Ah, a job sim for people who like configuring their router

The bytes must flow

Do you know how the internet works? I don't. But it might have something to do with the nine billion ethernet cables coming out of my basement like a colony of suspicious worms. This is Tower Networking Inc, a hacky wire-crossing simulator where you run an entire internet service provider out of a damp cellar in an endlessly growing high-rise. 

It's also a roguelike for some god-forsaken reason, but you can turn that off in the options and just play it as a straight-up cyberpunk job sim about making sure people can read all the awful news through their smoking modems.

It hit early access in summer last year but only recently popped up in my Steam recommendations, like a 1st line support blister waiting to be popped. You can get an idea of how deeply IT-brained the game is by watching the trailer, which expertly fuses the synthetic beats of hacker-happy music with green-tinted command lines and the kind of router configuration jargon that makes normal people break out in a fearful sweat.

 "Administrate the network," it announces with all the glee of a corporate training video you are mandated to watch to secure your bonus. "Troubleshoot

What are you running for?

One cannot survive on The Aesthetic alone

There is a loop of behaviour I get into when I see a game being highly praised by my peers. I try the game, I don't like it, I stew with annoyance, I see more praise, I decide I must be doing something wrong, I try it again, I still don't like it. I write a blast of vaporous thoughts about why I don't like it, but I'm only half-convinced by my own screed, and I see more people enthusing about the game. I think: this can't be right, I am missing something, I am not giving this its fair shake, a proper evaluation, I am playing it wrong, I must commit to it somehow, I must roleplay, or I must get deeper, it will reveal itself soon, surely. I play again, and I still don't like it.

This annoys me because I feel locked out of enjoying, even with great effort, something that others enjoy with no effort at all. This is a silly emotion, but a persistent one. I want to like the videogame. Why can't I just like it? Yes, I am talking about Marathon.

Some praise it as a tense and fatal teamfight generator, while others

Jank Mail: NVIDIA, corporate comedy and Elder Scrolls

This week in PC gaming

This weeks’ newsletter arrives late, with apologies: I thought I would be able to write it during my journey back from America, but overestimated the efficacy of in-flight WiFi and my own energy levels after slogging through two airports, three rail lines and a last-mile cab ride. You get the benefit of something written in the fuzzy-head/itchy eyeballs state of jetlag, rather than the exhausted-to-the-point-of-incomprehensibility one, and I hope you’ll be able to tell the difference.

Jank has rudely persisted in my absence. Brendy admitted he was wrong about Slay The Spire 2 and celebrated its co-op mode, Graham reviewed the videos he watched while playing Lost and Found and my podcasting partner/nemesis Alice Bell reviewed Esoteric Ebb. She made do without me for this week’s Total Playtime, which addressed the main issues of the week before pivoting to endorse furry art.

Chief among the former was NVIDIA’s debut of DLSS 5. This tricks out existing games to give “photo-realistic” visuals through the magic of aftermarket gen-AI and was loved by Digital Foundry and hated by almost everybody else, including a number of developers whose work was featured in the announcement. NVIDIA’s CEO said

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. What a week it has been for blog posts. There have been good blogs, bad blogs, new blogs, and much discussion thereof across the internet. It's enough that you could begin to trick yourself into thinking that games media is healing, although I suspect this is in reality a consequence of its recent fragmentation. In any case, I am pleased to be able to link to so many independent writer-owned sites, of one kind or another, in the below roundup of good writing about videogames.

Duncan Fyfe wrote about lore for Remap by looking at the Elder Scrolls series, and talking to its fans and many of its writers about the often haphazard, contradictary way its world has been constructed, for better and worse.

During a dispute with his boss that a colleague remembered as about whether the world of The Elder Scrolls could accommodate Amazon women, Goodall quit the company. “I loved the original Elder Scrolls too much to stop arguing in their favor,” he said later. He had approached The Elder Scrolls full of zeal for the world and conviction in the stories that took place there. He had come into the world factory armed

Total Playtime: Stoatal Playtime; Our DLSS 5 Is ON

The slopping forecast

Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.

