Any week that includes me sneaking a pro wrestling piece onto the site and Tina telling us about a weird cat game is a good week, but it was cool for other reasons, too. The biggest news? Two cancellations and one sequel announcement. But there was more.
- GTA V Secret-Hunters Still At It, Now Believe They Can Go Inside UFOs | If you’ve kept up with my weekly round-ups, you know I’m a sucker for stories about fan theories. Patricia Hernandez presented this one, keeping us updated on the ever-interesting GTA secret-hunters. Runner-up-fan-theory-post: her Bloodborne one. What a headline!
- Diablo III Player Reaches Level 70 In One Minute | One of our guys in Budapest, Gergo Vas, regularly spotlights amazing player achievements in Blizzard games. This one’s particularly impressive. Semi-related, it took me some time to understand what was happening at the end of this close StarCraft II match that Jason Schreier highlighted, but, once I got it... wow!
- Losing In MOBAs Should Be More Fun | You’ll see a headline like this one from Yannick LeJacq and might think he’s making a weird complaint, but he is actually smartly arguing about the pros and cons of how games such as League of Legends handle defeats, comparing it to the likes of Mario Kart and Mortal Kombat. Yannick plays League about as often as the average person eats a meal, so I think he knows what he’s talking about.
- Months Later, YouPorn’s Pro Gaming Team Looks Kinda Dead | In this one, Nathan Grayson follows up on what appeared to be a publicity stunt and, sure enough, things haven’t turned out so well. Hype rarely gets a follow-up. I’m glad when it does.
- Beer, Masturbation, And Twin Peaks: A Conversation With Swery65 | An unusual, lovely short interview with one of Patrick Klepek’s favorite creators of oddball games. One of two really good chats with developers from last week, the other being this fun reader Q&A with Tim Schafer.
I’d also like to highlight a fine piece from our pals over at Kotaku UK, who shared memories of seven games they’d seen in action that were never released.
It wasn’t a huge post in terms of traffic (mid-level performance, basically), but one of the other stories that sticks out from the week was Jason’s Saturday afternoon piece about police responding to what turned out to be a bomb threat at a GamerGate meet-up in Washington, D.C. We don’t write about the GamerGate movement that much, maybe once or twice a month if something notable pops up, though we’ve certainly heard from readers who say we cover it too much. This was a pretty obvious one to cover. GamerGate folks have what seems to have been their first meet-up in the U.S. on Friday night, they seem to be having a good time, they’re forced to clear the bar-restaurant when the cops show up to investigate some sort of problem, and this is after a bomb threat had been Tweeted in reference to the event earlier that day.
It’s just our luck that a fair amount of GamerGate-related drama happens on Friday/Saturdays, which presents some logistical challenges. It took the better part of Saturday to pick up what we could about the event from accounts from attendees, but we were hamstrung much of the day by the challenge of getting the cops or the restaurant to talk about the incident and confirm the official reason that the police had showed up. We’d seen a Tweeted bomb threat and considered it likely that was the reason the cops arrived, but wanted to close the loops. A fruitless few hours later, when we couldn’t, we went with what we had and updated the piece the next day when the cops finally decided to confirm some details about the threat to the gaming news site Polygon. Of course, we spent part of Saturday getting complaints that the story wasn’t up soon enough but that’s the norm for weekend stories about controversial topics, where it just seems to take more time to get the details you want—and then sometimes you don’t even get them all after an afternoon of trying. So it goes...
Oh, one more thing from the week! I want to show two great GIFs, because it really was a standout week for Highlight Reel’s GIFs.
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 Mike’s post about Gabe Newell talking paid mods on Reddit.