The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. This week's main story involved Big Walk's use of AI and the IGF juror's who have publicly stated they won't vote for a game that makes any use of LLMs. The Lie-In isn't for recapping the news - Jonty did that yesterday - but lots of people wrote interesting articles and blog posts about the situation. So let's round up some links worth clicking.

AI researcher (and Jank pal) Mike Cook wrote In Defence Of Giving A Shit, which properly frames much of the discussion around the IGF.

The worst takes I have seen on this matter attempt to frame it as an extreme position on the part of the jurors who released the statement, or unfavourably compare this issue with another important issue, or toss around phrases like 'purity test' or therapyspeak. I really feel like we've lost all sense of perspective on AI as an issue. The IGF has no AI policy. It explicitly is asking people to draw their own lines. This group of people drew one. That you disagree with where the line is doesn't make it somehow extremist or unreasonable.

There were a lot of

Good morning, videogames. Nintendo's Ocarina Of Time remake has been released, after weeks, months, possibly an eternity of wide-angle lens discussions about whether remakes are healthy endeavours within an artistic ecosystem or craven, corrosive money-grabs designed to numb the proletariat with Class-A nostalgia. I find this discussion both reductive and tedious, and now the game is out some people want to continue having it. No! No!! I am putting my fingers in my ears and la-la-la-ing and instead reading articles about the actual videogame Ocarina Of Time. Join me.

Christian Donlan reviewed the remake for Eurogamer, getting at the larger resonance of The Game As Cultural Object while also illuminating what's great about the experience of playing it.

It is my bright delight today to be able to tell you that, around thirty years later, having just revisited the game in Nintendo's new remake, Ocarina of Time is still worth telling people about. It's still an adventure so surprising, so satisfying, so moving that I need to talk about it.

Nintendo regularly run interviews with their own developers. These are obviously a form of marketing, but they often contain real

Good morning, videogames. In contravention of the theme of this column, I have started setting my alarm for 7:30am every morning. That's the time I need to get up on school days, and I'm told - have been told, for years - that a consistent wake-up time will solve 15% of the things what ail me. So far I am just groggy and grumpy all the time, so no change. Perhaps you are still young, carefree, bundled in your blankets on a long lazy Sunday. I salute you. Take these links and leave me alone.

Aftermath have been running their regular Inside Baseball week. As part of that, Joshua Rivera offered advice for freelance games journalists: never pitch reviews. In a more perfect world he wouldn't need the disclaimer at the top, but I do like that he just comes out and says, "I am being a stinker."

Instead: have a thesis. Write about art. Make arguments. Tell an editor what you see in a game or movie or show, and how it speaks to a moment. How it's in conversation with other work. Tell them how Nathan Fielder's oeuvre is better understood through the

Good morning, videogames. It's Sunday morning and this is the Lie-In, which makes it the perfect time to offer you a cryptic crossword. If you haven't done the first Jankword yet, go do so now. Marsh has constructed not only a set of moderately devious clues, but a primer on how to play cryptic crosswords for the uninitiated. And if you're still not convinced to try solving it yourself, there are jokes around the margins. Tried it already? Then you may proceed below to some articles worth reading from across the rest of the web.

For Remap, Rowan Kaiser writes about the ways Star Wars Galactic Racer might not be a racing game, or perhaps not a good one, anyway.

Likewise Galactic Racer seems wholly uninterested in getting you to learn its tracks by any mechanism other than crashing every time you're surprised. There are no maps of the tracks shown, no best lines while racing, and while there are a few corners worth memorizing because they're difficult and demand careful navigation, more of the ones worth memorizing are because they're simply too difficult to visually parse whether something is a tunnel or

Good morning, videogames. All the best writing about videogames this week was published on Jank, including four reviews, four freelance articles, a podcast, several regulars (including this one) and a blog post about a chair. We still need 75 more paying members to be able to open up freelance submissions and expand our pool of writers, if any of this moves you. Otherwise, I will begrudgingly admit that other websites exist. Here's links to some of them.

I'm looking forward to the Ocarina Of Time remake, due for release on Switch 2 next month. I've not played the game since the N64 original was new, some 30 years ago, and I've forgotten most of its details. That might be ideal, going by Matthew Castle's preview of the remake for The Guardian.

The dilemma facing any remake, let alone of a game recognised as a genre-defining classic, is how closely you hew to the past. As with this year’s Star Fox revamp, Ocarina of Time finds Nintendo in a celebratory mode. It’s a polished victory lap for a game with little to prove. For newcomers it means seeing what the fuss is about

Good morning, videogames. This week's Lie-In is a relatively short one, but several of these links are to long reads that will fill your comfy Sunday morning all the same. Let's dig in.

Earlier this year, before the Microsoft divestment, some staff at Double Fine tried to unionise. Then two weeks later, they retracted their petition. For Kotaku, Rebekah Valentine spoke to current and former staff to find out what happened. This is excellent reporting.

However, over the course of the thread, the tone began to shift, with more openly concerned and even negative voices speaking up. Several self-admittedly ineligible people expressed discomfort with having not been told about the union in advance, suggesting that all employees should have a say in the decision, even ineligible ones. Multiple others, again mostly (but not entirely) ineligible, stated that they supported unions generally, but a few also argued that unionizing wasn't right for Double Fine due to its unusual make-up.

As part of that report, Valentine also conducted a lengthy interview about the situation with Tim Schafer, published here in full. I think Schafer deserves some credit for being willing to sit down and talk about

Good morning, videogames. Thanks for all your responses to last week's question about which reviewers have a definable aesthetic taste. My personal opinion is that I don't think there are many good answers to the question, because the realities of modern games media don't provide opportunities for writers to work as critics or with editors long enough to refine their taste and their voice. I'm taking the number of commenters that named designers rather than writers, or writers long-since retired, as a sign you all agree. Don't correct me. Thank god for Sin though, eh? Let's move on to another week of links to articles you might enjoy.

I've wanted to read something in-depth about the booming Pokémon fangame scene for a while. Ana Diaz delivered just that for Fansplaining this week.

The popularity of the fangames themselves attests to the central role they play in the Pokémon fandom, which is massive: Pokémon is estimated to be the highest-grossing media franchise in the world. Fangames have huge audiences; Pokémon Uranium, for example, has reportedly been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. A quick search on YouTube reveals that video

Good morning, videogames. I have a question. Who are the videogame reviewers that, to you, have a definable point of view? I don't mean that you like their work, or that you agree with it. I mean, tell me the writers who have a coherently expressed set of aesthetic principles that they apply, resolutely and consistently, in their work? Such that you can say: that guy "hates this type of stuff", that gal "loves this type of stuff"? Maybe that "stuff" is a whole genre, or just a mode of play, a style, a trope, a design choice, anything at all, but whatever it is, it's a defining aspect of that critic's work. Alright? Alright. Now here are some articles worth reading from across the past week.

Japanese game studios have been relatively shielded from the choppy seas of the recent games industry. For This Week In Videogames, Francisco Dominguez tried to find out why.

From the outside looking in, it's a harsh indictment of Western studio culture. Due to Japan's strong labour protections that severely restrict the use of layoffs, reckless cycles of overhiring followed by layoffs never became a regular occurrence domestically. Prominent