version of Microsoft's Kinect? Not quite. It's just a wireless receiver for a PC that looks like a Kinect, down to the Microsoft-inspired packaging.
But wait! Don't write it off as some useless piece of Chinese junk. This may be worth a novelty shot, as it'll let you use a wireless 360 pad on a PC. Provided it works. And I'm not going to make that guarantee.
You can contact Luke Plunkett, the author of this post, at plunkett@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
You can contact Brian Ashcraft, the author of this post, at bashcraft@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
Ocarina of Time might not be the only Zelda game we see brought back to life on the 3DS. Nintendo talisman Shigeru Miyamoto has been thinking about bringing some older games to the handheld as well.
In an interview with GamesRadar, Zelda boss Eiji Aonuma said "Well actually, even Mr. Miyamoto himself has been talking recently about going back to the 2D Zelda games, in particular the ones that were designed with multiple levels to the world like A Link to the Past, and taking those 2D graphics and recreating them in 3D so that you could get a sense for the depth of those worlds."
"That's something that might be interesting to do, so I would say there might be a possibility of something like that in the future."
Note he doesn't mean recreate them entirely so they look like Ocarina or Wind Waker. He just means taking the 2D games and giving them a 3D effect. Which...might be cool, I guess, but how many times can people be expected to buy Link to the Past? SNES, Game Boy Advance, Virtual Console, there comes a time you've played a game enough, you know?
You can contact Luke Plunkett, the author of this post, at plunkett@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
Like God of War, Team Ico and Sly before them, Sony platform heroes Jak and Daxter will soon be getting HD re-releases on the PlayStation 3. [Game Informer]
In their attempts to thwart pirates, most PC publishers end up pissing off paying customers with intrusive or bothersome DRM. All, that is, except for Bohemia Interactive, who the likes of EA and Ubisoft could learn a thing or two from.
Bohemia's games have long used a copy protection system called FADE, which is part-security device, part wonderful troll.
You see, most forms of DRM, or digital rights management, try to cut the user off at the source. Prevent them from ever booting their game up. This may sound good on paper, but once pirates get past the gates—and they always get past the gates—they're free to play the game.
But FADE lets pirates download a game and start playing. Start enjoying the title, seeing what all the fuss is about. It's only a few hours in that things start to go a little wrong. In Bohemia's ArmA, for example, your aim starts to get a little wonky. You'll notice the AI getting erratic. These glitches start to slowly increase in size and occurrence until, bam, you've been turned into a bird, or the screen looks like it's suddenly underwater.
Sometimes the pirate knows what this is and admits the defeat, but other times it gets even better. They take to official forums to complain, where they're revealed as pirates. Other times, because they've got a taste for the game, they'll do the right thing and go and buy a copy.
Once FADE hits this point there's no recovery, and to this day, a decade after it was first used, from Operation Flashpoint through to Bohemia's recent Take On Helicopters, there's yet to be a widespread means for pirates to circumvent the system.
If it works for Bohemia, and can even encourage sales instead of punishing legitimate customers, surely other publishers could give something similar a shot?
You can contact Luke Plunkett, the author of this post, at plunkett@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
Thought Leno's jokes the late night wars were bad? With Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, they just got worse.
On tonight's Tonight Show, Leno mentioned how big Modern Warfare 3 was. Instead of showing the actual game, Leno showed the live-action commercial, with his head superimposed.
The clip climaxed with Leno firing a rocket into the Ed Sullivan Theater, where late night rival David Letterman hosts The Late Show. The audience broke into applause.
You can contact Brian Ashcraft, the author of this post, at bashcraft@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
Walmart is sending out mailings to customers, letting them know what Black Friday deals are in their area. While Kotaku hasn't seen the ads for everywhere, it has seen the one Atlanta. This is it.
While some of the smaller items will vary from store to store, the blue chip items—here, a blue Nintendo Wii—should be the same.
The "limited edition" Blue Wii is priced at $99.96, a good deal if you don't already own one. It's way cheaper than the $149.99 that the Wii is priced at elsewhere.
Walmart's other blue chip item is also, oddly, blue: It's a PS3 DualShock 3 controller, which is $54.96 and a Walmart exclusive. There are also PS3 and Xbox 360 Kinect bundles, priced at $199.96 and $199.96 respectively .
There are also a whole host of games, priced at $10, $15, and $28. The ad shows what titles you could expect.
