There’s a weird tension that emerges when you think about games a lot, but have to decide if you’re going to write something or just talk about them. I’ve been on a bit of a podcasting rampage recently, having worked out a fairly reasonable workflow and finding the necessary gaps in my working week where I can comfortably record my waffly monologues. And perhaps it’s the degree of waffle I can emit that determines whether I’m going to write a tight 1500 or say a rambling 120 minutes. As ever, I let my gut guide me for most decisions for all things Affectionate Discourse, so in the absence of wanting to write about anything this week, I decided it’s probably a good idea to write about the podcast as I really do fall short when it comes to promoting my episodes. With that in mind, here’s a run down of some of my recent editions:
R-Type Final 3, for the most part
Back in mid-March, I went deep on R-Type Final 3, with a little bit of discussion of Gran Turismo 7 as a partner chill-out game (particularly if you’re deep into some post-apoc grimverse gritfest and need a break). I noodled around the game’s visual style, ship collection and its florid celebration of the fundamental R-Type principles. Most importantly, there’s a fair bit about the original R-Type Final and how unusually special it is. My cat interrupts at one point, which is probably the highlight of the episode. There’s some diffusion into Gradius chatter, with a savage diss of Darius for good measure.1 I mention Progear, because it’s brilliant, and end up doing a wildly offside rant on magazine purchasing, DVD collecting and all sorts. As part of my 2025 review series, the deeper focus here, in combination with wildly divergent tangents, is a terrifying harbinger of things to come.
The AI episode that features another human
Starting off with an Ultramagnetic MCs riff, this episode is a chat about post-LLM AI and videogames, from the standpoint that it’s a tool and its evilness is down to both its application in a capitalist context and the individuals that are in control of it. This alone may be enough to draw significant anger, but it’s kinda what I believe and I’m really sorry if it upsets you. At the very least, you’ll be getting two quite individual viewpoints on the whole shebang that are definitely not from either pole of the general discourse. There is, however, a nice little tidbit about professional games writing as my guest, Mark Sorrell, did that for longer than I did.
Obsidian’s last gasps at AAA? Cling to the memories.
Another 2025 review spectacular, this episode sees me talking about Obsidian’s twin open-worlders, both of which inexplicably launched in the same calendar year. Avowed gets the Coles Monologues treatment first, with Outer Worlds 2 bringing up the year. Expansive addendums suddenly appear, where I tangent off to expose my fetish for vintage CGI and, more importantly, celebrate Buck Rogers in the 25th Century; a true gem of the late-70s, space-disco Sci-fi melee and something The Outer Worlds 2 contrastingly borrows from, and yet refuses to fully understand. Given the current maelstrom that Xbox finds itself in, the idea of a studio with the talent of Obsidian getting to make another AAA open-world RPG seems less likely than ever, so why not wallow in a romantic waffle for two games you probably didn’t play and will never truly deserve.
This is how much I fucking hate Star Wars: Outlaws. Trying to bring balance to the force, I also talk at length about how much I fucking love Heat Signature. My chief tangent in this episode is for children’s sci-fi books of the late 1970s and early 1980s, cassette futurism and the idea that our Gen-X reinforcement repetition wasn’t vertical microvideos of media we love, but wonderful hand-painted sci-fi imagery that we thumbed through over and over again. This episode was surprisingly popular, mostly because of my incredibly aggressive Star Wars critique. I don’t actually believe that catharsis is real, or that it works, but fuck me, I really love indulging in it. And maybe that’s the point.
Starfield deserves your time. Listen to me justify that claim for over five hours
Like the entire Affectionate Discourse project, this episode is both a deeply earnest attempt to rigorously examine a significant artefact from a significant medium and a deeply immature and elitist private joke at your expense. And I made people sit through five hours of it. The big tangent for this episode is the history of CGI, expertly creating a secret arc with the previous two episodes, where I could snip out the tangents to construct a far more interesting episode for Gen-X nostalgia tragics. Shamefully, I realised during editing that I could have easily done another two hours, so many apols that I didn’t do an hour apiece on favourite POIs and the aesthetic style of Bethesda’s outrageously flawed Sci-fi RPG. Maybe I’ll do that when the next DLC appears in four years’ time. Somehow I have the faith that Starfield will outlive Bethesda itself and rise, like a phoenix from the ashes, to be really great (with shoddy 2009-era character anims).
But that’s not all! Still to come this year is:
A bitter, unhinged assault against Forza Horizon 6
A hardware episode!
Getting someone to do the PlayStation 2 idea I spent most of the pilot episode explaining
Interestingly, it was in doing part of one of the above that I had an idea for something to write about. It’s funny how I immediately knew it should be written, not spoken. But that’s what going by the whims of your stomach gets you - utterly capricious decisions with no reasonable justification. With that said, I really hope you do listen to some of my podcast episodes and if you enjoy them, spread the links as far as you can. I’m almost thinking about turning on monetisation in some form or other so you would be helping me quite a bit if you did. And so, as I struggle to bring this edition to a close because all I can think about is Arkane maybe being on the Microsoft chopping block, I shall end with a hearty au revoir et merci beaucoup!
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With apols to Mr M. Robinson, London.
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