August 9th

Welcome back readers.

Hey! In case you needed a nudge, you’ve got a little over a week left if you’d like to participate in our Friendslop Essay Jam. A pretty big one-of-those came out this week and we’ve included an article about it below!

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

New and Cool

This week let’s open up with some critical thoughts on recent games.

• Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?! – I’d Rather Get Isekai-d | startmenu
  Artemis Octavio laments that Strange Scaffold’s latest isn’t firing on all cylinders where it counts most.
• mental training with rhythm heaven groove | one more swim
  Grayson Morley thinks about performance anxiety and gets back into the groove (Further Reading: Alex Wen on Rhythm Heaven).
• Review: Ambrosia Sky | No Escape
  Kaile Hultner dwells on Ambrosia Sky, the feeling of home as a trap, the gravity well of the worst people we know (Further Reading: Claribel F. Millgress on Scarlet Hollow).
• Take a Big Walk with No Small Games: Hands-on Impressions | No Small Games
  Kate Hunter and Emily Merritt praise Big Walk‘s highly legible puzzle design in service of cultivating joyful shared experiences.

“I struggle to think of another game that has given me the feeling and opportunity for connection that I’m experiencing here. After being so active and goal oriented when it came to solving the puzzles and finding all the “babies”, I am dazzled and delighted by the moments built in that encourage us to stop and experience shared beauty with our friends.”

Peek and Poke

Our next two picks both situate games and designers from the microcomputing era.

• Genma Taisen (1983) | Renga in Blue
  Jason Dyer looks in on the early days of licensed tie-ins and multimedia franchises in Japan (Further Reading: Ogre Run on Roads to Lord).
• Joe Blade – “Prime the explosives” | Super Chart Island
  Iain Mew situates an early hit from the budget era of Spectrum games.

“That focus on volume also set up Interceptor rather well for the beginning of the budget games era. They set up their own budget label, Players, in 1986, and while it didn’t have any hits that year, it slotted neatly into their overall approach. They continued to receive a lot of submissions, some by frequently returning programmers. By that time the Joneses, who at the time of the Coast to Coast item in 1985 reviewed every game submitted to Interceptor, had largely given the job of evaluating incoming games to Simon Daniels. At some point in early 1987, the pile Daniels worked his way through included a game called Joe Blade.”

Dip Switch

This is kind of a design-focused section, but specifically in relation to arcade and “retro” design paradigms.

• Pocky & Rocky: Reshrining Expectations | faea’s house
  faea makes some sense out of an uneven-but-interesting remix of a storied SNES shooter (Further Reading: Marc Normandin on Truxton Extreme).
• I Irrationally Hate RetroAchievements | Kayinworks
  Kayin goes full hater mode on the attitudes and ideologies at play in extending a contemporary metagame structure retroactively to previous generations of games (Further Reading: Alli on the gentrification of retro).
• Annalynn | Lakespirit
  Lakespirit contemplates how core arcade design values are passed down more or less successfully in a modern reinterpretation (Further Reading: Pang on what makes something “arcade-y”).

“You get the impression that Annalynn’s creator is someone earnestly passionate about their interests. That their game enthusiastically line up all these deep cuts, in order to gush about their most beloved moments. And that, just maybe, their passion has tunnel visioned them a little. That these blatant points of inspiration are sanded down.”

Shrine to Design

This one’s also kind of a design-focused section but without the specific (a?)temporal anchoring of the previous trio.

• Gamers in the Hands of an Angry God: Spirituality in Silent Hill f | Unwinnable
  Emma Kostopolus offers a brief meditation on the questions of faith provoked by Silent Hill f‘s offering system (Further Reading: Dave Tomaine on prayer in Earthbound).
• Never The Two Shall Meet: The Separation Of Story & Sex Scenes In Porn Games | Adult Analysis Anthology
  Fsyco pulls apart the problem of and charts out solutions to pornonarrative dissonance (Further Reading: MxMorganic on Scarlet Maiden).

