Welcome back readers.

Thanks for bearing with me during my first ever “Zelda Mulligan” during my tenure here–first only, perhaps, because I joined Critical Distance the year after the last Zelda came out. While I can hardly say I’ve got a probably-two-hundred-hour game that came out less than two hundred hours ago out of my system just yet, I’m recharged and ready to share nine cool new picks for the week.

This Week in Videogame Blogging is a roundup highlighting the most important critical writing on games from the past seven days.

Redfall

Well-seasoned crit sees a fairly-reliable delay of a few weeks from the release of a game, so while Tears of the Kingdom may be the talk of the town at the moment, the last big discourse magnet is now starting to pay rich critical dividends. Here are two pieces I enjoyed about Redfall and, even more so, its contexts.

“Five years into the Game Pass experiment, Microsoft’s first-party studios (outside of those that exist solely to perpetuate the existence of a marketable brand, like Turn 10, 343i, or The Coalition) operate on the ‘one for the money men, one for me’ model of Hollywood auteurs in the Christopher Nolan mode. They make one trend-chasing game that will hopefully generate enough income through micro-transactions to fund their more experimental work.”

Solid Sixes

I have a real soft spot for the decidedly mid Star Wars games of a few hardware generations ago, so I was quite tickled to see that the folks at Eurogamer feel the same way and have been sharing their thoughts on the subject. Here are two highlights.

“It’s awful, really, looking back at it now, but at the time I was wowed. For me, someone whose gaming life had gone from the NES to the SNES and now the N64 via a brief love affair with the Amiga 1200, Shadows of the Empire represented one of my first experiences in a fully 3D environment. I wasn’t about to let bad gameplay put me off! I’m not even sure I knew what bad gameplay was, back then. It’s funny: the more I have come to understand how video games work, the harder they have become to love.”

Back to Present

Now that I’ve gotten Nostalgia Time in, let’s turn our focus back to a pair of very recent releases.

“The realm of personal is where most of MyHouse’s symbolism lies-from the metatextual presentation of the mod to the community to the map itself.”

Playing with Protagonism

Both of these design-focused selections are engaged with questions of player and protagonist, and how different systems influence and impact each and both.

“I’m content, for now, for a fantasy of control that pushes it out of reach, that forces me to improvise, and never gives me exactly what I want.”

Critical Chaser

Longtime readers may by now have deduced that “Final Fantasy V” is one of my activation phrases. “Job”, on the other hand, is not.

“I thought my diploma sealed my fate. To this day, I can say I’ve looked at every opportunity with an open mind and a heart for adventure – and I’m all the happier for that.”


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