Sundays are for hoping the plumber has ordered that new sink part. My sink is apparently ‘non-standard’. “Why can’t I just be normal?!” I scream in silent longing. Armitage Shanks would never do that. Before I look forward to no longer having to wash my pasta bowl in the same place I brush my teeth, let’s share this week’s best article about games (and game-related things!)
For Aftermath, Luke Plunkett spoke to ‘Albert’, an anonymous industry vet, about the difficulties of creating a demo for a major showcase or event – despite sometimes knowing it’s “100% Grade A Bullshit”.
Now that I think about it, I was actually in a studio (if I wasn’t directly involved) in a trailer that was 100% top-notch crap. Essentially, our publisher really wanted things to be shown and despite the fact that our next project wasn’t even in pitch stage let alone production, we had an outside team create a trailer to to build hype. It was completely disconnected from anything we were hoping to do, and it was so early in development that it couldn’t help but be misleading or tie our hands. That one was stupid. Luckily it didn’t take up a lot of our resources and time, but it was still demoralizing because we had little to do with it and we all knew it would be promises we couldn’t necessarily keep.
For Unwinnable, Jay Castello wrote about “Supergiant’s Scrappier, Better Underworld.” Those are the landscapes and characters from my favorite Supergiant game, Pyre.
But unlike the spaces 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 a world. Escaping this is a journey that takes the Nightwings through a variety of jewel-toned, dimly lit environments, each with their own moods. It requires the car, a home base that feels comforting and busy at the same time. And it gives all the characters a sense of grounding, a place in the world that gives them important narrative weight.
For The Guardian, Keith Stuart chatted to the enthusiasts who created a replica of the PDP-10 mainframe computer – the same series on which the prehistoric game SpaceWar! had been designed.
The attention to detail is wild. The lights on the front aren’t just for show. As with the original machine, they indicate the instructions being executed, a few CPU signals, and the memory contents. Vermeulen calls it watching the heartbeat of the computer. This element was taken very seriously. “Two people spent months working on one particular problem,” says Vermeulen. “As you know, LEDs turn on and off, but incandescent bulbs glow a little. So there was a whole study to get the LEDs to 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 applied, but we added the lamp glow. More CPU time is spent simulating that than simulating the original CPU!”
House of the Dragon is back! The first season was great! I can understand if you’re twice shy at this point, but I think you should give it a chance. However, you could absorb it all by proxy via Glidus’ excellent summary videos.
“Orientalism: Desert Level Music vs Actual Middle-Eastern Music” is a video Brendy recommended after a conversation about Metal Slug Tactics.
Ed sent me this. 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’m so mildly amused by it that I don’t even mind such a blatant simplification of FromSoft’s design ethos. In this seven-hour video essay, I will…
Music this week is Previous Industries by Open Mike Eagle, Video Dave and STILL RIFT. I once had an insightful conversation with Open Mike outside a 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 readers. Nice weekend!