On a personal note:
1. We fucking did it. I am so proud of everyone involved.
2. Unionizing is a goddamn fight, regardless of any, ah, "diplomatic" coverage on the matter. This is a general observation, unrelated to today's news -- of course.
3. UK devs: your turn. DMs are open if you need help.
The workers at ZA/UM Studio have unionized.
First recognised games union in the UK, too. May many others follow.
www.gameworkers.co.uk/workers-at-z...
This week: RDR2, TotK, ACVI, and several other games that aren't acronyms!
critical-distance.com/2023/10/22/o...
hello it took two attempts but i made some bread, hope you do something nice for yourself too!
And my new #gamestudies friends, if you find yourself even more curious abt #HistoricalGameStudies and #GamingthePastinEd, I'd be delighted if you checked out gamingthepast.net (there's a book too, but the site is where I've collected almost 20 years of work on games in and outside of history ed.)
deep-hell.com/swim-sink/
Faith moves us forward. It is a propellant. It is sometimes a convenient excuse for violence.
@feelthebryn.bsky.social
Wrote about Hydlide, a game notorious in North America for sounding and looking and playing poorly, but it's actually a vital piece of action RPG history that, for a few reasons, never got its due outside Japan. One of those reasons? The failure to update it even a little bit for 1989's standards.
hahaha not me; I could sail through Lost Levels like it was nothing when I was 9, but now you throw that shit at me and I'm just, you want me to do WHAT?
I reviewed Saltsea Chronicles for @pastemagazine.bsky.social !!! glad to give the new @gutefabrik.bsky.social a Paste 9.7 (i.e. go play this, it’s special)
Full sequence of the annular solar eclipse at Shiprock, New Mexico. This was a dream composition of mine. So much time, energy, and money went into making it happen. I'm forever grateful to the Navajo for letting me shoot it from sacred ground. An experience I'll never forget.
I see a dozen gaps and I already know the names of half
A very kind friend gifted me a smartwatch and the thing I love most about it is now I get to feel like shit about the 5800 steps I get in on a work day because the watch thinks I should be getting 10,000
They absolutely had me with the intro cutscene dialogue; I just found the pacing of the following half hour and drip-fed battle tutorials a bit much
One day I'll make it through Soul Hackers 2's intriguing but still very long introduction to see the game on the other side.
When I see some middle-aged neoliberal doing corporate apologia on here I have to wonder what prompted them to choose the trans shitposters/sex workers/autistic millennials site of all sites for their pulpit
The weird granular thing that gives me hope is the Hamster CEO saying they conceive the Arcade Archives series, which launched in 2017 and is mostly a Switch initiative, as being about 50% complete to what they want to eventually release 👀
It feels like the burden that settlers should be assuming in rethinking the hegemonic structures that contribute to *ongoing* oppression of Indigenous peoples in this country is being passed along to students who are both new here *and* also oppressed by the same or similar structures.
I'm seeing an increase across faculties here in (well intentioned!) assignments asking students to engage with Indigeneity and historical colonial injustices in Canada, but I think these assignments were designed for a settler audience rather than the actual student audience taking these courses.
For Bullet Points, I tried to figure out what Starfield, ostensibly a game about space exploration, actually thinks space exploration is. Unsurprisingly, it's mostly a vehicle for becoming the specialest guy there ever was bulletpointsmonthly.com/2023/10/05/a...
It is essential to fascism's endurance that you mistake stupid people as simply evil, and evil people as simply stupid.
Happy to see Remap launch their full site and look forward to their continued success.
If you missed our stream, Remap's big announcement today was the re-launch of remapradio.com. Not only does it look awesome, but it heralds some big news: we're bringing back writing. Many of us at Waypoint are writers at heart, and we don't want to lose that at Remap.
I like Analogue's products but I really do not like their business model, practices, or branding. Their identity is predicated on further and continued gentrification of retro games, turning it into a playground for guys in their forties who got in just before the middle class evaporated.
Some speculations:
1) It's gonna be expensive, moreso than the Duo. The FPGA grunt to drive an N64 core won't be cheap
2) If Analogue does PS1 or Saturn, expect one or the other in two years
3) I think Analogue increasingly sees themselves in competition with upscalers and modders
If this place ever gets promoted posts I hope it's sooner than later so the site is still small enough that I can personally make an outsized contribution to making each and every promoted account here miserable
Reskeet with a banger pic of your cat
I recently re-watched The Matrix films with a friend and I was struck not with smug condescension that we used to think trenchcoats and polarized lenses were cool, but rather with a bit of melancholy that we used to think computers were cool.
