Australia won a gold medal in skateboarding at the Olympics. It might have been controversial if it were a different sport. Here is a very schizophrenically edited video recounting the dramatic events.
And here is Tom Towers’ review of The Ramp: Tom Tower's’ review of The Ramp.
It’s all about the Chinese TRON Knees this episode. Tom and Phil discuss Art of Rally, which just launched for consoles, we wax nostalgic about our favourite arcade racing games and then discuss Hot Shot Racing, Jason Schreier's new book Press Reset, Vegan Fish, Giantbomb, Omno, The Last Stand and The Ramp on Australia's longest running video game podcast.
Oh and Tom also made me watch the above. Thanks for Listening.
Phil Fogg
DreamWorks wasn’t a diss! I’m surprised I didn’t take more screenshots, but I did take two. Can you guess which ones without visiting Steam?
To identify who screenshotted what (and read the review itself), click here.
Tom and Phil discuss Valve's Steamdeck, Nintendo's Switch OLED, Sky Children of Light on Switch, The First Tree on PC, Before I Forget on PC, Yakuza: Like a Dragon and Not Tonight for Switch and PC. Thanks for listening.
Ynglet is a curious game. A completely original take on 2D platforming, and a mysterious aesthetic and narrative, melding real world settings, television media, aquatic and plant life with algorithmic music!
Spoiler alert: it is well worth playing. But if you need more convincing, read Tom’s review here.
For what Omno lacks (or seems to lack, so far) in thematic content compared to the games its aesthetic immediately brings to mind (the likes of Journey and Ico), it makes up for in the hand-crafted passion which it exudes from every pixel—Jonas Menke began work on Omno as a hobby after working as an animator, and the free expression that this allowed shows.
The demo, though short, immediately establishes three equally harmonious aesthetics, two of them flowing in and out of each other seamlessly: lush vegetation into ancient ruins and ancient ruins back into lush vegetation; followed by a cold cut to a desert.
Although the full game promises to combine puzzle-solving with platforming, the demo (which is available on Steam) consists of collecting energy, then some light platforming; though with an interesting mechanical twist: after jumping, Omno can dash forwards with his spear mid-air, acting a little like a horizontal double-jump. It’s very satisfying zipping over to a hard to reach ledge and grabbing hold of it. Indeed, even the basic movement of Omno is itself satisfying; the animation expressive and fluid. Equally satisfying is teleporting between two points in space, Omno’s body being distorted as he is sucked between dimensions .
All this makes for a tremendously promising game, personal expression transforming indie clichés into something intriguing.
Fingers crossed it lives up to its potential!
Playing Cyberpunk 2077 and Cloudpunk back to back made for a fascinating experience. The former treats cyberpunk as material for pastiche, and the latter as genre conventions to imitate in service of a point-and-click adventure game-style comedy drama in the German tradition; yet both end up tackling the individual’s response to an atomsed society in ways which authentically build on the work of the cyberpunk authors and auters which inspired them. Reducing said movement to pastiche and genre conventions is also very much in line with the original movement of cyberpunk itself, as the original cyberpunks mined noir and counter culture material in an equally reductive way.
But Tom’s review is just about City of Ghosts, not Cyberpunk 2077. Or is it? In any case, check it out here.
Building on the ground Papers, Please broke, Mind Scanners has the potential to be special.
Its aesthetic is a mind-bending blend of two opposing forces, Freudian psychology and Soviet bureaucracy. (So it’s actually a Jungian duality, if anything!) This would be intriguing enough, but the lo-fi aesthetic is suitably dismal yet engrossing, and the day-to-day routine of the work simulation is like a lava bath for the brain, as you try to juggle pleasing both the id and the ego of the General Secretary and your own sense of justice.
For Tom and Phil’s impressions of the Mind Scanners beta, click here.
Ready Player One is not a love letter to popular culture, but the crushing revelation that art is utterly futile. That someone may present to an audience Brazil, A Clockwork Orange, Star Wars, The Iron Giant, The Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, or even Kurt-fucking-Vonnegut as meaningless commodities whose existence is only valuable to the protagonist in so far as they either look cool or will help him become rich and famous, and supposed fans of these works will embrace such a depiction is nothing short of sickening.
