Last week feels like it happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away for some reason. It was a good week. Here are my favorite Kotaku posts from it:
- Video Games, 2015 - Short, sweet and to the point. Luke Plunkett’s sequel to one of his other fine posts, Video Games, 2014. (Also this past week: Jason Schreier had a more playful post about how big-budget gaming—and the gaming press—works these days.)
- One Of The Weirdest PC Performance Tweaks I’ve Seen In A While - I love posts like this that come from our writers checking out a slightly-old game they enjoy and discovering something about it worth sharing. In this case, our own Kirk Hamilton owes a debt to the Internet’s SgtSweatySac. We salute you, Sgt!
- The Best Anime and Manga for Beginners - I liked this starter list by guest-writer Juliet Kahn. I also liked Luke’s round-up of his 13 favorite World War II movies. Overall, I think our Bests subsite continues to be a winner, though, as with Luke who oversees it, I wish we had more posts on it.
- Kotaku Asks: An Anonymous PR Person For A Major Video Game Publisher - Jason Schreier’s been doing his damnedest to keep our new Friday ask-me-anythings interesting. This was the best one so far.
- Popular YouTuber Says He Won’t Cover Game After Twitter Spat - A self-evidently interesting story about the popular YouTuber Totalbiscuit swearing off further coverage of a game he disliked, Titan Souls, after one of the game’s developers publicly celebrated Totalbiscuit’s dislike for his game (and made no effort to hide his dislike of the critic). This was a tricky one for Patricia Hernandez to write, largely because only one side of this story wanted to talk. Through the editing process we had some good conversations about how to make the story feel fair and clear when one side (the game dev) wouldn’t reply to requests for comment. It’s common to have one party not want to talk, which then puts more pressure on the reporter to convey more of a counter-argument themselves. Not ideal, but better than not running a story at all.
Those were my five favorites, but I also wanted to highlight this fun GTA ghost story by Patricia, this Dark Souls year-old-glitch post from Patrick Klepek (which was followed by this happy turn of events), and the great GIF below from Friday’s Highlight Reel, brilliantly looped by our own Chris Person.
If I can highlight my own writing, I was pleased to publish my interview with some scientists whose gaming-and-sexism study had recently gotten a fair amount of press and social media attention. I was equally pleased with the complex and largely civil discussion in the comments below it. Also, a comment I wrote on GamerGate-centric post and discussion thread on Saturday is worth reading for those interested in some of the more controversial stories we’ve run and how I responded to a reader critical of them (If you’re a regular reader of the site, you may have seen/heard much of what I discuss in there before, though the bit about how I feel about affiliate links and how we have used—or at times tried to avoid using them—is new).
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 about Redditor Guanlong’s amazing Cities Skylines uber-interesction.