Halo: Reach ViDoc Trailer X10 Slams onto the Internet Today

As the blockbuster prequel to the best-selling Xbox franchise of all time, exclusively for Xbox 360 by acclaimed developer Bungie, Halo: Reach puts you front and center in the fateful moments that forged the legend; new trailer.

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Halo: Reach ViDoc Trailer X10 Slams onto the Internet Today

Darksiders Video Review

Darksiders (X360) It’s like The Legend of Zelda, except with dismemberment and decapitations.

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Darksiders Video Review

It’s The Little Touches That Make A Legend Of Zelda Themed Wedding This Great [Culture]

Jaded as we are, we’re still thrilled to see a couple of Nintendo loving nerds like Kotaku reader Kyle and his recently wedded wife Ashley take The Legend of Zelda wedding theme to the next level. The classy level. Of course, Kyle and Mrs. Kyle had a custom made Triforce cake—obligatorily pictured below—but it’s the Zelda cartridge cufflinks that the groom and groomsmen wore during the ceremony that ups the video game wedding contest. If my eyes and memory are accurate, that’s The Legend of Zelda (NES), Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (NES), The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES), The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (N64), The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (N64) and The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker (GameCube) keeping these gentlemen’s cuffs from flapping in the breeze. How nerd-cool is that? Oh, did somebody want cake? Kyle’s threatening to send video of some of the Zelda-themed wedding’s nerdier moments our way, but until he does, congratulations to the bride and groom for getting hitched in such a Hyrulian fashion. Thanks, Kyle!

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It’s The Little Touches That Make A Legend Of Zelda Themed Wedding This Great [Culture]

The Twenty Best-Rated Games Of The Decade [Reviews]

Lost slightly amidst all this “end of year” review business is the fact this is also the end of the decade . Which means it’s time to take a look back and what the best games of 2000-2009 were. According to review aggregation site Metacritic, the top twenty games of the past ten years are…well, pretty damn surprising. Games like GTAIV, Halo and Super Mario Galaxy are up there, as you’d expect. But some of the others, including the top-rated game of the decade, are coming straight out of left field. Here they are, courtesy of MCV, with only the highest-ranking score of a multiplatform game included. 1. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 – 98 (Activision) 2. Grand Theft Auto IV – 98 (Rockstar) 3. Perfect Dark – 97 (Nintendo) 4. NFL 2K1 – 97 (Sega) 5. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 – 97 (Activision) 6. Halo – 97 (Microsoft) 7. Metroid Prime – 97 (Nintendo) 8. Grand Theft Auto III – 97 (Rockstar) 9. Super Mario Galaxy – 97 (Nintendo) 10. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty – 96 (Konami) 11. Half-Life 2 – 96 (Valve) 12. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker – 96 (Nintendo) 13. Resident Evil 4 – 96 (Capcom) 14. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess – 96 (Nintendo) 15. BioShock – 96 (2K Games) 16. The Orange Box – 96 (Valve) 17. Out of the Park Baseball 2007 – 96 (Sports Interactive) 18. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves – 96 (Sony) 19. Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn – 95 (Interplay) 20. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past [GBA] – 95 (Nintendo) Wow. I mean, I liked the second Tony Hawk game. It was a blast. But better than Half-Life 2? Better than Halo? That’s questionable. Same for NFL2K1. Yeah, it was a pioneering sports title, but an aggregate score of 97? I think some review outlets were being a little generous around the turn of the millennium. Top 20 Games of the Decade [MCV]

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The Twenty Best-Rated Games Of The Decade [Reviews]

Blood Pact: Meet the minions, part 4 – the felhunter and mage-hate …

Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest brought to you by Dominic Hobbs. Ah, of course. Our latest prodigy. The real thing can’t live up to the legend, I’m afraid. No matter, you’ve come here to learn, not to hear me make jokes to …

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Blood Pact: Meet the minions, part 4 – the felhunter and mage-hate …

Zelda Developer Was Stumped By New Zelda Game’s Puzzles [Ds]

