August 16th

Welcome back readers.

If you’ve been procrastinating getting a submission together for our Friendslop Essay Jam, a predicament I have absolutely no stake or prior experience in, I have good (bad?) news: the deadline for submission has been extended from August 20th to August 31st. We’ve already received a bunch of really interesting pieces, so join the conversation!

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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.

Walk-Run

This time around let’s start with a big section on multiplayer games of all shapes, sizes, and speeds.

• Alive for Twenty-Five Minutes at a Time | Unwinnable
  Levi Rubeck sings Marathon‘s praises–as a solo heist game (Further Reading: Patrick Fiorilli on Marathon).
• The Rift That Does Not Exist Anymore | Deemon Cove
  Deemon thinks about the state of League, the Rift you can go back to (Classic), and the one that never was (the Rift in memory) (Further Reading: J.M. Henson on myhouse.wad).
• Immortal Emeritus | Chisel
  Mikhail Klimentov comes out the other side of Valorant (Further Reading: Renata Price on Valorant).
• Don’t Tell My Friends, but I Think On-Together Kind of Sucks, Actually | Unwinnable
  Jay Castello reviews a–hold on [checks notes] co-working game? Oh boy (Further Reading: Crystal on VRChat).
• Big Walk, Long Distance | The Stacks
  Joey Wawzonek muses on communication and connection in Big Walk (Further Reading: Kate Hunter and Emily Merritt on Big Walk).

“With little to do but wait or walk over increasing distances, we are returned to the late-night Minecraft sessions of youth, absentmindedly hopping around a home or flipping through chests while learning more about each other. All of Big Walk is quiet. I do not worry about filling dead air. I do not worry about running out of things to say. I luxuriate in peace. Tell me of your day. Tell me of your anxieties. Tell me you love me a thousand times, and I will return a million to you.”

Call-and-Response

A story spread around very quickly in games press this week that Compulsion Games’ South of Midnight was no longer being published by Microsoft, at least on Steam, with the insinuation being that if you bought the game, Microsoft wouldn’t see the money. This is important given the fact that Xbox remains an ongoing target of the BDS movement. The situation as it stands with South of Midnight may not be as clear-cut as was previously reported. Here’s two writers exercising a little due diligence.

• No Reply | Autumn Wright
  Autumn Wright is not satisfied with the assumptions that go with South of Midnight having its publisher credit swapped out on one distribution platform (Further Reading: Puke on BDS coverage in games press).
• Why it matters who South of Midnight’s publisher is | No Escape
  Kaile Hultner goes digging and comes away without confirmation (Further Reading: Ian Walker on the worker-owned model and BDS).

“The BDS boycott is not an ego-satiating purity test designed by white leftists with delusions of grandeur and a superiority complex. It is the rational, reasonable and conservative response to decades upon decades of Israeli apartheid and genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and the rest of the occupied territories. The part of the BDS boycott that is targeting Microsoft is not all-encompassing and totalizing; it is targeted specifically at the easiest thing for someone to stop using; in this case, Xbox hardware and Microsoft-published software. Games like Call of Duty, Fallout, Keeper and South of Midnight. A confirmed and material change to the publishing contract of games put out by studios like Compulsion and Double-Fine under Microsoft ownership would mean that those games would no longer fall under the boycott. And that would be a good thing! Otherwise, if everything stays the same with those contracts, nothing changes with those games’ boycott status. And that’s why confirmation mattered.”

State Machines

Our next pairing is also an industry-oriented one, but specifically oriented around inquiries of nationality and locality over time.

• The ‘Geofencing’ Problem: Genres, National Identities and Global Games | Historical Games Network
  Will Butler examines the long entanglement–and gradual disentanglement–between genre borders and national ones (Further Reading: Ogre Run on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33).
• Relooted Review — Reclaiming the Future | Gamesline
  Crystal situates Nyamakop’s Pan-African futurity in relation to a wider, whiter (but changing) South African games industry (Further Reading: Ash Parrish on Relooted).

“Relooted is the largest single project by team scope, size and budget in Sub-Saharan Africa to date, perhaps only rivaled by Kiro’o Games’ ambitious 2016 RPG Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan. The African games industry is growing, and Relooted will likely be remembered as a milestone in future histories of the growth of African game development. The in-game heist team returns cultural heritage of the past to Africa, but the Nyamakop team is creating new African cultural heritage for the people of 2099 to remember. Perhaps more importantly than the status of Relooted as an individual artifact, it serves as the first project for a new generation of game developers who will go on to make something even better.”

Operant Conditioning

Two fresh picks this week on Zero Parades.

