At midnight tonight, David Galindo and his team are surprise-releasing ChefSquad, a collaborative cooking game that can only be played on Twitch. “Wait, what?” you might reasonably ask—and by way of answering you there, David has kindly stopped by to give us the scoop on this weird, joyful, formally inventive, genuinely new creation.

ChefSquad shares some DNA with David’s Cook! Serve! Delicious! trilogy, but as much as it’s a spin-off of those, it’s also a foil to other stream-only games—games that, in David’s view, pretty fundamentally misunderstand the technical peculiarities and cultural priorities of Twitch.

What does it mean for a game to be built not just for streaming but on the relationship between streamers and their audiences? In asking that, we also ask what kinds of games are better suited for a stream-centric media ecosystem in the first place, how developers can try and thrive in that brave new world, and how to even talk about the value of games nowadays.

You can play ChefSquad on Twitch.
If you’re a streamer, you can download the game for free on Steam and Itch.
And don’t you dare forget the Cook! Serve! Delicious! trilogy.
You can also follow David on Twitter.

———
• David talked more about the Cook! Serve! Delicious! trilogy last time he was on the show.

• That game about a starship bridge is Artemis.

• Here are WhatifJulia’s Twitch and Twitter.

• It does seem like The Bell Is Right is all but lost to time, sadly.

• For those who haven’t heard about hate raids, or the massive Twitch leak.

———
“All The People Say (Season 4)” by Carpe Demon.
“ChefSquad” and “Intermission” from the ChefSquad OST by Jonathan Greer.

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Left-click to play. Right-click to download.

Megan Fox heads up Glass Bottom Games, the small-core-team-and-a-cloud-of-contractors behind SkateBIRD. (They were a larger core team for their first-person brawler/roguelike Spartan Fist, it should be noted). Here Megan talks about how SkateBIRD first came to be, and the nuts and bolts of bringing it to life—not only from a technical and artistic perspective, but also in terms of running a studio in a fair, equitable, robust, and sustainable manner.

We don’t talk much about Glass Bottom Games’ previous works (the cat-rescuing auto-runner Jones on Fire, the first-person brawler/roguelike Spartan Fist, and the comedy-noir adventure game platformer Hot Tin Roof: The Cat that Wore a Fedora). But that makes a certain sense, given how close to SkateBIRD’s launch we were speaking. Megan was (and is) in it.

You can get SkateBIRD on Steam, Switch, Itch, Luna, and Xbox (where it’s on Game Pass).
You can hear the game’s soundtrack on Spotify, Steam, and Bandcamp.
You can also follow Megan (and Glass Bottom Games, and SkateBIRD) on Twitter.

———
• Here’s prototype maestro KevKev on Twitter.

• Here’s the Kitfox crew on the baggy, the shaggy, and the craggy in game design.

• If you haven’t already, do check out our talk with Xalavier Nelson Jr.

• And for more about how Blendo Games is operating these days, here are Laura Michet and Brendon Chung talking about Skin Deep.

• Meanwhile, our talk with Laia Bee covers the topic of why small studios generally can’t juggle two games at once was not (among a whole lot of other topics).

• We didn’t get to talk about Ultima, even though I wanted to. So regardless, here’s Megan talking about Ultima VII.

———
“All The People Say (Season 4)” by Carpe Demon.
“Atlas’ Gospel” and “Strut” from the SkateBIRD OST by Nathan Madsen.

We’re on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, Spotify, PocketCasts, Podyssey, and everywhere else. You can also subscribe using good old-fashioned RSS.

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Left-click to play. Right-click to download.

A Musical Story takes place in the mind of a musician, and it also takes place in an era when rock as a wide-open experimental space, and the album was the thing, and every album was in some sense a concept album. The game is likewise an experiment in telling a story—here a wordless, internal, emotionally raw one. It’s a work about how music relates to memory, and what both music and memory mean, individually and in combination.