The next Zelda won’t be too easy for veteran players, the longtime head of the series’ development at Nintendo, Eiji Aonuma , recently told Kotaku. Plus, the new DS adventure will cater to Nintendo fan’s research-proven taste for independent women. In a brief e-mail interview with Kotaku in advance of the release of next month’s The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks , Aonuma explained that Link’s latest adventure takes an unusual route to satisfying and challenging veteran gamers: “One of our lead planners for the game is a programmer, so he has a different, more scientific or mathematical approach, so to say, to creating puzzles,” he wrote to Kotaku. Aonuma is the producer on Spirit Tracks. “Development team members, including [senior Nintendo developer] Mr. [Takashi] Tezuka and myself, actually got stuck in several places. So the dungeons and puzzles pose a different type of challenge than what we have utilized in previous games, and will certainly require longtime Zelda fans to approach each challenge differently. ” Getting more specific, he noted: “I believe that the latter half of the Tower of Spirits dungeon in The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks — [which] players will revisit throughout the game — has puzzles which require a different type of approach from those of previous games,” The chief architect of most of the major Zelda games, Aonuma has talked with your Kotaku deputy editor before about how to balance the creation of a new Zelda game to satisfy veteran fans and newcomers. A couple of years ago, I suggested that his team consider giving the player their boomerang and bow-and-arrow from the get-go. that might be a way to make new Zeldas more alluring to veteran series gamers. But never has he admitted to being stumped by some of the puzzles his designers have created. The game won’t all be harder. Controls, for one thing, will be easier, Aonuma said. I had asked him what his team had learned about the touch-screen controls implemented in the previous DS Zelda game, The Phantom Hourglass. That prompted this reply: “The one consistent piece of feedback we received about the controls in Phantom Hourglass was that it was too challenging to execute the roll move. You had to draw little circles at the edge of the screen to make Link roll. This is actually something we felt similarly about during development, but ended up not having enough time left in the schedule to implement another solution. In Spirit Tracks, this move is done by tapping anywhere on the screen, so hopefully players get more use out of it. ” Another tweak for the new game is in the Zelda character herself. In a change for the series, the Spirit Tracks Zelda takes on the game’s adventure alongside Link, in the form of a spirit. She’s not a damsel in distress just waiting to be saved. She’s an active adventurer. Aonuma said she was designed out of a desire among both Zelda fans and developers to have a stronger princess. “We recently received information from a survey conducted in the US that indicated that, among our female characters, users had a preference for those that were more on the independent side, such as Shiek and Tetra,” he wrote. He was referring to the Zelda-in-disguise incarnations of Princess Zelda in The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. “Making Zelda a more integral part of the game was also a goal for our Director, Mr. [Daiki] Iwamoto, so we set out with this element in mind when we started making the game.” Link’s different in this new game too, of course. He so often is. Aonuma didn’t divulge if or how Link will behave differently. Visually he looks like the Link in the GameCube’s Wind Waker and the DS’ Phantom Hourglass, but with the new game set 100 years after Hourglass, it’s no surprise that this Link is at least a new hero. “The Link character in Spirit Tracks is different from those featured in previous games,” Aonuma said. “He’s a brand new Link. The game does share ties with Phantom Hourglass and Wind Waker though. This is mostly communicated to the player through the Niko character, who appears in all three games. Of course he is much older in Spirit Tracks, and his aging conveys to the player that much time has passed across the timeline of all three games.” Niko? That’s the stripe-shirted guy , not the GTA guy . The new Zelda, Spirit Tracks, will be released in North America on December 7 for the Nintendo DS.

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Zelda Developer Was Stumped By New Zelda Game’s Puzzles [Ds]

Zelda Developer Was Stumped By New Zelda Game’s Puzzles [Ds]

