The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. As you read this, I pray that I am having an actual lie-in. I must recuperate after spending all of Saturday tired and wounded, after having spent all of Friday evening fighting off the brigand Edwin from aging ad-funded webzone RPS. After several hours of struggle, he fled back into the underbrush, his devious mission unfulfilled, and his current whereabouts are unknown. I suspect we shall see him and his rotten ilk again. For now, at least, I retain the strength necessary to share some articles, videos and podcasts worth consuming from across the past week.

Sony closed down Bluepoint Games, the studio best known for remaking Demon's Souls, without them having released a new game under Sony's ownership. Nathan Brown tackled this with customary scorn in his Hit Points newsletter this week.

With new blockbusters taking longer and costing more than ever to make, and nostalgia never a more powerful currency, shuttering a proven specialist in remakes and remasters is frankly insane. Casting out a team of such deep technical expertise and, more crucially, such broad institutional knowledge — Bluepoint doesn’t just know its own tools and technology, but also those of the studios whose games it has modernised, from Sony Santa Monica to Naughty Dog, Team Ico to FromSoftware — is simply inexplicable.

It's part paywalled, but I also enjoyed Nathan's surprise Saturday newsletter to address the retirement of Phil Spencer.

Hit Points has, to put it mildly, been no fan of Phil Spencer over the last few years. But as he saunters off, snowboard under one arm and sixteen of his favourite game-logo T-shirts under the other, for the final time I thought we should give him his dues before we consider where it all fell apart. Things did look pretty good for Xbox under his auspice for a while.

I had been planning on playing and writing about Vholume since I saw it on Bsky a few weeks ago. Now that I have, I went back and read Christian Donlan's take on the game in last week's Bathysphere newsletter. Well worth it.

Speedrunning is the point here, I think. You’re certainly encouraged to race through the first level as fast as you can to open up the second, and even more pleasing, level. What I love about this is it’s only when you’re moving at speed that Vholume works its greatest trick. You’re a thing of pure momentum, your eyes and hands making decisions without the rest of the brain’s involvement. And yet every few seconds you race past something - or slide or wall-run past - that your brain only registers, moments later, and then tells you that you kind of want to go back and take a second look at that thing you almost saw.

I'm not sure this interview with Tony Gilroy is as forbidden as it makes out, but it's still cheering to hear the Andor writer talk frankly about his show's themes and their relevance to the present moment.

So you get out your Fascism for Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible. How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used? So I don’t think it’s prescience so much as the sad familiarity of fascism and the karaoke menu of things that you go through to do it. You could list them from the show, or you could list them from the newspaper.

Harper's Magazine sent Sam Kriss to profile tech founder Roy Lee and others from a supposedly new trend of "agentic" people who, rather than those with any particular skills, are being backed by venture capitalists. "The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way," explains the article, which goes on to reveal what you already suspect: that there is a dark nothingness at the core of most of these people. They're not even aiming to get rich, because money is so abundant and accessible as to be meaningless. Instead they are a mass of men seeking to live a life of the loudest desperation possible.

There was something he very badly wanted to impress on me, which was that Cluely cultivates a fratty, tech-bro atmosphere. Their pantry was piled high with bottles of something called Core Power Elite. I was offered a protein bar. The inside of the wrapper read 'Daily intentions: Be my boss self'. “We’re big believers in protein,” Roy said. “It’s impossible to get fat at Cluely. Nothing here has any fat.” The kitchen table was stacked with Labubu dolls. “It’s aesthetics,” Roy explained. “Women love Labubus, so we have Labubus.” He showed me his bedroom, which was in the office; many Cluely staffers also lived there.

Bijan Stephen, writer and game designer at Compulsion Games, asks what it means to make something. Jank was borne of some of the same thoughts discussed within

A Do It Yourself mindset that really meant do it ourselves. It meant contributing. If you wanted to be a part of the scene, you did something. You played in a band or you started a record label or you put on shows or you wrote a zine. Or maybe you brought some food for the touring bands playing in a tiny apartment. Or you did all these things and more. I found this inspiring. The idea that art wasn’t just for everyone, but it was something for anyone who cared enough to participate.

A visual and animated explanation of how dithering works.

I still really want to play Mewgenics, but for some reason I started StarVaders, a different turn-based tactics game, when faced with the opportunity. I continue to listen to McMillen on podcasts however, and his appearance on Chris Plante's Post Games is worthwhile.

I won't watch this until I play Cairn, but Jay Castello has a new video essay about climbing mountains in games, also including discussion of Peak, Jusant and Baby Steps.

Music this week is Picture Window by Japanese Breakfast. I feel extremely late to the party - more of a Japanese Brunch, if you like - but I have been listening to this song over and over for days.

Sleep well, videogames.