This Week in Videogame Blogging, Uncategorized

October 26th

by

Welcome back readers.

We’ve got an absolutely stacked issue this week at 31 new-and-cool picks. If you like what we do here, please do check out the Patreon! I’m going to go lie down for a bit.

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

Haunted Houses

This is the closest issue we’ll be running to Halloween without going over this year, so in that spirit I thought I’d start us off with a set of articles that revolve to greater or lesser extent around haunted houses. Some are more literal than others, and I’m bending definitons to sneak a couple of these picks in, but I trust you’ll see the vision.

“It doesn’t have to end in a house fire – but what terrifies me is knowing that for a long, long time in the aftermath, remembering is going to drive you to that broken electrical box behind the bookshelf. Distance only helps so much. Getting on a plane and moving on will not save the mind from flashing back to the shell of what that house used to represent. Escaping from the cycle requires unpacking so much more – the revelation that the fire, the destruction of the memory, is a safer option than grieving, is safer than the betrayal that comes with moving on and moving forward – for real this time.”

Radical Highway

Let’s keep the theme running just a little bit longer and check out two pieces in dialogue with the idea of costumes. I suspect GwG will have a couple more of these to close out the month next week.

“Seconds later an apathetic thirty something year-old man barks a drink order at the cashier. Lazily he says the drink is for the all-too-familiar recently-deceased person all over the news. Shadow looks towards the counter. The costume’s enormous head gives no emotion except for what one can deduce from its permanent “too cool for this shit” smirk. Something is about to go down. I am into spectacle. Take my commitment to watching all forty-two seasons of the Latin soap opera Destrúyeme Me Por Favor, Mi Amor as substantiating evidence. I have not even played Sonic X Shadows Generations; it has not even finished downloading, and I can already anticipate that it is going to rule.”

Paying Respects

We’ve got some eulogies next–one for Tomonobu Itagaki, and one more for a certain idea of AAA games that we might identify with the era of the PlayStation 2.

“I want everyone to know that behind the mask of his public persona, behind the bravado and the smack talk and the faux rivalries with other developers, that Tomonobu Itagaki was one of the good guys, easily one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. He wasn’t perfect; he had faults, but he was loyal, and he was always there for his friends. I am lucky to have numbered among them. The Itagaki that the fans know is not the real deal. They don’t know how awesome he was or the compassion he really had for the world around him. They don’t know the spiritual side of things, or the very human things he shared with people like me. He was very gentle, despite the leather jackets and the sunglasses. He did things his way, and the world was better for it. A lot of Japanese developers try to stand out, but Itagaki was one of a kind. I was very fond of him and his laughter. He lived his life to the fullest and always made you feel very much alive to be around him.”

Sound Decision

Let’s focus on soundtracks, ambient effects, and sonic landscapes in this next set.

“In addition to pure silence, huge portions of the Super Metroid soundtrack make use of long, sustained, low notes that evoke the industrial sounds of a machine hum. There are also songs with very spare percussion intros, similarly allowing the musical score to sound more like the background noise of machines clanking, as opposed to recognizable tunes. It’s only when the actual melodies kick in that the player might realize that the sounds they were hearing were part of a musical score, not just sound effects that accompany whatever dangerous area Samus happens to be exploring. These minimalist songs, interspersed with specific moments of silence, allow the more high-octane and propulsive musical cues—during boss fights, timed escapes, and so on—to feel that much more dramatic.”

Super Guides

Owing to the length of this week’s issue, I’ve opted for a few mashup themes in the back half. This set remarks upon contemporary trends in the industry (remasters, cozy games), but also some of the parallel movements to the commercial industry (essay jams, for example), and media practices and literacy outside of games proper.

“The fact that Declare so clearly derives from Papers makes this much worse. This works if you do the work of making a structural change such that the work in the utopia is fundamentally different from the work in the dystopia, but that hasn’t been done. They’ve tweaked the lighting, adjusted the design, shifted the political metaphor, but the fundamental work of policing that was so rightfully criticized as evil remains present. They’ve simply taken the dystopian and declared it wholesome as-is.”

Good Game Bad Game No Game

This next set of three make sense to run in their own section, at least in my mind. The guiding theme I see here is a dearth of friction in contemporary popular games–polished but ultimately predictable and unchallenging experiences. The shout to Hades II here indicates, I think, that this is not merely a “AAA” thing. Perhaps Alli charts a path toward rediscovering some of the friction we’ve lost.

“That’s the real reason bad games make people uncomfortable, they show the seams; and remind you that there’s code under there, and someone actually wrote it. When you fall through the floor in a janky platformer, you’re seeing the skeleton of the whole system. It’s like catching your favorite actor fumbling their line but keeping the take anyway. Imperfect… sure, but there’s humanity in that, no?”

Searching Action

Our longest section this week, this is where I’ve put all of the ideas I associate most strongly with genre inquiry and design analysis.

“A good brawler not only has a good core rhythm established by its combat mechanics, but a judicious application of them, giving itself space for downtime and knowing when to increase the tempo. Even the sickest drum solo would get tiresome if it went on for an hour. You can keep it simple, as long as the rhythm is engaging.”

Pokémon Section?

Pokémon Section.

“In Pokémon legends: Arceus, Hisui is portrayed as a vast wilderness. And, as a member of the ‘Galaxy Expedition Team’ survey corps, it is the player’s job to survey and explore. But the real-life goal of the real-life ‘Team Galaxy’ – the Kaitakushi, or ‘development commission’ – was not just to explore, but also to displace the Indigenous inhabitants of Hokkaid? and convert their ancestral territories into high-intensity farmland. The real-life Ainu, rather than waxing lyrical about the wonders of Pokémon, instead watched as their land was systematically stolen.”

Critical Chaser

I’m always glad to have the opportunity to close the issue out with poetry, and Penn does not disappoint.

“Someone asked,
“Which Yu-Gi-Oh!
video games
let you play
as a girl?””

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