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history

June 5th

…at a Dreamcast racing port with an especially convoluted publishing history, which bears all the appearance and reputation of a bad game but which, for a very specific historical racing audience, might still have something to it.

“What I mostly imagine would keep folk invested in the game though – besides whatever love of the setting and the classic cars they bring in with them – is the satisfaction of overcoming all the odds in order to squeak out satisfying wins. And believe you me: Scoring wins really does seem to come down to the very last…

June 13th

…let’s now shift gears to a pair of historically-minded perspectives on archives and cultural imperialism.

  • Archives and Historical Accuracy in the Elder Scrolls Online | Play the Past Alvina Lai explores the social and political importance of archives, as briefly expressed in an ESO daily.
  • The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake Can’t Shed Its Orientalist Roots | Fanbyte Saniya Ahmed unpacks the orientalist development history, authorship, and pastiche of the Prince of Persia series as a whole.

“Although Ubisoft’s Indian studios took charge and are regionally closer to Iran, their cosmetic and

…

June 19th

…Queer Melancholia in the Post-Post-Apocalypse of NieR:Automata – NiCHE Kaitlin Moore ties together the destabliziation of the environment, time, history, embodiment, and human subjectivity in the world of NieR Automata.

  • Being Trans is the ‘Dark Souls’ of Gender: An Exploration of Parallels | Epilogue Gaming Flora Eloise, in an expansive critique, relates the experience of coming back to Lordran to the experience of coming out as trans.

    • “Being trans is a way of becoming your own mental self-defense instructor, developing techniques that disarm, diminish, and defuse the slurs, the dog whistles, the cheap shots, the awkward…

    June 27th

    …an entire way of being that stands in opposition to your own. You are fighting the alien – not the humanoid, but the truly inhuman: that which is utterly incommensurate with us.”

    Adventure Awaits

    Next up we’ve got a pair of lookbacks at influential RPGs.

    • Remote Control, a quintessential game made with RPG Maker | Vidyasaur Vidyasaur digs into the history behind a console-based RPG Maker game that for a brief moment managed to break into mainstream games press coverage.
    • June 2022 Update – The Only Game I Ever Replay | Clockwork Worlds Austin…

    August 1st

    …entrench the game in the effaced history which formed it in the fictional world, and in doing so allow the characters to accept it as it is.”

    Gachocalypse

    Would have just called this one “Gotcha” but Skeleton did that one already.

    • The Last Days of This Dying Gacha Reveal a System of Exploitation | Fanbyte Jay Castello picks through a ruined machine, painted in a friendly guise of Kpop parasocialism.
    • Sounding Board: Do No Harm | No Escape Jeremy Signor asks games press to reckon more openly and honestly with the exploitative architecture of…

    August 14th

    …few genre-specific issues this week, and first up are a pair of pieces unpacking some of the community turmoil around fighting game characters.

    • ¿Hombre o mujer? Guilty Gear Strive confirma cuál es el género de Bridget | GamerFocus Julián Ramírez unspools the winding history of Guity Gear‘s recently-topical trans character (Spanish-language article)
    • The Kirby Trap – LudoLudo Dissonance | Pixels for Breakfast Rinoa Carmichael juxtaposes Kirby’s cute approachability in Smash with the difficulty some players have moving off to other characters.

    “This is the trickiness with having easy entry points into ultimately very complicated

    …

    September 18th

    …Drakengard that attempts to be welcoming to a player, instead actively trying to make them quit the game.”

    Off Script

    Next up, we’ve got three different and delightful explorations of critical themes–each of them slightly incongruously executed in their respective games.

    • Ghostrunner: el cliché de los ciberninja en el cyberpunk | GamerFocus Julián Ramírez unpacks the history and baggage of the cyborg ninja in cyberpunk media, finding its more interesting posthuman implications largely unexplored in the recent Ghostrunner (Spanish-language article).
    • The Endless Possibilities of Transness in Sonic Unleashed | KRITIQAL Danny McLaren explores how…

    October 2nd

    …of forming your own experineces with a game that has accumulated as much discourse and baggage and sheer weight as Kentucky Route Zero.

  • A Totem | Bullet Points Monthly Yussef Cole considers The Last of Us Part I as a sort of totemic work, increasingly more a representative arifact of design and industry ideology than a videogame sold and resold on its own merrits.

    • “It’s a museum exhibit that requires my participation, my enthusiasm. Less a history than a mutated memory. Less picture perfect than xeroxed and redrawn. A piece of ruin, of headstone, wrapped in…