Halo Moves To Unreal, Nintendo Announces...An Alarm Clock, And More Of The Week's Top Stories

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This week, YouTuber and Kick streamer Jack Doherty crashed his $200,000 McLaren sports car while broadcasting, an event which has seen him banned from the latter platform permanently. Also, The Weather Channel used its Unreal-powered storm visualization tool to give viewers a good look at just how bad the devastation from Hurricane Milton could have been in the lead-up to the storm’s arrival in Florida, and the results were incredibly effective.

In more traditional gaming news, the folks behind Halo announced a rebrand from 343 Industries to Halo Studios, and also revealed that they were moving from the proprietary tools known as Slipstream to Unreal. We’ve got an early glimpse at both Master Chief and the signature Halo landscape as they look in the popular engine. Nintendo, meanwhile, no doubt aware that millions of fans are awaiting any details on the successor to the Switch with bated breath, took the opportunity to announce...an alarm clock! It’s a distinctly Nintendo move, and one that generated no shortage of hilarious and exasperated reactions from across the interweb. We rounded up some of the best.

All these stories and more await in the pages ahead.

Popular YouTuber and Kick streamer Jack Doherty made news over the weekend after he crashed his pricey sports car into a guardrail. The crash happened during a livestream on Kick and he has been banned from the platform permanently. - Zack Zwiezen Read More

A screenshot of the Hurricane Milton storm surge simulator.

Five years ago, The Weather Channel announced a new, immersive weather presentation tool, powered by Unreal Engine, that uses mixed reality to better depict major weather events. Since then, it’s been regularly used on TWC for weather reports and storm warnings, though it’s most effective (and memorable) when depicting severe weather, like showing viewers how wildfires spread. Today, that tech is being used yet again to showcase the potential storm surge from Hurricane Milton, one of the biggest storms in recorded history, set to make landfall in Florida later today, October 8—and it’s terrifying. - Alyssa Mercante Read More

Leave it to Nintendo to psych out fans who are already hyped up about an impending Switch 2 reveal by announcing a fancy alarm clock instead. Alarmo will wake you up to sounds of Mario coins and chirping Pikmin. It costs $100, works best if you sleep alone, and it’s breaking the internet’s collective brain. - Ethan Gach Read More

Roblox stock fell a whopping nine percent after the publication of a report that claims the software is a “pedophile hellscape,” alongside figures that it claims suggest the company is massively exaggerating the number of people using it. - John Walker Read More

Gif: Halo Studios / Microsoft / Kotaku

Unreal Engine is so good at making games look hyper realistic that it’s become a meme for a certain style of uncanny fan video showing everything from The Legend of Zelda to The Simpsons remade with ultra detailed CGI effects. Well, now Halo’s Master Chief is getting that treatment for real, and the initial tease looks impressive. - Ethan Gach Read More

The Silent Hill 2 remake has only been out for a few days (for those who had early access at least), but in that short amount of time, people have already created and published a bunch of useful, silly, and odd mods for the PC port of the game, including one that removes all of its iconic fog. - Zack Zwiezen Read More

As people continue waiting patiently for official news of the Switch 2, Nintendo has taken the unusual step of rolling out a public testing program for a secret new piece of Switch software. It filled up in seconds as players eagerly signed up to be guinea pigs for whatever the Mario maker is cooking up. No one knows for sure what that might be, but fans are already speculating based on some new clues. - Ethan Gach Read More

Gif: NEARstudios / Kotaku

Hawthorn is an upcoming game from some ex-Bethesda devs about animals harvesting produce, setting up dinner parties, and generally chilling about in the great outdoors and fulfilling everyone’s cottagecore dreams. It looks sort of like Animal Crossing if it took place inside of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. - Ethan Gach Read More

Yajirobe is a samurai who loves running away from fights and is generally useless except for when he’s giving Goku health-restoring Senzu beans or slicing off Vegeta’s tail. Now the “bean daddy” (not that guy) is destroying players in Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero and being accused of breaking the meta in ranked matches. - Ethan Gach Read More

An image shows game characters escaping a Steam Deck.

In February 2025, the Steam Deck will turn three years old. And while plenty of games still run like a dream on the portable PC, it’s clear that over time, more and more big new games are pushing this tiny computer to its breaking point. And it might be time for an upgrade. - Zack Zwiezen Read More