writer and games guy. stuff to read on my blog! sometimes not here but usually not dead. making you shiver with
@rachel_gmad
. thanks for coming! he/they
Announcing something short and sweet with
@rachel_gmad
! Chiaroscuro Imago is a shivery horror game about murky secrets and stark realities. Enjoy a catered meal. Meet someone new. The phone is ringing. Learn a different language. Discover what happened to the moths.
stephen king wrote a book about an alcoholic being scary, king himself being an alcoholic trying to articulate his fear of losing control. but because he was an alcoholic he also gives the character a sympathetic out. kubrick never does and it’s clearly why he hates the movie lol
"Stanley Kubrick just couldn’t grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel. So he looked, instead, for evil in the characters & made 'The Shining' (1980) into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones."
--- Stephen King
it’s pretty fucking sad to rob an author of a universe he’d been working in for over a decade, steal a game from the core creative team that made it happen, and then appear to have such a large amount of trouble figuring out what to do with it that you add a Meme Making Mode
Create the Disco scenes of your dreams.
Introducing Collage Mode: the new functionality that gives you the creative freedom to stage just about anything in-game.
Available now for PC and Mac players, with console rolling out soon:
"counting cards" is such a funny concept. there's a game at the casino you can win by using your brain and if you choose to do that instead of making decisions arbitrarily they ask you to leave
king feels symbiotically connected to jack and always has. he’s a monster formed by a very specific, powerfully terrible period of his own life. he’s always been super uncomfortable seeing that character be reinterpreted, especially in a way that clearly reviles him
but kubrick doesn’t care. he has no reason to view jack as anything more than a shitty, selfish, unrepentant fuckhead who hates and hurts. king wants you to believe that jack was possessed by Evil; kubrick knows jack was only goaded into doing something he wanted to do anyway
Just in time for spooky season, Remedy returns with a much-anticipated survival horror sequel to the beloved
@alanwake
franchise. We can't wait to see what Bright Falls has in store for us this time around!
#BlooberTeam
#AlanWake2
like king obviously knows that jack is a horrible guy but he also knows there’s a bit of himself in there, even if it’s a dead part of him that he absolutely disavows. it’s why he can’t quite bear to truly interrogate him textually outside of simply making him a Complex Victim
what makes Nintendo so interesting is that they are simultaneously tapped into culture but also not tapped into culture at all. most companies would be so aware of Big Yoshi as to put extra work into the new model and try to play off memes etc in marketing. here he simply exists
king has thrown weird punches at kubrick’s work for decades, unable or unwilling to articulate his actual issue with it. he claims the movie has “no center” which is a nonsensical complaint. it makes sense when you realize why he can’t find it: he’s no longer in the frame
it’s like they’re retroactively trying to make sense of disco elysium’s appeal through the people who seem to constantly make fanfiction and tributes for it. “perhaps they will like a feature like this?? it seems like people enjoy when kim says dumb shit???”
just to be clear: i love king’s the shining. it’s a great book and commands a different power entirely. i have this old tattered copy that i bought from a dusty bookstore and i treat it like The Bible. but also, as any true king fan knows: he is sort of a funny guy
a lot of these "look at this stupid annoying corny video" twitter pile-ons feeling like people are trying to export the endless shame and humiliation in their own brains into a brain that gracefully lacks it, and which is clearly happier for it. makes 'em a bit jealous imo
all of this is just an almost poetic way to cap off a saga that’s had a studio and its remaining employees suddenly pivot HARD to denying that any one person or group of people can make a game like disco elysium what it is. they’re gonna prove it to you… somehow
remember when discord tried to launch an entire games store integrated into the client and shut it down within a year because nobody bought anything on it
i mostly feel bad for people who don’t jive with emulation or piracy or anything, and who can’t really grasp why anyone would want to cross the insurmountable mental wall of Breaking The Rules. people who can’t kill the cop in their brain are wasting their life in little ways
It's ever so amusing watching people rally around Mark Kern, who can only talk about his past because the only thing he contributes to the games industry now is... nothing.
