March 10th

Welcome back readers.

Our fansite jam is off to a spirited start, with both progress updates and submissions already starting to come in, including from some of the CD team! If you want a sneak peak before the submission deadline of March 31st, well, you’ll just have to come see for yourself by joining our Discord server.

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

Industry Topics

We have a large issue this week–23 picks!–so I’m playing fast-and-loose with some of the groupings. Our opening segment is partly industry, partly just games and culture more broadly.

• Nyamakop: “There’s demand for African-created content outside of the continent” | GamesIndustry.biz
  Marie Dealessandri sits down with Nyamakop developers Ben Myres and Sithe Ncube to discuss the challenges of game dev in South Africa, the need for more diverse studio talent, and more.
• Dune: How a Revolutionary Video Game Rescued Frank Herbert’s iconic novel from Obscurity | The Independent
  Ed Power delves into the history of an all-time sicko classic: Dune II.
• The thing they say they’re mad at never actually matters | No Escape
  Kaile Hultner implores folks to keep their eye on the ball when reactionary influencers trot out their industry red-string board of the week (curator’s note: Kaile works for CD).

“I don’t have a call-to-action here, except to ask the folks who are unfortunately keyed into this story to tell your offline friends that this shit ain’t got legs. That might be the best thing we’ve got at the moment. What is important to understand is that it isn’t ever the target of their garbage-slinging that matters. If it wasn’t Sweet Baby it would be another company with a similar mission. Or even just a game dev with that mission. But what actually matters is combatting their bullshit bigotry.”

Prince of Persia

Now let’s move through a series of game (or franchise)-specific topics! First up is the cinematic platformer (and more recently Metroidvania) bulwark, Prince of Persia.

• Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Represents | PopMatters
  Luis Aguasvivas sees Prince of Persia‘s latest outing as a course-correction of the series’ historical Orientalism.
• Making Leaps | Unwinnable
  Phoenix Simms presents a personal, political play history of the Prince of Persia series.

“If games can make us aware of systems and our actions within those systems and how we could better translate thoughts into actions, why do we still insist that games are just escapist entertainment? Yes, I know that they are capitalistic objects in most instances, and therefore subject to the BS of “too big to fail”. But at the level of consumers and players of this media, why are there still so many who refuse to see how games can influence you politically? Is it the seeming absurdity of realizing that games, as silly or irreverent as they can be in their representation, can be mirrors of how different cultures around the world perceive agency?”

Balatro

Now let’s gather perspectives and impressions around a deckbuilder I can’t scroll two screens on a games site without bumping into lately: Balatro.

• Balatro Finds Order in Chaos | Gamers with Glasses
  Nathan Schmidt sums up deckbuilder roguelike Balatro as a game that both has The Juice while also provoking good questions about genre.
• balatro is poker | a weapon to surpass blaming yourself or god while knee-deep in the dead
  Chuck Sebian-Lander identifies Balatro as a deckbuilder you can absolutely just vibe through.
• ‘Balatro’ Doesn’t Encourage Gambling, It Exposes It | Inverse
  Renata Price likes Balatro and wants you to know it’s not what you may have read it is.

“Balatro, like many deck-builders, isn’t about the joy of being a poker player, it’s about the joy of being the house. It is a game about stacking the deck in your favor until you build a system that manipulates probability so effectively you cannot conceivably lose.”

Unicorn Overlord

There’s broad consensus in these three selections about Vanillaware’s recent tactical RPG Unicorn Overlord: the story is average, the systems are anything but.

• Unicorn Overlord: The Kotaku Review | Kotaku
  Willa Rowe finds a capital-T Tactical RPG in Unicorn Overlord‘s mechanical swagger.
• Unicorn Overlord Is Playing 4D Chess with a Hundred Pieces | Paste
  Emily Price concludes that Vanillaware’s take on the fantasy TRPG has the juice, if not quite the narrative chops.
• Unicorn Overlord Pushed My Strategy Skills to the Limit — And I Loved Every Second | Inverse
  Robin Bea finds joy in the details when it comes to Unicorn Overlord‘s strategic systems.

“What makes Unicorn Overlord’s combat such a joy, and so hard to master, is that a tiny tweak to anything can drastically change the outcome of a battle. Trading out a nimble thief for shield-bearing hoplite when facing armor-piercing enemies can be enough to turn a crushing defeat into a victory. So can using the right item at the perfect time, giving a key character a better piece of equipment, or changing the priority of tactics so that your archer takes out squishy mages instead of wasting arrows on armored foes.”

