Sundays are for remembering how to write on paper. I used to fill A4 notepads with scribbles as an undergrad but the habit has gradually fallen away, as I’ve sunk into the endlessly editable quagmire of online journalism. I’ve got a nice thick biro with Blue Prince press event branding, and a fresh moleskin notepad I got from a magazine subscription. I’m writing a story about spiders. It’s heaven, though I do occasionally get the shakes for not being able to open a browser tab and read a random bunch of articles, like these ones.
Previews for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond have revived debate over how much a game’s characters should “nag” you in the course of teaching you things and helping you. As described by Alex Olney over on Nintendo Life, there’s a new character called Mackenzie you’ll need to escort for a time, and he is quite the chatterbox. Metroid is not a series known for its voiced dialogue – see also, zebras do not typically live underwater – so this does sound like an egregious offence. Still, Inkle and 80 Days developer have swung by with a brisk blog post illustrating the wide range of ways their own players have needed a little “nagging”. Here’s their entry on Pendragon.
Players didn’t realise that: you could choose which of your pieces to move on your turn. We thought this was obvious, because the game is a “chess-like”, but because the UI resembled a tactics game, where the turn order is commonly in a rotating sequence, people stuck with whoever the UI surfaced as the next piece to play. Since this tended to default to the last person you played, they’d moved one piece around the board on their own until it was killed. This is not a good strategy.
Alastair Hadden – writer of what is still my favourite piece on Disco Elysium – has good thoughts on Sloclap’s Rematch, Andrea Pirlo and playing for others. It makes a fine accompaniment for J.C. Rodriguez’s brilliant article for us on the sanitisation of Skate and skateboarding. It also makes me want to commission Hadden to review Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road (sorry Alastair, I do not have the power).
Despite its infidelity to the rules of soccer — and often to the rules of physics — Rematch instantly feels much more like the real thing. The game has you play in third person, with a limited view of the pitch. You spend more time reading and responding to other people’s play, becoming a radar for the movement of your teammates and foes. The game demands you mark your opponent off the ball, make runs that come to nothing. Often, you will find yourself squinting at a play unfolding in the distance, without you. The business of goalkeeping, in Rematch, is also nearer to the truth: it’s the waiting that kills you, the concentration required to rescue your team from a sprung counterattack.
Oma Keeling dreams of a thing to play.
and i begin to think about how the rain outside would sound inside a world where i never leave. and i am the red ball, moving through the obstacles. they’re made of the skin of silverfish and the frozen blood of cattle that are culled in an outbreak. of some disease. caused only by the conditions of factory farming. and i begin to quiver and move less delicately. more like a car on a motorway.
Over at Defector, Kelsey McKinney reviews Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Frankenstein. I saw this myself recently and yeah, its portrayal of the Creature is quite one-dimensional, though I’d like to read a longer account of his skin, and the film’s representations of anatomy at large. Also: I think this film’s Frankenstein tower might be the best one. Somebody commission the Scorn devs to make a game there.
In the book, Victor creates the creature in a grief-stricken state that borders on insanity. As the book goes on, and more and more of his loved ones die, the grief threatens to overwhelm him completely. I recently read the horror novel Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova, in which a mother consumed by grief begins to feed a fragment of her dead son’s lung, growing it into a monster whom she loves intimately. She loves it even as it kills neighborhood cats and attacks her mother and grows more and more violent. This is a more interesting interpretation of Frankenstein than one in which a creator hates its progeny for existing, and the Creature remains pure.
A general shout-out to Bullet Points Monthly – a bastion of witty, undiluted critical writing on current releases. They’re doing a month of articles on Silent Hill f, which I’ve still yet to finish. While we’re talking witty, undiluted critical writing, a certain Nic Reuben has an embryonic Patreon you might want to back.
Music? Let’s build out from that Frankenstein article with this track from the fourth opening sequence for Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, in which there are many Frankensteinian monsters. Anime characters flipping around popping off ultimates at each other, or standing on remote hilltops with their hair whipping in the wind: the good stuff.