October 4th

Welcome back readers.

Bit of a late-in-the-evening post this week by my time zone and recent posting schedule. My work timetable is a kind of horrific jigsaw puzzle right now, except the pieces come from four different boxes and make four different pictures.

Anyway! Please support our Patreon! We’re doing ever-so-slightly better than treading water at the moment, so every little bit helps. Contrary to any previous threats, real or imagined, issued on social media about us adding horse armor to the roundup to keep us solvent, we will be doing no such thing. But we could definitely use your support.

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

Bare Knuckles

We’ve got lots of writing this week on older games. The first conversation we’re going to open here has some genre specificity–we’re looking at beltscrollers, beat-em-ups, whatever you prefer to call them–and pursuing threads of mechanical foundations, run-based play, metaprogression, and the connections, if any, between arcade games more generally and roguelites.

• Streets of Rage 2, Final Fight, The Floor, The Ceiling | Lakespirit
  Lakespirit mourns and marvels at a genre frozen in amber (Further Reading: Pang on the material histories and desgin philosophies of coin-ops).
• vehemently’s review of Absolum | Backloggd
  Vehe Mently comes out mostly high on the recent beltscroller, but also takes the occasion to ruminate on the (meta)progression from arcade games to roguelites (Further Reading: Amr al-Aaser on Absolum).
• Why I Love Unfair Traps in Arcade Games | DUCK_BERET
  Cass contemplates run-based play, memorization, telegraphing, and humor in arcade games and their successors (Further Reading: Kimimi on beat-em-ups).

“Because arcade games are run-based, the same trap often manages to be funny multiple times. It won’t catch you on most of your subsequent runs, but maybe you’ll forget about it one time and get caught out. Even if you remember that it’s coming, there’s a chance you’ll mess up your execution and get hit by it anyway. Those are some of the funniest moments in these games to me.”

She Sells Rocket Shells by the Seashore

Our next two selections this week both come from Quake mappers, both participating in a recent themed jam (rooftops), both debriefing on their work, processes, and goals.

• new Quake map: Mermaids In The Basement (for Quake Rooftops Jam) | Radiator Blog
  Robert Yang debriefs on the sun-soaked seaside secrets of his latest Quake jam submission (Further Reading: beverly jane on you broke me).
• Quake Rooftop Jam: Concrete Heart | Violet Premonitions
  Clenow grapples with trying to capture the style and substance of Mirror’s Edge in a Quake map (Further Reading: Natalie Clayton on Mirror’s Edge).

“Once I had some grasp on how the map was going to be lit and textured, I spent a long time trying to figure out what the map was actually about. This was absolutely the hardest part of the process, far harder than figuring out the look or drawing the textures. I wasn’t really interested in making a super heavy combat map, so my first iterations were mostly still about movement, trying to make rooftop spaces that were fun to move around. Nothing about this really grabbed me though.”

Interactive Multi-Media

We’re still looking at old stuff, but this time we turn our attention to the humble CD-ROM on the Windows 9X PC.

• Austin Powers Operation: Trivia – A quiz with no mojo | You Found a Secret Area!
  beverly jane excavates a most peculiar twofold adpatation–a You Don’t Know Jack clone cobbled together around an Austin Powers license (Further Reading: Caroline Delbert on Encarta MindMaze).
• An Intro to Daiso’s The Game Series (Trump 1, Nekomata Tanteisha, Nyanpoline, TechnoSylph: vsys gaiden) | CD ROM Journal
  Misty De Méo delves into the realm of ultra budget Japanese PC games (Further Reading: Nicole Branagan on Idol Mahjong Final Romance).

“Maintaining a steady output of games at this rock-bottom price isn’t easy, and that’s what ends up making The Game Series so strangely interesting: cheap shovelware is usually boring, but Daiso was working at such a low price point they almost couldn’t afford to be plain boring. Daiso leapt at every opportunity they could to find cheap software they could put out, and the result is a genuinely eclectic line of games that mixes bottom-of-the-barrel shovelware, reissues of whatever independent games they could get their hands on, original games from indie developers taking whatever publisher they could find. It’s consistently more interesting than the more expensive shovelware series that could afford to be selective or to enforce any kind of consistency.”

Bare Witness

Next let’s delve into industry-oriented perspectives, with both interview and commentary.

• How Indie Game Composers Are Surviving the Layoff Storm | NOWPLAYING
  Peterline6 checks in with how freelance composers are dealing with precarious, gig-based work in an increasingly investment-shy industry (Further Reading: Wallace Truesdale’s recent interview with Denshattack! composer Andrew One).
• i won’t play order of the sinking star
  Oriane Tury reckons with the negative parasocial impact of one Jonathan Blow on the puzzle games community (Further Reading: Skeleton on Jonathan Blow).

