Everybody's Talking At Once

Greg Kasavin descends and/or ascends to our realm to talk about Hades, Supergiant's roguelike recently surprise-released into Early Access on Epic Games' brand new storefront. We talk about how Hades both builds on and departs from Supergiant's previous games (Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre), and then we talk a great deal about the infinite applicability of Greek myth to daily life—as stories about power, sure, and as stories about family, definitely, but also as stories about class, about immigration, and about studying competing accounts of history.

• Here's the first episode of NoClip's Hades documentary.

• And here's Greg's Hades interview with Gamasutra.

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.

As 2018 winds down, esteemed ETAO Podcast producer Frances Michelle Lopez sits down to talk about what we played in 2018, what we're looking forward to playing in 2019, and what's currently sitting in our to-read piles. We couldn't get to everything, during this conversation or throughout this year. We never can. There are too many games, too many excellent games, games forever and everywhere and for all seasons.

Not all of the games we played in 2018 were released in 2018, of course, but that's part of the point. We want to get better at talking about games outside of their prescribed press windows—because the medium deserves it, and because hey, it's not like anyone knows how games media are supposed to work anymore anyway. Let's rewrite the rules.

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• Speaking of ruling, Maggie Mae Fish does that, too. She rules.

• Ben Kuchera said the thing about Spelunky's leveling system, but I guess he said it on the now-defunct Penny Arcade Report, so a direct link is hard to come by.

• Here's the New Frame Plus about the animations in Red Dead Redemption 2.

• The Jackbox Party Pack 5! Even in the what-we-forgot section, I forgot that.

• @ us, Toby Fox.

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.

Heather Flowers talks EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER: Powered by Blood (and the MEATPUNKS material beyond). We talk about body horror, episodic storytelling and serialization, the anger and clarity of punk, the multiplicity and illegibility of punk, and the process of creating EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER on a schedule that's more MODERATE MEATPUNKS SOME OF THE TIME.

SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS START AT 20:14.

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• Here once again is Heather's MEATPUNK MANIFESTO.

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.

ARMS got announced with the Switch, and it launched with the Switch, and it's been both passionately loved and broadly ignored. Lucio was late to the Switch party, and thus late to the ARMS party, but he's been pretty taken with the game. We've played together a bunch, and had about as much fun as we've ever had with a 3D fighting game.

Almost a year and a half on, what exactly is ARMS' place in the fighting game scene, in Nintendo's oeuvre, and in games more broadly? What's its place anywhere? Why didn't it make more of a splash when it was new, and what might it signal about what we expect from games—as in, how much do we expect games to change after release, and how long do we expect them to stay relevant, whatever that means?

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• "Tripping probably lost me 2 games or so in a span of 6 years playing the game competitively, and probably won me 3 games or even less. But in Smash 4, rage is a much, much worse mechanic."

• You actually see about 11 minutes of football when you watch a football game on TV, apparently.

• Here's that video about Super Smash Bros. Melee as a spectator sport.

• Splatoon was indeed the last new series that Iwata insisted on Nintendo proceeding with.

• That line from I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats is actually about treasuring the unknown, not cherishing it, but you get the idea.

• The original Animal Crossing did come out on the N64, but only in Japan. It was remade for the GameCube soonafter, and that's the version that made it stateside.

• Dillon's Dead-Heat Breakers is that very strange 3DS game I was thinking of.

• ARMS has sold about 2.1 million copies, or 0.276 Ocarinas of Time, worldwide.

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

https://etao.blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/etao-podcast-43.mp3

ARMS got announced with the Switch, and it launched with the Switch, and it’s been both passionately loved and broadly ignored. Lucio was late to the Switch party, and thus late to the ARMS party, but he’s been pretty taken with the game. We’ve played together a bunch, and had about as much fun as we’ve ever had with a 3D fighting game.

Almost a year and a half on, what exactly is ARMS’ place in the fighting game scene, in Nintendo’s oeuvre, and in games more broadly? What’s its place anywhere? Why didn’t it make more of a splash when it was new, and what might it signal about what we expect from games—as in, how much do we expect games to change after release, and how long do we expect them to stay relevant, whatever that means?

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• “Tripping probably lost me 2 games or so in a span of 6 years playing the game competitively, and probably won me 3 games or even less. But in Smash 4, rage is a much, much worse mechanic.”

• You actually see about 11 minutes of football when you watch a football game on TV, apparently.

• Here’s that video about Super Smash Bros. Melee as a spectator sport.

• Splatoon was indeed the last new series that Iwata insisted on Nintendo proceeding with.

• That line from I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats is actually about treasuring the unknown, not cherishing it, but you get the idea.

• The original Animal Crossing did come out on the N64, but only in Japan. It was remade for the GameCube soonafter, and that’s the version that made it stateside.

• Dillon’s Dead-Heat Breakers is that very strange 3DS game I was thinking of.

