Everybody's Talking At Once

Aidan Moher is probably best known for his long-running, Hugo-winning blog A Dribble of Ink and its spiritual successor Astrolabe, or else for his short-form fiction, which prods at the boundaries of various sci-fi and fantasy subgenres. Today, he releases his first non-fiction book, FIGHT, MAGIC, ITEMS: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese RPGs in the West?and he stops by to attune to our aetheryte and have a chat.

You can get FIGHT, MAGIC, ITEMS, both physically and digitally, all the places listed here.

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• Here's Aidan's Astrolabe post about "pre-release jitters".

• FIGHT, MAGIC, ITEMS tells the full story of The Portopia Serial Murder Case, but in short: It was one of Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii's earliest games, and it was first released for the NEC PC-6001 was a visual novel controlled with a text parser. That wasn't going to work on the Famicom, both for storage reasons and for interface reasons—and in reworking the game for button-based menus, Horii laid the groundwork for the menu-based JRPG interfaces to come.

• Here's Legend of Etad, which was built for the Playdate.

• The remastermeisters at M2 were involved in Seiken Densetsu: Legend of Mana (Square Millennium Collection), so at the risk of being reductive, that's probably why it's a good'n.

• For a look at why the Dragon Quest games didn't come West for a while there, here's a lovely Paste piece looking back at Dragon Quest V these 30 years on.

• Here's the Action Button review of Boku no Natsuyasumi that discusses, among a great many other things, the radically combat-free opening hours of Dragon Quest VII.

• And here's Aidan's first piece on "weaponized nostalgia" in Final Fantasy VII Remake. He talks about the game's remarkable highs and equally remarkable lows, and about the oddness of trying to write about or think about or even just engage with a work that's so ever-incomplete.

• Yoshi-P recently said that he "decided to position FFXIV as a fan service title, and because it belonged to the MMORPG genre, I was able to run with an idea nobody had ever tried before and create a sort of Final Fantasy theme park." That's one half of Final Fantasy's relationship to its own past. The other half, Drew has written about in the context of Final Fantasy VII Remake. Drew and Lucio have also talked about remake culture generally, and Drew has thought a bit about remakes seeming simultaneously pious toward, and embarrassed by, their originals.

• Here's that Digital Foundry video on DOOM for SNES.

• And here's Aidan's article for Wired about using CRTs to play games here in the modern era.

• Atlus' deeply anti-preservationist lawsuit against a "gray" Shin Megami Tenei Imagine Online server is a pretty good example of why preservation often has to be, you know, extralegal.

• If these ideas of genre (and sharing, and anti-gatekeeping) are intriguing to you, then do check out our conversation with Santiago Zapata.

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Jessica Rizzo stops by to talk about the labor of making games—and specifically, the vitally important, structurally maligned discipline of Quality Assurance—in the context of her work with ABetterABK, Game Workers Unite, and CODE-CWA. Building on our previous conversation with Emma Kinema here on the show, we discuss where game development fits into broader conversations about making work (and everything else) more democratic.

The Weekly Standup Podcast is on Twitter, and the show itself is on Twitch and YouTube.

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• Jessica was going by Jessica Gonzalez at the time of this interview.

• For those unfamiliar with Grandma's Boy.

• When we talk about in-fighting on the left, we have to acknowledge that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism all occur in leftist spaces, and that such spaces need a way of dealing with them. The issue comes when we focus more on dunking than on resolving the issue at hand?and Twitter is particularly good at making the former feel like the latter.

• Here's Fight Like Hell.

• Here's the report Drew was referring to about Nintendo, though as Jessica pointed out, the issue of contractors being treated abysmally is by no means unique to Nintendo of America.

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Jessica Gonzalez stops by to talk about the labor of making games—and specifically, the vitally important, structurally maligned discipline of Quality Assurance—in the context of her work with ABetterABK, Game Workers Unite, and CODE-CWA. Building on our previous conversation with Emma Kinema here on the show, we discuss where game development fits into broader conversations about making work (and everything else) more democratic.

The Weekly Standup Podcast is on Twitter, and the show itself is on Twitch and YouTube.
For Jessica’s activist work and sundry social media mabobs, check out her Linktree.
You can also follow Jessica on Twitter, along with ABetterABK, GWA, and CODE-CWA.

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• For those unfamiliar with Grandma’s Boy.

