September 28th

Welcome back readers.

We’re two for two on this recent streak of on-time Sunday updates. I’m hoping to keep this up as I adapt my schedule to accommodate a couple of new work commitments in my non-CD life. So how about that Patreon support, eh? Thanks as always for helping us keep this show going.

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

Medium, Message

An overarching theme this week is games and culture. We’ll start with two larger interviews/conversations that situate games, tech, and interactive art within larger topics of cultural movement and process.

• A Conversation with Nathalie Lawhead | TIER
  The TIER folks chat with Nathalie Lawhead about IF, text and image, tech literacy, nostalgia, and determinism, and lots more (Further Reading: Nathalie’s previous writing on making weird digital art).
• The Mouse Trap | TANKtv
  Liz Ryerson and Vicky Osterweil chat about Disney, videogames, cultural power, cultural collapse, and forging new cultural movements.

“I think about blockbuster movies and AAA video games as cathedrals – the only way regular people get to see what millions and millions of dollars look like. Much like Gothic cathedrals demonstrated the emerging wealth and power of the church, these productions demonstrate corporate power.”

Hot and Cold

These next five picks keep the culture theme going through lenses of representation, identity, culture writing, legacy media, and remediation.

• Games Criticism Isn’t Dead, But That Doesn’t Mean It Can’t Get Worse | Endless Mode
  Grace Benfell continues the conversation on where games crit is at and how we can identify its ills (Further Reading: Previous articles from Grace and Kaile Hultner).
• I Don’t Want to Be This Kind of Animal Anymore | Unwinnable
  Ashley Schofield cracks Harry’s egg.
• My Defunded Friendly Neighborhood | Gamers with Glasses
  Samantha Trzinski relates the narrative arc of horror game My Friendly Neighborhood to the historical and contemporary landscape of political attacks against children’s television programming.
• BLIPPO+ Asks If You Want to Get Bent | Gamers with Glasses
  Patrick Fiorilli tunes in and catches the wave (Further Reading: Claire L. Evans on interactive cinema).
• i’m coming to accept that the big corporation won’t love me back | Medium
  Traceitalian outgrows Final Fantasy (Further Reading: Leanne on Final Fantasy XVI).

“It’s bad for the soul to be committed to a franchise. Sometimes it takes putrid, childish messes like Final Fantasy Sixteen to remind you of that. I’ll choose new compromises and new imperfect relationships with large corporate media and when they don’t serve me I can walk away. I walked away from this for two years.”

Skating By

Is EA’s Skate countercultural? No. Is it good? Well, um. . . .

• Skate Can’t Be Punk, It Never Was | Endless Mode
  Moises Taveras observes that the authenticity whiplash some folks are getting from the new Skate game was telegraphed in earlier entries.
• Skate Early Access Review | IGN
  Luke Reilly bails on this smooth and sauceless freemium follow-up (Further Reading: Nicole Carpenter on Palestine Skating Game).

“Skate is just so aggressively different in tone, style, and spirit from its ancestors that any brief trance I found myself in was constantly broken by its embarrassing dialogue, trite art style, and sterile, mobile game-style progression. Arming Skate with a faithful facsimile of the incredible feel of the old games means little if the rest of it is constantly turning me off. Unfortunately, Skate is so fundamentally irritating and unsatisfying in every other way that there is currently just no appeal here whatsoever for me to play this over any of the originals, old and creaky as they may be. I don’t know what Skate will look like in 12 months time, or when it’s no longer in early access, but it’s left a horrible first impression. The Fortnitification of Skate may well be the most disappointing thing to happen to skate culture since razor scooters.”

Unsafe Harbour

This next group brings together different modes of writing both on adult games as well as games caught up in the recent Itch and Steam payment processor takedowns.

• Demure Doujin Works – Talking with a Local R18 Hobby Dev | Gamesline
  John chats with Demuresoft artist Jenn about making games and pushing through the cultural panic around adult games.
• Confetti’s Cozy Corner: Consume Me – an important game with content warnings | Gayming Magazine
  Milady Confetti reflects on Consume Me, content warnings, fatphobia, and body dysmorphia.
• They Should Make ‘Em All Like This: The Hardcoded Review | BP Games Inc.
  Bigg revisits an adult game that has already earned its flowers in the mainstream press, in order to focus on the porn.
• VILE: Exhumed and the Politics of Digital Horror | Gamers with Glasses
  Spencer Johnson uses Cara Cadaver’s VILE: Exhumed to unpack and demonstrate the tactics and stakes wielded alternately by reactionaries and artist-led counter-protest movements to nudge the risk-aversion calculus of payment processors (Further Reading: Grace Benfell on VILE: Exhumed and Girls Purgatoriem).

