November 17th

Welcome back readers.

As promised, after a week to take stock, we’re back at it. To close the gap, this week’s issue is correspondingly embiggened, but even this must be considered an abridged list. Let’s get to it.

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

Critical Practice

Our opening section this week is a loose coalition of pieces that are all about or in conversation with the practice of criticism itself, and the principles that guide it.

• We Still Believe Nathalie Lawhead | TIER
  Grace Benfell and Phoenix Simms reflect on the accountability games media must take and model to put an end to the culture of victim-blaming Nathalie Lawhead endured.
• The You That Remains, And Remains and Remains, And ‘1000xRESIST’ | Epilogue Gaming
  Flora Merigold puts her feelings about 1000xRESIST in conversation with the six months of writers who have come before.
• Talking About Games: To Talk or Not | SPACE-BIFF!
  Dan Thurot outlines some criteria for when no coverage is preferable to negative coverage when it comes to tabletop games and prototypes.
• Five Theses on Antifascist Game Criticism | Gamers with Glasses
  The GwG crew outlines some antifascist principles of criticism and play.

“Video games are fun, and it is so much fun to write about video games that we genuinely cannot stop doing it, even though independent game crit is outrageously time consuming and unprofitable. We will face the days of mourning when they come (and they’re here!), but some part of our psyche will have the tools to face those days because we know that joy also still matters, and that the people we are up against are a bunch of joyless, grouchy turds.”

Limits of Imagination

Now let’s look at intersections between recent games and politics, race, and 80’s-guy capitalism.

• Metaphor’s Neoliberal Fantasy | Matt Horton
  Matt Horton circles back on the imaginative limits of Atlus’ latest fantasy RPG.
• Tetris Forever is marketing disguised as a documentary | canon fire
  Amr Al-Aaser doesn’t think this collection, with its gaping omissions and outsized concern for Henk Rogers’ legacy, is quite a full Tetris. Maybe not even a double.
• Barret and the BBC Problem | No Escape
  Nicanor Gordon uses FF7 Rebirth as a springboard to unravel the dehumanizing, hypersexualizing, and neutering antiblack stereotypes that permeate popular media.

“So putting that all together: an international racist entertainment complex that echoes the plantation politics of the past has codified a binary in which Black males are only seen as animals or clowns. These polar extremes produce the heroes and characters across diverse media, but neatly pack them into buckets — a gun-toting hulk with a massive cock, real or implied, or a neutered clown that is harmless and pathetic.”

Restless Dreams

Lots of good horror games writing this week–here’s a selection spanning titles and subgenres.

• Alan Wake 2: The Lake House Is A Great Expansion About The Horrors Of AI Art | Kotaku
  Willa Rowe sees Alan Wake 2 out on a critical high note.
• The Forgotten from Disney Dreamlight Valley | Unwinnable
  Deirdre Coyle finds a reparative undercurrent to the suburban horror of Disney Dreamlight Valley.
• Sorry We’re Closed – Reseña | GamerFocus
  If you’re hankering for some survival horror but gayer and more neon (so, gayer), Julián Ramírez has a rec for you.
• The Discomfort of “Hello Neighbor” in Contemporary America | Unwinnable
  Emma Kostopolus juxtaposes the vigilant paranoia of Hello Neighbor with a nation of people looking over their shoulders for all the wrong reasons.
• The Silent Hill 2 remake is a horror game with the lights on | AV Club
  Grace Benfell muses on what Silent Hill 2 loses when its restless dreams are dragged into the HDR glare of the AAA limelight.
• …But You Never Did | Bullet Points Monthly
  Ed Smith sizes up this sleeker, more sanded-down Silent Hill 2 by unpacking its more pliable, player-oriented protagonist.

“James Sunderland is not a silent protagonist, either in the Silent Hill 2 remake or in the original game. But in the remake, he is more you, more us, more the players. He responds more to our inputs. He reacts more correlatively to our own movements, and to our ideas of what he ought to be able to do, as a person with a body. He becomes a silent protagonist not in the verbal but in the mechanical sense.”

Nuts and Bolts

Time to roll up your sleeves, because in this section we get really into the weeds on cinematography and (checks notes) jumpy pulse bastards with melee. Am I reading this right? Rob am I

• Multiplayer: Video Game Cinematography | Reverse Shot
  Kambole Campbell, Forrest Cardamenis, Cole Kronman, Esther Rosenfield and Dan Schindel chat about the craft and choreography of cameras, cuts, and more.
• Battletech AAR: July 31, 2024 | KVLT TAPES IN THE MAIL
  Rob Parker gives the beginner-friendly lowdown on 31st century combat (curator’s note: Rob is a moderator on the Critical Distance Discord server).

“The newly-resurrected Centurion from Corean Enterprises finally got back into the fight in time to shred the rear armour of Axman with an AC20 shell. It’s now hanging together with duct tape and a prayer. After two turns of sustained fire from several other mechs, was the victim of *another* Death from Above attack from the Wraith. This displaced it off the top of the mountain.”

Gather Party

Now for an RPG-focused section looking at writing, turn-based combat, franchise legacies, and more.

• Dungeons & Dragons Warriors of the Eternal Sun: A hollow game for a hollow world | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi plays the weird D&D game on Sega Genesis. If only it were good.
• Turn-Based Games: Dying to Thrive | Unwinnable
  Lizzie Edkins contemplates the ebb and flow of the humble turn-based game over years and tech trends.
• In Elden Ring, dragons are three-dimensional characters | Polygon
  Nicole Carpenter delves into the lore and tragedy of Elden Ring‘s dragons and dragonkin.
• Dealing With a History – World of Final Fantasy | Pixpen
  Sam Howitt closes the book on Final Fantasy for now.

“We know puns are wordplay, and play is important here. There are a lot of things that made me really consider that the title is an incredibly deliberate choice. World of Final Fantasy sounds like it could be fairly generic, but it’s thought about carefully. Final Fantasy is a videogame and this is a world of play. The toyetic appearance, the playful language and also how it is deliberately artificial.”

Loud and Proud

Here we’ve got a couple of pieces reflecting on gender and queer visibility.

• Steam’s Hottest Fishing Game Turned a Queerphobic Request Into a Hilarious, Expensive Joke | Inverse
  Robin Bea applauds Webfishing‘s expensive commitment to the bit.
• My Gender is Liberty | Into The Spine
  Megan B. Wells presents a loose chronology of gender expressivity in games over the years.

“Choosing to be consistently masculine is exactly as much of a choice as choosing to be consistently feminine. Choose to change nothing, and you contain multitudes.”

Critical Chaser

Let’s close this week off with some creative nonfiction and some perfectly normal formal analysis.

• Leaving Night City | Inkfish Magazine
  Boen Wang meditates on the spectre of Night/New York City
• The Gamecube Startup: A Critical Analysis | Medium
  Vehe Mently offers a formal introduction to the Nintendo Timecube.

“the centrality of the perfect fourth is the nexus of all of this. It is creating a quatral universe. This kind of quatral emphasis is one was employed in Schoenberg’s 1st Symphony. But the fourth, as the inverse of fifth, is a shadow that lingers in all Western music and much music across the globe. It’s EVERYWHERE, and the Gamecube start up is just making that known. The music and animation do not accompany each other they are each other made manifest to the senses. It is the cube.”