His legacy is Firefall, a failed MMO that tanked his studio, and now spends his days on Twitter faffing.
what really disgusts me about this is that they don't even care. they don't! james somerton isn't even named here. if they found him drowning, they'd stick a hose in his mouth. he's only any use to them dead, as a vector. it's not even misguided empathy: it's playing pretend
today a customer was excitedly telling me that his kid “created” a video game by asking ChatGPT to program it for him and i almost replied “this is an insult to life itself” because i forgot i was at work
it's like if you were tasked with rebuilding the Great Pyramid and you understood everything about the assignment on a technical level without knowing or caring about its place in history or culture. just another working day where i model the large yoshi sitting on Yo'ster Isle
i think video games have always had Good Graphics in the way that a silent film from 1897 still looks beautiful. the advantage to graphics becoming "better" is that it makes new kinds of art possible! but the old graphics could accomplish different things, they weren't *worse*
so much of what Nintendo exports is nostalgia but it's also all very rote in a way that is neither good or bad. when you play a Nintendo remake you're never like "they must have spent a lot of time thinking about how to recreate this iconic moment" they just do it
there are remakes like FF7's where the game becomes a commentary on the act of doing something again with context and there are remakes like RE4's where the game is content to be a different take on the same idea. Nintendo is like if "remake" and "remaster" meant the same thing
one of my only memories of being a discord partner (we all make poor choices as teens) was this time someone at the company created "Big Wungus" which was a meme (?) of the wumpus doing the Big Chungus pose. it was as vile as it sounds and nobody liked it. focus testing failed
a bit of context that tends to get lost is that half-life 2 was one of the first games to pair high-level established acting talent with a writer who could write great material, and it’s so good that everyone forgets the bit in the story where they casually invent time travel
hearing one of the head valve writers say that story in games is like "music in a movie" helped me to understand that they probably aren't the masters of storytelling I once thought they were, they're just really good at presentation and pacing, or something like that
whenever somebody says something about video games that could be construed as even mildly dismissive, a bunch of gamers go “oh yeah? i’ll show him” and then reply with some of the most puerile, embarrassing things you’ve ever heard in your entire life
Last night, 39-year-old composer Ludwig Göransson won his second Academy Award for his score to ‘Oppenheimer’. In a heartfelt speech, he thanked his parents for giving him his foundation in music.
one of the worst things about gamers is how often they’ll flatten an interesting compromise driven by tools or tech or time, with all of its nuance and teachability, into a simple narrative where developers have all the power in the world but simply don’t care to exercise it
i thought it was grating when i saw it! if you clicked on it because i just shared it maybe you found it irritating too. this is normal, but who cares. it's just an exuberant dorky meme made for fun. why would i even talk about how i felt about it? it clearly isn't made for me
but people online are increasingly irritated by confidence, which they lack, and can only really process that by externalizing and multiplying what would otherwise be a normal "this annoys me but is harmless and fun and creates no harm. i will go look at something else" reaction
james somerton doing an apology video at all is such a fuckup. there is obviously no salvaging this and any crook with even a shred of good sense or dignity would know it. the only move he got any respect for was quietly fucking off immediately!
(super mild spoilers for spider-verse. like three seconds of footage)
i was rewatching a camrip of the movie with my girlfriend and it had the most batshit ad in it i’ve ever seen i feel fucking crazy
doom 3 is a really interesting game unfairly maligned because the idea that the original doom was itself a horror experience barely landed for the folks who only saw it as some kind of bloodthirsty powertrip, which is all doom is now. i’ve really grown to appreciate it
Today is the 19th anniversary of Doom 3.
id Software's brave plunge into darkness, it was not only a unique take on the first-person horror genre, but it was also an impressive tech marvel.
Are you a Doom 3 enjoyer? What was your favorite thing about it?
everyone wants to make stuff with confidence and nobody wants to be terribly self-conscious about it. a lot of folks can't make the stuff they want because they're afraid it'll come off as cringe or whatever, even if it would be fun to make and they'd be happy to have done it
i honestly want to know what happened here. feels like the plan was to spruce the vibe of the menus up after launch in some way and the can kept getting kicked down the road until it finally came down to "okay it's been six years. we'll just make themes for the next console"
the right-wing and fundamentally anti-intellectual desire for "apolitical art" is about inertia. their guts fall out whenever they open their mouths: they're misanthropes who are so fragile that they can't bear to confront reality, which continually asserts itself in their lives
The same people who will say “we just want games to be apolitical again” will then say deeply political stuff like this, making it evident that they want games to reinforce deeply patriarchal, essentialist and limiting notions of gender, which is not apolitical at all.
