Writings from the Creator of I Wanna be the Guy and Brave Earth: Prologue.
I like having nice, well balanced takes on things, sometimes getting lost in nuance in ways that muddle my point. But anyone who follows me knows that some days I just to give in. I just have to be a hater . Anyone who follows me knows I have a deep seated hatred of Achievements. Not so much the vague concept of little extrinsic goals, which have been in gaming for decades. No, what I hate is the…
It feels slightly challenging talking about a game from someone you've worked with. Doric, creator of Dungeon Gals , was also the FM Synth wielding musician for Moonlight Duelists . She did an incredible job for me, which might make me a bit biased , but I would argue if she can make incredible things for me , she can surely make incredible things out of the feelings in her heart for herself.…
I didn't expect to play Deadly Shadows , but I also didn't expect to play hours of Thief mods and fan missions, so here we are. I want to start, for clarity, by saying I really like this game. I really enjoyed playing it. I liked the tone of this game, which rests somewhere between Thief 1 and 2. I liked the ideas to mix up the formula that went into this game. So with that all abundantly clear,…
I was ready to be done, or maybe jump to the divisive Thief 3 , but the more I played, the more people tried to tempt me to try stuff in the FM or 'Fan mission' community. Thief has a series falls in the same place as Doom , with a little bit of Bethesda Game energy. These are games that are kept alive by their communities. The history of these games is inseparable from the history of the people…
At the end of my Perfect Dark revisit , I mused about the difference between US/European and Japanese game design in regards to realism in the 80s and 90s. To summarize, the trend I noticed is that Western games often tried to simulate reality . Fall damage, ledge grabbing, a particular fondness for momentum, and the much hated limited ammo . Strategy games tend to be military tactics simulators.…
I love hating on Rare . I love hating on pre-2000s UK games. I love hating on basically every euro- whatever genre you can think of. Half of this is joking. It was a very different gaming culture over there, with different social pressures (Though can we trust the social pressures that makes Dizzy the Egg make sense?) due to a focus on cheap PC gaming. Half of this isn't even fair (I'll take an…
I've been a pretty consistent fan of Bennett Foddy's work. I love Getting Over It to the point where I got a Gold Pot by accident, just by casually playing over and over again. I've even had the pleasure to hang out with Foddy, giving a talk with him on troll games in a time so long ago it feels like The Old Internet (It was called fucking ROFLCON) . There, also I had the pleasure of also meeting…
I was, as is my normal way, not on the hype train for Silksong . I wasn't reading updates, I wasn't Silkposting . I wasn't desperately waiting for a release date. I had no emotional stakes in its existence. I really liked Hollow Knight , but I didn't crave more of it. It genuinely helped remind me what the weird, vibey 'genre' we clumsily call Metroidvanias are actually about. They aren't about…
With comments like "Lunacid sure isn't that much like King's Field or Shadow Tower" there was a lot of "Okay so when are you going to play Tears of the Moon ?" Lunacid: Tears of the Moon, is a breezy prequel to Lunacid, notably made with the ancient Sword of Moonlight: King's Field Making Tool . It's janky, it's hard to get to display right, and it was one of the few times I was happy about Steam…
Inglorious Basterds was famously a hard movie to end. How do you end a WW2 period piece that so diverges from real history? How do you come up with a believable ending, without throwing away all the credibility you've built up? How do you untangle the knot that you yourself created, without undoing your story and your creative voice? Well, you stop caring and shoot Hitler in the face with a tommy…