This Week in Videogame Blogging

July 12th

by

Welcome back readers.

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On the weekly side of things, we’ve got 23 new-and-cool picks on deck. Let’s get into it!

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

Disc-ourse

We’ll call this the industry section this week, with four pieces that relate in some way to Sony’s decision to abandon physical media for its consoles.

“Eradicating physical media, firing the human artist to replace them with generative algorithms, and selling cloud software to guide military strikes in a warzone are all expressions of the same corporate drive to rid the world of human creation. They want a reality that is sterilized of physical artifacts, human labour, and resistant populations. They want everything uploaded to a proprietary server they control, and where human history, human art, and human bodies can simply be deleted with the push of a button.”

Letters of Reference

Consider this a coda of sorts to the previous section: two pieces exploring labour topics as narrative themes in games.

“Look over various documents to see if they fulfill the needed requirements, and keep an eye out for any discrepancies. Reject anyone deemed unsuitable by the unseen powers above. Yes, even if their only crime is being older than 31. Yep, even if they cry and say they’ll be homeless without a job. It’s not your role to evaluate; it’s your role to process.”

Shell Bounce

Two very different spaces here–games writing and speedrunning–but both of these next two are about navigating those communities when they’re not always terribly welcoming of who you are.

“Ultimately though, this is a culmination for me, not just of all the nights spent playing kaizo until my thumbs throbbed even after I put down the controller, but also of years spent dealing with the kaizo community as it once was and coming out the other side. I won’t be the first trans woman to do a kaizo run at a mainline event or anything, but I’ll be the first one who dealt with the awfulness that almost made me and did make some people leave forever. In my head at least, I’ll be representing something.”

Collision Checks

Five picks on boundary-pushing games. Not always for the better. But sometimes, sometimes for the better.

“Warframe’s story is about bodily autonomy and people’s identities. And while these are universal struggles that every human being has to battle with at some point in their life, to be trans is to have these specific struggles. These are my specific struggles. As I played Warframe these struggles played out in front of me in words and concepts and places I knew. Warframe may not explicitly be a trans story. But in the ambiguity consciously placed into the story to allow oneself to see oneself. There is not a single game in which I had more trans thoughts, in which I was confronted with new ways and language to speak about my Self, than Warframe. And I really wasn’t expecting that.”

Coast to Coast

Two on coming-of-age stories this week. One sounds pretty good. The other is Mixtape.

“Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t need Mixtape to be gritty or representative of exactly my teenage experience for me to enjoy it. I didn’t install this game expecting to see anyone bloody their knees sucking dick on a gravel parking lot outside a punk bar. There doesn’t need to be violence and sex and trauma for it to be real. I just wish it had some kind of presence. Specificity. Risk. The sense that someone actually metabolized an experience into a meaningful story instead of reproducing the aesthetics of experiences they saw in reruns of John Hughes movies. That’s my biggest problem with this game. Mixtape isn’t authored. It’s assembled.”

The Big Picture

Here’s an RPG section. Well, one’s about a film. One’s kind of about books. But it goes together. Trust the plan.

“To consider that Nishimura initially left Capcom from the stress of working on the Monster Hunter franchise, it’s clear that Witch of the Dark Castle was made by a group of long-standing veterans operating on a smaller scale, a method of production that’s sorely needed in an industry where operating costs continue to soar, and it’s perhaps the genre of the gamebook which allowed Nishimura and the rest of his team to carry out the game’s development within more limited means. With Witch of the Dark Castle, I’m reminded of Daraneko who writes of The Use of Life, “While this title is technically a JRPG, we are not aiming for a good old JRPG” style, but rather a “good ‘new’ JRPG” style, in hopes of showing that this kind of evolution is absolutely possible.”5 Towards more good new JRPGs then.”

EX Skill

Two very different meditations here on difficulty in play.

“This punishing, obtuse style has drawn facetious comparisons to Fromsoft’s recent titles, but in learning to play Mega Man Zero, I found the experience more similar to learning fighting games, Ninja Gaiden Black or uh, Sonic Lost World. Like those titles, Mega Man Zero offers you next to nothing in terms of guidance, fails to explain basics nearly essential to playing the game, and has to be learned by seeking outside resources and imitating others techniques. Inti Creates made a game that’s almost impossible to enjoy blind, which I can only recommend with a mountain of caveats and an encyclopedia worth of tech.”

Monster Mash

Next up, cozy games, but something is amiss. . .

“I have admittedly been scratching my head at why this was the approach Nintendo decided to take, other than that they didn’t have any other ideas about how to remove humans from the game-world. These sorts of anti-technology, pro-environment messages are now so trendy as to be essentially meaningless (the Toy Story 5 trailer presents absurd and damaging amounts of cognitive dissonance), especially when they’re hawked by massive conglomerates that encourage the sort of mindless consumerist escapism that got us into this mess. But I think it also says something positive, that these messages have thoroughly seeped into the zeitgeist. Maybe, even though the people in charge right now don’t seem to care about the planet and its inhabitants (human or otherwise), the staying power of messages like this will inexorably shift our behaviors and values, one adorable game at a time.”

Critical Chaser

A little poetry to close the issue.

“Been blocked inside.
Locked inside.
Lost inside my head.

Too many
spirit blocks.
Too many
bad thoughts.

Gotta pause.
Play some music.
Clear my headspace
with three spells.”

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