Reading List October 2020 (Patreon)

Happy Halloween folks! This whole pandemic sure does put a damper on things, but you’re bound to get a whole bunch of trick-or-treaters stopping by anyway. So while you’re manning the door, utterly incapable of getting anything done because someone’s hitting the doorbell every 10 minutes, this month’s reading list is more than enough to get you through the night!

Second Opinions

Whenever I finish a review, I usually end up watching a few other reviews or other related content afterwards. Here’s some of the best stuff other people have had to say about the games I’ve been talking about lately!

Tangibility in Deep Space: The Cockpits of Star Wars: Squadrons by Cole Henry: Touch is not one of the senses usually invoked by video games, but Henry goes into detail about how Squadrons made a universe he felt like he could reach out and touch.

Star Wars: Squadrons Has a Fun Campaign, but It’s Missing the Brilliance of TIE Fighter’s Military Flavor Text by Wes Fenlon:  Fenlon compares the newest Star Wars dogfighter with its old inspirations, and pines for what some of this newest iteration has lost along the way.

Star Wars: Squadrons Is Exactly What I Needed by Luke Plunkett: Plunkett expressed a feeling that’s probably familiar: It’s about time EA got off their butts and did something vaguely interesting with the Star Wars license. But he also goes a step further, contextualizing EA’s baffling struggles with Star Wars in particular with their many, many past successes doing licensed games in the past.

Mass Effect...10 Years Later by Raycevick: Raycevick’s deep dive into Mass Effect is known the world over, but seeing as I even went so far as to directly reference it in this week’s video, I thought I’d include it here. If you somehow haven’t seen this video, it’s very much worth the watch!

Mass Effect Analysis — The Shared Ownership of Commander Shepard by GMTK: A few months back, Mark Brown took a deep, deep dive into Mass Effect’s roleplaying systems, one of the major topics of my own video, and spent an hour picking apart the pros, cons, and evolutions of those systems across the entire Mass Effect trilogy.

It Deserves a Category All of Its Own

10mg: Invading Steam with Microgames to Make a Point by Simon Carless: By far the coolest thing I’ve seen all month is the advent of 10mg, a small collective of super tiny indie developers that have specifically made a series of 10-minute games with the intent of getting players more comfortable with short-form games. Carless took the time to interview the group about the purpose behind the series and the many creators that came together to make it!

Certified BANGERS

Game music was a random theme in my personal reading this month. From an interview with the singer of Snake Eater to an in-depth study of Baka Mitai, this month was all about discussing legendary game music!

Cynthia Harrell, The Woman Who Sang ‘Snake Eater,’ Is Ready to be Heard Again by Ash Parrish: Harrell has fallen so far off the radar that some conspiracy theorists posited she was straight up dead, so imagine both the shock and awe Parrish experienced when she actually bagged an interview with the singer of one of gaming’s most legendary singles.

Sayonara Wild Hearts’ OST Is Basically Chvrches From a Parallel Vniverse by Ari Notis: While we’re on the topic of Kotaku, they’ve spent the past few months building up a new series called Morning Music where they highlight one soundtrack every day. And of course, it was only a matter of time before they got to the absolute masterpiece that is Sayonara Wild Hearts’ soundtrack.

Baka Mitai Actually Slaps Though by 8-bit Music Theory: 8-bit went on an exhaustive bar-by-bar analysis of Baka Mitai, the bittersweet Yakuza melody that launched a thousand memes, and made a strong case for how the song itself is brilliant.

The Spoopy Month

While we’re all inside for Halloween, that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy some spooky media! And as always is tradition, youtube’s been flooded with horror game discussion to fit the season.

Shinji Mikami: The Birth of the Survival Horror Game by Archipel: Shinji Mikami, director of everything from Resident Evil to God Hand, frontlined Archipel’s regular interviews of Japanese artists in a two-part interview. It’s fascinating stuff!