• When we talk about in-fighting on the left, we have to acknowledge that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism all occur in leftist spaces, and that such spaces need a way of dealing with them. The issue comes when we focus more on dunking than on resolving the issue at hand—and Twitter is particularly good at making the former feel like the latter.

• Here’s Fight Like Hell.

• Here’s the report Drew was referring to about Nintendo, though as Jessica pointed out, the issue of contractors being treated abysmally is by no means unique to Nintendo of America.
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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“Get Thee Behind Me” and “Union Maid” from Talking Union by The Almanac Singers.
“Boom Went the Boom” (lyrics by Joe Glazer, to the melody of “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay”) performed by Joe Glazer and Bill Friedland, from Songs of the Wobblies.

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

Aaron Nemoyten stops by to talk about his work on Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes and Heroes of Dragon Age, which gives us a chance to talk about live ops and monetization—two topics that are core to how players experience games, but that only semi-seldomly get talked about as game design. We then dive into his newer, smaller, more experimental games.

Also Brazil, MDK, and naturally, DOOM.

You can see a while bunch of Aaron's work on his website.

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• Sandwiches of History is also on YouTube, for us olds. Roll for Sandwich, not so much.

• The Art of Game Design (also known as The Book of Lenses) is a foundational text to the way game design is currently taught in academia, and one that's weirdly unknown outside of it.

• Here's Aaron's talk on game design, and his essay on Mafia Wars and Team Fortress 2.

• And here are his postmortems on Heroes of Dragon Age, and on Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes. Oh, and let's not forget his Doom 2 level (or for that matter his Portal 2 levels).

• Since we talked, Aaron did release Idle Overlord, and also published a bunch more write-ups, including on Superhero City, Starbeard, that one Madagascar game, and the unreleased Dungeon Keeper Social.

• The Action Button review of DOOM clocks in at three hours, thirty minutes, and twenty-two seconds, for the record. (Svelte, by what turned out to be Action Button standards).

• Why did Drew say As You Like It? He clearly should have said Hamlet: Citizen Kane didn't get to be Citizen Kane by trying to be the Hamlet of movies.

• The eternal problem of shiny new tech making games less flexible, less open, and perhaps even less uniquely games—that came up in a wonderfully weird way in the recent episode of The Video Games History Hour about Toonstruck and Siliwood.

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Last time Anisa Sanusi was on the show, she talked about the Limit Break mentorship program, and her thoughtful, wide-ranging UI/UX work on Planet Coaster and Elite Dangerous. Now she's back to talk about her work on Rollerdrome, how it dovetails with her own newfound love of skating, and how she collaborated with the rest of the team to convey loads of timely information to the player without giving the game too gamey an aesthetic.

You can get Rollerdrome on Steam and PlayStation.

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• "The Dice Punks go Meatpunk!" is here, and everywhere else you want podcasts to be.

• Here's Anisa's episode of What Else Do You Do? wherein she talks about her skate crew and their specializations and such.

• Neo Cab is another game with a comic-booky visual style, albeit one with some more shading, and therefore distinct from Rollerdrome or Sable.

• Here's that joyful video of Anisa watching the Rollerdrome reveal.

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Chandana Ekanayake has more than two decades' experience in the game industry, stretching from work on The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard and Enter the Matrix to his projects at Outerloop Games, the studio he co-founded. Here he talks about the studio's anti-colonialist sci-fi falconry adventure Falcon Age, as well as their upcoming game Thirsty Suitors, an RPG about romance, family, cooking, skating, mutual understanding, and lots else besides.

MINOR SPOILERS for THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS, of all things, at 1:12:55.

You can wishlist Thirsty Suitors on Steam.

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• Here's our conversation with Megan Fox about SkateBIRD, as well as our conversation with Shawn Alexander Allen about Treachery in Beatdown City, and while we're at it, our conversation with Greg Kasavin about Hades.

• For those who haven't seen Venba.

• And for those who'd like to check out Eka's keynote at GCAP, replete with a cutlet recipe.

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Franny, Lucio, and Drew check in on what they've been playing, including but by no means limited to Elden Ring. We talk Neon White, Tunic, Horizon: Forbidden West, and Stray, as well as some of the games we're looking forward to later this year, from God of War Ragnarök and Splatoon 3 to Venba and We Are OFK.

