The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. Some weeks, no great writing about gaming comes to me organically and I need to make a special effort to go looking for it. I hope you appreciate the sacrifices I have made for you this week in reading and rejecting several dreadful reviews, previews and features to find even a handful I could bring myself to share. Thankfully, once the games are out of the way, I get to link to a great and somewhat horny article by a nonagenarian.

One of the pumping limpets clinging to the walls of bilge-filled cultural adulterant PC Gamer With Airs wrote a review of Roman Sands RE:Build that is worth putting your waders on for.

Each of those component games is a short masterpiece, executed with huge prowess at every level of the art, sound, design and writing. They might seem totally dissimilar, at first. One game is a hyperactive, time-looping hotel job simulator in which you tend to some cartoonishly awful older guests, shifting incrementally between times of day as you hurry between parts of a garish and phantasmagorical resort that is being menaced by an approaching sun. It's a place without memory, in which activities reset when you stroll back into the sea at moonrise - a lovely spectacle of swirling stars and blissfully solid darkness.

Former Videogamer and VG247 man Tom Orry turned his newsletter Low Poly Mess to the task of savaging misleading headlines this week. You'll have seen exactly these kinds of headlines all over the internet, and it's always cathartic to hear someone yell about it.

Make no mistake, I’m about to name, shame, and explain a number of the worst offenders I’ve noticed. I have no issues with the writers being asked to come up with these headlines (and I suspect lots are given formulas to adhere to), but I wouldn’t shed a single tear if the sites themselves folded into oblivion and those at the top lost a lot of money. Trash doesn’t deserve success and as long as they exist the internet is a worse place.

Germinate is a "mini blog about indie visual novels from a rotating collection of writers".

Steam Hype is a new PC games site from the publishers of Nintendo Life written primarily by Dominic Tarason.

More or less everyone quit Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra). Editor-in-chief Danielle Riendeau wrote a farewell post, which may suggest a reason why.

What happened to game journalism... well, it's more of a niche, but I can say only that reporting honestly on layoff after layoff and corporate malfeasance writ large and executives gambling the whole industry down the drain was tough, but somebody had to do it.

But it's not something one can do without editorial independence.

Roger Angell was a sportswriter, sometimes called the best ever writer about baseball, and a contributor to The New Yorker. For that magazine in 2014, he wrote This Old Man (Archive.ph link), about the experience of being 94-years-old. Angell lived until he was 101 and died in 2022.

Here in my tenth decade, I can testify that the downside of great age is the room it provides for rotten news. Living long means enough already. When Harry died, Carol and I couldn't stop weeping; we sat in the bathroom with his retrieved body on a mat between us, the light-brown patches on his back and the near-black of his ears still darkened by the rain, and passed a Kleenex box back and forth between us. Not all the tears were for him. Two months earlier, a beautiful daughter of mine, my oldest child, had ended her life, and the oceanic force and mystery of that event had not left full space for tears. Now we could cry without reserve, weep together for Harry and Callie and ourselves. Harry cut us loose.

Paul Ford is an AI moderate, which means he manages to make pretty much everyone mad all of the time. He's back in The New York Times this week: "A.I. Slopware Is Everywhere Now. Nobody Is Using It."

For a while, I must admit, it looked as if software developer roles like mine were done for. How could we fight against tireless robots? But our industry is slowly realizing that making truly cutting-edge software still requires humans to think and work together, to maximize their skill sets and to practice their respective crafts. A.I. can write very good software, but it also makes it easy to do someone else's job badly, which is part of why all those projects fail. Now that everyone can code, it's become clearer why many shouldn't.

London's "hottest lesbian bar" closed down suddenly and its Instagram account turned into a dog groomers. The Londoner investigated with a story that goes places, albeit never quite living up to its opening.

It was only after two months of frantic, bordering on obsessive, investigation, featuring deep dives into financial records, council licensing databases and anonymous interviews, that I was able to put together a picture of what may be one of the most bizarre sagas of my career to date. It's an absurd story of sitcom proportions that pulls together a mansion full of mummified cats, secret business deals and a man only referred to as "the demon twink".

Music this week is '90s Kate Bush-sampling dance track Something Good by the Utah Saints. Dance music from this era often now sounds to me like it's from an Amiga game (and not just because of Burning Rubber). Which is to say, it sounds like a banger.

Sleep well, videogames.