Adult Games

Here are the final three pieces in the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology. Check ’em out!

• The Surprising Likeability of DoHna DoHna | cohost
  Iyane Agossah finds a crunchy critique of institutional power structures in a sex trafficking eroge (content notifications for discussion of games involving sex trafficking and sexual assault).
• Patching in holes and hogs in adult games | cohost
  Mr Hands documents a patchwork history of gatekeeping and access of adult games on Steam (content notifications for discussion of games involving sexual violence and exploitation, incest, and underage characters).
• Fuck this Game: Intercorporeality, Erotic Cybernetics, and Becoming the Input | cohost
  MorganH’s theory of erotic play interactivity–including but not limited to adult games–justifies this long pullquote.

“It is important to not misconstrue the heightened complexity and corporeality of adult games as being of some kind of ero-Edenic virtual paradise where players and their game avatars are unified in enlightened beatitude. Pornographic games can be as rife with misogyny and racism as they can center egalitarian and queer narratives. The hegemonic, heterosexual white masculine figure is still the dominant avatar in the adult game imaginary, and no amount of wireless connectivity to a Bluetooth buttplug changes this. In playing games, we distribute ourselves across the virtual world, bringing our bodies along, inescapable from the politics of being. These bodies might be abled, disabled, a victim of systems of oppression or a beneficiary of them, or even a gleeful enabler of them. In pornographic games the presence of the player’s own sexual body takes on even greater significance. Adult games function only when our bodies are present in every way a body can be present: physically, actively, and sensually. That this sensual interaction pushes players towards a more symbiotic relationship to the game does not cleanse either player or text from their respective contexts.”

This Isn’t Just for Me I Swear

…But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I have a great fondness for shmups, scrolling shooters, and all things STG.

• Interview: Kenta Cho (Japanese indie game developer)  | I  Get Info
  Matt Sephton chats with extremely prolific indie developer Kenta Cho about Paku Paku, Cave shmups, hardware platforms, and more.
• Essential experiences: Shmups | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi takes inventory of favourites past and present in the greatest genre to ever do it.

“Shmups may go in an out of fashion, but they’ll never die.”

Nuts and Bolts

The boundary between these next two sections is more of a soft gradient than a hard line, but these first three selections put more emphasis on design analysis.

• In Defense of the Jump Scare: A Manifesto | Unwinnable
  Emma Kostopolus recuperates the humble jump scare as an important tool in the horror designer’s kit.
• Video Games and the Art of Failure | Triennale Milano
  Matteo Lupetti examines failure in games through a series of critical lenses, spanning queer theory, tragicomedy, and more.
• Island in the Sun | SPACE-BIFF!
  Dan Thurot spends some time with Horizons of Spirit Island, a simplified, more accessible version of the esteemed anti-Catan-ial classic.

“So the argument has been made that because Spirit Island doesn’t turn history on its head, it cannot qualify as a decolonial fantasy. What a lack of imagination. Decoloniality has never been defined solely by its relationship to human beings. That, too, is a consequence of suborned thinking. The task is to expand one’s sphere of empathy.”

The Play’s the Thing

Meanwhile, these next three pieces put more focus on play discussion and impressions, as well as connections beyond their respective object texts.

• Dear God Everybody Needs To Play Pentiment | Paste
  Grace Benfell reminds you not to sleep on this literary game of constancy and community.
• Seasonal Space | Unwinnable
  Jay Castello plays a nature photography game that has something to teach about what and how we notice.
• And the Crowd Goes Wild | Unwinnable
  Maddi Chilton ponders the moments of quiet in dystopian bloodsport game Rollerdrome.

“It’s never quite established what Rollerdrome‘s sport is reflecting in the society that watches it. Are the general public kept sedate under the heavy hand of the corporate overlords? Do they watch because it’s how they can bare their teeth, how they can rebel without rebelling, feel something real and still go home at the end of the day? Or are the cities filthy and riotous like the gluttonous crowd in The Running Man, the game simply mirroring the everyday violence of dystopian life?”

Critical Chaser

Phew, long roundup! Here’s a genuinely feel-good story to close the issue out.

• I’m Gonna Marry a Mayor | Into The Spine
  Lena Wilson tells a sweet little story of community care.

“In May 2022, she became the mayor of a virtual town she named Lesbos, after the Greek isle that bore Sappho. We’d been dating for six months. Almost two years later, she still tends her pixelated domain.”