“Face the dissonance, and be resolute in your choices. Tear through the hype and the marketing, and be true to your values. Honor yourself. I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t want to take part in this charade, so I won’t play Order of the Sinking Star.”

Fortune’s Weave

A new Fire Emblem game just came out! Turns out we already had a tag for that, and–oh, I was here when Three Houses came out. What a time. At any rate, it’s lighting up a lot of sickos in my orbit. Here are a couple of critiques.

• Short Blog Regarding Fire Emblem Switch 2 Black Chara
  Full Metal Fukumi connects issues of Black character design in the new Fire Emblem with broader patterns in anime-styled media (Further Reading: Nick Ray on Riot’s approach to Black character design).
• i fucked up my fire emblem training | four more runs
  Grayson Morley has significant misgivings about redundancy and disjointedness across Fortune’s Weave‘s four-protagonist split and accompanying tutorials (Further Reading: Harper Jay MacIntyre on Path of Radiance).

“If my goal is to see as much of Fortune’s Weave as I can stomach, then it seems to me that I need to stop fucking around and finish Act I with one of these patently cursed individuals. Maybe then I can at least get a whole arc, narratively and mechanically, before delving back into the easy stuff. You can’t go out and run the same distance at the same pace every single day and expect to get better, and you can’t play four 8–10-hour tutorials in a row and expect to like a game.”

Losing My Marbles

Here I’ve picked out a variety of play reflections, varying in form and focus.

• Oh!Ware Gets That Being A Sore Winner Can Be Fun | Exalclaw
  Wallace Truesdale plays Evil Mancala. Well. Evil-er Mancala. Laudatory (Further Reading: Nate Schmidt on Balatro).
• I Couldn’t Gel with Granblue Fantasy: Relink, but It’s Fine! | Gamesline
  John Michonski just doesn’t get gratification from the grind, even when the gacha is gone (Further Reading: Eithan Rosemberg on Relink‘s approach to adaptation from the gacha format).
• Sleepy Zebes | Autumn Wright
  Autumn Wright asks what contending with the classics gets you, in literature or games, and arrives at different outcomes for each (Further Reading: Marc Normandin on remakes, literary editions, and The Iliad).

“Learning about modern art can help me appreciate Barnett Newman, trying to cast The Boy and the Heron into the mold of Hayao Miyazaki’s career can be diminishing, and playing Super Metroid with a walkthrough feels a bit like when I first started reading theory for Dr. Wheeler’s classes. Coming to class, having no idea what I read beyond a string of words, then working through Debord sentence by sentence together. I didn’t know what I was learning that semester until long after I had learned it—until I could read theory by myself, slowly still, but independently. Until I could pick up any novel I found daunting to broach in high school and know it was a matter of time, and maybe some effort, to read the prose. At the culmination of my undergrad, I had grown used to the syntax of translated Greek in Aristotle and Plato. Contemporary YA novels and lit fic felt easier to read when I began reading more for pleasure. But now I had bigger questions—of craft and theme. And to this day, I feel like I’m still trying to read at that level. Could I ever play Metroid like I read Irving? Maybe. I’d like to play Ravenous! I could play Dread on my own, after all, but I didn’t like it. What did laboring in Dread produce? Who would I be at the end of playing Super Metroid?”

Merc With a Meta

Next up we’ve got a loose paring bringing together ideas on intertextuality and adaptation.

• The importance of being earnest: How Marvel Tokon’s Deadpool trades ridicule for fighting game reverence | Rock Paper Shotgun
  Ashley Schofield considers adaptation and genre self-reflexivity in Tokon‘s approach to Marvel’s most annoying guy (Further Reading: Samantha Trzinski on Spooky’s Jump Scare Mansion).
• Sylph, Undine, Gnome, Salamander and the Swiss Doctor Who Invented Them | Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games
  Drew Mackie traces the textual roots of the elemental spirits that recur in a surprising number of SNES RPGs (Further Reading: Samuel Messner on The Caverns of Freitag).

“if it weren’t for sylphs showing up in more than one video game back in the day, I might not have any idea who Paracelsus was. And while I’m obviously thankful he introduced the idea of cleaning wounds as a means to preventing infection, I’m also charmed that this man took the time to assert that the world actually was a magical place. Reading this text in 2026, I can almost fool myself into thinking the world still is magical.”

Critical Chaser

It’s October! Let’s close out the week with some seasonal musings.

• The Magic Circle of Fall | Unwinnable
  Emma Kostopolus circles back on the dissonances upon which we insist between ritual and reality (Further Reading: Autumn Wright on Night in the Woods).

“Maybe that’s what all rituals, everything from decorating the Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving to hiding plastic eggs in the yard so the neighborhood kids can find them on Easter morning, are about. Maybe we all still love the idea of play, and we’re all, in our own ways, trying to keep the magic circle unbroken.”