Reading List (February 2022) (Patreon)

Here we are, folks. Reading list time again! This list is a little on the smaller side than usual, but if you haven’t heard, G/O Media’s workers (meaning for our purposes, Kotaku) went on strike like two days ago and are requesting readers not to visit their websites. So we’ll be doing our very tiny part and removing the several articles I had lined up from them. It’s such a great and terrible sacrifice, I know.

Second Opinions

Unpacking My Life With Unpacking by GC Vazquez: I mentioned that I found Unpacking’s plot a little too universal to really enjoy, but Vazquez found this to be a boon, connecting with those beats and how they played out in his own life.

In Just 2 Hours, If On a Winter’s Night, Four Travelers Tells One of the Best Adventure Game Stories I’ve Ever Played by Alexis Ong: Ong also did a review of Winter’s Night recently, and if the title didn’t give it away, they were over the moon with the game.

After a City is Buried by Jacob Geller: Geller used a few themes and setting details from The Forgotten City to talk about how frighteningly regularly our own real world cities get buried before being built on top of — from the Siege of Kaifeng to volcano eruptions to modern day flooding of native american territory from dam construction.

Workers On Strike!

Unionization continues to be a hot button issue in video games, but the big recent news comes from the other side of the industry with the GMG Union (which includes Kotaku) going on strike to win better working conditions. I know that if you ask ten different people their opinion on Kotaku, you'll get 12 different takes, but I hope that the many, many times I've highlighted their writers' work here has gotten across what an excellent website it can be despite a long and incredibly well-documented history of bungling c-suite management. This is an important voice in the industry, and they and all the other GMG outlets deserve fair compensation for their work, so spare a thought for them while they’re out there and maybe consider donating to their strike fund.

How Can You Help?: As part of their announcement to strike, GMG Union put out a quick explainer on what actions you can take if you want to support their workers during this difficult time.

Why I’m on Strike (at My Other Job) by Jordan Calhoun: Calhoun, editor in chief for Lifehacker, detailed some of their early experiences on the picket line at the GMG strike.

Fun* and Games by Aaron Mak: Mak covered the current union effort at Raven Software’s QA department and went into a basic primer on the profession’s typically poor working conditions.

A Franchise Looking Back

Halo Infinite purposely sets itself up as a homage to the franchise’s glory days, which in turn invites comparison and has inspired plenty of people to write about how the game relates to those earlier titles.

Does Halo Infinite Ring Hollow? By Hotcyder: Hotcyder looked at how Halo Infinite glued two games together between the game’s trademark linear levels and an open world reminiscent of the very first game, discussing what works, what doesn’t, and how Infinite compares to many of the other big open world games in recent memory.

Dust and Echoes by Rosarie Teppelin: Teppelin looked at how 343 has written themselves into a corner with Halo Infinite, painting the game as one obsessed with the franchise’s past, yet unable to live up to it because of its refusal to invent new things of its own.

Shades Reborn by Julie Muncy: An effective chaser to Teppelin’s above article, Muncy focuses in on one of the many points Teppelin makes, illustrating just how different an experience Infinite is for those familiar with the franchise’s past and expanded universe as opposed to a newcomer.

Everything Else

Inside The Nintendo Power Hotline by Blake Hester: Hester explored a weird slice of video game history: the Nintendo Power Hotline, a call center Nintendo established back in the ‘80s for people to call in and get help beating the company’s games and went on to become a beloved bit of gaming culture from that era, by interviewing several of the people that used to work there.

The Abridged Videogaming History of Big-Money Buyouts & Mergers by Super Bunnyhop: No doubt inspired by the recent buyout of Activision Blizzard, SBH went through a brief history of video game mega-mergers and how they’ve worked out — and finds some not so great trends.

The First Digital Deckbuilder Was a Magic: The Gathering Game From 1997 and it Ruled by Jody Macgregor: Macgregor went all the way back to Magic: The Gathering’s first video game adaptation to uncover a special “adventure” side mode the game had that played very much like a proto-deckbuilder and didn’t just encourage, but required you to break the card game’s rules over your leg to succeed.

Is It Possible To Make Feeling Weak Fun? By Adam Millard: Continuing his stellar work, Millard used the inevitable Elden Ring difficulty discourse as a jumping off point for ways different games disempower the player.

Did I Complete My 30 Day Game Making Challenge? By GMTK: If you haven’t been following along with Mark Brown lately, he decided to learn more about game development…by actually becoming a developer! And his latest ordeal was a vertical slice of his cool little magnet puzzle game, and he detailed every step of the process in this video!

My Favorite Animation of 2021 by New Frame Plus: Dan, bless his soul, looked at way too many games in 2021 and highlighted some of the best and coolest animation across the industry.

Reading in Video Games (And Why I Barely Do It) by Razbuten: Razbuten’s latest is all about optional text logs — those things you find every 20 feet in an open world game and promptly ignore — and how games might make them a bit more enticing to read.

Spiritfarer’s Recipe for Solarpunk by Phoenix Simms: Simms discussed the major themes of afterlife-boatman-simulator Spiritfarer, talking about death, living in oppressively corporate societies, and the narrative power of food.

Sifu’s Toughest Battle is With Its Own Origins by Ash Parrish: It already feels like a lifetime ago, but Sifu was an early hit in February, and Parrish reviewed the game with an additional contextual focus on the cultural lineage of Chinese kung fu movies it’s emulating.

Postmortem: Media Molecule’s Ancient Dangers: A Bat’s Tale by Richard Franke and Catherine Woolley: Like LittleBigPlanet before it, Dreams is a big DIY software that promises players and enthusiasts that they, too, can make a cool new game without needing to be a total professional. But the folks at Media Molecule, who made Dreams, took it a step further and decided to make a game inside their own platform from scratch, then did a postmortem on how it went.