• ARMS has sold about 2.1 million copies, or 0.276 Ocarinas of Time, worldwide.

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

We’re on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Podbay, PocketCasts, and RadioPublic.

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

Headliner: NoviNews puts you in the shoes of he/she/xe who curates the news in a country that is rapidly going strange, and just as rapidly becoming politically unstable. It's a game about information as a tool, news as a product, and ideology as a career.

We talk about the process of being even-handed and open minded without slipping into being anything so soppy and unhelpful as neutral or, for that matter, centrist. We talk about the world-building connections between NoviNews and the first HEADLINER, not to mention Jakub's other games. We talk about biases more pervasive in the news than oft-cited left/right biases. We talk about late night comedy and TED Talks, and unavoidably, we talk about capital-P Politics.

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• Here's Samantha Bee on Watergate.

• A lot of what I'm saying about frequently-undiscussed media biases comes from Brooke Gladstone's The Influencing Machine.

• The TED talk Jakub mentions was not what I was thinking of. Nor was this. Hm.

• Here's Jakub talking about his data-mining back when he was making the first HEADLINER.

• There are some better predictors of voting for Trump, and specifically for the being an Obama/Trump voter, than Apprentice viewership.

• Yes, Operation Wetback was a thing, and yes, it was called that.

• The exportation of Texan biases too all of U.S. public education is a hell of a thing.

• And here's an excellent retrospective of the nuances of free speech in the United States.

• Do actually get out there and vote, yeah?

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

Bobby Fowler and Brenda Noiseux (collectively known as Almost A Game) stop by for a Halloween-as-hell chat about their whimsical tabletop skulduggery simulator, Wicked Apples. We talk about the unique joys of tabletop games—and of digital game, for that matter, and about translating each to the other. We also discuss the ever-rewarding oh-so-fine-line of making all-ages macabre: making it less grim than Grimm, you might say, not to mention less archly moralistic.

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• Immortal Defense was excellent, but I believe that I was actually thinking of Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten. (Sorry, Adam).

• Here's that one Imaginary Worlds about "the imagination gap".

• It was Alec Meer who argued, "the quintessential element of boardgaming, I would argue, is the OH YOU BASTARD moment."

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

Henrik Pettersson introduces us to The Gardens Between, a wordless narrative puzzle game in which you play as time itself. We talk about themes surrounding memory, the quest to make complicated games simple (and vice-versa), the seemingly-ever-in-progress indiepocolypse, and a few untranslatable Swedish words.

Oh, and SPOILERS for Persona 5 from 01:03:38 to 01:05:15, for some damn reason.

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• Here are some of those ideas about memory and retention.

• Here's that Polygon article on there being "too many games."

• And here's my sleepy-ass playthrough of Kentucky Route Zero.

• And here's my interview with Joel Corelitz about GOROGOA.

• We don't talk about it in the interview, but the game's "ambient slow trailer" is just lovely.

"All The People Say (Season 2)" by Carpe Demon.

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

Greg Lobanov swings by to walk about Wandersong, with its happy-go-lucky approach to world-in-the-balance storytelling, its massive 110-tune soundtrack, and its uncommonly rich soundscapes. We talk about the collaborate process that brought the game to life, the thinking behind a music-driven game, and how our emotional connections to games—both in the moment and in retrospect—can be so utterly driven by music and sound in any case.

We also talk a bit about the "needlessly time-consuming" elements of the games we played as kids that, in games we come to as adults, can be grating and alienating. Games have gotten better at pithiness. Players have maybe even gotten better at knowing when difficulty is even necessary or interesting in the first place. It's not a given that all games get more interesting as they get more difficult or demanding, after all. Let's make room for the silly and the chill and the simply joyful, too.

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"All The People Say (Season 2)" by Carpe Demon.

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

Josie Brechner (a.k.a. Visager) talks about her OST work in EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER, Blossom Tales, Spice of Life, Gay Monster Kiss Club, and my electric heart, not to mention her other music, including the Songs for Unmade Worlds series. She makes wonderful music, for games both real and imagined (as well for for things that are not games, and for its own sake).

We talk about how subtlety is for fuckers. We talk about why trans folks tend to be interested in body horror. We talk about punching Nazis (and more broadly, excluding them), but also about the positive flip-side of that, namely building a community.

And of course, we talk about punk.

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• And here's the best article (half-)about the whole Taylor Swift thing.

• Robert Yang's work rules.

• As does rook's work.

• Game Workers Unite! is doing important work all around.

• Helixsnake's Skate 3 videos are things of beauty.

• Petter Coffin's worldview has some confusing/confounding elements, but the fish hook thing is useful, in my estimation.

• Contrapoints and Innuendo Studios were the YouTube channels that got me thinking about how (and when, and to whom) we should talk about fascism on This Here Internet.

• Yvette Clarke and Jerry Nadler are great. Chuck Schumer is not, especially.

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