September 22nd

Welcome back readers.

In deference to some travel commitments I have coming up this weekend, I’m anticipating that this is going to be the first of two consecutive Monday Mulligains. But fear not, I’m still at it, reading the cool and good crit, fifty one weeks out of the year, right on time every Sunday, even if Sunday doesn’t come out till Monday. By the way, have you seen how many Wednesdays there are in a week on our Discord?

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

Dialogue Branches

This week we’re opening with a selection of industry-focused interview pieces covering topics spanning labour, audience engagement, and localization.

• Inside Annapurna Interactive’s Mass Walkout: Internal Politics, the Surprise Remedy Deal, and Why It All Happened | IGN
  Rebekah Valentine collects the stories of the folks inside the abrupt resignation of Annapurna Interactive’s staff.
• X ban in Brazil: “Allowing Musk to disregard court orders sets a dangerous precedent” | GamesIndustry.biz
  Marie Dealessandri talks to the Brazilian game developers impacted by Twitter’s legal negligence and collects their strategies to reach global audiences.
• How translators performed the herculean task of localizing the most incomprehensibly British videogame of all time into German, Portuguese and Traditional Chinese: ‘What on Earth are these characters even talking about?’ | PC Gamer
  Matt Cox sits down with seven of the localization teams responsible for bringing Thank Goodness You’re Here to appreciative weirdos worldwide.

“I think the translators would all agree, though, that it’s best to play the hand you’re dealt. Especially, in the case of German translator Nele Katzwinkel, when you’re holding a card that lets you swap in a joke about a tomato that’s “drier than Megg’s fruitcake” with a reference to a german pastry your grandma used to bake — a pastry named after the private parts of a nun. I hope her nonnenfötzchen was moister than Megg’s plums.”

Out Now

Next here are some reflections and discussions on (mostly) new games.

• Hollowbody is a British horror triumph, but blurs the line between homage and rip-off | Eurogamer
  Vikki Blake locates familiarity as both strength and weakness in British urban horror game Hollowbody.
• UFO 50 review: the 8-bit era is back and better than ever | Digital Trends
  Very cool to see Digital Trends looking back on their coverage of the historic and still-relevant LX console over the years. The guy who gave Mooncat a 46 has some nerve.
• Astro Bot Suffers From Its Soulless Devotion To The Sony Brand | Kotaku
  Cole Kronman will acknowledge under protest that there’s a pretty fire game under all that Brand Appeal, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

“I don’t think Astro Bot is asking for anything quite as insidious as brand loyalty, but it’s somewhere in that ballpark. Brand appreciation? Brand wistfulness? A desire to see its old IPs resurrected, and its current ones sustained? I balk at that almost as much as I do at the fanservice itself. Yes, of course I’d buy a new Dark Cloud day 1–but we should demand more from this industry than familiarity. The next Masaya Matsuura is already out there. So is the next Kaz Ayabe, and the next Hideo Kojima, and the next Kazutoshi Iida, and the next Fumito Ueda. They won’t show up unless we let them work.”

Literary Collusions

These two picks in their own ways each explore the virtual intersections of literary production and communal practices.

• I became a medieval poet in Minecraft | Eurogamer
  Emma Kent picks up the pen and skirts the local blasphemy laws while getting to know the denizens of long-running RP server Lord of the Craft.
• Video Games Set in the 19th Century and Their Literary Allusions | PopMatters
  Samantha Trzinski explores the communal reading practices that emerge both within and without the magic circle in games about Jane Austen, Lord Byron, and more.

“In a way, these games – though exclusionary – bridge past and present approaches to reading, allowing 19th-century works to live on as they were originally intended to be read: in the company of others.”

Level Editor

Now for this week’s highlights on design and structure.

• Orcus, Kaizo Super Mario World, and the Art of the Spin Jump | Jeremy Signor’s Games Initiative
  Jeremy Signor highlights an engaging on-ramp to one of the most versatile tools in the nascent Kaizo sicko’s toolkit.
• It’s Time To Accept There Isn’t A Better Porn Game Format Than The Visual Novel | BP Games Inc.
  Bigg makes the formal case for the VN as the quintessential porn game format, now with ray-tracing.

“Visual novels are very friendly to developers without a lot of experience making games but can ALSO be imbued with a lot of mechanical and narrative complexity – Ace Attorney is a visual novel. Dangan Ronpa is a visual novel. 999 and Umineko: When They Cry are visual novels. I’ve actually PLAYED a porn game – Long Live The Princess – that adapts Ace Attorney‘s interrogation mechanic for pornographic purposes, and it’s fucking great! It works really well! Porn games can HAVE interesting gameplay mechanics, but they need to work FOR the medium, FOR the purposes of enhancing that sexual stimulation – you can’t just make a bad version of a completely disparate genre of game, put some cum in it, and hope for the best!”

Context, Paratext, Metatext

Here are a pair of thoughtful reads on games and the many other worlds they intersect.

• The Stanley Paratexts | First Person Scholar
  Miriam Scuderi examines The Stanley Parable‘s reciprocal relationship with its many paratexts.
• The Nostalgia of ‘Boku no Natsuyasumi 2’ Leaves Me Yearning For a Illusory Past | Medium
  WordsMaybe dwells on the quasi-remembered nostalgia of South Jersey summers with Boku and friends.

“The nostalgia of Boku’s childhood resonates with its players because it is an idealized form of their own pasts. I too spent my summers by the sea. I stayed at my grandmother’s and would go to the beach, swim, skimboard, surf, go crabbing, play mini-golf, scour my uncle’s enormous VHS collection, play too many video games, and hang out with my cousins. In my mind, the island where I spent my youthful summers on the southern coast of New Jersey was only a bit different from the small town of Fumi. But such isn’t reality. It never was, and like Boku, the worries of those older than me and the real issues of those days and that place were tertiary.”

Critical Chaser

Click to read more and/or convert the known universe into cookie dough.

• The Harrowing Methods to Achieve 100% Cookie Clicker Completion | VGBees
  Jay Castello descends through concentric circles of cookie clicking sickodom.

“But before you can get to that, you will have to learn what ascension is. After a few hours in the game, you’ll probably have enough buildings and upgrades that you’re making millions of cookies per second. Leave that running for a while (or micromanage the hell out of it, depending on your preference) and you’ll reach a trillion total cookies, which will give you a prestige level. By ascending, you can reset your game and start from scratch with no cookies or buildings but cash in these levels for permanent upgrades.”