it’s incredibly fucked up that i can play the metroid prime remaster on my steam deck like it’s nothing. took like four minutes of effort. this feels like it shouldn’t work
a lot of people are living that life! they get to be cringe or corny or whatever and are clearly having a great time. they don't really care what you think about it because they're not making it for you. and all a lot of people can think is "you need to be put in your place"
“there’s a wonderful world of so much interesting human expression that you can acquire almost immediately, and all you have to do is jaywalk across an empty road” you’re asking me to break the LAW?? piece of shit. what if a car suddenly materialized and i got the driver killed
i am of a similar mind with the "i like girls" video which was the last one of these a few days ago. it could be a loser thing in a vacuum but the person who made it is fine. clearly a nice guy! happily married, has a healthy attitude about this stuff. same people can't get it
this is just modern day cringe compilation shit to me truthfully. maybe the video of the two homestuck characters singing drop pop candy irks you. that's fine, but it isn't for you. why complain? it would be weird to paint the person who made that as silly or bad. walk away
this outside of stupid pieces of shit who simply can't stand to see queer people living an uncompromised happy life, though some of their feelings probably come from the same place. the idea that you can be whatever makes you happy frustrates them because they are never happy
@sorrelquest
it’d be funny if spider-man 3 turns this into a running joke. nobody bought her book and nobody listened to her podcast and now she’s switching to video essays where she just reads a piece of paper off in front of the camera and uploads it raw
longtime followers will know i am a retired half-life fanatic with far too much scholarship on these video games and holy crow. this is one of the cooler things. they let the good half-life nerds update the game and remove two decades of cruft from it. what a dream
Half-Life turns 25 this weekend, and we're pushing a big update to bring back some of that 1998 feeling with restored original launch day content, brand new multiplayer maps, a look behind the scenes with the original development team, and more:
it was sad watching weirdos trying to hunt down tweets that would show the guy was "pornbrained" or whatever while rapidly scrolling by anything that suggested he was, at that exact moment, sleeping in a big bed with his wife being both untroubled (save by them) and untroubling
most anti-piracy or anti-emulation discussions are not based in reality. they don’t know what they’re talking about. the average consumer thinks that torrenting is illegal. every Nintendo game this year leaked a week early and worked on your computer immediately. didn’t matter!
here's my latest article! in exactly 7000 words i wrote about the decay of virtual reality, an artistic canvas gradually destroyed by the reckless, dreamless inanity of its largest producers. how did it happen? was it inevitable? can it be reclaimed?
writer: this is a grounded human drama. they never say "The Z Word" in my story. the Infected Runner Walker Undeads will be referred to by their proper names
audience: but people know about zombies. wouldn't it be more grounded if they called them zombies
writer: you dumb bitch
‘The Last Of Us’ crew reveal they were not allowed to say the word ‘zombie’ on set:
“We weren’t allowed to say the Z word on set. It was like a banned word. They were the Infected. We weren’t a zombie show.”
the way non-developers talk about game engines is so funny. looks like a new game is running on the mystical "Unreal Engine 5," which i hope is as optimized as "Unreal Engine 4." people found ways to optimize "Unreal Engine 4" but they'll have to start from scratch here
we've removed it from the equation with Ad Hominem but i really do think that jealousy is the ultimate root cause of a lot of these things. folks who lack emotional literacy can only respond to this stuff by jeering about it. totally unable to realize why they're so fixated on it
half-life 2’s actual story is understandably a mess of shuffled pieces, lost context, and the occasionally ridiculous connecting bit. it’s a miracle the game came out at all! and none of that matters to the majority of folks because the actual character scenes haven’t aged a day
it's fair to assume this context isn't a given but i find it typically is. there is absolutely a more than insignificant percentage of people who get even more irritated when they find out that someone they think is "embarrassing" enjoys a loving relationship (and they do not)
i like when people use words like “joypad” or “joystick” to describe a video game controller. it’s a taste of how whimsical these things used to be before the activity of “gaming” gradually became overrun with disease
it’s a great example of how a disjointed, messy narrative can be almost entirely overlooked by the average audience if the characters feel *right* and the individual scenes are mostly good, a strategy video games frequently use because of how fuckin’ hard they are to make
thinking about when the Twin Peaks VR game (hold your confusion) had to finally answer the question of what you see in the Red Room when you look up, and instead of it being some kind of interminable blackness or whatever they went with "red ceiling"
ultimate zelda timeline: only one of them actually happened. we’re not telling you which. every other zelda game is the same event as understood and retold by various cultures at different points in history
In the declining weeks of Half-Life 2’s development, as many team members faced malnourishment, Gabe Newell brought in a large Party Burger to appease his staff. According to several employees, it “smelled like victory and tasted like a lobster raised in an ocean of gasoline.”