Also: What have Lucio's kids been playing? What are the kids into these days, we ask, sounding as old as we've ever sounded, and embracing it. (The kids are into mods, hearteningly!)

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• Here once again is the People Make Games investigation into Roblox, and their follow-up about the Roblox folks trying to get them to take the original video down.

• Kirby Your Enthusiasm, basically as Drew described it? Totally a thing.

• Zach Barth's most recent appearance on the show was in fact his eighth.

• For those who don't know, the Bryant in question is the Director of OXENFREE II: Lost Signals, so we do not claim that our excitement for that game is entirely objective.

• We didn't really get to in it on the show, but the doubling of identities in Elden Ring isn't just about being confusing. It's thematic. It's about people playing different roles over long lives, to say nothing of eternal lives. (That said, it is also tremendously confusing).

• The Teddy in question was Teddy Dief.

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Zach Barth is back to talk about Last Call BBS, which is the last Zachtronics game, and also a collection of eight smaller—though not all especially small!—Zachtronics games, unified by the fictional hardware spec for which they were built and the fictional software pirate who distributed them. It's a celebration of pursuing weird ideas, messing with old computers, and various kinds of inevitable endings. Here Zach talks about why the studio is closing up shop, why they're choosing to end things on this particular note, and what might be next.

You can get Last Call BBS on Steam and on Game Pass for PC.

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• As Drew mentions in the in intro, there's also this live interview from GDC 2019. (The crowd was there to learn how to be Zach, which was not what Zach was there to teach, but hey).

• Drew refers to flatgames generally and Hypnospace Outlaw specifically, so for more on that, check out our conversation with Jay Tholen.

• Episode 7 of The Zachtronics Podcast is the one where Zach and company play Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and for which Zach originally made Dungeons and Diagrams.

• Here's the interview where Zach first talked about Last Call BBS being the last Zachtronics game, and also about teaching (if it's still there; Twitch is very weird and kind of bad that way).

• And here's the Kotaku piece (which presumably is sticking around) where Zach goes into more detail about the decision to close the studio.

• Zach mentions Logic, which rules.

• Zach also mentions Seeing Like A State and The Case Against Education.

• Here's the mook about expensive Japanese PCs from back in the day.

• And here's the stop-motion animated Last Call BBS trailer.

• The artist whose name we couldn't remember is Zdzisław Beksińsk.

• And the podcast Zach mentioned is Louder Than A Riot (not really a pun), which uses the catchphrase "Rhyme and Punishment" (an excellent pun). You can hear about the drama here.

• Thanks to The Mysterious Ian K. for the header gif (and the good conversation about the Japanese-style model-making in Last Call BBS).

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Wyatt Bushnell and Mike Salyh both have a background in physically extant escape rooms—not to mention arcade games, and other "out-of-home entertainment" experiences. (Gallery nerds would call them site-specific). As the co-founders of Coin Crew Games, they're now bringing that experience to a videogame for PC and consoles, in the form of Escape Academy.

Here they talk about making the switch to at-home digital games, the importance of social play, and the tricky balance between exploring novel ideas on the one hand, and on the other, having your idea make instant, gut-level sense to players (including distracted and/or drunk ones).

You can get Escape Academy on Steam, Epic, Playstation, and Xbox (including Game Pass).

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• And here's Two Bit Circus!

• For more on arcade games (in and out of the time of COVID) check out our interview with Nik Mikros and Josh DeBonis of Killer Queen fame.

• Yes, Chuck E. Cheese (the character) is properly named Charles Entertainment Cheese, and yes, Drew will bring this fact up at any opportunity.

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Heather Flowers has expanded the world of EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER into a TTRPG, in collaboration with Aura Belle. Here both of the authors talk about the rough-and-ready nature of the Powered by the Apocalypse system on which MEATPUNKS is based, and the thoroughly American nightmare that is Meatworld—plus, how to invite true improvisation for GMs and players alike, and "how to depict harm without causing it."

Brief spoilers about a major villain in the MEATPUNKS sourcebook from 0:28:45 to 0:29:28.

You can get the free quickstart edition of EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER right now, and the full game soon, over at Sinister Beard Games.

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• Here's Quietus, and here's Singularity.

• Here's our conversation with Spenser Starke about Alice Is Missing.

• And here's what the hell Drew meant by "the Mormor thing on Sherlock."

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