Sundays are for admiring for the nine different houseplants you successfully repotted on Saturday, a moment of quiet appreciation that lasts just long enough to forget that you willingly spent real money on bags of what could accurately be called dirt. You paid. For dirt. And now it’s back.
Also back this week, in a sense, is Computer Entertainer, a mail-order games newsletter that plopped onto US doorsteps between 1982 and 1990. Its rights have been bought up by preservation outfit the Video Game History Foundation, who’ve scanned and uploaded every single issue for anyone to read and/or download for free. With headlines like “WOULD YOU BELIEVE STEREO VIDEO GAMES?!”, it’s both an intriguing and often amusing time capsule from an era before writing about games would quickly switch off the light behind your eyes. Still there’s some serious history here that transcends simple giggles. As the VGHF team note, Computer Entertainer was one of the earliest US games publications, making it a vanishingly rare source of contemporary news and reviews on 80s games, as well as the first to be run by women. Here’s the full archive.
Friend of RPS Rick Lane asks: how tall is Garrett from Thief? About thiiiiiiiis tall. Featuring insight and an excellent visual guide from original designer Romain Barrilliot.
The reason Garrett’s height feels so ambiguous in Thief is simply because the game features some incredibly tall enemies. “The funniest thing is that some other NPCs such as Hammerite dwarf him,” Barrilliot says. “I guess everyone in The City has eaten a lot of soup when they were young.”
For Unwinnable, here’s Wallace Truesdale on how recent football games Rematch and Despelote have, in very different ways, rekindled his love of real-life ballkickery.
Despite all the mischief players can get up to that interrupts random passerbys, Despelote makes you feel like a drop in the sea of change washing over an entire country. It translates the fact that no matter how deeply one may feel about soccer, as Julián is undoubtedly head over heels for it, the sport is so much bigger than one person. And there’s a deep comfort in that, knowing wherever you go you can find someone who understands, if not matches, your love. An assurance only found when a known language is spoken, one I’ve found joy speaking myself when I run into people who also spent their childhoods pounding cleats into dirt and turf.
My favourite piece of writing about the ongoing Steam/Itch/adult games/payment processors situation this week was, obviously, Edwin’s. My second favourite was Grace Benfell’s for Gamespot, which fiercely focuses on possibly the most aggravating aspect of think-of-the-children prohibition crusades: they rarely end up actually protecting anyone.
It is easier than ever to find upsetting material and to extrapolate that upset to a fundamental societal ill. When the personal is political, everything is public. In her essay, “west elm caleb and the feminist panopticon,” Rayne Fisher-Quann discusses the urge to hold ordinary individuals uniquely responsible for societal woes. She writes, “the crucifixion of these individuals is ultimately a system of smoke and mirrors that obfuscates true systemic change while providing us with enough satisfaction to stop aiming higher.” Though the work of Collective Shout takes place in a different context, it is driven by a similar impulse.
This last one is from, uh, 2022, but a much more recent author plug has had me repeatedly muttering “How have I never heard that” up to and including the time I’ve spent writing this post. Anyhow, the Date ‘Em Ups blog has a thinky yet friendly piece on the difficulties of defining dating sims, with an aside on the unexpectedly impactful genre contributions of Hideo Kojima – yes, that one – and his Konami colleagues.
What’s impressive isn’t just how well Kojima Productions made an adventure game work within the world of Tokimeki Memorial, but also how comfortably Tokimeki Memorial transitions into an adventure game structure in turn. Many smaller elements of the original game manage to survive the shift in genre, not only in terms of lore and background details, but even mechanics. In particular, the phone in your room, which is used in the original game to arrange dates with girls and receive intel on them from your pal Yoshio, still charmingly functions. While there are no dates to invite other girls out to when each game already hones in on one in particular, you can nevertheless call them up once you’ve met them to have another conversation before you turn in each night, the contents of which change regularly as the game and their respective optional sub-plots advance. It might appear to be a small touch at a glance, but it lends your interactions with these characters a level of closeness that’s never truly afforded to the original game because of its structurally open-ended mandate.
Today’s music is JOON, whose breezy beeps and beats recently graced the Wheel World soundtrack. Give it a Go.
