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Good morning, videogames. I have spent much of my spare time this week spring cleaning, and I'm not done yet. Before we begin another day of scrubbing, lets stay in bed a little longer and enjoy some fine words about games.

For Teen Vogue, Nicole Carpenter asked, why are thin bodies the default in games? It's for the expected reasons, but Carpenter speaks to actors, animators and motion capture experts to explain the challenges and all the ways it's wholly achievable.

Problems arise when there's a big difference in the skeleton of an actor and the body they're being tied to. Drop a short actor's skeleton into a tall character's body and you've got a "spatial problem," Counsell says. "A four-foot tall character takes five steps forward, they've traveled a few meters," he says. "A ten-foot tall character takes four steps forward, they've traveled tens of meters." A short character with an unnaturally long stride, or a tall character with tiny, fast steps, is just not going to look right.

I have yet to start 007: First Light, which means I am yet to read any reviews of

Good morning, videogames. A heatwave has struck the UK this weekend, a country where all the buildings are designed to retain heat. Unfortunately I must remain indoors, because my skin is designed the same way. Let's take a sweaty, sunburnt look at some writing about videogames from across the week.

Over at Remap Radio, Dia Lacina took on the unenviable task of reviewing ZA/UM's new game, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies.

We learn in the opening minutes of Zero Parades that CASCADE is the only agent to return from a job gone bad, and now she's warehoused in a filing cabinet-gulag for failed spies called "The Freezer." This is where you stew in self-accusatory depression, spending your days drowning under paperwork while you hold trauma's finger and point it right at yourself. This is spy hell.

The scandal-soaked rat kings over at the Jank spiritual predecessor didn't manage a full review of Zero Parades (unlike us), but Edwin Evans-Thirlwell did deign to bring his takes-one-to-know-one expertise to explaining why ZA/UM's latest is "both bootleg Disco Elysium and a spirited interrogation of fake culture in

Good morning, videogames. It has been a week of everyone, everywhere writing about Mixtape (including me), which means our links mostly have a theme this time. The theme is: articles I disagree with. Is Mixtape worth a perfect score? Is it cheap pablum? Is it too nostalgic? Is its depiction of the '90s too fast and loose and therefore not nostalgic enough? Is it an Australian psy-op? Are teens unlikeable? Are games journalists unlikeable? We will not answer any of these questions (except maybe the last one, every day forever), but here are just a handful of the articles I disagreed with this week.

Cameron Kunzelman wrote about how and why Mixtape deploys its music, and whether it can be effective in a world of nostalgic Spotify playlists.

What is maybe more notable about Mixtape, and what might bring people to clear defensiveness or derision when they encounter it, is that the kind of sampling it does with the database of culture is about your emotions. Bugs Bunny shows up in Space Jam because he is intellectual property that will draw Looney Tunes fans closer to the product, and he exists in contextless space and time to be summoned

Good morning, videogames. We did it. We made it through the first week of Brendy's paternity leave and Jank did not immediately crumble. Sure, you might save some empathy for Brendy and his partner, exhausted as they no doubt are, but Jonty and I are the true casualties here. We are the Timon and Pumbaa of Jank, our trio's down to two, and the blog won't fill itself. Let's lift the log of the internet and see if we can find some slimy yet satisfying writing about videogames underneath.

I remember following the Nakatomi Plaza mod for Half-Life way back when, but had completely forgotten that it got turned into a full retail game, and had never connected that its developers went on to make the modern MechWarriors. Rick Lane tells the story for PC Gamer, which includes plenty of twists and turns.

Holtslander, however, says that he called Fox Interactive, and that the plan was not to persuade them to let the modders make a Die Hard game, but simply to allow them to use the assets they'd created to make something else. "I got connected to somebody there and I started my

Good morning, videogames. I'm a few hours late posting this today because, frankly, I was too tired last night to face putting it together. I am doing it now, on Sunday, squeezed between familial appointments. You may be doing similarly as you read this, a collection of fine writing about videogames from across the past week.

Over at Ars Technica, Kyle Orland spoke to some of the players who bought into and lost money on Legacy, Molyneux and 22cans' short-lived web3 game.

In addition to Molyneux’s usual game design bluster, though, was a newfound enthusiasm for the idea of making money from simply playing a game. “And because it’s a blockchain game, you earn,” Molyneux said at Galaverse, leaning on the last word for emphasis. “For a game designer, imagine how exciting it is to know that a game design that you’ve been working on, people will be earning money with it!”

MindsEye developers Build A Rocket Boy said that the game's DLC would contain real "evidence" of sabotage committed against them and their game. For Polygon, Giovanni Colantonio went looking.

Like MindsEye itself, all of this is painfully stupid. Blacklisted is a petty