March 8th

Welcome back readers.

Let me start with some around-the site news. First, we published the roundup for our second Fansite Jam! If you haven’t already done so, go check out the submissions!

In a less cheerful update, it appears that the web service we use (used?) to organize bookmarks and help prepare our weekly issues may have abruptly disappeared off of the Internet, without so much as a “hey, we’re winding things down here, time to back your stuff up!” For me, that’s an archive of nearly six thousand links for articles featured in Critical Distance which I suddenly can no longer access. As best as I can tell, little-to-nothing has been lost that cannot eventually be rebuilt–most of the information is duplicated elsewhere, albeit in less-convenient formats–but rebuilding is going to take time, and being without said service is going to screw up our workflow for a few weeks. TWIVGB will continue uninterrupted, but over the next few weeks issues may be a little unusual in size and shape while we rebuild our process.

It’s an annoying setback for us, but nothing we can’t handle. That’s in part thanks to your support of our project through Patreon. If you’d like to join up, your contributions will make it easier for us to weather unexpected infrastructure failures like this one.

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

Full Steam Ahead

We’re going to start things off this week with a loose set of industry-level perspectives, touching upon colonialism, trans visibility, copyright, and Steam Charts augury.

• The Keen Edge of Legacy: An Interview with tonia laird | Unwinnable
  Phoenix Simms catches up with friend and author tonia laird on the occasion of the publication of her debut Seventhblade to discuss her work in the games industry, subverting colonial expectations, and more (Further Reading: Zeb Larson on chasing the anti-colonial video game).
• The Futanari to Femboy Pipeline | The Stacks
  Puke documents a distinct absense of trans visibility, agency, or even the word on Steam amid the proliferation of futa and femboy porn games.
  
• We’ve freed Cookie’s Bustle from copyright hell. Here’s how. | Video Game History Foundation
  Phil Salvador chronicles the VGHF’s victory over a persistent copyright troll (Further Reading: Samantha Trzinski on Spooky’s Jump Scare Mansion).
• The One Where I Crash Out Over Numbers | Carlito Calzone
  Nicanor Gordon implores you to step away from the Steam Charts and maybe work on your relationship with your dealer (Further Reading: Mikhail Klimentov on killing the CEO in your head).

“How many people around the world play League of Legends or fucking Valorant? How many? Too many! A FAKE FUCKING NUMBER amount of people. How the fuck is Riot still laying off hundreds of people? Think about yourself at your job or your mum or your brother or your mate. Some CEO/CTO/COO/C-Suite fucker has a finance dude wyrmtongueing their ear off about how they can replace you and your department with an AI agent that can do your job a quarter as well in half the time. Somehow their wages go up and the stock prices soar. How does that make sense?”

In Play

Our next section focuses on practices of play, both on individual and communal levels.

• After my ADHD diagnosis, I began to rethink how I play games | Mothership
  Nico Deyo reflects on a life of play, pre- and post-diagnosis (Further Reading: Michelle Caldeira on a neurodivergent Dreamcast Christmas).
• fully managed austerity space fascism, or: friendly fire isn’t | Third-Tier Miscellany
  etcetega deliberates the aftermath of a Helldivers 2 player being harassed off the Internet for (checks notes) offering a charity dono if the devs stress test their own game.
• Carving Out Culture in Skate | Medium
  Martin Apparatgeist goes to bat for the much-maligned Skate reboot and asks whether it really has a culture problem (Further Reading: Alexis Ong on Skate Story).

“But skateboarding culture is of course not one single thing. It is both Tony Hawk and Tas Pappas. It is an olympic sport and a career, as well as hobby and counter-cultural expression. It happens in arenas as well as in parking lots. Its something we do to relax, and something we do to lock in. Culture is never static, it moves and shifts with the people within it. Skateboarding culture what we do when we get on our boards.”

Leon on Me

Resident Evil: Requiem came out just a short while ago, and by all accounts it has reviewed quite well. This is not to say it is without its problems, and indeed there is a pattern I’m seeing here among critics as we move outside the review window.

• Resident Evil Requiem: Dead inside | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi sees an emptiness in Requiem‘s noncommittal, at times ahistorical romp.
• playing resident evil: requiem is like playing two games. one of them is even quite good | leaving the party
  Kerry remarks upon the bifurcated–and a little uneven–structure of RE‘s latest.
• By treating the past with reverence, Resident Evil Requiem loses its profane bite | AV Club
  Grace Benfell reflects on Resident Evil‘s recursive, self-reflexive turn (Further Reading: Ed Smith on Silent Hill 2).