In this interview, Charles Bardin talks about A Musical Story both as a game and as a larger art project—and about his longstanding love for 70s rock, his soundtracking work on other games like Overloop and Stellar Overload, and the undersung genius of the Rhythm Heaven games.

You can wishlist A Musical Story, and play the demo, on Steam.
And you can wishlist Overloop on Steam too.
You can hear a bunch of Charles’ music on his website.
You can also follow the team, and the game on Twitter.

———

• After Bit is a wonderful channel across the board if you’re a French-speaker—and if you’re not, then hey, there are English subtitles on their excellent Fez video.

• Game Maker’s Tool Kit did a fine essay on what Charles refers to as “the Nintendo way.”

• You can, if you’re so inclined, check out the When This Ends on Bandcamp.

———
“All The People Say (Season 4)” by Drew Messinger-Michaels.
“Dream When You Can’t” from the Overloop soundtrack by Charles Bardin.
“Pinewood, Here We Come” and “Back on Tracks” from the A Musical Story soundtrack by Charles Bardin and Valentin Ducloux.

We’re on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, Spotify, PocketCasts, Podyssey, and everywhere else. You can also subscribe using good old-fashioned RSS.

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Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is a big heartfelt spectacle of a game—you’ve likely seen some of its dream-vibrant, mirror-polished visuals, and a bit of its cartoony gunplay—and as the game’s Lead Writer, Lauren Mee had a huge amount to do with the heartfelt part of that equation.

Rift Apart is a game about blowing stuff up and about difficult friendships. It’s wacky and warm, at once a relentless sugar rush and a contemplation on who else we could have been, and who we might yet be. That’s quite a balance to strike, and in this conversation, Lauren talks us through the process of striking it.

You can play Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PS5.
You can hear the soundtrack on Apple, Amazon, and Spotify.
You can also follow Lauren (and Insomniac Games) on Twitter.

———

• It was Keza MacDonald in The Guardian who said that Rift Apart is “the video game equivalent of eating an entire packet of Haribo at once, or reading a book written entirely in all-caps.”

• For more on latter-day Telltale, do check out our conversation with Juan Vaca.

• Here’s where Dia Lacina said that “this is a game about friendship and games about friendship fucking rule. Rift Apart is better than action figures.”

———
“All The People Say (Season 4)” by Drew Messinger-Michaels.
“Ode to Nefarious” and “Sweet Home Sargasso” from the Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart OST by Mark Mothersbaugh and Wataru Hokoyama.

We’re on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, Spotify, PocketCasts, Overcast, Podyssey, and RadioPublic. You can also subscribe using good old-fashioned RSS.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

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Amid the E3 madness, this crush of new games and games yet to be, we thought we’d take a moment and think a bit about games that are, in one way or another, not new. Let’s talk about games that we replay, and especially the ones that we keep revisiting at different points in life.

Why do we replay games? What kinds of play aren’t quite replaying, but are closely related? Certainly there are lots of games wherein you’re expected to never stop playing, or to come back frequently, but that’s a bit different—or is it? Where do remakes, remasters, and straight-up rereleases fit in? Is there something special about replaying a game without much of a reason?

———

• A bunch of the changes made in Super Mario All-Stars were arguably minor, but some weren’t, and in any case there were a bunch of them.

• The handheld rerelease/remake of Final Fantasy Tactics was called Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions. The biggest addition was multiplayer.

• Here’s Robert Yang’s piece on the textures in the Final Fantasy XII remake.

• And here’s an example of uniquely bad stewardship that happened since we recorded, even.

• Nobody on the podcast crew has ever played the Electronica 60 version of Tetris. The GameBoy version is pretty gettable, albeit not my straightforward, fully legal means.

• Here’s the Game Discoverability Weekly newsletter.

• The interview with Jordan Thomas on this here podcast took place right at the beginning of The Blackout Club’s Early Access period.

• The very Jewish tabletop RPG I referred to is A Great Miracle Happened Here.