“Discomfort isn’t the same as danger. Art that makes you uncomfortable with your own complicity in surveillance culture isn’t the problem but part of the solution. The sooner we learn to tell the difference between content that actually harms people and content that simply challenges our comfort zones, the sooner we can have real conversations about protecting both artistic freedom and vulnerable communities.”

Map Quest

A couple pieces for you on in-game maps!

• Keep Driving Understands That Maps Can Be More Than Functional Accessories | Endless Mode
  Wallace Truesdale finds solace in the road already travelled (Further Reading: August Moulang on desire paths).
• I Love 1000xRESIST’s Terrible Map | Endless Mode
  Willa Rowe shouts out the diegetic affordances of a good bad map.

“Both the in-game signage of the Orchard and Watcher’s map exist as different versions of communal information. The signage was created by people using the Orchard in a different way than the sisters who drew the map, building a timeline of the space and deepening our knowledge of the Orchard. Even with the post-release addition of a map, Sunset Visitor encourages players to engage with the Orchard as a physical space by treating the map less as a useful way of navigating but as a means for storytelling.”

Diffscourse

Silksong has helped to spin the discourse wheel back around through a number of larger topics, difficulty and accessibility among them. Here are two new slices from those conversations.

• Difficulty Isn’t Everything | Inner Spiral
  Alli peers into the economic and cultural histories of difficulty in games, from coin-op to FromSoft (Further Reading: Clayton Purdom chats with Bennett Foddy about being bad at games).
• Hollow Knight: Silksong Reinforces the Metroidvania Genre’s Accessibility Barriers | IGN
  Grant Stoner peers beyond the difficulty discourse to examine what Silksong actually does (or more often, does not) do to provide players with an accessible experience.

“Hollow Knight: Silksong, from the perspective of a sequel, is an achievement. Yet, for disabled players looking to dive deep into Team Cherry’s newest game, it’s an accessibility failure. Difficulty aside, disabled players have few offerings to help them navigate the map and defeat challenging enemies. And for those comments undoubtedly proclaiming that not every game is made for everyone, let it be for the individual to decide – not based on inaccessible practices, but rather just a fondness of the genre. For developers looking to Silksong’s success, I ask that they please use its lack of accessibility as motivation. As a lifelong fan of the Metroidvania genre, I hope someone will use Silksong’s failures as inspiration to make me return.”

Blobber Team

More niche genres and older games rule the roost in this section for sickos (it’s me, I’m sickos).

• Psychic Storm: You don’t need a crystal ball to survive this shmup | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi plays an offbeat PC Engine CD shmup with a cast of four, which tosses the score, adds plenty of lore, but could have been more.
• How the Nintendo Switch 2 Could Finally Steal Me Away From the Playstation Vita | Endless Mode
  Dia Lacina highlights the bright points and gaps in the Switch’s status as a worthy DRPG successor to the venerable Vita.
• We Will Reclaim This Land: Thoughts on Fire Emblem Path of Radiance | dreamcastaway
  Harper Jay breaks down why the Gamecube FEmblem still crits (Further Reading: Sraëka-Lillian on Fire Emblem 4).

“It’s hard to imagine what playing this game might have been like to someone who was younger and happened to pick up a copy at the right time back in 2005. Fire Emblem wasn’t new to the west but for as much as I like the GBA, I don’t know if they’re hitting like this. Which isn’t to say that they’re bad but rather to say that I think there’s something pretty special happening here in Tellius. While the tactics in Path of Radiance are fairly easy, it maintains an epic feel by packing the game with characters who go through remarkable growth arcs. From rookie to general, outcast to queen, and much more.”

Critical Chaser

I fondly remember accidentally unearthing a Galaxian minigame in Mortal Kombat 3 at a slumber party. When else were you going to go that many rounds?

• The Last Slumber Party | Jake Should Be Writing
  Jake Steinberg bonds with a bud over Borderlands 4.

“Borderlands 4 would have you believe it’s nothing more than a hyper-masculine hallucination: rippling muscles, grotesque violence, characters whose abrasiveness are their entire personalities. A frat house with rocket launchers. But somewhere beneath the nonstop screaming, something else is happening. The women are powerful. The queer and non-binary characters claim center stage. Every NPC seems compelled to declare their horniness in a way that feels equally opportune and democratically mandated. The sheer gratuitousness of the violence has cleared out enough room—it has created a layer of protection—for tenderness to bloom, an irony so sharp you can only accept it on faith. You enter for the guns, but you stay for the closeness.”