It's always a pleasure to look back at a week's worth of Kotaku stories. You get your news, some reviews, some pointed, not-for-kids commentary about Pikachu. All that good stuff. Best five stories? Maybe these...
- The Sad Story Behind A Dead PC Game That Can't Come Back | Features editor Kirk Hamilton loves No One Lives Forever, as does a group of people whose speciality is resurrecting classic PC games so people can buy and play them without pirating them. These folks were going to bring back NOLF, except some corporations got in the way. A bummer of a story by Kirk, but one that we're better off knowing. Who knows, maybe it'll help change things.
- Guy Beats Fallout: New Vegas Without Ever Healing | I'm a big fan of the gamer-does-extraordinary-things-in-video-game sub genre of stories that Patricia Hernandez frequently finds. She had a few this week, including one about a speedrunner's unintentional breaking of a Super Mario 64 world record and one about a person who spent three years, on and off, trying to beat an absurdly difficult Super Mario World level of their own creation. But my favorite of these was her piece about the no-healing Fallout guy, in part because of just how enterprising the player had to be to get the game to even let him play that way. Great, ingenious stuff highlighted by Patricia.
- My First Few Weeks With League Of Legends Were Nothing Like I Expected | I enjoyed our writers' takes on games they're playing, including Nathan Grayson's reflections, while playing an unusual PC game called Cults and Daggers, about his loss of religious faith as well as Luke Plunkett's efforts to play NBA 2K15 as if it's a role-playing game ("This is NBA2K15's 'kill rats in the sewer' phase.") The week's highlight was Yannick LeJacq account of developing a lust for League of Legends. No, League players, he definitely wasn't a smurf.
- Dead Or Alive Is More Than Breasts | Hey, another stealth-theme week! Here's an entertaining and passionately-argued piece by Mike Fahey about the Dead or Alive games' obsession with virtual breasts, a piece that wound up working well in tandem with Patricia's attempts to get game developers to explain how video game breasts are made.
- Halo: Master Chief Collection Has Been Broken For 100+ Days Now. This is a little post that news editor Jason Schreier largely ran in order to highlight Team Beyond's superb rundown of the Master Chief Collection's sloppy first 100 days. Why'd this make my top five? Well, we've been surprised at the relative lack of outcry, despite our and other outlets' coverage, about the state of what was supposed to be the Xbox One's flagship late-2014 release. I think Jason's framing here finally got more people's attention, justifiably so.
As I did last week, if I can highlight one of my own pieces, I was pretty pleased with my lengthy report about a talk that feminist gaming critic Anita Sarkeesian delivered at NYU. In the talk, she outlined eight things she thought game developers should change in order to make games better for women. Writing about women and video games, let alone about Sarkeesian, tends to provoke strong reaction and plenty of heated comments. I tried to include just enough of my own perspective on what she was saying, pro and con, to encourage discussion that was more about her ideas than, as is so often the case, about her. It seemed to help—as did just listing the Eight Things in a comment below the story for people who were too busy or impatient to read the full report.
There was plenty of other stuff I liked from the past week—including this superb episode of Highlight Reel—but I've cheated enough in getting around my supposed five-story limit here. And now I've got to go catch a flight!
Got thoughts about what we published last week or about stories you'd like to see on the site? Let me know.
To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo. Top image from Luke's post highlighting the stunning in-game photography of a group of Elite: Dangerous player-photographers.