• Suicide Mission | Bullet Points Monthly
  Astrid Anne Rose situates Zero Parades in relation to the ouroboroi of espionage, real and fictional (Further Reading: Reid McCarter on Zero Parades).
• This Sacred Body / This Bloody Mind | Stop Caring
  Artemis Octavio pushes past PR, Reddit bluster, and industry mythologization to try and see Disco Elysium and Zero Parades separately, together, as they are (Further Reading: Jay Castello on Zero Parades).

“Zero Parades has a clearer vision than Disco Elysium: it is not mired so much in itself and the world that it ends up being a more personal story for Hershel. Harry’s fractured mind only allows him to see the world in what Deleuze would call schizophrenic logic; Cascade is conversely caged by the ideological trappings of her position and service to her country. And it was in those moments when she falters the most, when she has less hope for the world and her government, when she believes nothing matters, where I found Zero Parades to be more nihilistic.”

A Ten in My Heart

Since Kimimi wrote about 6/10 games this week, it felt right to pair her piece with what scanned to me as a worthy example.

• The magic kind of middling: All my love to 6/10 games | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi salutes the 6/10 banger (Further Reading: Oisin Kuhnke on the 7/10).
• X-Blades: Liar Liar, No Pants to Set on Fire | Cat Calls Soup
  Akshit Dangi sees glimmers of something greater in the marble with one of the Xbox 360 games of all time (Further Reading: Emily Price on “mid” games).

“I catch glimpses of the game somebody at the studio, TopWare, actually pitched in a meeting once, swagger intact, budget presumably to match too. It isn’t really a different game that’s before me now. It’s the same one, just in the small things that come every now and then, the way concept art wants a game to be seen.”

Open-Ended

I’m calling this the design section but I’m being very loose with it, bringing together writing on difficulty, music, and scope.

• Small Touches: A Case For (Very Short) Porn Games | Adult Analysis Anthology
  Liz Alfos delves into the history of the Flash Internet to make the case for the quickie (Further Reading: Ana Bahia on the Flash games Internet).
• The Trial of Mixing and Mastering Denshattack!’s 80-Song Soundtrack | Exaclaw
  Wallace Truesdale chats with Andrew One about keeping Denshattack‘s massive and collaborative 80-song score on-track (Further Reading: Wallace’s previous writing on Bandcamp).
• Thoughts about Knytt Classic and game difficulty | Laura Michet’s Blog
  Laura Michet dwells on access and aesthetics, situating Knytt in relation to the generally-much-harder indie platforming peers of its day (Further Reading: Alli on difficulty, friction, and cozy games).

“It had something to say about platforming, a genre I feared and avoided and felt like I couldn’t access. When I was playing Knytt, I was using my brand new income from my summer job to shatter my parents’ household videogame bans. I had just bought a PS2 and a used copy of Shadow of the Colossus. I was hungry for weird vibey shit, and games that seemed to be saying something… and here was a game saying something very big, in a very small package, for free. And I could actually finish it!”

Coin-Operated

This group also brings together some design musings, but the more overarching theme is arcade and retrogaming and their associated communities. Okay, that wasn’t exactly one theme either.

• Re-release this: Emerald Dragon | Retro XP
  Marc Normandin offers a hear-me-out on an early and ambitious RPG that came out seven times and never once got localized (Further Reading: Kimimi on The Legend of Xanadu).
• AI vibe coded game projects suck | You Found a Secret Area!
  beverly jane has had it up to here (you can’t see this but I’m gesturing with my hand a few inches above my head) with LLM bros inundating retrogaming spaces with faulty and fraudulent commits (Further Reading: Thomas James on the many ills of the vibe-fan-translation).
• Idol Mahjong Final Romance: A Slideshow Disguised as a Video Game | Nicole Express
  Nicole Branagan gets into the guts of an early, never-ported, strip mahjong arcade game (Further Reading: Baxter Burchill on the history of strip mahjong games).
• Wild Guns Reloaded | Lakespirit
  Lakespirit tackles another gutsy remix from Tengo Project (Further Reading: faea on Pocky & Rocky Reshrined).

“It cements your play as more aggressive – more about preventing outcomes, than working with what’s handed to you. None of this is untrue of the SNES classic, but this new take affixed my eyes on what made it so special. And isn’t that what a wealth of new materials should make you feel? Allow you to find new love for its roots?”

Critical Chaser

Every Atari VCS is personalized.

• The Garfield Game That Never Was | moth place
  Lilly ponders a prototype Atari 2600 game, a liminal ludic lasagna (Further Reading: Giovanni Colantonio on Garfield Kart 2).

“But for a while, there is bliss. Garfield is in an endless zone of pleasure, consuming and continuing. As we all must.”