Sundays are for realising that the smell you can smell is that smell. That smell which smells. And how does it smell? It smells smelly. You open the door, and there they are. Anchovies. All waiting to play Hollow Knight: Silksong. No. Stay back. They won’t. Into your cardboard box they file, clearly experts in filling tight spaces thanks to their past lives as tinned goods. From upstairs, you hear the unmistakeable sound of roaring laughter, echoing amid the damp paper. “I told you to let me out,” bellows a triumphant Adrian Edmondson. “Now you’ll pay the price.” As the light fades from your eyes, you picture some writings from this week.
The first assortment of words that floods your vision comes courtesy of The Game Business’ Christopher Dring. It’s accompanied by the sound of a thousand phones dring-dringing. “Hello,” you whisper. “The Indiana Jones developer has a fight club in its basement”, the voice on the other end of the line rasps. It continues thusly:
“There is a fight club going on in the basement,” he begins. “Our animation director is Jujitsu, really high level, and he’s been holding this thing where people can go down during lunch and get beaten up, more or less. There are a lot of hobbies at MachineGames. There are a lot of people who are into sports shooting. It’s a very nerdy culture. We have LEGO building Thursdays.” Andersson is sitting next to audio director Pete Ward, so I had to ask… “No, I haven’t been down to the basement to get beaten up,” he answers. “We’ve been very busy on the game for the last couple of years.”
This animation director scares me, you muse into the reciever. The other person hangs up. Just as you think you’re out of the woods, a portal to a parallel universe opens up inside one of your corneas. Through it pops a vision of an interview between Pocket Tactics’ Holly Alice and David Wildemann, director of cosy narrative management game Tiny Bookshop.
I encountered a seagull asking for a book (I think that’s what ‘Gwak’ meant). I gave it a kids’ book and it was happy – which book(s) does the seagull enjoy? Haha, most! It avoids long and very long books. And really loves books with food or animals in them.
You see a flock of bookish gulls take flight towards the nearest seaside chip shop. Except the chip shop’s perched on one of your eyelashes. It hurts. Give me strength to endure, you think. It arrives via a piece from Defector’s Maitreyi Anantharaman. You’re distracted by thoughts of WNBA basketball player Skylar Diggins, queen of the productive crashout.
For as long as Diggins has played in the WNBA, conflict and disorder have swirled around her. She was drafted to a team that relocated from Tulsa to Dallas soon after she got there. The Diggins-era Wings, whose GM and coach once got in a fistfight after a game, were not much more competent than their current iteration. There are a few ways to act in the face of such chaos. One is to be the calm in the storm. Another is to just try to outstorm the storm yourself. No matter how crazy life gets for Skylar Diggins, she can get crazier.
That’s cool, you think, I might check out NBA 2K26 and see if being able to construct a team with both WNBA ballers like Diggins and their male NBA compatriots in the myteam mode makes 2K’s hoops cash cow better this year. Then, the pain’s back. It’s like a vampire’s draining your retinas. NO! It’s Rebel Wolves founder Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, telling PixelArena.io’s Lauren Bergin in no uncertain terms just how much of a vampire game The Blood of Dawnwalker, that vampire game from ex-Witcher devs, isn’t.
Our war contains a lot of different creatures of the night. In this origin story, we needed the vampires because Coen has this vampire nature, but when we’re thinking about the saga, we’ll include parts that are not about vampires at all, and are instead about other species. Our lore and our IP is so complex with its relationships between creatures of the night and humans that you’ll feel that it isn’t just a vampire game.
You silently scream amid the anchovies, as a final quote roars into view. “Someone would have to be dying in front of me, saying, ‘My last wish is for you to sing that song!’ for me to sing that song.” A person on a stage atop your pupil points out that this is a bit of a weird thing for singer Kelly Clarkson to have said to Entertainment Weekly in 2011 about her song A Moment Like This, which is this week’s music. Laughter erupts.
“Curse your twisted slapstick soul, Adrian Edmondson,” you squeal. “This torture will go on for a Skong time yet,” he replies, sagely.