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January 10th

…monstrosity in games alternately along gender/misogyny and cosmic/racist axes.

  • Game Log: Tales of Berseria – Digital Ephemera Dan Cox weighs tropes and tensions of femininity and monstrosity in an uncommon feminine-led installment in the Tales series of JRPGs.
  • Zarf Updates: Four (or five) recent Lovecraftians Andrew Plotkin explores the mechanical and thematic diversities to be found among games associated with a Lovecraftian, cosmic horror influence, as well as the various ways in which these games address or don’t address the racism inexorably tied to the tradition.

“A lot of Lovecraftian games start out with

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December 2020

…room for players to creatively (if privately) role-play. (Autocaptions)

  • The only winning move is not to play – Mr Wendal on games (6:12)

    Mr Wendal looks at the effect of some curious instances where the player is punished for following a game’s instructions. (Manual captions)

  • Cloudpunk, or has God Already Decided? – Curio (34:08)

    Eric Sophia argues that both Ion Lands’ Cloudpunk (2020) and Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy (1320) are texts that critique the notion of agency within the binding social and economic systems that they were produced under. (Autocaptions) [Note: spoilers for the endings

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    • February 28th

    …Love You Man! Reflections on Twenty-Four Years of Male Friendship and Gaming — Gamers with Glasses Jason Mical and Roger Whitson discuss how normative masculine sociality informs shared play experiences and vice versa.

  • Pokemon Omega Ruby’s Contest Spectacular is one of the series queerest moments | Gayming Magazine Latonya Pennington examines the ramifications of magical girls, Cosplay Pikachu, and queer coding in Pokémon‘s Gen VI remakes.
  • Memory Pak: When Harvest Moon Taught Me About Death | Nintendo Life Kate Gray looks back at a Harvest Moon installment with a touch of permadeath.
  • Bowser’s Fury Is About a…

    • The List Jam Roundup

    …Personal Playstyles

    Similarly, these entries use the list format to explore and highlight moments of realization, strategies and reflection in their own moment-to-moment play of games, highlighting that as much as we analyze videogames as a designed artifact, we ultimately don’t have any special insight into what players actually end up doing unless we ask.

    • List of Mods I Have Installed In My Current Stardew Save by dumplingsquid
    • An Incomplete List of Games that made me Trans by moniker ersatz
    • A Non-Exhaustive List Of Video Game Deaths (That Just Happens To Be Ten) by Velcro

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    March 7th

    …Ultima VIII utterly pale in comparison to those that separate the PS2 from today. If that wasn’t enough to crumble you instantaneously into a pile of dust, the PS2 actually overlaps with the tail end of big-box retail game packaging. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m trying to delete it.

    • The incredible boxes of Hock Wah Yeo | The Obscuritory Phil Salvador celebrates the long-gone era of weird and wonderful game packaging by looking at the work of possibly the artform’s greatest master.
    • Ultima VIII (or, How to Destroy a Gaming Franchise in One Easy Step) | The

    …

    April 18th

    …genuinely clarifying and productive. It returns us to ourselves.”

    Objects in Mirror

    Our next two selections look back to titles with a mixed reputation, or an uncertain place in their franchises’ overall critical canon, and draw upon the clarifying passage of time re-examine why those offbeat installments were and are pretty great.

    • Assassin’s Creed: Unity is the best game in the series | In The Lobby Cole Henry makes the case for Assassin’s Creed‘s fifth main outing as the design priorities of the first game perfected.
    • Change is bad. And good. And necessary. –…

    March 2021

    …Ops – Cold War Really That Bad? – Writing on Games (14:05)

    The singleplayer campaign of Call of Duty: Black Ops deserves some praise, insists Writing on Games, because it takes itself much less seriously than the previous instalments in the series. (Manual captions)

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    April 25th

    …father for the sake of doing it; to prove that for all of his overbearing temper and abusive ways, he could not stop me, not truly.“

    Critical Chaser

    I’ve been enjoying the Let Me Tell You About My OC series over at Sidequest a whole bunch. This week there’s a new installment!

    • Let Me Tell You About My OC: The Shared Anxieties of a Long-Time Storyteller | Sidequest Natalia Lopes introduces Laurus Francoeur.

    “As someone who writes comics and is constantly nervous about sharing them with the world, playing as Francoeur has…

    June 6th

    …Paso, Elsewhere is not an interesting game because it stars a Black protagonist or because it’s made by a Black person. It is interesting and compelling because you look at it and you instantly know it’s the next game you need to play, period. And it’s Black as hell. The ‘and’ is important because I can’t imagine… because part of my personal nightmare for this is being so proud of the diverse perspective that it represents from a variety of vectors and the diverse team that’s bringing it to life and it’s just getting put into this box because of…

    September 19th

    …narratives, mechanics, and thematic resonances.

    • Ultima 4 [1985] – Arcade Idea Art Maybury appraises Ultima 4 as one of the more successful early installments in an ongoing canon of games which try to capture some aspect of Dungeons & Dragons‘ essence, focusing on the game’s innovations and experiments with scale, structure, and moral philosophy.
    • A is for Jump – GlitchOut Oma Keeling is thinking about platformers–their simplicity, their strangeness, their ubiquity, and most of all their narrative flexibility.
    • The Spectre of Gacha Oblivion | Bullet Points Monthly Kazuma Hashimoto considers the ways in which Nier is

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