stephen_totilo

If you can wait, wait. Neither is a must-have yet. Both are a clean break from the previous consoles, since they lack backwards compatibility. Xbox One tries to do more and I'd say doesn't do some of what it's trying as well as it should (see the inability to separately control the volume of the TV signal and games that it can display in splitscreen--you have to listen to both). But Microsoft actually has a good, diverse launch line-up. PS4 tries to do less at launch and, as a result, I'd say they do more things well. Neither has a must-own game yet. Sorry to not make it easy for you.

Ultimately, what do you want? To play Titanfall and split your TV and games on one screen? Get Xbox. To effortlessly livestream and play Naughty Dog's games? PS4.

We think review scores are silly. They don't tell you enough. What's a 7.3 really mean and how is it different than a 7.4? Is a game that got a 7.4 this year even really better than a game that got a 7.3 last year? It's madness. So we don't do them. But you know how when a friend gets a game you ask them how it is? "How's that game? Should I play it?" The idea is that the friend probably says, "Yes" or "Don't bother" or "I don't know" or "It's really buggy now" or "Leave me alone, you creep".

Our review "scoring" system is designed to give you that friend-type response as an initial entry point into knowing what the reviewer thought. We also provide a review card that gives you a synopsis of the review that you can read in the time it takes to sneeze twice.

If you're down for more, then we have a full review for you. The "Not Yet" was included in that system as a way to signal that, hey, this is one of those modern games that might need some patches or some proving out of its multiplayer by regular gamers before we can tell you if it's worth your time.

Nintendo doesn't do enough with Metroid. I miss Advance Wars, too.

I'd like to be excited about a Fable game again. And there's this other little franchise that I miss. It's called Half-... something. I forget. It's been so long.

When Bill Gates calls to complain to me about that, I put Kaz Hirai on hold and get off the chair Reggie Fils-Aime gave me for my birthday to tell him that it's a damn lie.

I don't know. We probably all have our sentimental favorites, but given how I get heat from every console company at some point or other every few months, I'm confident that we're doing a good job of favoring no one too much.

Luke's in Canberra, so I can't give him a high five right now. I'll go to the zoo and high five a kangaroo. Same thing, right?

Kotaku was covering gender, race and class issues regularly earlier than other major gaming news outlets, as best I can tell. And from the start we recognized that it'd be tricky.

Some folks don't want us to report or write criticism about that at all, because they'd prefer to not have those issues in their gaming coverage. Even among that crowd, there are the people who are uninterested because they care about the play of games over the content. Others simply can't tolerate social politics showing up in gaming news.

Others simply disagree with some of the things we report or opinions some of our writers state. I completely understand when a reader says, "hey, why did you make a post about there being no women on stage at the PS4 event? You didn't do that for any other gaming event? And who cares?" We can't let the fact that we never covered a topic or angle before restrain us from every covering it in the future. And we can't get so tangled up in worrying about offending someone that we censor ourselves.

Sony not having women on stage was a fact. What it represented was up for debate. We saw people talking about it on Twitter and one of our writers volunteered to write it up. I thought it was an interesting thing to note and something worth following up with reporting (which we did, the same week).

There are readers who won't see a story like that as anything other than a rude attack on Sony. They'll see it as an attempt to hurt Sony or the PS4. It's not. It's a story about a thing that happened, a thing that seems distinct enough to be newsworthy, a reaction, and ultimately some exploration as to why.

I look at Kotkau as an outlet that has infinite space. There are stories I've been dying to get to all year that I still haven't gotten to. So when people perceive imbalance, it's sometimes because we just haven't gotten to reporting other parts of the greater story. Other times, the perception of bias or nitpicking is in the eye of the beholder. I recall a controversial piece that Patricia wrote about Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon. I thought the piece was terrific because she wrote about something that was uncomfortable, wrestled with her reaction in her own article and even featured the creators of the game disagreeing with her. It was all there on the page and it was all stated in a reasonable, non-kneejerk manner. That's the kind of criticism, whether it's about social issues or good use of shoulder buttons, that I think games deserve.

I do think that there's been a lack of strong coverage of the contrarian points of view to some of the social issue stuff. But I must also say that when popular arguments against Anita Sarkeesian boil down to her just being in it for the money, it makes it harder to get past that and find the arguments that hold water. It's not like the things she's pointing out about games are fiction. I mean, have you played Ryse? Well, no, you probably haven't, but you'll see.

I welcome all criticism. It influences us and makes it better. Except the criticism where people are just assholes or claim that we don't know how to report or somesuch. Then people just make themselves look foolish and I tune them out.