April 19th

Welcome back readers.

Kept you waiting, huh? It’s taken me an extra day to do the work, but we’ve got 23 new-and-interesting picks ready to go this week, so pull up a chair and grab a beverage. While you’re here, I also want to extend a warm thanks to everyone in our community for keeping us going through thick and thin. If you like what we do, check out our Patreon!

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

Breaking Kayfabe

Let’s start wth the industry-level perspectives this week. We’ve picked three articles ranging widely in topic and scope, but all of them point to structural problems where we could be doing something better but currently are not.

• Wrestlemania: WWE’s monopoly on wrestling games never ended | AV Club
  Madeline Blondeau situates the much-diminished contemporary state of wrestling videogames in the historical context of the American pro wrestling landscape.
• With DLSS 5, Nvidia look to rewrite the truth before our eyes | Rock Paper Shotgun
  Mike Cook exposes the technological, artistic, and ideological shoddiness of the yassifier (Further Reading: Jenn Frank on DLSS 5).
• When Do We Start Giving A Shit? | Medium
  Puke juxtaposes the low-cost social justice-oriented reputation of the games press with uncritical Microsoft coverage amid the BDS campaign against it (Further Reading: Autumn Wright on the boycott one year later).

“I just don’t want to hear the “no ethical consumption under capitalism” spin anymore. That line has lost all meaning. There’s no way of talking yourself out of it, by claiming that reporting on these efforts is necessary, because at least you can see them in a neutral light or whatever. I don’t care about your rationale, because that’s just what it is: a justification. Your stance doesn’t mean much, when you’re still doing the thing you shouldn’t be doing at all. There are hundreds of other projects you could be highlighting instead. I don’t need to know what kind of goonerbait Overwatch is doing this week. It does not matter, not even a little. Stop.”

Friend Mouth

Marathon continues to compel some really stellar crit. Here’s two more for you out of Bullet Points.

• Serfing the Superstructure | Bullet Points Monthly
  Lewis Gordon examines runners through the lens of a techno-feudalist present.
• Die Better, Runner | Bullet Points Monthly
  Yussef Cole narrates the life and death and life of the player-runner (Further Reading: Mikhail Klimentov on Marathon‘s corporate satire).

“Videogames are spaces that, at their best, offer a taste of something beyond the normal repetition of everyday living. They offer something apart from life, with its million indignities and responsibilities. They offer the promise of adventure, of battery acid in the belly, of clenched jaws and screams of triumph or comic dismay. For a glimpse of this promise, the runner, the player, projects their minds beyond the bounds of their life, into another place: to play among the delicate ruins of another’s dreams, the coded worlds someone else spun together and wrapped in glorious skyboxes. The dreamers are gone, or watching from afar as their windup toy continues its meandering path without them. All that exists now is you, and a million others like you.”

Living the Dream

Next let’s unpack different ideas of home and community, via interviews, exhibits, and play.

• Home is a Multiverse – An Interview with Sonya Mwambu and Nada El-Omari about +1-home | TIER
  Phoenix Simms unspools notions of home across localities and temporalities in conversation with designers Sonya Mwambu and Nada El-Omari about their hybrid interactive exhibit +1-home (Further Reading: Phoenix and Grace Benfell’s conversation with Nilson Carroll).
• What Are We Doing? | Medium
  Abram Buehner implores you to play Tomodachi Life for you and yours rather than for the algorithm.
• 17 indie developers who are making games about messy, sometimes toxic, queer romance | Mothership
  Kastel collects stories from in and around the Toxic Yuri VN Jam community (Further Reading: Willa Rowe’s picks from the jam).

“Our words and ideals sometimes contradict each other. But there is definitely something queer in the air: people are empowered to make the visual novels that reflect their own journeys in understanding themselves. As KillJill puts it, “There’s a really special moment happening in the queer [English-language visual novel] sphere, and I hope more people realize that.””

Old Game, Newtype

New perspectves on some really old games.

• Mobile Suit Gundam | Ephemeral Enigmas
  Ephemeral Enigmas plays, to the best of my knowledge, the very first Gundam videogame.
• Nekketsu Koha Kunio-Kun (Technos Japan, 1986) | exp.
  Mathew Kumar plays the original beltscroller and pours one out for its late designer (Further Reading: Amr al-Aaser on beltscroller design).

