The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. All the best writing about videogames this week was published on Jank, including four reviews, four freelance articles, a podcast, several regulars (including this one) and a blog post about a chair. We still need 75 more paying members to be able to open up freelance submissions and expand our pool of writers, if any of this moves you. Otherwise, I will begrudgingly admit that other websites exist. Here's links to some of them.

I'm looking forward to the Ocarina Of Time remake, due for release on Switch 2 next month. I've not played the game since the N64 original was new, some 30 years ago, and I've forgotten most of its details. That might be ideal, going by Matthew Castle's preview of the remake for The Guardian.

The dilemma facing any remake, let alone of a game recognised as a genre-defining classic, is how closely you hew to the past. As with this year’s Star Fox revamp, Ocarina of Time finds Nintendo in a celebratory mode. It’s a polished victory lap for a game with little to prove. For newcomers it means seeing what the fuss is about without having to scrutinise the N64 original on unflattering flatscreen TVs.

I am now damned to be suspicious of niche blogs with brief, Wikipedia-citing articles, but if you're a font fan like me, then this invitation to consider the fonts of the original Gameboy and its packaging is worth setting suspicions aside for.

The Game Boy logo uses Gill Sans, set in all caps and italics and utilizing tight kerning. Gill Sans was designed by Eric Gill and first released in 1928 by Monotype. Two logo variants exist; a primary logo set in Gill Sans Italic, and a secondary logo using bolder letterforms. These are not from Gill Sans Bold Italic, but were rather emboldened artifically.

Relatedly, the internet is beset by crawlers of all kinds, many of them now AI-derived. The Crawler Zoo imprisons those crawlers and tells you about them.

Hayao Miyazaki wanted to adapt an underground, sorta-violent American comic in the late '70s. He couldn't get the rights, but its influence did alter his art and storytelling thereafter, writes Animation Obsessive.

Later in the '80s, Miyazaki and Mœbius became friends and mutual fans. Corben, though, seemed to have zero curiosity about any of this stuff. In an interview before his death nearly 40 years later, he said, "I'm afraid I don't know anything about Hayao Miyazaki or his work."

Marc Weidenbaum writes about making music in the age of AI, but really his thoughts on craft are relevant whatever your medium.

The first is don't let anyone or anything, or anything acting like anyone, or anyone promoting anything, convince you that craft is outdated or will ever be outdated; you will only improve, only make the sounds you imagine in your mind's ear and feel in yourself, by working steadily to achieve them. Also recognize that expected paths lead to unlikely ends the more patiently and curiously, guided by instinct and experience, you walk those paths. There is always an excuse to not put in the work. If you allow "AI" (I put it in quotes because it's less a specific thing, in this context, than what is often cast as, to borrow a historical term, a specter) to become that excuse, well, it's unfortunate, but there would have been other excuses. So, the best thing to do is put the threat you may perceive from AI in a tidy little box full of all those other excuses, don't distinguish it from them, and get to work.

For Bloomberg, Jason Schreier visited Rockstar in the run-up to the GTA6 launch to discuss the making of the game and the re-making of the studio's culture over the past several years. This is a fairly broad overview, written for a mainstream audience, and so maybe doesn't go as hard on some of those cultural issues (and union-busting allegations) as you might like, but I think there are still quotes in here that it's good to have on record.

Even after the firings, unionization efforts continued at Rockstar. Over the summer the group asked for voluntary recognition and has been talking to company management every week. Kolbe says it's been a positive process. "We go where the team goes," she says. "So if they want a union, they will have a union."

Random encounters are annoying, writes game designer Eric Merz.

But it's because of this, that I firmly believe that they have a place and a purpose. They rip me out of that single-minded pursuit of my next objective and confront me with a problem I have to deal with right here and right now. They make the murky in-between spaces real, tangible and threatening.

James Bridle asked various LLMs how to build a chair with the scrap wood he had available, and then constructed the results. As an experiment, I think this is sub-par in several ways, but it's a good article.

What we have here is, quite literally, a chair designed by someone who has read a lot about chairs but never actually sat in one. They know what a chair should look like, what it should do, the mechanics of how one is put together, the physics of holding you up. But they have no embodied experience of the world, no history with chairs or any other object, no physical memory. They don't know how it feels, not merely to sit in a chair, but to encounter one in the world, to place it among other things in a home, to live with it, to be around it every day as one goes about the mundane business of life.

Geordie jazz has taken up a portion of my week in the shape of Wor Jackie by Knats. The song is a collaboration between the jazz trio and spoken word poet Cooper Robson, and the title is a reference to beloved post-war footballer Jackie Milburn. But really you can just enjoy it for the drums. Like it? Consider supporting them on Bandcamp.

Sleep well, videogames.