Sundays are for more cats. He’s reached the “follow me to the bathroom when I come downstairs to pee in the evening” stage, but he still won’t come upstairs – which means I have to leave him alone for long periods while I work, which makes me feel terrible. Before I get around to setting up more treats on the stairs, let’s read this week’s best post about games (and play-related things!).
“It's become a bad habit to want to do the grave dance in unpopular games,” says Tyler Wilde, writing for PC Gamer.
This joy over Concord’s poor turnout—it apparently made the top 50 best-selling games on the PS Store over the weekend—is partly due to a sense of “I told you so” justice: the idea that out-of-touch, creatively bankrupt executives are cynically chasing trends while the rest of us have the good sense to avoid releasing a Concord, a Marvel’s Avengers, a Suicide Squad, a Gotham Knights, or that confusing Gollum game. But it’s not actually that easy to know why one game succeeds and another doesn’t.
The developers at Firewalk Studios, many of whom are ex-Bungie, made a game they had experience with, and released it without the free-to-play monetization we often complain about, which isn’t cynical or sneaky. But concurrency numbers have taken on a moral quality in some cases: If you release a game that’s not popular, everyone suddenly feels morally justified in shaming and embarrassing you, whether that’s because all big-budget games are bad, or live-service games are bad, or you’re just too woke — take your pick.
Madeline Blondeau wrote for Paste about “How the Sega Genesis Made Its Strange Work.” There’s your Altered Beast title, I click on it.
Of course, Sega wasn’t the only red-sauce restaurant. Third-party developers would push the boundaries of acceptable carnage in the early ’90s. Namco, for example, managed to turn the dismal 1988 fighting game Splatterhouse into a pair of ambitious, often disgusting games. While the first sequel, Splatterhouse 2, was a polished remake of the first game, the third game pushed the boundaries of both its genre and its platform. This was not only due to its arguably the most extreme content in the series, but also its non-linear progression and four branching endings. These endings were extremely dark, involving the death of the player, the loss of a spouse, and infanticide; it was far from a triumphant victory. While not a controversial subject that defined the Genesis, disgusting games like the Splatterhouse games found their way onto the platform and advanced what could be depicted in electronic entertainment.
Valued RPS reader #4478 highlighted this IGN piece in the comments last week. “A Prominent Accessibility Advocate Worked with Studios and Inspired Change. But He Never Actually Existed,” writes Grant Stoner.
Banks’ death was a significant loss for the video game accessibility community. She regularly engaged with developers from studios like Ubisoft and The Coalition, pushing for better options and designs. She helped revolutionize games journalism with the creation of Can I Play That, a site dedicated to accessibility and disability-focused coverage. She even named an award in her honor, posthumously recognizing individuals with disabilities in games who have improved their communities and educated others about the importance of accessibility.
However, in the years since Banks' alleged death, mounting evidence and testimonies from those close to his business have suggested that he was not who he claimed to be. In fact, some are convinced that Banks may not have existed at all.
Here's a largely useless but admirable haunted banana joke. I haven't read this study on lucid dreaming and virtual avatars, but it looks interesting because it has some interesting words in the title. Here's a non-scientific but entertaining video on the cultural perception of Goblins. Here's an older Rhystic Studies video on Magic's Chaos Orb, which I missed when it came out – great anecdote at the beginning. This week's music is Lights From The Gate by Mountain Realm, preferably while playing one of Grey Gnome Games' nifty dungeon-tinkerers. Have a great weekend!