Everybody's Talking At Once

Lilith Walther aetherboosts her way on over to talk about Nightmare Kart, its previously life as Bloodborne KART, its demake predecessor Bloodborne PSX, and the relationship between retro aesthetics, open development practices, and a general attitude of… YOLO?

Nightmare Kart will be out for free on May 31.
You can see more of Lilith’s work, including Bloodborne PSX, on Itch.io.
You can also follow Lilith (or rather, Bunlith?) on Twitter, and see her stream on Twitch.
She’s also got a Patreon, a Ko-Fi, and a Discord.
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• Here’s the Noclip documentary about Bloodborne PSX. We’d also point highly recommend this Gayming interview, which is the source of that quip about intellectual property law being eldritch—”Capitalism is terrifying. That’s our cosmic horror”—and also the occasion for Lilith saying that the original Bloodborne

kind of talks shit about the people in power, and the protagonist is an outsider, and all your friends are disabled people and sex workers and other outsiders. Then a lot of the enemies are the upper-class people responsible for the plague who trapped all the lower-class people into central Yarnham and closed the gates – who then die horrible deaths anyway from their own creations. It’s a direct response to a lot of the problems with gothic horror as a genre. It’s incredible, and it’s probably why it’s so transgender.

• Melos Han-Tani and Marina Kittaka from Analgesic have been on the show twice, first to talk about Anodyne 2 and then to talk about Sephonie. Both interviews get into the topic of older design tropes worth recovering (and new ones worth jettisoning, or at least bemoaning).

• The Rock Paper Shotgun Electronic Wireless Show recently did an episode on free games.

• Drew was drawing on David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, though he did misquote it. Graeber’s phrase is not “basic communism” but “baseline communism,” which he defines as

the understanding that, unless people consider themselves enemies, if the need is considered great enough, or the cost considered reasonable enough, the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” will be assumed to apply.

He goes on to say that, “in fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability” (emphasis his). This is obviously true on the level of giving someone directions if you know the way, or (as Drew says in the episode) handing someone a tool they’ve asked for. Just as obviously, we sometimes operate on other principles, such as hierarchy, exchange, or (as Lilith says in the episode) reciprocity. As Graeber says:

All of us act like communists a good deal of the time. None of us act like a communist consistently. “Communist society”—in the sense of a society organized exclusively on that single principle—could never exist. But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.

• Ah, and anyway, here’s Add Astra.

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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“Pthumerian Cup” from the Bloodborne KART April Fool’s joke, the Bloodborne PSX OST and the BBKART Soundtrack, by The Noble Demon.

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Dragon’s Dogma II is full of inventive, quirky flourishes, meaningful frictions, and… shameless micro-transactions that capitalize on those exact quirks and frictions. We can, of course, get meaning and joy out of art that comes to us compromised. Which is good news, since most art, if not all art, comes to us compromised. But the details matter.

So let’s dig into the details, and along the way let’s talk about monetization, opera, high art, low art, and how Dragon’s Dogma II is like a D&D campaign where all of the other players are dogs.

This episode contains discussions of death, dying, and mourning.
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• Dia Lacina has written a bit about Dragon’s Dogma II, and a bit about Dark Arisen.

• Podcasters helping podcasters, here’s a good summary of the weird relationship of dogs to Octavia Butler’s work.

• Here’s Alexis Ong’s piece about pawns.

• And here’s Dan Olson’s video about Fortnite.

• You can hear the Met’s Saturday Matinee Broadcasts on lots of still-extant terrestrial radio stations and their websites. My mom and I usually go with KUSC.

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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
Messa da Requiem by Guiseppe Verdi, performed by the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, featuring Leah Hawkins, Karen Cargill, Matthew Polenzani, and Dmitry Belosselskiy. Recorded September 27, 2023. Broadcast March 30, 2024.

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Helldivers II is a wildly popular co-op shooter. It’s also extremely funny. It’s also very much about fascism, both in the sense that its satirical lens is aimed at fascist tendencies in moribund democracies, and in the sense that its core pleasures are… sort of fascist?

The music makes you feel like a hero as you do your space violence on behalf of Super Earth, and let’s be honest, the capes are rather dashing. Here’s a game that wants to have its cake and eat it too, and we’re inclined to say it pulls it off. So let’s dig into how it’s doing what it’s doing, and the slipperiness of making art about fascism that isn’t useful to fascists.

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• The clip about Super Earth is from this Helldivers II ad. The in-game propaganda and advertising are fairly consistent in tone, and so far, in terms of world-building as well.

• If you’d like to keep entirely Joel mysterious in your mind, then we can respect that—but if you’d like to know more (to coin a phrase), then Aftermath has you covered (kind of).

