The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. I am a little late with The Lie-In today, such that it is no longer morning as this goes live. This is because I met up with Jonty in fleshworld on Friday night and we filled ourselves with the devil's liquid. The regret on Saturday was overpowering. Now it is Sunday and I am reborn via the medium of links to good videogame writing.

Star Fox released this past week. I am currently resisting the urge to buy it, at least until I've completed a couple of other Switch 2 games that sit in front of it in the queue. For now, I enjoyed Chris Schilling's review for Eurogamer.

Conscious as I am that memory is the most unreliable of narrators, I don't recall feeling quite so exhilarated by some of these stages. Katina's mothership is more imposing than ever, spitting out fighters by the dozen. Sector X's derelict base feels enormous as you pick your way through its ruins. Take the warp route on Meteos and your destination is positively kaleidoscopic, a proper feast for the eyes. It's not too much of a stretch to suggest this is close to the game its creators envisaged in their minds, before realising what the N64's specs limited them to.

For Kotaku, Jake Steinberg writes about some very different reasons for loving Star Fox 64.

Before the sprint to the Arwings was over, I loved Slippy Toad. He rented out the same part of my brain reserved for anyone else with that spark. A crush convinces you to begin secretly constructing a future around them. A crush transforms ordinary details into meaningful clues and chance encounters into cherished memories. Surely, before long, I’d be daydreaming about tonguing that frog under the bleachers.

In her newsletter, Marie Le Conte re-ran an old article about growing to like football, on her own terms. I understand the complexities of football, but my enjoyment of it very much lives in the level Le Conte talks about here.

2018 should have been the point at which I chose to learn more about football, but I didn’t. Instead, it’s when I realised that I never would, and I like football as it is. I like that football, the way I watch it, is incredibly straightforward. Either a team scores goals or it doesn’t. Little men run across a field for an hour and a half and hopefully the ball will end in a net at some point, but equally it may not.

Which prompted Kieron to link to his old piece about learning to love football via Sensible Soccer, first published by The Escapist and then over on his old blog. I've been bummed-out recently when hearing UK press express nostalgia for the NES, SNES and Mega Drive, while the Amiga and its fleet of British developers disappear from cultural memory, and I am, unrelatedly, currently writing something about football games that mentions Sensible Soccer. Maybe I will only write about Amiga games from now on.

Sensible Soccer was a cartoon of a football match, and cartooning is the art of magnification by removal. What remains is what the artist consider important. And in this cartoon simulation of football, you’re left with what is – basically – the core of football.

I'm a little late to this, but Aftermath's Chris Person wrote about an electronic music festival in New Jersey that took place during game five of the recent Knicks vs. Spurs NBA Finals. The organisers had no plans for how attendees could keep up with the match, and so a laptop balanced on a chair became the solution. Watch for something similar to take place if England are still in the World Cup by the time games industry conference Develop takes place next month.

In the big tent area where food and coffee were served, various ad-hoc setups quietly emerged on phones and laptops during Breadwoman’s set, a slow, haunted ambient performance piece that took place in a wooded grove involving a woman with a face of bread. Eventually these setups winnowed down to two laptops, and over time one laptop won out. The crowd grew and grew, which necessitated putting that laptop on a folding chair on top of the table so more people could see it.

Brendon Chung, developer behind 30 Flights Of Loving, Gravity Bone and the recent Skin Deep, wrote about readability in level design. I think this stuff is fun to think and learn about even if you don't design your own levels, because it'll increase your appreciation of others' work when you're playing it.

I like the work of art-pop outfit Rubblebucket, and lead singer Kalmia Traver continued in a similar style with (sometimes?) solo project Kalbells. Big, dreamy, dancey, flutey productions.

Sleep well, videogames.