It's a news episode this week, and you know what that means: people getting cross about AI. The results are at least entertaining, though, starting with NVIDIA's DLSS technology which promises to yassify game characters regardless of circumstance or the artistic decisions of their creators. This is seemingly in service of photorealism, which has been the final goal of graphics card manufacturers since the days when they put weird CGI fairies on the boxes, but has never really been creatively interesting and never will be because we already know what reality looks like.

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Total Playtime Episode 31: Stoatal Playtime; Our DLSS 5 Is ON
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It nevertheless appears inevitable that the technology will be both widely available and widely used despite making the output actively worse, making it the videogame equivalent of TVs using motion smoothing by default, but in the meantime the memes have been pretty good and that's the best we can hope for in the grim darkness of the far

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

The sun is shining in Brighton, which means my appetite for going outside has returned and my appetite for playing games has greatly dimmed. Luckily I have no available friends nearby this weekend, and so I shall be inside playing videogames anyway.

What of you, our attractive and popular readers? Tell us if and what you're playing in the comments below.

Beavers on ziplines, some of which are robots, float over farms full of lush crops.
I hope these beavers have union protections.

Timberborn

Initially launched in Early Access in 2021, this colony sim features sandbox building and water physics, allowing you to construct vast, hydroelectrically-powered cities of lumber with your populace of beavers. This week brought a 1.0 update, which changes the art and tutorial, adds tools to automate the operation of your city, and smooths the creation of mods. Top stuff.

Some peasants cross a bridge to enter through a stone gate and into a city surrounded by trees and a wooden fence.
Pencils were so big in medieval times.

Going Medieval

Initially launched in Early Access in 2021, this colony sim features sandbox building and deep citizenry management, allowing you to construct vast cities of stone with your populace of needy settlers. This week brought a 1.0 update, which changes the tutorial, adds new endgame objectives among other content, and smooths the management of your many workers. Top stuff.

Lots of baseball player headshots littered in formation across a baseball field.
Pure videogames.

Out

I want more backstabs in Slay The Spire 2's co-op mode

This is why people don't play games with me

When you come across a treasure chest in Slay The Spire 2, it pops open with the goody-bestowing effervescence of a piñata, a relic appears, and life is good. But what if two relics appeared? What if, as you extended your pointy-fingered hand to grab 'em, a second slinky arm came jutting into view to poke you and contest your choice. It is your brother's arm, and he has selected the same shiny trinket you would like. The hands shake violently and a showdown begins. In the deepest, dankest dungeons of this surreal realm, there is only one way to settle this. 

You do rock, paper, scissors. 

I've already praised the additive joys of Slay The Spire 2 - its fancy boss fights, tricksy minibosses, and the new doom-fuelled reaper character all please me greatly. Like me, you will be forgiven for shrugging off the sequel as a kind of roid embiggened remake, as if mere iteration is not a satisfactory approach for the godfather of all the card-based commupance we've endured for the last decade. It is good. And it has one more Strike up its sleeve: co-op card-slinging. A multiplayer crawl through even beefier enemies which

Lost And Found Co. review (of the YouTube videos I watched alongside it)

It could have lost the plot, and maybe I have

Lost And Found Co. is Where's Wally with a mouse pointer. You peer into orthographic worlds and you long to live within them: bustling city streets filled with colourful stores, buskers, and cute cats; a cluttered house that looks like it's fallen out of the pages of Kyoichi Tsuzuki's Tokyo Style; a park, a jungle, a swamp, a convenience store, an island bar, a cat cafe.

The game's objective is that you find a given list of items in each location to bring notoriety back to a shrine goddess and win a popularity contest against an evil corporate president. My objective, however, is to dissociate of an evening while watching YouTube videos on a second screen. So let's appraise Lost And Found Co. in how it enables my goals.

Video 1: Episode 43 by Quest For The Best

I haven't watched this anime and never will.

Second screens have been a commonplace part of PC gaming for decades, and today people refer to certain releases as "podcast games". It's certainly always been a regular part of how I play games. I used to watch Buffy The Vampire Slayer on an adjacent television while playing Counter-Strike betas; now I watch video

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