• Here’s my piece on moon, and one where I talked more about “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” in contrast to “Springtime for Hitler.”

• Here’s Umberto Eco’s essay on “Ur-Fascism” and Ruben Ferdinand and Elliⓞt’s essay on Attack on Titan (a classic pairing).

• We use bits of Lindsay Ellis’ video on Mel Brooks, F.D Signifier’s video about Hajime Isayama’s New York Times interview, and Mark Brown’s recent video on Spec Ops: The Line.

• We don’t think there’s anywhere to (legally) hear the full Starship Troopers commentary other than the physical releases of the film, unfortunately.

• The Freud quote is from The Ego and the Id, and the Truffaut quote is from this interview.

• The intrusive thought at the end is from this clip.

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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“Guren no Yumiya” by Linked Horizon, from the first season of Attack on Titan.
“My Heart Leaps Up” from Mack and Mabel by Jerry Herman.
The extraction and victory music from Helldivers II.

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

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While the show was taking a break, Drew started putting together some essays on the growing list of recent recent surprise hits—games that, for whatever reason, have been doing vastly better than their developers or publishers had expected. 2024 does, so far, seem to have a sort of serial monogamy to it, with the Sauron’s Eye of game-liker attention focusing intensely on one thing before moving on to the next, abruptly and fickly, with equally frightening fervor.

So at the risk of being eternally behind the viral content curve (as though we’ve ever feared that around here), we’re going to take a little time to think through the breakout successes of this year, starting with Palworld. We’ll also be talking about Last Epoch and Helldivers II (which got so popular that they ceased to function) in future installments.

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• I mention the episode of Experience Points about Palworld, in the context of positing a possible public domain Pikachu.

• Jack Saint’s video brought the fan design issue to my attention, and also got me thinking about which pal designs work better than which other ones. (Those would be the more original, less chimeric pals).

• Here’s that much-discussed Hbomberguy video about YouTube plagiarism.

• And here’s OpenAI telling the UK’s Parliament that they would have no business model if they had to respect anyone else’s intellectual property rights.

• Astra Taylor pointed out that full automation is still an aspiration and a threat, a pipe dream and a nightmare, rather than a reality, when she coined the terms “fauxtomation.” I learned about this concept from Brian Merchant’s thoroughly excellent Neo-Luddite book about the original Luddites, and about what we can learn from them, Blood in the Machine.

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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“Pal of My Lonesome Hours” by Abe Lyman and Walter Hirsch, performed by Abe Lyman and His California Orchestra.

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

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Lucio and Drew talk about some of the games they’ve enjoyed gaming at this year, from KarmaZoo, Pizza Tower, Wobbly Life, and The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, to Remnant II, Spider-Man 2, Street Fighter 6, Jedi: Survivor, Wo Long, and Tears of the Kingdom.

Speaking of, spoilers for Remnant II from 40:53 to 44:21.
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• We’ve talked before about playing games, including but not limited to Destiny 2, wrong.

• Guilty Gear -STRIVE- does not, at time, of publishing, have a simplified input option for supers.

• Here once again the Bartle taxonomy of player types.

• The curling documentary in question is “Stone Cold,” which is the fourth episode of the Netflix series Losers.

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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“If It Wasn’t For You” by Buddy Rose, Gene Rose, Harold C. Berg, and Herb Wiedoeft, performed by the Crystal Orchestra.

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

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Glen Henry and Chase Bethea drop achor awhile and talk about Sunken Stones, why pirates mean freedom, and why the Golden Age of Piracy was a lot more Caribbean than Pirates of the Caribbean would have you believe. Also, inevitably, One Piece.

You can play the Sunken Stones demo on Itch.io, and wishlist the full game on Steam.
You can find Chase’s work on his own website, as well as on Spotify and Bandcamp.
And you can find Glen’s work on the Spritewrench website.
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• Here’s Glen’s previous appearance on the show.

• And here’s our conversation with Tanya X. Short, wherein we talked a bit about Five Strategies for Collaborating with a Machine and On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots.

• For more about why Drew will take every opportunity to defend and ere’s Blood in the Machine and a great recent interview about it.

• And here’s Chase talking a bit about his process, including the more technical side thereof.

• LucasArts made some intensely impressive music tech for the Monkey Island series specifically, including iMuse.

• In Pirate Enlightenment, David Graeber gives us this useful assessment of the centrality of freedom for the actual, historical pirates of the Golden Age:

Perhaps the best that could be said of them is that their brutality was in no way unusual by the standards of the their time, but their democratic practices were almost completely unprecedented.