A Journey Through Paratopic | Monsters of the Week by RagnarRox: Ragnar spent a full hour analyzing Paratopic (longer than it takes to play the game itself), discussing how the game uses mundanity and the many different film lineages the game draws from.

Shadows of a Sunless World | Tiny Terrors by Soft and Hollow: Soft and Hollow has been spending the past month discussing a flood of spoopy games kind of like how I do my quarterly wrapups, but one video per game. Their work’s absolutely worth checking out!

Everything Else

The Rise and Fall of Britain’s Bedroom Coders | Design Icons by GMTK: Mark Brown chronicles a brief, formative period in early computing when the “formal” gaming industry as we understand it today was still slowly coalescing and Britain’s biggest developers were indie coders and hobbyists working at home.

What is “Blaseball” and Why Is It Taking Over the Internet? by People Make Games: Blaseball’s absurdity has been front and center all around the internet the past few months, and People Makes Games explores a history of the game and why everybody is losing their minds over it.

Playing Pokemon Go With My Son Is My New, Unpaid Part-Time Job by John Walker: In what is starting to become a journal series of sorts, Walker shares a highly amusing and heartwarming anecdote about how Pokemon Go has taken over his son’s — and therefore his — life.

How to Make RPG Combat More Interesting by Adam Millard — The Architect of Games: Millard has a problem you might be familiar with (I certainly am): Combat in RPGs has a tendency to get pretty drawn out and repetitive long before the game is over. So of course, he went step by step trying to find ways he thinks those combat systems could be improved.

The Openings of Far Cry: Explained by Quest Marker: Quest Marker broke down all the components of why Far Cry’s introductions are great — and how the rest of the games following often don’t live up to them.

Is The Last of Us Part II One Big Guilt Trip? by Games as Literature:  Games as Lit addressed a longstanding argument about Last of Us Part 2, that the game fails in its attempts to condemn its violence by forcing the player to take part in it, by breaking down the divide between the player and the player character, and how actions committed by one aren’t necessarily actions committed by both.

Death Stranding Review by Matthewmatosis: Matthewmatosis randomly put out a big review of Death Stranding, discussing everything from the success (or lack thereof) of the game’s traversal mechanics and its place in the gaming lexicon as a “nobi game.”

Hades & The Gods (Story & Theme Discussion) by Super Bunnyhop:  SBH used Hades as a springboard to discuss ancient Greek mythology and how it relates to our world today.

League of Legends’ Fake Anime Pop Star Is Sad Tweeting About Genocide by Gita Jackson: League of Legends’ latest playable hero has had an extensive but unfortunately dicey marketing campaign leading up to her release, raising more than one question about the boundaries of ethical marketing.

‘Catch These Hands’: The Black Boxer Trope in Fighting Video Games by Joshua Adams: Adams explores the trend of black characters in fighting games always ending up boxers, particularly in settings where they’re both the only black character and the only normal guy that doesn’t get to shoot fireballs out of their hands, as well as both the cultural origins and implications of the trope.

Estimating Platform Revenues — A Discovery Conundrum! by Simon Carless: Carless took a look at revenue splits using the absolutely fantastic The Gardens Between (it’s a marvelous game, I’ve covered it in the past, go play it) as a case study.

How Hades Speedrunners Clear the Game in Under Eight Minutes by Ari Notis: Speedrunning is always fascinating to read about, and Notis detailed everything going on in Hades’ burgeoning speedrunning community!

Baldur’s Gate 3 Devs Built a Testing AI. Then, They Tried to Defeat It by Patricia Hernandez:  Hernandez takes a quick look at Larian’s efforts to automate some of its QA testing, then shares a few amusing anecdotes from the company’s experiences implementing its new AI.

PC Gaming Is Really Unpredictable Right Now and It’s Fun as Hell by Evan Lahti: The past few months have seen a lot of small indies blossom from out of the woodwork into full on sensations, and Lahti took a minute to bask in the chaos that is currently PC gaming’s upended status quo.