August 30th

Welcome back readers.

There’s just one day left to get your entry in for our Friendslop Jam! Stay tuned for the issue compiling the submissions.

Even with all of that participation (we love to see it), our regular issues continue unabated, with fifteen new picks for your reading list this week. If you sympathize with our workload our Patreon is one way to communicate that sympathy.

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

In Media Rez

This week let’s start with a few pieces that put games in conversation with music and theatre.

• On Cratediving | No Escape
  Kaile Hultner contemplates the contrast between the welcoming catch-up of music discovery and the guilt and urgency of the videogame backlog (Further Reading: etcetega on backlogs).
• The Point of a Remake | Sadboy Barrett
  Barrett Courtney draws upon the traditions of renewal and perturbation inherent to stage production to point out a lack in most videogame remakes (Further Reading: Nicanor Gordon on games and theatre).
• Sick with Longing in Revachol | Deleted Saves
  Steven Stoermer traces Disco Elysium‘s arc in microcosm, from melancholy to hope, in key moments of its soundtrack (Further Reading: Flora Merigold on Lost Records: Bloom & Rage).

“You press play and let the music wash over you. A mental surfactant, it gently abrades and carries away the rougher edges of your present consciousness. You watch your daughter twist and spin along with the opening tones. You already miss this moment in anticipation of its passing, and all the future moments in anticipation of their arrival. What thoughts and feelings will she have when she is as old as you are now? What will capture her, the way this song does to you? You leave the song behind as you step outside together, now alone but for birdsong. Look up at the blue sky. It is already hot in this city, too hot to sustain a Revacholian drizzle. This is a land of thunderstorms, sudden and torrential. Her tiny hand holds tight to yours. She needs you (for now). You can keep her on this earth. Be vigilant. You love her. She makes everything worth it.”

Walking Big

Big Walk gets the title nod here, but this one’s about multiplayer and shared play more broadly.

• The Erotic Circle | Adult Analysis Anthology
  Gwyndolyn Marchant revises the magic circle to discuss erotic games, voyeuristic play, and the slippage between players and characters (Further Reading: Anne Sullivan and Anastasia Salter on the craft circle).
• Remembering That We’re All Instruments In Big Walk | Exaclaw
  Wallace Truesdale muses on Big Walk, playing music, the experience of the ephemeral (Further Reading: Joey Wawzonek on Big Walk).
• I Spent Hours Tracking Down Big Walk’s Mysterious Flying Folk Hero To Learn His Secret | Kotaku
  Rebekah Valentine seeks out the legend of John Bigwalk (Further Reading: Cameron Kunzelman on support summons in Dark Souls).

“It was just after 4 p.m., and I was feeling a bit dejected. I had to admit to myself that this was a silly experiment. I was banking on one guy to happen to be online during my specific working hours, see my post, and be both available and interested in an interview about himself. It would be wiser of me to try again tomorrow, maybe wait and see if the content creator whose name I’d been given responded to my message. Then, right about when I was thinking of throwing in the towel, I saw it. A flash of red. And…silver?”

Stay Low in the Turn

If I had a quarter for every time somebody wrote in granular and loving detail about 80s checkpoint-based arcade racing games, then this week I’d have enough to play both of these games once. Did I mention we have a Patreon?

• Out Run – “A tank full of gas and an open road” | Super Chart Island
  Iain Mew documents the coin-op checkpoint racer’s road trip across the 8-bit micros (Further Reading: Ara Maybury on OutRun).
• Past meets present: TX-1 | Retro XP
  Marc Normandin excavates a largely-forgotten, extremely sicko checkpoint racer that dialed up the simulation and spectacle in equal measure (Further Reading: Seer on the BattleTech arcade contraption).

“If nothing else, TX-1 is a game that should be experienced so that you understand a missing link in the history of racing sims: for Japanese developers and players, there was nothing missing, not for such a hugely successful game that dominated in arcades for four years, even as its sequel similarly took off. But overseas, with the game failing to win a spot in the arcades in North America, there’s a significant gap in between Pole Position(s) and OutRun, between those games and Final Lap. One that should have been filled with TX-1.”

Boxing Texts

These next three picks focus on story–its practice, its prominence, its provocations.

• The Writing is the Reward | Breaking Arrows
  Steven Santana pens a polemic against the numbers-go-up of it all (Further Reading: Vehe Mently on Ball x Pit).
• Hell Maiden Early Access: Back to the Inferno | Gamers with Glasses
  Sophie Atkinson checks in on Hell Maiden neutral on the vampsurv genre as a whole but impressed with this game’s literary ambitions (Further Reading: Ashley Bardhan on Hell Maiden).
• Don’t Stare at the Sun Too Long – Saros (PS5) Review | Gamesline
  Rose surmises that Saros is too safe (Further Reading: Lia on Returnal).

“Arjun is an interesting character for sure, and gradually eking out this backstory, and the absurd directions things take on the larger scale, has a degree of intrigue to it. Compared to Returnal though? A story about cycles of maternal abuse and self-reflection? Hearing about a guy who’s upset he fumbled his ex-wife is not exactly the most compelling narrative experience for me, especially when it’s wrapped up in the absurdity of a Lovecraftian draping. I get it, a lot of the creatives behind this game are men, and the same goes for much of the medium of game design, as the machinations of Patriarchy and its intersections with Capital collide to consistently exile women from most things. That said, however, was there really nothing more interesting you could have Rahul Kohli do than yell about how he needs to find his ex-wife? Like, that’s the depth of the emotional nuance we get out of him for 95% of the game?”

KBM

Here’s another three selections as we move towards some meditations on mechanics.

• Dirge of Cerberus: Valentine’s day | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi tucks in to some bona fide 6/10 PS2 Vintage Valentine (Further Reading: Akshit Dangi on PS2-era design futurism).
• Database Detective: Minor Crimes Division Review | No Small Games
  Emily Merritt checks out a desktop detective game driven by SQL queries (Further Reading: Emma Kostopolus on > Terminal).
• Denshattack! | Lakespirit
  Lakespirit wants to like the new Trainy Hawk, but finds that it never really rises above playing the hits (Further Reading: Wallace Truesdale on Denshattack‘s soundtrack).

“I am not a woman of high-taste. I like pulp, and other juices. At the end of one boss battle, your train shoots through the heart of a bigger train – like how Goku killed King Piccolo. Yep, I smiled. I’ll admit it. There were dozens of guest-composers on this, and I’m probably one of the only people who were most excited for Harumi Fujita’s contribution. These developers share taste with me!! But, when everything about Denshattack! reminds me of something else, it doesn’t have something of its own I can remember it by. And when reviewed as a derivative, it’s under-studied on the works it’s worshipping.”

Critical Chaser

A hundred hours deep and not even salty about it.

• I found salt in Vintage Story | Laura Michet’s Blog
  Laura Michet ticks off another day in the salt mines (Further Reading: Madison Butler on Nut Sort).

“I know that most people in ancient times did not experience what I’ve experienced. Most people were not mining salt to unlock all the salt-related parts of their diet. Vintage Story modders have added the ability to evaporate seawater to make salt as well. But the devs want us to mine it, because mining it is hard, and because this is a game about struggle and misery. I have my prize now, so I’m benevolent and wise and happy. It was all worth it.”