———
“All The People Say (Season 4)” by Drew Messinger-Michaels.
“If I Love Again” by J.P. Marry and Ben Oakland, and “I’m in Love Again” by Cole Porter, performed by Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra.

We’re on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, Spotify, PocketCasts, Overcast, Podyssey, and RadioPublic. You can also subscribe using good old-fashioned RSS.

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Xalavier Nelson Jr. is an absurdly prolific artist and an inveterate collaborator, having left his creative stamp on Hypnospace Outlaw, We Are The Caretakers, Can Androids Pray, Mr. Bucket Told Me To, and so, so much else, from tabletop RPG systems to comics to games journalism. Currently he’s working on SkateBIRD and Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, plus something else that he’ll be announcing this week. [EDIT: Oh hey, El Paso Elsewhere!]

Just this past week, he unleashed (sorry-not-sorry) a ridiculous, beautiful adventure game called An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs. The game is exactly what it says on the tin, but it’s also a lot more thoughtful, heartfelt, and political than its goofy premise might suggest.

In the course of discussing his dog airport sci-fi opus with us, Xalavier talks about the sometimes-competing goals of consistency and continuity, how his interest in dogs is really more existential, and what Drew has been missing about Solo—not to mention the utopian impulse behind the Dog Occupied Galaxies (D.O.G. for short), and perhaps most importantly, how to steep the development process in joy rather than in an unsustainable series of grinds.

You can get An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs on Steam and in the Microsoft Store. You can also wishlist Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator and StakeBIRD on Steam. Hypnospace Outlaw and We Are the Caretakers come highly recommended as well, and a bunch of other Xalavier’s other games and comics and such are on Itch.
And you can follow Xalavier on Twitter.

———

• Xalavier’s work at PC Gamer included the utterly wonderful series Inside Development (originally pitched title: Making Games Is Really Fucking Hard).

• Here’s the “buck-wild launch trailer” for An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs.

• Andy Weir wrote The Martian (as well as, more recently, Project Hail Mary). The quote I was thinking of came from this episode of Imaginary Worlds.

• Xalavier’s talk from WordPlay isn’t available online, but, here’s “Reuse Everything,” from GDC 2019, and here’s “KILL YOUR DREAM GAME AND USE ITS BODY FOR PARTS” from GDoC 2020.

• I know I’ll be picking up the omnibus of Tom Taylor’s All-New Wolverine, and Jeff Lamire’s expansive series, The World of Black Hammer.

• Mr. Bucket Told Me To is part of the Dread X Collection.

• When I alluded to guests talking about making art without harming themselves, I was thinking primarily of Jeremy Warmsley and, even moreso, Anisa Sanusi (who put it so succinctly that we used her version of the idea in this clip).

• “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding” is worthy as hell for reasons well beyond its snappy, tweet-length title.

• We only talk a very little bit about Hypnospace Outlaw in this episode, so if you’d like to go deeper on that one, check out our talk with Jay Tholen.

———
“All The People Say (Season 4)” by Drew Messinger-Michaels.
“dogtoggle” and “definitely marinara sauce (not blood) (marinara trench game loop version)” (and also the other version) from DOG MUSIC (An Album Made by a Human Currently Named RJ Lake That Makes Up the Official Soundtrack for a Game by Strange Scaffold Called “An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs” and is Good Music for Humans Who Like Music That Sounds Like the Kind Dogs Would Make If They Did That Kind of Thing) by RJ Lake.

We’re on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, Spotify, PocketCasts, Overcast, Podyssey, and RadioPublic. You can also subscribe using good old-fashioned RSS.

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Here we mostly talk about his game soundtracking work on Russell’s Quinn’s Linda & Joan, and on Minskworks’ historically situated, abstract-yet-simulationist opuses, Jalopy and Landlord’s Super. But of course, we do also find time to talk about the joys and perils of using stylistic touchpoints, the ever-thorny question of separating artists from their art, and the strange, intense relationship that players can form to the music in the games they (come to) love.
You can find Jeremy’s entire portfolio on his website.
You can get his work for Jalopy, Landlord’s Super, and Linda & Joan on Bandcamp.
You can also follow Jeremy (and his band Summer Camp) on Twitter.

