I know, I know, it’s hard to top a post about a great video game burger—seriously, that burger looks great!—but there are at least five other Kotaku posts I liked more last week.
- The Two-Year-Old Pokémon Card Thief | News editor Jason Schreier’s video game layoff stories were some of the articles I was proudest to publish last year (and, yes, due to popular demand, we will bring them back). With this “card thief” piece, Jason has kicked off a similarly crowd-sourced series, this time involving video game clerks talking about their most colorful customers. The “card thief” anecdote is good and made for a terrific image by Gawker Art’s Sam Woolley, but the one about the woman with the Wii and the credit cards? That one was my favorite.
- The Demon’s Souls Troll That Made Me Rage Quit | I’m a fan of stories that have some action in them, which is a distressingly rare element in most gaming coverage. Not a problem here in this story by reporter Patrick Klepek. We’ve got action in this piece in the form of an enterprising Demon’s Souls gamer called Potato Marshall who finds all sorts of creative ways to torment reporter Patrick in a well-recounted tale.
- Why People Are Arguing About Women Streamers Showing Skin | Reporter Nathan Grayson spent a good part of Friday trying to untangle the arguments ricocheting through the game-streaming community about whether women whose cleavage is visible while they stream games are... sexualizing themselves, entitled to do whatever the hell they want, making life tougher for other women streamers, making life better for them, or what. Nathan explained the ins and outs of that debate very well. I was also happy with the explainers we ran this week on some less sensitive topics, including whether Hideo Kojima has gone on his last sneaking mission for Konami and what the deal is with the unexpected company Nintendo’s partnering with to make cellphone games.
- An Abridged History Of Video Game Dicks | You can either consider this NSFW post from senior writer Patricia Hernandez as part of our unofficial series on video game private parts or maybe you might consider it part of last week’s sex mini-theme alongside Nathan’s article about a developer who is trying to present, as his headline states, “a better take on video game sex.”
- Final Fantasy XV’s Summon Will Blow Your Damn Mind | I hired Jason for scoops, but, hey, if he’s got the eye for an amazing moment in Final Fantasy that’s as incredible as the one in the video he captured last week, he’s welcome to post about it! A lot of our stories on Kotaku are too long, so it’s nice to get some short, easily-digestible items like this in the mix. Not that I don’t appreciate a good scoop. Jason had a nice Xbox One Phantom Dust break last week.
Crap. That’s already five, isn’t it? No room left to praise Klepek’s piece about the conflagration between a critic and the “poopbrain dev” who that critic criticized? No space to laud writer Luke Plunkett for posting about the sad collapse of a 42-side Civilization game? I guess I just made the room. Consider those as honorable mentions.
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 via that burger post.