The next Zelda won’t be too easy for veteran players, the longtime head of the series’ development at Nintendo, Eiji Aonuma , recently told Kotaku. Plus, the new DS adventure will cater to Nintendo fan’s research-proven taste for independent women. In a brief e-mail interview with Kotaku in advance of the release of next month’s The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks , Aonuma explained that Link’s latest adventure takes an unusual route to satisfying and challenging veteran gamers: “One of our lead planners for the game is a programmer, so he has a different, more scientific or mathematical approach, so to say, to creating puzzles,” he wrote to Kotaku. Aonuma is the producer on Spirit Tracks. “Development team members, including [senior Nintendo developer] Mr. [Takashi] Tezuka and myself, actually got stuck in several places. So the dungeons and puzzles pose a different type of challenge than what we have utilized in previous games, and will certainly require longtime Zelda fans to approach each challenge differently. ” Getting more specific, he noted: “I believe that the latter half of the Tower of Spirits dungeon in The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks — [which] players will revisit throughout the game — has puzzles which require a different type of approach from those of previous games,” The chief architect of most of the major Zelda games, Aonuma has talked with your Kotaku deputy editor before about how to balance the creation of a new Zelda game to satisfy veteran fans and newcomers. A couple of years ago, I suggested that his team consider giving the player their boomerang and bow-and-arrow from the get-go. that might be a way to make new Zeldas more alluring to veteran series gamers. But never has he admitted to being stumped by some of the puzzles his designers have created. The game won’t all be harder. Controls, for one thing, will be easier, Aonuma said. I had asked him what his team had learned about the touch-screen controls implemented in the previous DS Zelda game, The Phantom Hourglass. That prompted this reply: “The one consistent piece of feedback we received about the controls in Phantom Hourglass was that it was too challenging to execute the roll move. You had to draw little circles at the edge of the screen to make Link roll. This is actually something we felt similarly about during development, but ended up not having enough time left in the schedule to implement another solution. In Spirit Tracks, this move is done by tapping anywhere on the screen, so hopefully players get more use out of it. ” Another tweak for the new game is in the Zelda character herself. In a change for the series, the Spirit Tracks Zelda takes on the game’s adventure alongside Link, in the form of a spirit. She’s not a damsel in distress just waiting to be saved. She’s an active adventurer. Aonuma said she was designed out of a desire among both Zelda fans and developers to have a stronger princess. “We recently received information from a survey conducted in the US that indicated that, among our female characters, users had a preference for those that were more on the independent side, such as Shiek and Tetra,” he wrote. He was referring to the Zelda-in-disguise incarnations of Princess Zelda in The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. “Making Zelda a more integral part of the game was also a goal for our Director, Mr. [Daiki] Iwamoto, so we set out with this element in mind when we started making the game.” Link’s different in this new game too, of course. He so often is. Aonuma didn’t divulge if or how Link will behave differently. Visually he looks like the Link in the GameCube’s Wind Waker and the DS’ Phantom Hourglass, but with the new game set 100 years after Hourglass, it’s no surprise that this Link is at least a new hero. “The Link character in Spirit Tracks is different from those featured in previous games,” Aonuma said. “He’s a brand new Link. The game does share ties with Phantom Hourglass and Wind Waker though. This is mostly communicated to the player through the Niko character, who appears in all three games. Of course he is much older in Spirit Tracks, and his aging conveys to the player that much time has passed across the timeline of all three games.” Niko? That’s the stripe-shirted guy , not the GTA guy . The new Zelda, Spirit Tracks, will be released in North America on December 7 for the Nintendo DS.

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Zelda Developer Was Stumped By New Zelda Game’s Puzzles [Ds]

Zelda Developer Was Stumped By New Zelda Game’s Puzzles [Ds]

