Everybody's Talking At Once

Don Bellenger stops by to talk about his upcoming "open-world gardenvania," The Beauty Cult, as well as his cyberpunk roguelike-shooter-platformer (and nihilistic synthwave multi-media project) Black Future '88. Along the way, we discuss the importance of game developers taking inspiration from things other than games, the joys of disengaging from monoculture, the unique appeals of disreputable art, and the difficulties of crafting non-murder-based gameplay and game genresAlso, making music exclusively for yourself, sometimes. Also, briefly, bread.

You can get Black Future '88 on Steam and Switch, and the OST on Steam and Bandcamp.

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• That incredible power pop album I mentioned is Alright by Zzuf.

• When Don mentions "the Ghost Ship fire," he's referring to this absolutely horrific event.

• Like I said, before this conversation, I only knew of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality from Elizabeth Sandifer's analysis of it (and of Eliezer Yudkowsky's influence more broadly) in Neoreaction a Basillisk: Essays on and around the Alt-Right.

• That book also contains a thorough explanation of Roko's Basilisk—but if you're looking for something shorter and more focused, this Thought Slime video covers it pretty well, too (albeit with absolutely no attempt (like, whatsoever) to be charitable to Yudkowsky's overall project).

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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.

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.

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• 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.

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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.

UNBEATABLE is a rhythm game, and an adventure game, and it's serious about being fully both. More than that, it's a game about the emotional truths of music, and of being in a band, and a piece of art about the connection between making art and doing crimes.

In this episode, to get at some of those truths, Andrew Tsai, RJ Lake, Rachel Lake, Jeffrey Chiao, TJ Maddux, and Mireille Arseneault from D-Cell games all stop by to talk about UNBEATABLE (as well as [white label], the side story/demo/OVA that goes along with it).

You can play the UNBEATABLE [white label] demo on Steam, and back the full game on the Slacker Backer section of the UNBEATABLE website.

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• That game about entropy and suchlike is Cruel World (blame everyone else).

• I am not aware of a non-one-shot version of RUNONCE (remember me).

• Truly, madly, deeply, and from the bottom of my heart, fuck Led Zeppelin.

• If you want more nuance than "fuck Led Zeppelin," then fair enough. Here's a bit of that.

• Osamu Sato's Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou is, um, a trip.

• Here's that article about burnout.

• Here are the basics of that whole ugly business that happened at Respawn.

• Here's Sonic 2 in PICO-8, and also DOOM in PICO-8 (also known as POOM).

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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.

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.

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• 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."

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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.

Tali Faulkner (better known in internet circles as Veselekov) knew he had something timely on his hands when he made Umurangi Generation, but he couldn't have known how timely. The base game was inspired by the fires in Australia in 2019, not the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020—but with its themes of friendship and creativity in the face of apocalypse, and neoliberalism ruining everything, it did speak pretty urgently to the latter. Then the game's DLC took that once-accidental resonance on an even more intentional, direct, unmistakably, morally urgent way.

How screwed are we, in fact? What do do, given that? Where's hope, and just as importantly, in what seemingly obvious places won't we find it? How do we make a better new world rather than a worse one now that the old world is gone for good in any case? Umurangi Generation tackles these themes through (of all things) a loving, reverent, technically rigorous simulation of DSLR photography. The game takes creativity and bearing witness seriously as radical acts.

You can get Umurangi Generation on Steam and Switch.

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• Robin Enrico's Game of the Month Club presentation on The Flame in the Flood and the history of survival games (especially weird ones) is a fine thing indeed.

• For those unfamiliar with what posterizing does in Photoshop.

• Umurangi is an ultimately untranslatable Te Reo word. It literally means something like "red sky," but contextually means something more like "witnessing the end of the world." (The word also refers to the Huia, a bird that was hunted to extinction).

• I found this episode of On the Media to a really good summation of Fox News as it currently exists, from the ways it does harm to the ways it makes money.

• Here's the Life After Hate organization, which was indeed founded by Christian Picciolini.

• Here's Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds, and the audiobook thereof.

• And here's that paper on respectful design and Indigenous Knowledge.

• The other authors/academics Tali mentioned in the context of Indigenous Knowledge were Lyndon Murphy, Mary Graham, and Norm Sheehan.

• Here's that stream that Tali was recently on, on which he mentioned his recent conversation with Super Bunnyhop, who in turn just did a video on Umurangi Generation.

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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.

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?

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• 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.

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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.

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.

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• 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.

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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.

Yadu Rajiv does a whole lot of different things, all of them to do with games and the people and technologies that make them possible. By day, he's a Lead Game Designer at BYJU'S, working on educational games that toe the line between physical and digital, and the rest of the time he acts as an ambassador and an organizer for India's fast-growing indie scene.

Here he talks about what it means to wear those different hats, the unique pressures of running a community in times of isolation, and the odd, undeniable role of bootlegs and piracy in game history—as well as what it means for a game to be recognizably Indian, given both the cross-cultural nature of games as a medium and the extreme heterogeneity of Indian cultural identity.

You can find Yadu's work on his website, and the community he's building at gamedev.in.

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• The header image is from Yadu's excellent development blog post, about SpellDown, and the body image is from Venba by Visai Games.

• You can see Osmo's games on their website.

• You can find the BYOG 2020 games I mentioned right here.

• Do definitely check out the Video Game History Foundation and the utterly wonderful Video Game History Hour podcast.

• Here's that post Yadu mentions, about recent and upcoming indie games by Indian developers.

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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.

Santago Zapata stops by to talk about the history of roguelikes, his own expansive body of small works for the 7-Day Roguelike Challenge, and his larger works, from Castlevania Roguelike, to Ananias, to his current project NovaMundi: The Spear of Chaquén.

Is it a roguelike, this new game? The purists would say (and have said) no, but it's certainly philosophically adjacent to roguelikes—with its focus on learning from failed runs, its emphasis on exploring procedurally-generated environments, and its infinity of emergent micronarratives.

It's also a game steeped in Muisca culture, and as such a great way to talk about the process of research, the semiotics of art direction, and the ethics of using procedural generation in stories about real places and cultures.

You can get NovaMundi: The Spear of Chaquén on Steam.

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• Here's the Berlin Interpretation, as documented on RogueBasin, and here are my weird musings thereupon.

• Here's Rami Ismail's thread on Six Days in Fallujah, and here's his episode of this here podcast.

• Santiago's talk on roguelikes as "automated dungeon masters" is fantastic, as are all of his Roguelike Celebration presentations.

• And speaking of Roguelike Celebration, here's that recently-posted talk about Dwarf Fortress. If you're new to Dwarf Fortress (as a game, and like, as a concept), then the Noclip interview with Tarn Adams comes highly recommended as well.

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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.

Jeremy Warmsley's music has spanned pop (or more broadly, the whole touring band thing), film, television, radio, and recently, games. He's an inventive, thoughtful, ever-expressive voice wherever he shows up (including on podcasts, as it happens).

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.

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• 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.

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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.