On October 22, there will be an examination for certification in the Koga-ryu school of ninjutsu. I am not making this up. 

The latest blog post from NBN outlines a number of reasons why comparing the broadband rollouts of Australia and New Zealand is like comparing apples and oranges. To make his point, NBN CEO Bill Morrow finds an orange.

Comparisons between Australia and New Zealand are natural -- both countries think they invented the pavlova and neither wants to claim ownership of Russell Crowe. In this morning's post, Morrow tries to explain why we didn't do things the way the Kiwis did.

Despite the best efforts of my Indian mum, I never really celebrated Diwali growing up. When I saw that The Sims 4 was getting items for the holiday, I decided to finally try.

Tell me if you've ever seen this: there are only ten people or so left in your Fortnite: Battle Royale match. The storm cloud looms closer with every passing second. There's nowhere left to go. Left without options, everyone around you starts building toward the sky.

According to Nippon Ichi Software America president Takuro Yamashita, Microsoft "hasn't been very supportive of Japanese games". Since this is NIS America, Yamashita is talking about bringing Japanese games to the Xbox One and not selling loads of Xbox Ones in Japan.

A locked room, a mystery to solve, team work and a little magic. Over 80 escape rooms have popped up across Australia in recent years, so we talked to Chris Krajacic -- one of the owners and game designers at Canberra's Riddle Room -- to find out more.

Here's to the fools who dream ... of electric sheep.

Last weekend's Hearthstone championships at the new Blizzard arena in Los Angeles were filled with the kinds of moments that can shape a competitive esports scene. Not only did the tourney feature one of its first female competitors, it also raised questions about the thin line between playful animation and outright rudeness when playing Hearthstone in person -- and it all came to a head in a single match.

Earlier this week we told you about Claire Manning, a Melbourne gamer with a background in archaeology. She discovered the crumbs of a message in the hieroglyphs of an Assassin's Creed: Origins ad, and now she's finished translating the whole message.

Dungeon Keeper is one of my favourite games, so any new spin on the formula is always going to catch my eye. And that's the rough gist of Dungeons 3: an RTS that mixes dungeon management with a simplistic RTS action above the surface.

But rather than blending two of the most iconic strategy games of the '90s and early '00s, it ends up working better as an introduction to RTS games in general, helped in part with a humour that's best suited to younger gamers.

We're not far away from the release of the Xbox One X. And if you want to get an idea of how that extra power might be deployed in games, compared to what the PS4 Pro can do, here's Shadow of War with a handy example.

Star Wars Rebellion is an excellent board game that manages to capture the feel of the entire classic trilogy inside a single tabletop experience. Rise of the Empire is a new expansion for the game that does the same thing, only for Rogue One.

Like any subculture, the one that's sprung up around competitive games like Street Fighter and Guilty Gear has slowly developed its own special language, which can be hard to understand if you haven't been a part of the scene for years.

It's not the best of the modern Civilization games, but it's a perfectly playable game with expansions. And, more importantly, it's free.

Game developers have been trying to figure out how to paddle their way through pirate-infested waters for decades. DRM, "glitches" designed to thwart pirates, and more DRM have done little to stem the tide.

Seeing this, a handful of developers took less combative approaches, putting their games on sites like the Pirate's Bay themselves. Months (or in some cases, years) later, they say it was a worthwhile experiment, even if it didn't improve their sales all that much.

I want to play a game.

Halloween is nearly here, and so is the latest film in the Saw franchise, Jigsaw. To celebrate, we're giving away a Jigsaw prize pack. All you have to do is be the best HYPOTHETICAL psychopath.

This week on Kotaku Splitscreen, Jason and I take on South Park. We talk about the new game, The Fractured But Whole, as well as the show as a whole: its comedic sensibility, how its jokes function, and the baggage South Park has accumulated over the last 20 years on the air.

Easy one yesterday: it was Breath of the Wild. Specifically the noise meter, near the bottom right.

Let's see how you go with today's game.

For 13 minutes, Gonzalo "Zero" Barrios' face barely moved. It was the Grand Finals match of a Super Smash Bros. Wii U tournament, and Barrios, the best Smash player in the world, was squaring off against a formidable opponent. A few feet away, Barrios' bodyguard kept a lookout for a man who'd threatened to be there, in wait, with a gun aimed at the champion gamer.