Walmart's Black Friday sales start Nov. 24 at 10pm and runs all day Friday Nov. 25. Find the Walmart store closest to you in the link below.
You can contact Brian Ashcraft, the author of this post, at bashcraft@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
And that's just when you're looking at the pretty pictures of it. Its amazingness levels up when you find out the whole thing is made out of paper.
It's the work of graphic designer Taras Lesko, who was smart enough to not only build the thing—right down to the tiniest detail—but to take snappy pictures and even snappy video of the statue in action.
You can see some pics of the piece above (the second gallery entry being an awesome "making of" timelapse video), while the project's official site—see, I told you he was snappy - can be found below.
You can contact Luke Plunkett, the author of this post, at plunkett@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
Stories involving video games and crime can sometimes be sad. Or shocking. Thankfully, this is neither. It's hilarious.
Last week a 23 year-old man by the name of Timothy Joseph Mandes applied for a job at his local Best Buy in Bethlehem Township, Pennsylvania. When he was turned down, instead of leaving, he promptly walked to the games section, pulled an Xbox 360 console out of its box and stuffed it down his pants.
This was picked up by the store's security cameras, so two days later, police knocked on Mandes' door to arrest him. Instead of quietly going with them, he attempted to escape and got into a scuffle with the officers, who promptly tased his ass.
You can contact Luke Plunkett, the author of this post, at plunkett@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
Later this week, the fifth game in the Elder Scrolls series will be released. Considering the franchise is seventeen years old, that's not many Elder Scrolls games!
It's been quality over quantity, though, and over the years the series has sought to continuously evolve and improve, staying a perennial favourite while competing games come and go.
With Skyrim upon us, then, today is as good a day as any to look back on the history of the Elder Scrolls series.
In the gallery above you'll find footage from every major release in the series (not counting expansions), from the numbered "main" games to the less awesome spin-offs.
Total Recall is a look back at the history of video games through their characters, franchises, developers and trends.
You can contact Luke Plunkett, the author of this post, at plunkett@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
The Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994) - Our introduction to the world of Tamriel, Arena wasn't meant to be an RPG at all. It was only when developers Bethesda began realising that a fighting game's side-missions were more interesting than the fighting that the nature of the game was decided upon. That's why the game is called Arena: it was meant to be all about the combat, and despite arena combat being cut from the game, it was too late to take back all the posters and art that had been made.
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996) - Things got a little more mature with the second game in the series, so much so that Daggerfall shipped with a system that would lock kids out of adult content like dead bodies, blood and the sexier side missions.
An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire (1997) - Oh dear. The series makes the first of its two ill-advised detours from the main series. Battlespire was less of an RPG and more of a first-person slasher, was confined to levels instead of a sprawling world and was plagued by bugs.
The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard (1998) - Redguard was even more of an action title than Battlespire, and is the only game in the franchise to divorce the player entirely from the first-person perspective. I remember playing this game in my teens. I do not remember enjoying it.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2002) - Ah, that's more like it. Back on track. The third true game in the series, Morrowind was also the first in the main line to appear on console, courtesy of an Xbox version. Morrowind laid down the template the series uses to this day of leaving the player free to not only explore a fully-3D world, but to engage in structured side-missions like joining a guild.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006) - Long-time fans may sometimes prefer the slightly more complex Morrowind, but Oblivion is the game which blew the doors off the franchise, catapulting it from successful RPG series into industry blockbuster. Released across not just the PC but two consoles, it featured a beautifully-detailed world, haunting soundtrack and hundreds of hours' worth of side-missions. Like Morrowind, it's also benefited tremendously from a large and passionate modding community on the PC, extending the life and the appeal of the game.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) - The fifth game in the series, Skyrim, is out this week on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.
What's this, a new, more angular version of Microsoft's Kinect? Not quite. It's just a wireless receiver for a PC that looks like a Kinect, down to the Microsoft-inspired packaging.
Ocarina of Time might not be the only Zelda game we see brought back to life on the 3DS. Nintendo talisman Shigeru Miyamoto has been thinking about bringing some older games to the handheld as well.
Thought 
Stories involving video games and crime can sometimes be sad. Or shocking. Thankfully, this is neither. It's hilarious.
Later this week, the fifth game in the Elder Scrolls series will be released. Considering the franchise is seventeen years old, that's not many Elder Scrolls games!