Fortnite's emotes have taken on a life of their own: In the last two weeks, I've seen kids and adults replicating the game in real life. If you watch sports, you've likely seen goals or good plays celebrated through emotes. And if you play Fortnite, you've definitely had some jerk dance over your cold, lifeless corpse.

Earlier this month, a hentai game blew up. It wasn't the sex, though: people were talking about the game because of the incredibly detailed character creator. It's not the first time a game has exploded largely due to a character creator.

In the latest episode of Fave This, Gita Jackson and Maddy Myers talk about the never-ending debate around games like Bayonetta.

On Super Bowl day, I wasn't all that interested in the outcome of the football game. I was excited for something else - the rumour that a new Cloverfield movie was going to drop that same day. 10 Cloverfield Lane was fantastic, I thought, so maybe this will be too. I'm totally going to stay up and watch this! An hour later, I realised I had been tricked in by J.J. Abrams' latest marketing gimmick.

Last weekend, I spent hours chasing after a single elusive strawberry in Celeste. Over and over again, I kept dying to the toxic muck surrounding my collectible prize. Hundreds of wasted lives, an endless number of fuck-ups, a complete halting of progress. There was only failure, but I was stubborn. I was going to get that fucking strawberry if it was the last thing I did.

Nintendo's upcoming grand experiment with cardboard is unexpected enough that people have reacted dramatically to the announcement. Largely, fans seem to fall into two camps: Either they're psyched to build their own contraptions, or they don't understand why something like this exists at all.

In the first Fave This podcast of 2018,Gita Jackson and I discuss the controversy around fans shipping Rey and Kylo Ren as a couple in Star Wars (31:08) what the No Man's Sky community is up to, and where open world games go next.

Often, video games are about making decisions, and you won't always make the right one. Sometimes, there is no right answer. Sometimes, you've got to live with what you did.

Breath of the Wild makes you care about Zelda by making her pain palpable. By that measure, Zelda's journey is a good story that accomplishes what it sets out to do. At the same time, the tale at the heart of the game compounds an ongoing frustration felt by some fans: Zelda isn't allowed to be the kind of hero Link is. (SPOILERS AHEAD!)

Playing through Ultra Pokemon Sun and Moon over the last couple of weeks gave me a chance to reconsider the major characters and story beats, and I've walked away believing one thing: The world of Alola failed Guzma.

On today's episode of Fave This, I'm joined by special guest Danika Harrod from Waypoint. In between talking about how to be good at Twitter, we discussed the greatest Vine of all time.

On this week's Fave This, Gita and guest Heather Alexandra talk about how games can benefit from being campy. Whether it's Metal Gear Solid's Vamp or Deadly Premonition's sinner's sandwiches, a lot of games embrace how weird they are to be more fun.

Rick and Morty is in crisis, and we're not just talking about the few intense fans who make the show look bad. The show, as a whole, already seems to be running out of steam. (Spoilers ahead!)

2017 has changed Mario for me, and not just because he might be mind-controlling poor Goombas. Nintendo has told me too much about Mario, and now I can't look at him the same way again.

Destiny's lore, famously, is housed in things like gun descriptions and collectibles. How does this affect the way we interact with and understand the game?

In this special holiday episode of the Favecast, we're joined by former game journalist/one-time guest Kotaku weekend editor and Dishonored 2 narrative consultant, Cara Ellison, to talk about the subtle things women notice when men write female characters, primarily through the lens of Uncharted: The Lost Legacy.

Every week, there's a new headline about jerks who inundate Steam pages with angry reviews. Sometimes, the protests aren't even about the game at all, but rather a larger controversy involving a developer or publisher. How did this become the now normal?

A big controversy within the Overwatch community this year revolved around the healer Mercy. Top players experienced hostility and harassment just for picking the character, and major Overwatch personalities derided the hero for supposedly having a low skill ceiling.

The folks behind EasyAntiCheat, a service that stops people from cheating in video games, deal with one of the messiest issues in the medium. People often feel that anyone caught breaking the rules should be punished severely, but you don't always know why someone cheated. That's where things get dicey.