wow Content Warning is actually pretty genius. it’s a game about cynically Making Content that can be exported and turned into actual real content, but if you die the penalty works on both levels: you have nothing to post
but they’re not “masters of storytelling” like i’ve seen folks say, they’re just masters of knowing where their time and energy ought to be spent. if the game had the same great writing quality but doom 3 level facial animation fidelity, its legacy would be super impacted
the tf2 summer update is such an interesting microenvironment of Things: a company pushed into shipping a half-hearted and generally effortless update that *still* manages to be pretty good because it's just a grab bag of fun stuff their players designed over the last decade
my new favourite genre of tweet is like “You won’t believe your own eyes, but this video was created by an AI. Everything you know is going to change. Goodbye Hollywood!” and then you watch it and it just looks like this
i sat down and quickly wrote a bit about what my job is like. hard to pin a trigger warning on this stuff but sickness/dying/dementia is discussed heavily so please be kind to yourself and stop reading if you’re too uncomfortable to continue
already muting this but i hope everyone in the crowd that saw this video and immediately hated the person who made it and felt inclined to reply that i'm overthinking it etc continue to find exciting new ways to dodge figuring out where anything in their brain comes from
my favourite example of “this thing used to make sense” in hl2 is the bit where you casually teleport into breen’s office for no particular reason. in one version of the game, you’d do that, see a prototype local teleporter near you, and then blip out. got shuffled around!
i own what is apparently the rarest taunt in Team Fortress 2. you can't trade or sell the item but i bought it from a guy who was just pawning the codes off. the codes that are only supposed to come with the cooking gizmo that costs upwards of 200 dollars. never ask questions
The Strangest Collaboration Valve has ever done (or any video game ever) has to be Team Fortress 2 x Chef Steps to promote their Joule Sous Vide device.
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there are of course a variety of things that cause people to be weird about this is what i'll say. jealousy is one such thing. a lot of folks also just don't know how to process any kind of mild dislike without turning it into unwarranted aggression. perpetually in The Grump Zone
one of the best things about Deus Ex is that it predates the trend of telling the player as loudly as possible that something they said or did will be acknowledged later, so you casually say or do things and they come up later in a small way and surprise you. that's great
it sucks now that a kid's first exposure to horror is usually going to be some kind of coddling dogshit video game specifically tailored to enamor them (and then sell them merch) and not a horrifyingly violent movie they aren't supposed to be watching that will scar them for life
this boss in Lunacid is kicking my ass and i found out it's because the current real world moon phase is waxing gibbous and mostly full, which means he gets regenerating health until sometime next week when the phase diminishes the moon's visibility. this game is so fucking good
it's always about finding any grounds on which to stage bizarre campaigns, even if your only basis is "making someone pay the cost of the thing they're doing" which is "getting caught." they would celebrate somerton's suicide note under any other circumstance. but now it's a tool
just in general i could talk about the convenience store scene in Fire Walk with Me for hours but there is almost no entity in a movie that i find more unsettling than this guy. what the fuck was his problem
obvs Geoff is a spineless, feckless, craven master of ceremonies with only a dilettante care for games as anything more than products. none of that is surprising because he's a nepo baby. but it is amazing that he can still surprise people with the amount of dead air in his head
Geoff Keighley has shared his thoughts on the debate surrounding Dave the Diver’s nomination for Best Indie Game at The Game Awards.
“Independent can mean different things to different people, and it’s sort of a broad term."
when you accept that art is made by people bridging a vision in their head with the inherent imprecision and imperfection of reality, these things become really interesting to talk about. if you assume laziness on the part of the creators, you’ll be mostly wrong all the time
if you go and watch some of the first proper sound films, you might think that the camerawork is lazy or pretty static because they hadn’t figured out how to do cool stuff with it yet
actually the camera made so much noise that they had to film through glass in a soundproof room
@sorrelquest
it's a cautionary tale about being eight hours into a video game and going "flawless masterpiece. immaculate" because at any moment even if you think you're safe you could still be forced to sneak around the working joe robots for two fucking hours until the alien shows up again
what really happened to Minecraft was that it became a cultural institution and then got bought up by the biggest company in the world. updates must follow hulking, incomprehensible machinery. no real game design can happen because it’d be like adding new shapes to Tetris
it feels like youtube essays have allowed a lot of folks, who aren't actually that super at writing essays, to get away with spending half of a video summarizing the piece of media they're talking about instead of actually producing some kind of thesis. it's weird!
just popping in to say that cultural context is huge here (japanese studios are not going to be super aware of what's going on with their online western audience) but also i think just focusing on That discards useful nuance. imo Nintendo's treatment of this stuff is unique