The Lie-In

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 spiel," he says. "I was saying 'I was hoping we could come to some kind of agreement here.' And before I even had a chance to finish my thought, the guy on the other end of the line at Fox is like 'You mean, like a publishing deal?'".

On the subject of forgetting things: I meant to link this last week and then did not. For Bathysphere, Florence Smith Nicholls argues that you should make a zine about your favourite game. I strongly agree. Jank will, one day, make a zine.

I first made a zine about the queerness of archaeogaming back in 2018, but the most personal and weird one I ever made was in 2019 about the intimacy of playing the game Rayman 2 on a friend’s Nintendo 64. I love that zines are both spatially constrained but compositionally permissive - what does it matter if I scrawl across the page and make something rough around the edges for an audience in the single digits? That zine doesn’t just preserve the play experience I had as a child, it also preserves how I processed that memory seven years ago. A double image, a Xerox copy of a copy.

One of the wounded animals over at Kieron Gillen's blog published a review of Amberspire, the citybuilder from the makers of The Banished Vault.

The all-pervading presence of the crypt reminds me of London's old church cemeteries, crushed like dandelions between mishappen skyscrapers, refusing to be written out of the tale. It also immediately undercuts your primary objective of building a city populous and advanced enough to win recognition from other planets. However high your towers rise, your city is just another layer of debris and pollution applied to a strangely fruitful necropolis

For The Guardian, Keith Stuart picked eight of the greatest medical videogames, and took an appropriately broad approach.

Trauma Center: Under the Knife (2005, Nintendo DS): If you thought the Nintendo DS was all about cosy puzzle games, you were wrong. Developed by veteran publisher Atlus, this fascinating game was part surgery sim, using the handheld’s touchscreen and stylus for realistic operations, and part visual novel as lead character Dr Derek Stiles navigated life in a futuristic hospital. The game spawned a series of decent sequels and a live action TV pilot, which tragically was never commissioned.

A webpage that lists everything that your web browser hands over every time you visit a webpage.

Music this week is the latest from Yard Act. I don't like this as much as The Tench Coat Museum or A Vineyard For The North, but it's growing on me, and I'm glad they're back.

Sleep well, videogames.