“To write porn well, you must write it with purpose. You have to give serious consideration not merely what kind of sexual content you have, but how that sexual content integrates with the story. Who are these characters? Why are they having sex? Would it feel unnatural for the story I have in mind to have sex scenes at all? How is the sex going to inform the dynamics between the characters in both the sex scenes and the non-sexual parts of the story?”

Communities of Craft

I tagged this one under “industry” but we’re playing very loosely here, with a group of readings on genre paradigms, readerly/writerly practice, access, and archiving.

• Who Gets Left Behind In Sony’s All-Digital Future? | GameSpot
  Heidi Kemps talks to the folks with the most at stake in Sony’s move to digital (Further Reading: Dawn Davis on discs and rentals).
• because the machine must break (true empowerment in the age of AI tools) | The Candybox Blog
  Nathalie Lawhead conceives of witch hunts for LLM-generated work as a form of propaganda, and gathers tools and resources to chart a course out of this feedback loop (Further Reading: Luna on LLM accusations in indie dev).
• Difficulty and Improving | Inner Spiral
  Alli sizes up a spectre of frictionlessness haunting contemporary game design (Further Reading: Grace Benfell on 24 Killers).
• Paying No Mind | Unwinnable
  Phoenix Simms pulls together threads of preservation, performance, curation, and forgetting in a discussion of the archive under the attention economy (Further Reading: Oma Keeling on the right of the artist to be forgotten).

“I still think players, developers, games media, theorists and other stakeholders still need to grapple with decentralizing the ways that games are archived. But we should keep in mind that in spite of what corporations like Sony and Microsoft want us to believe, games are not just products and they can’t dictate how we experience them. How we perform them. How we make and distribute them.”

Scenario Ruleset

Close material analyses of tabletop and digital works.

• Tazmily em Mother 3: da Economia do Dom ao Capitalismo Forçado | Grindingcast
  Wilken Perez studies transformations of political economy in Mother 3.
• Liberation Ludology, Part Three: Nicaragua | SPACE-BIFF!
  Dan Thurot examines the meddling of American Empire in the Nicaraguan campaign of Stephen Rangazas’s latest tabletop historical strategy game (Further Reading: Sam Dee on Suzerain).

“Nicaragua is not only the strongest of the three scenarios we’ve played in this multipack, and not only one of Rangazas’s best uses of this long-running system about counterinsurgencies, but one of the best expressions of the wider COIN Series, period. It draws clear delineations between its besieged (and increasingly problematic) revolutionary government and the foreign-backed commandos raising hell in the countryside, presents a novel gameplay scheme in the constant ebb and flow of its insurgents, and, perhaps most importantly, draws the player’s attention outward to the wider problems of American imperialism besetting the titular guerrilla generation on all sides.”

Cave and Mountain

Some more personal reflections of games and play.

• Pray for a true peace in space | Anxiety Shark
  Niko Stratis chronicles the transition of Samus Aran (Further Reading: Julie Muncy on Samus Aran).
• FEAR UNDER MAKEUP | DEEP-HELL
  Skeleton comes back down from the mountain.

“Time lost is not gone. It cannot be found in a real place besides the inside of our own heads. Don’t mistake the way I yearn for the past for anything other than what it is: the belief that parasitism might as well be owed to some of us. Vampires abound, bloodsucking creatures, Zombies. From Software has made millions of dollars forcing the player in the role of the un-human, the un-dead. Shoot them in the head — they can’t feel it.”

Critical Chaser

Finally, somebody is asking the big questions.

• The Mysterious Connection Between Lufia and Lunar | Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games
  Drew Mackie also thinks it’s weird that your blue-haired neighbor, the most important girl in the whole world, showed up in two separate RPGs by different studios a year apart.

“I lay out these timelines not to imply that Masahide Miyata, who wrote the story for the Lufia games, was inspired by Kei Shigema, who wrote Lunar, though I suppose Lunar might have influenced Lufia in subtle ways. It’s also entirely possible that all the similarities I listed above are just coincidences, and that no one was inspired by anyone else. Having written about the origins of video games for a while now, my gut feeling is telling me that there’s a different reason behind these parallel developments: They’re both riffing on the same pop culture precedent, and I just don’t know what it is.”