Sundays are for hoping the plumber ordered that new sink part. My sink is apparently “non-standard”. “Why can’t I be normal?!” I scream in silent desire. Armitage Shanks would never. Before I look forward to not having to wash a bowl of pasta in the same place I brush my teeth, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and things related to games!)
For Aftermath, Luke Plunkett spoke to ‘Albert’, an anonymous industry vet, about the difficulties of creating a demo for a big show or event – even though he sometimes knows it’s “100% Grade A Bullshit”.
Actually, now that I think about it, I was in the studio (if not directly involved) in a trailer that was 100% grade-A bullshit. Basically, our publisher really, really wanted to show things, and even though our next project wasn’t even in stage of presentations, let alone production, we had an outside team create a trailer to create hype. It was completely separate from everything we hoped for, and it was so early in development that it couldn’t help but be misleading or tie our hands. He was shit. Fortunately, it didn’t eat up a ton of our resources and time, but it was still demoralizing because we didn’t have much to do with it and we all knew these would be promises we couldn’t necessarily keep.
Jay Castello wrote about “Supergiant’s Scrappier, Better Underworld” for Unwinnable. These are the landscapes and characters of my favorite Supergiant game, Pyre.
But unlike the areas of the Hades games, the Downside isn’t an endless labyrinth of rooms, filled only with enemies (and the occasional Charon shop). The downside is the world. Escaping it is a journey that takes Nightwings through a variety of jewel-toned, fog-lit environments, each with its own mood. It requires a wagon, a home base that feels both comforting and crowded. And it gives all the characters a sense of grounding, a place in the world that lends them important narrative weight.
For The Guardian, Keith Stuart spoke to the enthusiasts who created a replica of the PDP-10 mainframe computer – from the same series that housed the prehistoric game SpaceWar! was designed.
The attention to detail is wild. The lights on the front aren’t just for show. As in the original machine, they indicate the instructions being executed, the clustering of CPU signals, the contents of memory. Vermeulen refers to it as monitoring the computer’s heartbeat. This element was taken very seriously. “Two people spent months on one particular problem,” says Vermeulen. “As you know, LEDs turn on and off, but light bulbs stay on. So there was a whole study to make the LEDs simulate the glow of the original lamps. And then we found out that different lamps from different years had different glow times. Measurements were taken, math was used, but we added the glow of the lamp. Simulating this takes more CPU time than simulating the original CPU!”
House Of The Dragon is back! The first season was great! I understand that you are doubly shy at this point, but I think you should give it a try. You could absorb it all by proxy via Glidus’ excellent recap videos.
‘Orientalism: Desert Level Music vs Actual Middle-Eastern Music’ is a video recommended by Brendy after a chat about Metal Slug Tactics.
Ed sent it to me. While you wait for Shadow Of The Erdtree, why not play FromSoft Word? “The Dark Souls of Word Processors. One typo and it’s game over.” I enjoy it so subtly that I don’t even mind such a flagrant simplification of FromSoft’s design ethos. In this seven-hour video essay, you…
This week’s music is Previous Industries by Open Mike Eagle, Video Dave and STILL RIFT. I once had an illuminating conversation with Open Mike off the show about linguistic determinism and the work of Robert Anton Wilson. Ziggy Starfish is still the most vivid song ever written about social anxiety. Thank you, Michael Eagle, and thank you to the readers. Enjoy the weekend!