———

• Do check out the Limit Break Mentorship Program if you want to get involved! Applications close May 2. And do check out my talk with Anisa Sanusi if you’d like to hear more about the program’s goals (and how they’ve grown and changed).

• Here’s my upcoming record, and here’s the Dice Punks podcast.

• Here’s that podcast about Terry Pratchett books that Jeremy did, and here’s the one about movies under ninety minutes that he did alongside his wife and bandmate Elizabeth Sankey. They were on that one twice actually, the second time to promote and discuss Elizabeth’s essay film Romantic Comedy.

• “I Don’t Like Cricket (I Love It)” is a song that my American ass had never heard, I’ll admit.

• Here’s Adam Neely talking about “the harmonic style of 18th Century European musicians” (better known as music theory).

• You can hear some of those “remastered” SNES (and now N64!) tracks on The Brickster’s YouTube channel, and you can hear his reaction to the technical bizarreness of the Earthbound soundtrack on his episode of The Video Game History Hour.

• We both mispronounced Marina Abramović‘s name, but not, to be clear, out of any disrespect for her work.

• Curiosity was quite the project, and so too is petermolydeux.

• I had definitely never heard of Countdown, hopelessly American fellow that I am.

• Do check out our conversation with Brian Handy, as well as the plenitudinous audioludic compendium that is AudioGames.net.

• For the record, no less an authority than Chase Strangio would argue that tweeting against transphobia is productive, actually.

———
“All The People Say (Season 4)” by Drew Messinger-Michaels.
Some music from the bench scene in the Linda & Joan Prologue, and from a forthcoming in-universe Landlord’s Super mixtape, both by Jeremy Warmsley.

We’re on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, Spotify, PocketCasts, Overcast, Podyssey, and RadioPublic. You can also subscribe using good old-fashioned RSS.

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https://etao.blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/etao-podcast-106-russell-quinn.mp3

That is, until his current solo project Linda & Joan, which tells an intensely personal story about family, loss, and what people can do for each other when things get truly bad. (Given the subject matter, as I say in the intro, this episode does definitely come with a CONTENT WARNING for illness, death, and trauma). Here Russell talks about the desire to make something that is recognizably and definitively a game while still being as thoughtful as ever about form—and about the healing that can come with making art out of awful experiences.

• Here’s that Miranda July piece that Russell worked on.

We’re on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, Spotify, PocketCasts, Overcast, Podyssey, and RadioPublic. You can also subscribe using good old-fashioned RSS.

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https://etao.blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/etao-podcast-104-anisa-sanusi.mp3

Here Anisa talks about the difficulty of doing as much good as she can with Limit Break without allowing the scope of it to expand beyond what she can feasibly achieve, her approach to UI/UX, and how those two kinds of work potentially overlap.

Also: Marveling at Hades’ incredible UX despite the absence of a dedicated UX person on the project. Also-also: Undoing the myth of misery making for better art.

• And here’s my conversation with Greg Batha—a good one to check out if you want to hear about what UI and UX are, even.

• As I say in the outro: Applications for Limit Break will be open next month, and we’ll be sure to remind interested would-be applicants when the time comes.

We’re on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, Spotify, PocketCasts, Overcast, Podyssey, and RadioPublic. You can also subscribe using good old-fashioned RSS.

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https://etao.blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/etao-podcast-102-bryant-young.mp3

CONTENT WARNING for racism, police violence, and murder.

• And I seriously cannot recommend Are Prisons Obsolete? highly enough.

We’re on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, Spotify, PocketCasts, Overcast, Podyssey, and RadioPublic. You can also subscribe using good old-fashioned RSS.

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