The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. Last week's Lie-In was written in advance to cover for my absence, and frankly it was rude for people to continue publishing articles while I was away. Now this week's Lie-In needs to somehow contain almost two weeks of links to writing about videogames. Terrible for me; a bumper crop for you.

Aftermath launched Hater Week, a batch of articles in which they got a lot off their chests. I love this idea. Here's Gita Jackson on why survival games are annoying.

A video game character does not need to eat, drink, or sleep. They do not need to take their meds every day. They don’t go to the bathroom, or get hair cuts, or trim their nails—all these tiny chores that take up time in my life that I never think about but must complete. So why, why, would I play a video game where doing all these chores is not only necessary, but the point.

Speaking of haters, academic and translator Emily Wilson discussed her distaste for Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey. Wilson published a translation of the Odyssey in 2017 and knows her stuff, at least as far as the text is concerned, and doesn't tread lightly in her withering estimation of the film. I love this.

My teenagers had a good time. Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely. It’s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display – and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.

Which returns us to Aftermath, and to Gita Jackson, who had a hater's response to Wilson's review and expressed her love for action movies.

What has made me feel defensive over The Odyssey—a film I really liked but didn’t quite love—is that her disdain appears to extend to Nolan’s chosen form of the action movie. Nolan has made a lot of action movies. I think they encompass the majority of his career. While I think the movies he makes are largely pretty dumb, he has a real talent for spectacle which is enhanced by his technical ability. What I’m saying is: whenever I see that real, actual 747 crash into a building and explode in Tenet I hoot and holler like a child giddy on lemonade. Seeing that kind of stuff, artfully composed, is one of the reasons why I love movies.

The Steam Library of Babel, a piece of flash ficiton by Matthew Seiji Burns, writer of Eliza.

Inset into the other four walls of each room are alcoves holding small gray desks, flush with the recessed area. In front of each desk is a white faux-leather gaming chair with a headrest, armrests, and a small lumbar support pillow. The chairs are surprisingly comfortable. Even after all this time, I still find myself spending indeterminate eternities in their embrace, absorbed in the wonders of the Library.

Ojiro Fumoto followed up the wonderful Downwell with Poinpy, a mobile platformer that was trapped within the Netflix app until delisted around a year ago. Somehow, Poinpy has returned, and Game Developer tells the story. The story is short: the Netflix deal was only ever a timed exclusive, but there are some other interesting bits in the article, and Poinpy deserves more attention.

"Funny story is, the title being 'Poinpy' was the first thing that was decided about the game, even before we had any concept for it. Me and the lead (sole) artist on the game were trying to get a project going together and we sort of jammed out ideas, one of which was his 'Poinpee' sketch (shown below)," explains Fumoto.

Speaking of throwing things down wells, the haters still locked inside IGN's least haunted basement took a break from removing all the images from old articles to play Company Of Heroes' roguelite strategy spin-off.

At the start of each game you're in a weak state. You have a tiny roster of units you can field – in the case of the British, just engineers and a slow-moving anti-tank gun – and your enemy will soon outnumber and outgun you. Happily, with each wave your capabilities expand. You might be offered two new unit types to pick from, or two passive upgrades, or two active abilities. This means from game to game, the forces you can field and how they behave changes depending on what cards you draw.

I am intrigued by Bad Magpie, which is clearly more than the Goose Game derivative it could be dismissed as by lesser observers. For The Guardian, Chris Schilling spoke to its developers about their goals and the comparison.

That has led to a few happy accidents, as the studio builds a sandbox that feels truly reactive to the player’s input, bolstered by Eli Rainsberry’s deft audio design that gives each object its own sonic palette. “We’re testing the whole time, so we get to see what [players] want to do and try to accommodate that – or at least make a joke that gestures at it,” Batchelor says. For all that the scope has crept, there have been a few judicious cuts: a keenness to “degoosify” the game, as Fernandez puts it, led to a model village being removed, House House having got there first.

Also at The Guardian, Dominik Diamond wrote about trying to get his family together for one last night of videogames before they and their grown children begin to go their separate ways.

Through it all, we had games. They always brought us back together. Not just us all hunkering over Super Mario Kart like some kind of UN-mandated family therapy, but the conversations that happen when any of us spy another playing something new. Games are a cultural touchstone that helped us crack through the veneer of disagreements and distrust and remind us that we have more things in common than we sometimes feel.

For Remap, Duncan Fyfe wrote about Tyranny, Obsidian's cult RPG about being the villain, which is now ten years old.

A fair criticism of the traditional video game core-loop is that it codes the hoarding of power as cool. Games are worlds in which unfathomable ability and authority is concentrated in the individual. What are the implications of building deeply-simulated worlds populated by helpless supplicants and murderous mobs and investing the total control of that world and its people in the player? What does that mean for the fiction, what does that mean for real life? Games for the most part ignore these implications. Tyranny however takes the premise and presents the pursuit of power as a stressful dead end.

This is a great feature-length documentary about two guys who decide to get into extreme birdwatching, and it's free on YouTube.

How many times have you heard this drum beat, this bass line, this rhythm guitar? It's practically an entire genre unto itself, camped out in the shadow of Nile Rodgers, yet it's undeniable that I keep returning to Milk And Honey, the new song by Milk Talk.

Sleep well, videogames.