Up until today, I had three “gaming news” blogs in my Google Reader subscriptions: Destructoid, Joystiq, and Kotaku.

I had been meaning to cut these down to just one. After reading yet another stupid Michael Pachter story on Joystiq, I knew my criteria for choosing one: perform a quick “Pachter” search, and whichever one is the most Pachter-free is the winner.

The results?

Destructoid fared the worst by far. It looks like they post every time Pachter sneezes. Joystiq was better than Destructoid, but Kotaku was the best. So far, they have not even posted the idiotic “Pachter guesses what price Natal will be” story at all. They also don’t include a Photoshopped image of Pachter with a crystal ball in the stories they do post. Finally, about half of the search hits that his name does appear in are just in reference to a GameTrailers video series which one of the Kotaku people participates in, along with Pachter.

The search was far from scientific, but the lack of the obnoxious Pachter image, plus the presence of Stephen Totilo (whom I thoroughly enjoyed reading when he wrote for the MTV Multiplayer blog), makes Kotaku the winner.

I’ve found that I need to be more picky with my RSS subscriptions. When I have three blogs covering the same thing, I actually read less total in that group than if I have just one to focus on. My RSS feed culling has only begun.