“Best known as Renegade, Nekketsu K?ha Kunio-Kun is a cornerstone video game the likes of The Tower of Druaga or Xevious, in that it would spawn an entire genre that would end up in an almost entirely different–arguably simpler–place.”

Compile Art

Our longest section this week brings together different discussions on design, development, and play.

• Maybe Silksong Is Still Pac-Man | Bloomed Wings Blog
  Cindy dwells on runs, repetition, legibility, and iteration for the joy of it in classics old and new (Further Reading: Guilherme Alves on Shadow Labyrinth).
• The Narrative Design Implications of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s Many Diversions | Eteo Archetypes
  Malindy Hetfeld unpacks the narrative and thematic relevance of FFVII Rebirth‘s abundant and sometimes-maligned minigames (Further Reading: Flora Merigold on Queen’s Blood).
• Hellsinker: Rising above it | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi reckons with the legendary–and legendarily obtuse–doujin shmup.
• Beer Simulator – iBeer Review — Software-Assisted Pretend | Gamesline
  Crystal hearkens back to the toyetic pleasures of apps from the aughts.
• Unfair Flips – A Game About Probability | Seer of the Night
  Samael was sufficiently taken with Unfair Flips‘ ruminations on probability, pattern-recognition, and meaning-making that they adapted it for the Game Boy (Further Reading: Mathew Kumar on coin flip games).

“Unfair Flips reminds us that we are fallible humans, and sometimes we don’t understand the universe the way we think we do. It bills itself as “a game about probability”, but I think it’s really a game about human psychology.”

Release Window

We talked about old stuff up above, so here’s the new stuff: four reflections on recent games.

• Neverway – morar em São Paulo é horrível. Por Victor Hidalgo | Drops de Jogos
  Victor Hidalgo plays the Neverway demo and contemplates the next day after the worst day of your life.
• Impressions | Moves of the Diamond Hand – Alea Iacta Est | startmenu
  Artemis Octavio comes home to Off-Peak City in Cosmo D’s latest.
• Learning to See: Scrabdackle and the Art of Observation | Gamers with Glasses
  Spencer Johnson tucks into a rough-around-the-edges but lovingly crafted new episodic adventure.
• Dosa Divas – Eat Drink Mecha Woman | startmenu
  Ashley Schofield finds that compelling characters shore up shallow mechanics in Outerloop’s new RPG.

“Dosa Divas is a lovely little RPG. Even if simple in places where it could perhaps do with a tad more seasoning, there’s a heaping amount of heart in every crushing line of dialogue, every amend made to repair bridges burned, every dish served up by the party.”

Go Fish

These next three unpack themes and push boundaries of play.

• Down and Out in Legend of the River King | Deleted Saves
  Alexander B. Joy invokes a purgatorial softlock and learns from it (Further Reading: Dia Lacina on About Fishing).
• A Tale of Two Wars | Deleted Saves
  Hiero de Lima excavates the antiwar commonalities between Hundred Line and Nier Automata (Further Reading: Nikolas on Hundred Line).
• Games About Nothing Mean Everything to Me | Gamesline
  Isabelle ruminates on a tension between experience and obligation in the games she plays and the ones that linger–or don’t–in her memory.

“Boku no Natsuyasumi and Seabed each remind me, through beautiful expressions of not-a-whole-lot happening, the value of deliberation and slowness in everyday life. Neither title fixed me on their own, it was and still is an ongoing process of self-discovery. But the ways they make me feel are relevant, in my opinion, to this process, and their lasting places in my heart stand as testament to their efficacy.”

Critical Chaser

Not sure 50 years would be enough for me to get through La Mulana….

• I’m getting sucked into a time vortex. These are the games I’m taking with me. | Backloggd
  Vehe Mently is getting sucked into a time vortex. These are the games she’s taking with her.

“You may think that this would be a list of games I like the most; not so. These are games I think would adequately sate me while I toil away, hiding my hobby in the basement of my home so no one knows my secret as a time-traveller. We favor depth and replayability. Additionally, games that come out further in the future are more desirable, since it’ll be decades before I’ll get to play them again. Many of my all-time favorites are absent because I may have already exhausted them. Some of these are games I’ve yet to even play.”