Nor is Ready Player One the depiction of a dystopia, but a somatic propaganda in which the aristocratic doofuses are not hucksters, snake oil salesmen and quasi-religious figures who give value to their stocks only through the cult of personality they have cultivated are actually the geniuses they claim to be, capable of singlehandedly building virtual worlds all by themselves. (How anyone who claims to be a fan of Monty Python can depict the upper-class as anything but twits is astounding.) Though, when the virtual worlds they create are this vapid, maybe even someone like the world-renowned paedophile and entrepreneur, Elon Musk, would actually be capable of making one, too. Not to mention the fact that in spite of climate catastrophe and techno-feudalism, everyone still gets to play vidya games and watch movees (even in school!), so the world still seems, if anything, better than the one in which we live. To give him some credit, at least we see that in the grandiose visions of Elon Musk, there is nothing more than vanity—yet Ready Player One glorifies such vanity, giving us trivia in place of theology, and telling us this is the gospel: so long as we worship our new feudal lords, they will reward us with cool in-game items.
There are two human moments.
A black character finds freedom in the digital world, able to hide her blackness and thus escape racial persecution. The unstated subtext Ernest Cline is too afraid to say out loud: in this techno-utopia where anyone may be anything, black people must hide their identity to escape racial persecution. Yet we encounter no racism over the course of the book. Is sticking one’s fingers in one’s ears and closing one’s eyes a trait of the protagonist, or the fear of the author that he might offend his ear-fingering and eye-poking audience?
The protagonist’s relationship with his trophy is interesting in so far as he is never sure if she is really who she claims to be (gold, bronze, or silver), this being a fantastical depiction of the internet, after all. And while there is nothing wrong, theoretically, with her turning out to be exactly who she says she is (gold, but scratched), it never evolves beyond him just blankly stating I DNO IF U RLY HU U SY U R over and over; indeed, the fact that two characters courting one another discover each other to be exactly how they imagined the other says all you need to know about the depth of Cline’s characterisation—a failing made even more painful considering that this is the only concrete theme in Ready Player One.
I have watched the sort of idolatry in which Ready Player One revels grow over the years in the gaming community, and I find it, frankly, terrifying. The things Ernest Cline references are the same things loved by people who claim politics (what they really mean here is themes) are destroying [post-]modern art, but it takes the same sort of unthinking, loveless, joyless consumption of art to conclude that pretty much anything Ernest Cline references is apolitical. Yet I cannot help but feel pity for such people, because to consume art in this way, means that their own life must be without thought, without love, and without joy.
I had hoped that Ready Player One would, at least, have offered me some insight into this horrific way of conceiving of art, but on finishing it I am just as confused and frightened when confronting such thinking as I have ever been.
How can Cline claim to love anti-consumerist Rush, when he has written a novel which reduces the likes of Tolkien to an intellectual property which exists only for the purpose of mass production? I may be as frustrated by Tolkien’s works as much as I love them, and think very little of the film adaptations, but in speaking to lovers of both I have never had difficulty in understanding why they love them; why Cline does, I cannot even guess. Indeed, how can Cline claim to love anything at all, when the love interest of his story is a narcissistic projection of the protagonist, exactly in reality as he envisioned her in his head?
I am left with the troubling notion that, perhaps, the protagonist is a narcissistic projection of Ernest Cline himself.
Sid Meir’s name is well known to most gamers mostly because his well known titles all start with the words, Sid Meir. It is a publicity device used by only a few other titans of the video game development scene, such as Tom Clancy and American McGee.
It would be natural to assume that such a person would be insanely egotistical, but Mr. Meir’s 300 page memoir tediously depicts himself as a decent, peaceful and thoughtful person who would like nothing more than to be left alone to make video games and spend time with his family and friends.
Like all of the publicity he has ever done, putting his name on his games was not his idea, but he was smart enough to recognize that those selling his games knew more about marketing than he did.
The book spends a lot of time on his early life, and while this would be useful to a psychologist trying to help him, it really is not that interesting or revelatory to his design influences. The tagline of the book, “by the creator of Civilization!” indicates that most readers will come to the book to learn more about the games he has made rather than what made Sid Meir. Those readers will come way disappointed, but there are still enough revelations in the book to make it worthy of a read to those who are dedicated scholars of video game culture.
This photo was also not his idea.
My main takeaway was that every single great game Sid Meir made was influenced entirely by a pre-existing board or video game (or one of his co-developers previous work on a similar concept). This was always mentioned every several tens of pages into the descriptions of the game as a small matter not worth focusing on (but he did at least mention those facts).
Combining this along with the omission of his his co-writer—Jennifer Noonan’s name does not make the front cover—does start to reveal perhaps a more egotistic side of Mr. Meir’s personality that he has not shown to the public, but then again, perhaps I’ve been lulled by the book into playing the role of an armchair therapist.
Sid Meir’s Memoir is required reading for enthusiasts of Microprose, Firaxis or video game generalists but don’t expect a compelling read for this full-price and professionally published book.
Phil Fogg