Industry sales results

Short of the annual iPhone, few future devices get fans chatting like the next generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft. Both companies have teased what’s next recently—with Sony revealing some details about the PlayStation 5 in April, and Microsoft showing off a flashy video teasing so-called Project Scarlett at E3 in June. Both consoles are expected to launch by the holidays in 2020. In the absence of really robust information, speculation and rumors have proliferated on gamer forums, but why leave it to the forums when Gizmodo has a tipster blowing up our inbox claiming to have access to advance versions of both consoles—and showing us what they claim is photographic proof? Advertisement Our tipster, who claims to be working on a title for both consoles, sent us a series of messages from June through August to our SecureDrop. The first tip came in response to a nerdy theory we published following Microsoft’s E3 briefing. While Microsoft … [Read more...] about A Story About Two Tiny, Fuzzy Photos of a ‘PlayStation 5 Prototype’ [Updated]

2019 was the year of the Switch. Wii U is so far in the rear view mirror now that it all just feels like a bad dream. 2019 was the year that Nintendo proved that its console, a true hybrid machine that works just as well as a TV-based player as it does a portable, is more than just a flash-in-the-pan success. After a 2018 in which even Nintendo’s own output for the system was sluggish and uneven, it came roaring back this year with a nonstop blitz of amazing games, one after the next, in a wide variety of genres. Sales of both hardware and software have been record-breaking. Advertisement Kotaku is not running a companion State Of The Nintendo 3DS piece this year, because there are only so many different ways to write “dead.” Nintendo released a few farewell games for its long-lived portable this year, just in time for it to celebrate its eighth anniversary, then dropped it like a hot potato. But 3DS died so that Switch might grow even stronger. The release of the … [Read more...] about The State Of The Nintendo Switch In 2019

“It was an expensive mistake,” sings Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo on “The Ballad Of The Costa Concordia,” the 12-minute opus that comes near the end of his 13th record under the Car Seat Headrest moniker. The same song has a verse lifted from Dido’s “White Flag,” whose “Thank You” was famously incorporated into Eminem’s “Stan.” It turns out that this line also applies to the other, less typical sample on Teens Of Denial, the Cars-referencing “Just What I Needed / Not Just What I Needed.” For months, both Toledo and his label, Matador Records, thought that the Cars sample was cleared for use. As Stereogum pointed out, it’s hardly a sample in the traditional sense: “Just What I Needed / Not Just What I Needed” opens with Toledo playing a palm-muted E-chord and inserting some staccato strikes into the rhythm. It’s meant to play off the familiarity of the mega-hit … [Read more...] about How an indie rock band’s well-intentioned homage became a $50,000 mistake

I can't in truth call my Shanghai trip a comedy of errors, although there were errors, one of which resulted in my flying home first class. And while some of the Engrish I encountered was laugh-out-loud gut-busting. I can't quite refer to it as a tragedy, either. What it was, however, was a slightly nebulous, inchoate paradigm-fucker of a time/history/distance shift. Pudong, the area of Shanghai where Audi put us up, didn't exist in any way, shape or form resembling what it is now a mere fifteen years ago. The government laid a bunch of nightsoil in anticipation of a flood of foreign capital and a thousand skyscrapers bloomed. We joked after Chairman Li's speech in Detroit that the Changfeng press conference was an example of the Great Leap Sideways. Having seen Shanghai, I'm not so sure. Advertisement For most of us, the Chinese auto market seems far-off and regrettably goofball. And it is that. It's also the second largest in the world. Bear in mind, the first mass-produced … [Read more...] about Fast as a Shark: Living on Chinese Rocks

Few creators exemplify the promise and disappointment of the early decades of comic books as fully as Wally Wood. One of the great talents who flowered at EC in the early 1950s, he spent the rest of his career following that company’s implosion working across the industry as a cartoonist and occasional publisher, and outside it in advertising and illustration. One of the most gifted draftsmen from a golden age of gifted draftsmen, Wood’s tragedy is rarely having found subject matter that matched the ambition of his style. The sad circumstances of the final years of his life also point to the unchanging nature of the industry’s lack of support for older creators. Advertisement The Life And Legend Of Wallace Wood (Fantagraphics) offers a rounded portrait of a conflicted creator. Rather than a conventional coffee-table retelling of the artist’s life and career, editors Bhob Stewart and J. Michael Catron have by structuring the book as a series of essays by … [Read more...] about Remembering one of the most gifted draftsmen from a golden age of comics