The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. I am having an actual, proper lie-in this Sunday for possibly the first time in years, since I have no family appointments to keep. I look forward to waking up thick-headed, groggy and ill, like every 40-something when they get slightly more sleep than usual. Perhaps I can soothe my aching head with some good words about videogames.

Over at Aftermath, Luke Plunkett wrote about Soren Johnson's 4X game Old World, to explain what it gets right in its attempts to design around issues with the Civilization series.

I think a focused 4X game is a good 4X game. Why? By limiting its representation of history to a single era, Old World is able to invest in much more detailed and interesting diversions within that period than Civ has ever been able to manage. Most important of these is a dynasty and relationship system lifted straight from Crusader Kings, where every faction is made up of families and clans, and every major individual within them is represented by personality traits and skills, and the relationships they develop as a result.

Joshua Rivera reviewed Splatoon Raiders for The Guardian and liked it a lot less than many of his peers. I love an outlier.

Splatoon is Nintendo at its most offbeat, venturing forth in a direction few other game studios travel. And, according to sales, audiences outside of the company’s native Japan seem to struggle with how to receive it. In this context, Splatoon Raiders feels like a concession: Nintendo taking aside one of its rangier, peculiar creations and asking it to be a bit more normal. This is the biggest surprise about Splatoon Raiders: it is pedestrian.

Irish actress Brenda Fricker passed away last week, and so I re-watched this extraordinary interview from 2021. The gimmick of the Tommy Tiernan show is that Tiernan doesn't know who the guest is going to be until they walk out onstage, and this, plus the eerie quiet of a mid-Covid TV production and Fricker's unflinching honesty, produce an interview that discusses depression, pivots in the middle around a spontaneous poetry recital, and then finally veers into several funny show business anecdotes. The chummy banality of American celebrity video podcasts becomes almost unbearable by comparison.

I wrote the paragraph above and then the following day The Guardian published an article on the rise of gimmicky celebrity interviews. There's a 'why' in the title that the article never really answers, except for the implicit suggestion that it's because they perform well within short-form video algorithms. Perhaps that's all it is. Certainly I'm as guilty of watching these as anyone (the longer-form formats, at least), but occasionally I rediscover my self-respect and have to purge a bunch of channels.

But this year in particular, it’s not even the TikTok-iness of many interviews that feels so uniform – as mentioned, you can find the extra-long counterparts to balance out the minute-long nothing-bites. What’s become even more prevalent is what an older person might call the Fallon-ification of journalism, where a high-profile cast sits not for an interview but a series of games.

Beware of machine translated interviews, but I'll allow it for Miyamoto. Mario and Zelda's creator recently spoke to Famitsu and Video Game Chronicle pushed it through the translation bot.

“We’ve always focused on creating the best possible product to match the ‘fun gameplay’ we envision. I think that’s the only real difference. I might sound a bit arrogant saying this [laughs], but if you make things while constantly asking ‘will this make money right away?’ you can’t create anything truly unique or with broad appeal.”

I'm not a huge baseball fan, but I have had fun with early versions of Super Mega Baseball. For Remap, Samuel Horti wrote about his much deeper love for the series (sign-in required), and what has happened to the studio since it was acquired by EA.

A well-regarded studio responsible for a beloved franchise gets one last project out the door before being turned into a collection of warm bodies supporting the increasingly narrow slate of games that EA cares about. Projects are pitched and rejected, the founders depart, the franchise is abandoned, and the studio shambles on, feeding content into the microtransactional vortex that powers EA. It's a sad, familiar story… and in this case, one that's not quite that straightforward.

For Design Room, Duncan Fyfe wrote an oral history of the Addams Family pinball game. Fyfe has tremendous facility for pulling compelling stories from unexpected places.

Sharpe, who did not work in the pinball industry but had incredible facility as a player of pinball machines, went hands-on in the courtroom with the Gottlieb game Bank Shot and predicted that if he pulled the plunger just right, he could send the ball down the middle lane. By calling a trick shot and executing it, he overturned the ban and saved pinball that day. Pinball was a game — and he had mastered it.

I was torn between this and the smooth groove of their more recent, Sigur Rós-sampling single Concrete Glen, but music this week is Sylvan Esso's turn to '90s guitar fuzz, Hot Slob.

Sleep well, videogames.