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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“Luck Don’t Live Out Here” and “Pugnacity in Port Royal” from the Sunken Stones Soundtrack by Chase Bethea.

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

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Ezra Szanton painstakingly platforms his way over to talk about To The Flame, the first in his new studio’s forthcoming kinda-trilogy of horror games. He also talks about how to effective horror, what makes a game interesting to watch as well as play, and some of the potentially-actually-pretty-intereting applications for so-called AI.

You can find Ezra’s games on his Itch.io page.
You can also follow Ezra on Cohost, Mastadon, Twitter, and Bluesky.
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• Ezra’s Guide to Magic and Otherwise Significant Objects has Ezra’s name on it in part because of Bennet Foddy and Zach Gage’s 2019 GDC talk, “Put Your Name on Your Game, a Talk by Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage.”

• Here’s my piece on the hypothetical No Berlin Roguelike, as well as my Babycastles talk about masocore platformers, and about how Celeste fits into that tradition and also my article about the history of asking machines to lie to us.

• Be Honest is indeed featured in Tiny Mass Games, which you can hear more about in our talk with Matt Brelsford. We should note that Ezra also worked with recent guest Ryan Canuel, who himself is currently working with other recent guest Ichiro Lambe.

• Here’s the SCP Wiki (which is intensely creepy, as discussed), as well as a great video essay on why VHS is such a great format for horror.

• And here’s Ezra’s appearance on Party of One.

• Ezra’s studio co-founder is Fergus Ferguson, with whom he also collaborated on Radio Tower.

• Here’s Edward Ongweso Jr. arguing for the outright abolition of venture capital.

• And worst of all, here are Snolf and Snolf 0.

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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“Prom” by The Spookfish.

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

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Eric Peterson hops on over to talk about the joys of hobbyist game development, the things that need to change in professional game development (even when compared to other parts of tech), and the cultural importance of drawing little guys.

You can play JOUNCER PX (as it’s called now) on itch.io.
You can find a bunch of Eric’s work on his Linktree, and specifically on his Itch.io.
You can also follow Eric on Twitter.
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• Here’s our conversation with Jerry Belich about, among other things, Alt.ctrl.

• Drew has absolutely been referring Big Bad Beetleborgs as Bad Bad Beetleborgs, charmed by the misremembered repetition, for decades.

• Eric says “this the season” for witchy vibes, which indeed it was when we spoke. And of course, in a very important sense, it always is.

• Here’s that scene from Jurassic Park, recreated in Dreams. And then there’s this.

• This recent episode of This Machine Kills has a good summary of the labor actions taking place throughout, specifically, the US.

• If you have a few spare bucks, consider donating a few to Medical Aid for Palestinians, Palestine Legal, or If Not Now. There is also lots you can do, especially if you’re in the US.

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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
Some music that may or may not end up in Bounce Box, by Scott Lindeman.

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

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Ryan Canuel of Petricore stops by for a mostly-not-especially-spooky conversation about augmented reality, what bootstrapping actually means, and—alright, some stuff about horror movies right at the end there.

You can get the Mythic Realms demo in Quest App Lab.
You can wishlist AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! Remastered and play its demo on Steam, where you can also play Operation DogFight for free.
And you can find a whole bunch of Petricore Games’ work on their website.

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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
The music from the Mind the Arrow trailer, by Aaron Lin.
“After the Rain” by Francis Canaro, performed by Harry Fryer and His Orchestra.

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

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Jerry Belich talks about his wild work in the Alt.ctrl milieu, his boundary-redefining escape rooms (for lack of a better term), and his digital game work, from Recommendation Dog and Reel Steal on the Playdate, to High on Life and High on Knife.

High on Knife is out now on Steam, Epic, Xbox, and Playstation.
You can find Jerry’s work on this pretty comprehensive page of his website.
A Masterpiece in Disarray is available wherever you get books.
You can also follow Jerry on Bluesky.
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• Here are our past conversations with Megan Fox, Robin Baumgarten, Adriel Wallick, and the bit comedy devotee himself, William Pugh.

• And here’s the Experimental Gameplay Workshop where Jerry talks about Please Stand By.

• Arvi Teikari was indeed a student at the University of Helsinki when he started working on Baba Is You—and he also made the initial prototype for Nordic Game Jam. So that’s (at least) two villages that one might say it took.

• Drew mentions at the end that his music is on Bandcamp, which it is, for now.

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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
Some music from the Dune Swede that Jerry mentions.
“Mack the Knife” by Kurt Weil, performed by Ted Ferrer with the Klaus Alzners Orkester.

We’re on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, Spotify, PocketCasts, and just about everywhere else. 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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