The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. In contravention of the theme of this column, I have started setting my alarm for 7:30am every morning. That's the time I need to get up on school days, and I'm told - have been told, for years - that a consistent wake-up time will solve 15% of the things what ail me. So far I am just groggy and grumpy all the time, so no change. Perhaps you are still young, carefree, bundled in your blankets on a long lazy Sunday. I salute you. Take these links and leave me alone.

Aftermath have been running their regular Inside Baseball week. As part of that, Joshua Rivera offered advice for freelance games journalists: never pitch reviews. In a more perfect world he wouldn't need the disclaimer at the top, but I do like that he just comes out and says, "I am being a stinker."

Instead: have a thesis. Write about art. Make arguments. Tell an editor what you see in a game or movie or show, and how it speaks to a moment. How it's in conversation with other work. Tell them how Nathan Fielder's oeuvre is better understood through the prism that is The Sims, or the similarities you see between Rockstar's methodically slow and intricate approach to game design and the resurgent appeal of doorstop novels, three-hour films, and our desire to disappear. Have ideas only you can have. Build a foundation from which you can tell people: This is what my criticism looks like. I'd love to bring this approach to an upcoming release.

Sticking with Aftermath, Ashley Bardhan spoke to horror game developers. They think you're cool.

"I think that the horror audience is particularly open to games that challenge them," de Fault observes. "Horror fans like to have friction with their games; after all, the entire genre is founded on experiencing a negative emotion. So I think that fans of the genre tend towards valuing enriching experiences more."

Social media is awash with videos which mash videogames together. Keza MacDonald explains where they came from for The Guardian, and the answer won't surprise you at all.

Claude is now able to spit out a game’s source code from its compiled version overnight. Tell it to combine two games and it will help with that, too. There is not zero human involvement: from what I understand, the best of these mashups have needed significant human tweaking. But this has completely transformed video game modding because you now need drastically less time and computing knowledge to be able to pull off massive projects. It now takes an evening rather than months of work.

Nathan Brown has also been pondering the rise of AI-assisted decomps, particularly as it relates to ports and preservation. He doesn't know what to think.

In case you’ve not been paying attention, the last few weeks have heralded an explosion in fan-made — well, fan-directed, really; they have been overwhelmingly, and I suspect in some cases entirely, made by Anthropic's Claude — PC ports of classic, largely abandoned games. Bloodborne is far and away the headline act, but it is just the frighteningly sexy tip of the iceberg; pick a game that only you have ever loved and seem to still remember, and chances are there’s already a Github page for its ‘recomp’. You miss Wet? Tenchu Z? Blue Stinger? Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights??? You could be playing them all, and many, many others, right now on your PC — upscaled to modern resolutions, running in widescreen or ultrawide, with full controller support and all the graphics settings, cheats and tweaks you can shake a stick at.

Phantom Blade Zero isn't my kind of thing and so wasn't really on my radar, but I enjoyed Emma Kent's review of it for Eurogamer.

This is Phantom Blade Zero at its absolute peak: cinematic, free-flowing, and full of surprises. Its combat channels the seamless motion and creative choreography of the very best kung fu films, with some frankly astonishing combat animations that seem almost limitless in their ingenuity and variety. It's a game of extraordinary beauty, with jaw-dropping landscapes and hugely ambitious combat encounters. If only - if only! - it could maintain this incredible level of fluidity in all areas of its epic tale.

Emma is also the editor of Eteo Archetypes, which this week published a piece by Robert Yang on the Quake Brutalist Jam.

We Quake modders happily squat inside this ancient world that gamers have long abandoned. We've been quietly fixing up the place, little by little. Decades later, we've added fancy features like fog and sunlight, upgraded the obscure QuakeC scripting language, and built a whole new modern level editor that rivals most other 3D design tools. Few outsiders knew of our secret renaissance... until now.

Music this week is the catchy, Canadian, '90s guitar pop of Sloan.

Ba ba bada ba.

Sleep well, videogames.