“Despite it all, Silent Hill 2 still exists. There are multiple great, if extralegal, ways to play the original. The reverence of Bloober’s 2024 remake is insulting, a devotion that manages to miss the point. Resident Evil is more successful and more charming. The series’ endless revisiting of its campy lore is an undeniable part of its lasting power. Yet Requiem still feels trapped in a past it cannot quite capture.”

Sweep Range

Lots of design-minded thoughts this week, spanning all sorts of game genres.

• Melee Attacks in PVP Must Be Fast! | Celia Wagar’s CritPoints
  Celia Wagar pulls apart the pitfalls of the waiting game (Further Reading: Melos Han-Tani on bumpslash design).
• Frustrating Mechanics Tell a Story in Death Howl | Gamers with Glasses
  Brandon Walsh learns to deckbuild with the punches, moving ever-forward through loss and grief (Further Reading: Phoenix Simms on Welcome to Elk).
• Öoo (NamaTakahashi, 2025) | exp.
  Mathew Kumar delights in a slice of mechanics-first design.
• Rally Point: Whiskerwood suggests that, even without the violence, colonialism is a scam | Rock Paper Shotgun
  Sin Vega tucks into a city builder with a slow-burn take on the exploitations of a colonizer-colonized hierarchy (Further Reading: Sin Vega’s previous writing on Empires of the Undergrowth).

“This is a vastly better model of colonialism than I’d expected (and I nearly added the “neo-” prefix, since that basic imbalance is still a foundation of global politics today, however indirectly it manifests). In the absence of the usual “+1 difficulty per year” colony sim artifice, my naturally slow and semi-organised expansion meant I had no real grievance with the Claws, and didn’t really mind their inflated costs. They also send, see, regular supply ships, offering a choice of three preset (though somewhat randomised) bundles. Bigger bundles offer more advanced goods, at the cost of adding dramatically more to your next tax bill.”

The Second Story

We’ve also got a bunch of selections this week examining story, narrative structure, and theme. Curator’s disclaimer: there are no featured picks this week that have anything to do with Star Ocean 2.

• kaorukofan1993’s review of Hell is Us | Backloggd
  kaorukofan1993 pushes through to see what Hell is Us actually has to say about trauma, our emotions, and cyclical violence.
• despelote and Keeping Your Eye On the Ball | Jeremy Signor’s Games Initiative
  Jeremy Signor examines Despelote‘s focus on focus in its story about a boy, a ball, a nation (Further Reading: Wallace Truesdale on Despelote and Rematch).
• Mountain of False Metaphor | Unwinnable
  Jay Castello counters the heights of Cairn‘s summit by describing a shallowness in its world and themes.
• A Real Boy | Bullet Points Monthly
  Willa Bloomfield-Rowe sketches out Nate’s Pinocchio-shaped journey towards emotional honesty (Further Reading: Astrid Anne Rose on Baby Steps).

“Baby Steps, like its inspiration, is a cautionary tale. But unlike Pinocchio, who must escape the whale in yet another test of his determination, Nate’s story ends here. Faced with a final decision, Nate must choose either to continue to struggle alone towards the mountaintop or give up ground, fall into the pit, and ask Moose for help. The choice is clear, and this admission not only gives him a warm place to rest and empty his bladder. It allows Nate to define for himself what it means to be a real boy.”

Rare and Retro

Is 2014 retro? Wrong question. The 3DS eShop is closed. Long live the 3DS eShop.

• Radirgy de Gojaru! | Ephemeral Enigmas
  Ephemeral Enigmas shines a light on easily the most overlooked entry in the Radirgy shmup series.
• Returning to Goldeneye and Perfect Dark | Kayinworks
  Kayin goes back to Rare’s N64 shooters and in doing so excavates a little parallel universe of FPS design philosophy.

“It does make me think though, about the design philosophy we see going from something like Duke Nukem 3d, to Perfect Dark. That if you strives to recreate reality, interesting things will fall out. If you go through the song and dance of airport security in Perfect Dark, surely that will be good? Each individual thing on its own many or many not be good, but taken as a whole it mostly all comes out as a big win, even if it feels like some decisions were made without thinking about the consequences.”

Critical Chaser

CHRIS used THESAURUS! It wasn’t very effective. . .

• “Astonish Is Super Effective!” – How Pokémon Taught Me To Love Words | Nintendo Life
  Alana Hughes got a lot more than “basic reading ability” from lifelong exposure to Pokémon‘s ponderous vocabulary.

“Imagine asking your parents at six what ‘Guillotine’ means (pronounced extremely incorrectly, of course) after a Krabby just hammered you with its big claws; besides reading French Revolution textbooks or slicing paper, when else will that come up? I kept pestering every time I saw an attack I had no understanding of. What on earth is an ‘Aurora Beam’? And what does it mean to ‘Constrict’ something?”