Sundays are for looking up the average costs of raising a child, then researching the startup investment required for a currywurst food truck, then wondering how your spouse would react to some kind of Powerpoint pitch deck. Maybe while serving them one of those little cardboard trays, with a sausage in it.
German gastronomy dreams promptly shattered, seems like there’s little else to do but read some of the best games- and not-games-related writing from this past week.
Putting Nathan Brown’s Hit Points in these feels like cheating, but also, you should read Nathan Brown’s Hit Points. This week, on the scarcely conceivable horror of having to call tweet-tossing tosser Randy Pitchford your boss:
Like I said: imagine working for this clown. Imagine being on the customer-service team when Mr Medieval Times comes swinging in, like, gimme a login, I’ll show these moaning know-nothings who’s boss. Picture the poor engineering teams who now have to scope out a roadmap of fixes for an overlord who has publicly insisted Borderlands 4 is “pretty damn optimal”, and the comms and community teams who have to come up with a way of messaging it all to the public. Imagine being literally anyone at Gearbox, finally sending a game several years in the making out into the world and having the conversation around it dominated by the snide social-media witterings of your thin-skinned, unsilenceable CEO.
Why make a remake? Video Games Industry Memo offer the developer/publisher perspective, and suggests some rules on how to do it right. Also the first and hopefully last time I’ve been exposed to the word “remakesters”.
Not only is the financial cost much lower, but the risk is too. Regames leverage an established fan base and reputation to ensure excellent sales for the new venture. Last year’s remake of Silent Hill 2, for example, has already more than doubled the sales of the original game, while Resident Evil 3’s sales are almost threefold that of its predecessor. Remasters and remakes of previously popular games simply don’t fail. Just ask the Crash Bandicoot N’sane Trilogy which sold 20 million copies, outselling the three games it remade combined.
If you missed my (surely value-adding) writeup from Friday, The Graun’s Keith Stuart looked at a study into why some of us really invert their game controls – a study partly inspired by one of Stuart’s previous articles on the subject. The answer isn’t particularly simple, but it is surprising, at least if you’ve internalised the “It’s just how I’ve always done it” mindset.
What they discovered through the cognitive testing was that a lot of assumptions being made around controller preferences were wrong. “None of the reasons people gave us [for inverting controls] had anything to do with whether they actually inverted,” says Corbett. “It turns out the most predictive out of all the factors we measured was how quickly gamers could mentally rotate things and overcome the Simon effect. The faster they were, the less likely they were to invert. People who said they sometimes inverted were by far the slowest on these tasks.” So does this mean non-inverters are better gamers? No, says Corbett. “Though they tended to be faster, they didn’t get the correct answer more than inverters who were actually slightly more accurate.”
Neil Paine charts the decline of the skateboarding genre, and critiques recent attempts at reviving it.
Skateboarding is a creative act of rebellion in a public space — a refusal to be told where you can or can’t ride. Today’s triple-A game publishers are the opposite: they are the system, enforcing rules designed around profit-maximization. Trying to capture skating authentically inside that corporate framework is becoming almost impossible. And while I couldn’t care less about knee-jerk complaints that the games have “gone woke” — a tired jab YouTubers hurl at every major release now — the truth is that today’s Tony Hawk entries do feel sanitized, designed to pass an HR-department review rather than channeling the messy, sometimes offensive punk energy they had in 1999.
For Bad Faith Times, here’s Denny Carter on the transience of cultural shifts, by way of a bizarre US truck ad.
The makers of this jingoistic masterpiece without equal threw in some culturally diverse images – ever so fleeting, hardly perceptible – to avoid explicit racism. Tossing in a flash of luchadores fighting and a quick mention of jazz gives the Ram ad cultural cover. Sure, the boot of fascism is firmly on your throat, pressing harder all the time, but everyone is invited to this party. Everyone is welcome to join this political and cultural submission. This is the kind of race-neutral fascist vision that helped pump up Trump’s share of the Black and Latino men in 2024. Whoever made this big, dumb truck ad has looked powerfully into that voting data. You can feel it.
Today’s music is Futique, by Biffy Clyro. Better than Ellipsis, worse than Puzzle. But then, everything’s worse than Puzzle.