April 26th

Welcome back readers.

This time around I’m taking a bit of a breather with a lighter week, but we’ve still got fourteen new-and-cool reads for you to check out. If you liked this technically-on-time-going-by-my-time-zone issue, 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.

Titanium Court

Two up top this week for new game Titanium Court. I keep getting told to play this one.

• The year’s weirdest game is hard to explain and even harder to put down | The Verge
  Alexis Ong begins to peel back the layers of the Titanium Court (Further Reading: Kastel on Void Stranger).
• Titanium Court Makes You Reckon With Your Own Magic | Exaclaw
  Wallace Truesdale unfurls the semiotics of the Court.

“Titanium Court has been called and marketed as hard to describe, but after hours of matching stones and water, fighting centaurs and and gunboats, and prying answers out of friendly foes and antagonistic allies, it might be better to say that the game encourages you to describe it in your own way rather than rely on storefront tags. It asks that you recognize your own magical ability and reckon with the impact it has on the worlds both in and out of the Titanium Court.”

Relay Race

Marathon articles have mostly gotten their own sections here, but this week I think these three go really well together.

• An Incision Tracing the Stock Market Curve — Cruelty Squad Review | Gamesline
  Lilith assesses the aesthetics and animosity of Cruelty Squad (Further Reading: Skeleton on Cruelty Squad).
• In ‘Samson,’ Victory Is Seeing The Sunrise | But Why Tho?
  Will Borger revels in the thrills of the videogame crime drama (Further Reading: Yussef Cole on Mafia: The Old Country).
• Ante Up | Bullet Points Monthly
  Astrid Anne Rose muses on addiction, aesthetics, AI, and aura on Tau Ceti IV (Further Reading: Lewis Gordon on Marathon).

“Humanity is so alienated from itself, wrote Walter Benjamin, that it can “experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” The runner sacrifices her mind on the altar of the machine zone; she surrenders her consciousness to hyperpop entropy. The world is at bay. Her past is cloudy. Her future is certain: run.”

Two for the Books

This week’s interview picks both highlight underlooked histories.

• The Second Life of Moon Child – A Conversation with Metin Seven | Gamesline
  John talks to developer Metin Seven about the recently viral 90s videogame hero and his now-open-sourced game.
• “It’s Almost Like A Religion” – The Incredible Journey To Document Nintendo’s History In Brazil | Time Extension
  Jack Yarwood talks to Pablo Miyazawa about the Nintendistas project (Further Reading: Felipe Pepe on the gentrification of videogames history).

“”It’s something that we, the people who like Nintendo, have called ourselves for a long time here in Brazil,” says Miyazawa. “We have this suffix ‘- istas’, which is something that you can put at the end of many words. So, for people who like Sony games, we have the term Sonistas. For Xbox, we have the Caixistas, because box translates to ‘Caixa’ in Portuguese. So Nintendistas is something funny, because it means people who like Nintendo, but at the same time, it can almost be translated as someone who sees and feels Nintendo like a football team, or as something very important in their lives. It’s almost like a religion to them.””

Save Battery

TIL there’s more than one Magic Knight Rayearth game.

• Magic Knight Rayearth: Girls’ day out | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi tucks into a breezy bite-sized Game Gear RPG (Further Reading: Kimimi’s previous Game Gear writing).
• SOLDIERS DesireWing and the Perversion of “Heroes” | Ogre Run
  Ogre Run plays through a sprawling testament to the ambition and irreverence of hobbyist dev (Further Reading: Phantom on Cave Story).

“To play through DesireWing is to thus watch a developer slowly come in to themselves as they grow more confident in both their storytelling and game design.”

SCPH-1001

These next two picks both examine cool intersections between games and music.

• Of Course Swansea Likes DMX | Medium
  Hiero de Lima cross-compares kayfabe in hip-hop and Mouthwashing (Further Reading: Hiero’s previous writing on Swansea).
• LATTICE 200EC7: Haruomi Hosono’s hidden video game soundtrack | once bitten, twice shy
  Shy chronicles a long history of creative exchange between videogames and the alumni of Yellow Magic Orchestra (Further Reading: Misty de Méo on Moon Light Café).

“It feels appropriate that the first person to take the initiative to present video game music as something worth considering as its own piece of art would make video game music that could be appreciated both in and out of context with the work that accompanied it. The evolution of technology that inspired Hosono and his friends to make music that sounded like the future enabled him to create something that embodies the respect he shared for video games and music equally.”

Critical Chaser

Three for the close this week!

• Last diary entry of the snail woman who falls from the sky into the Hunter’s Nightmare | Plant or Beast
  Ashley Bardhan shouts out the mysterious Shell Girl in Bloodborne.
• The Parable of Aava the Mountaineer | Breaking Arrows
  Steven Santana climbs down from the mountain to meditate on Cairn‘s messaging.
• reflection on a pirate reality | GlitchOut
  Oma Keeling muses on the push and pull of the pirate grind.

“i’m generally very permissive in play. when play is work that i don’t want to do, that’s what brings in this kind of rigid and pissed off attitude i began to have. i’m very much not that person, and yet i am.”