Late last week, I was reading through a forum, a forum I really like and respect — especially for the way they ban and lock down threads. Anyhoo, there was a thread where people we drinking Kotaku hatorade. Nothing new there! When you ban hammer as many people as us, you are bound to make bitter mortal enemies. And that’s a-ok! The interesting part was where one individual listed off the reasons why he/she/it disliked Kotaku: Stuff like he/she/it didn’t like the way we wrote or that we did no original news. (We do tonnes of original news and write decent enough! He/she/it should’ve hated on our spelling. Our spelling sucks.) The kicker? This individual totally hated our daily Notes. Like that was a point of contention. Guess he/she/it was confused reading something that wasn’t game news or even game related necessarily. Not sure if the commenters will agree with me, but I personally find the Notes super helpful. When I wake up, it’s the first thing I check. It’s how I know what’s going on, what happened last night, get my bearings, etc… Still, very curious and quite funny!

What you missed last night
My First NPD chart
Gabe Newell hates Vista-only DX10
Leipzig Best in Show
New Ken Levine photos!

I’ve never played a good game where the developers put a big icon of the button you’re supposed to press onscreen… I look at Heavenly Sword and it seems really half-assed, because it’s asking you to do all these button-timing sequences but you are not getting much payoff from it.

Snap! Heavenly Sword producer Kyle Shubel’s answer to those criticisms?

My response to Mr. Itagaki would be that the intent of the Hero sequences is to empower the player to experience events that would be nearly impossible to play in a natural platforming state… for example, making the player run down ropes, leaping from rope to rope as they’re being cut from underneath you, all while dodging other objects — that would be a frustrating experience to 99 percent of our users if we were to force them to do that manually.

Itagaki is that 1 percent. He’s not like us mortals, you know. He wears sunglasses when he sleeps and bathes.

Thanks Christian!

If only he’d saved his hate for anonymously posting into the comments on an internet blog site thus starting a massive flame war like an adult.

Boy Arrested For Writing PS3 Sucks On Video Game Cases [Fun Tech Talk]

A hacker has knocked GayGamer.net, the only news gathering gay-gaming site, offline with a series of denial of service attacks after flooding the site with threatening emails and hate speech, the site’s owner said Sunday.

Flynn De Marco, the site’s owner and Kotaku weekend editor, said small waves of denial of service attacks started Wednesday morning, causing occasional timeouts on the site. By Friday the site, working with their host, was able to block the IPs where the DOS attacks seemed to be coming from. Then Friday evening someone began flooding the site’s forums and chat room with hate speech, including some death threats, and over-sized images meant to bog down the site, De Marco said. The flood of messages and images all originated from the same IP in Philidelphia, he added.

The site deleted the offensive messages, but the continued DOS attacks lead to the site’s host taking GayGamer down until the attacks could be permanently blocked. De Marco hopes to get the site operational by Monday, but is having problems getting a straight answer from their host, GoDaddy.Com.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigations a hate crime, also known as a bias crime, is a criminal offence committed against a person, property, or society that is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin.

It’s sad to see that even in the virtual worlds of gaming and game coverage people decide that the only way they can express themselves is by attacking others. Here’s GayGamer’s official statement on the outage:

Hello, faithful readers:
As you might have noticed, we have had some connection issues in the last few days and now the site is completely down. I’m sad to say that we have been the target of homophobic hackers. Thankfully, they didn’t get to our database so all of our stuff is still in tact. At this point we are just waiting for our service provider to ensure everything is good before putting the server back online.
Hopefully, this will be resolved by the end of this weekend, so please keep checking back. You can’t keep a good gay gamer down, so we’ll be back before you know it, serving up all the sassy game content you can handle.
Cheers,
Fruit Brute