The next Zelda won’t be too easy for veteran players, the longtime head of the series’ development at Nintendo, Eiji Aonuma , recently told Kotaku. Plus, the new DS adventure will cater to Nintendo fan’s research-proven taste for independent women. In a brief e-mail interview with Kotaku in advance of the release of next month’s The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks , Aonuma explained that Link’s latest adventure takes an unusual route to satisfying and challenging veteran gamers: “One of our lead planners for the game is a programmer, so he has a different, more scientific or mathematical approach, so to say, to creating puzzles,” he wrote to Kotaku. Aonuma is the producer on Spirit Tracks. “Development team members, including [senior Nintendo developer] Mr. [Takashi] Tezuka and myself, actually got stuck in several places. So the dungeons and puzzles pose a different type of challenge than what we have utilized in previous games, and will certainly require longtime Zelda fans to approach each challenge differently. ” Getting more specific, he noted: “I believe that the latter half of the Tower of Spirits dungeon in The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks — [which] players will revisit throughout the game — has puzzles which require a different type of approach from those of previous games,” The chief architect of most of the major Zelda games, Aonuma has talked with your Kotaku deputy editor before about how to balance the creation of a new Zelda game to satisfy veteran fans and newcomers. A couple of years ago, I suggested that his team consider giving the player their boomerang and bow-and-arrow from the get-go. that might be a way to make new Zeldas more alluring to veteran series gamers. But never has he admitted to being stumped by some of the puzzles his designers have created. The game won’t all be harder. Controls, for one thing, will be easier, Aonuma said. I had asked him what his team had learned about the touch-screen controls implemented in the previous DS Zelda game, The Phantom Hourglass. That prompted this reply: “The one consistent piece of feedback we received about the controls in Phantom Hourglass was that it was too challenging to execute the roll move. You had to draw little circles at the edge of the screen to make Link roll. This is actually something we felt similarly about during development, but ended up not having enough time left in the schedule to implement another solution. In Spirit Tracks, this move is done by tapping anywhere on the screen, so hopefully players get more use out of it. ” Another tweak for the new game is in the Zelda character herself. In a change for the series, the Spirit Tracks Zelda takes on the game’s adventure alongside Link, in the form of a spirit. She’s not a damsel in distress just waiting to be saved. She’s an active adventurer. Aonuma said she was designed out of a desire among both Zelda fans and developers to have a stronger princess. “We recently received information from a survey conducted in the US that indicated that, among our female characters, users had a preference for those that were more on the independent side, such as Shiek and Tetra,” he wrote. He was referring to the Zelda-in-disguise incarnations of Princess Zelda in The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. “Making Zelda a more integral part of the game was also a goal for our Director, Mr. [Daiki] Iwamoto, so we set out with this element in mind when we started making the game.” Link’s different in this new game too, of course. He so often is. Aonuma didn’t divulge if or how Link will behave differently. Visually he looks like the Link in the GameCube’s Wind Waker and the DS’ Phantom Hourglass, but with the new game set 100 years after Hourglass, it’s no surprise that this Link is at least a new hero. “The Link character in Spirit Tracks is different from those featured in previous games,” Aonuma said. “He’s a brand new Link. The game does share ties with Phantom Hourglass and Wind Waker though. This is mostly communicated to the player through the Niko character, who appears in all three games. Of course he is much older in Spirit Tracks, and his aging conveys to the player that much time has passed across the timeline of all three games.” Niko? That’s the stripe-shirted guy , not the GTA guy . The new Zelda, Spirit Tracks, will be released in North America on December 7 for the Nintendo DS.

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Zelda Developer Was Stumped By New Zelda Game’s Puzzles [Ds]

Behold, Spirit Tracks Multiplayer Screens [Screens]

Those of you familiar with The Legend of Zelda: The Four Swords will have no trouble recognizing the color coded chaos going on in these screens. The rest of you will want to check out my multiplayer preview .

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Behold, Spirit Tracks Multiplayer Screens [Screens]

Nintendo Plans "Surprising" Zelda Showing At E3 2010 [Wii]

Nintendo fans are in for more than just new Wii Vitality Sensor software at E3 2010 . The Legend of Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma says Nintendo hopes to show something “surprising” about Link’s next Wii-bound adventure. Aonuma tells the UK’s Official Nintendo Magazine that the Zelda team has been trying “something new in terms of the structure” of the next entry in The Legend of Zelda, which Shigeru Miyamoto teased at this year’s E3 in the form of new concept art . The next Zelda game after The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks appears to be aimed at mixing up the now-familiar 3D formula. Aonuma tells ONM that he agrees with Miyamoto that “if we are following the same structure again and again, we might not be able to give long time Zelda fans a fresh surprise.” The still unnamed Zelda title will take advantage of the Wii MotionPlus peripheral and, more than likely, will offer a new role for Link’s trusty Master Sword, as hinted at by the Wii game’s concept art. Zelda Wii: Expect Surprises At E3 2010 [ONM UK]

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Nintendo Plans "Surprising" Zelda Showing At E3 2010 [Wii]

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