Scanline Talks

You know, despite our ambitions of being a gaming coverage site, we talk about a lot of anime. Our most frequent and consistent shows are about anime and manga, so of course we had to dedicate a category to it. In one of our more prestigious awards, we discuss our favorite anime and manga of the year from 2024.

The Nominees Are:

Here's our write-up for the winners!

Our intro and outro music for the Gimmick Awards 2024 is Afternoon After the Rain by Kazuki Kaneko, and our art is a commission from Sarracenian on Bluesky.

...And here are the Instrumental songs, which is to say, the ones that aren't lyrically focused- the human voice is still allowed as an instrument!

The Nominees Are:

Here's our write-up for the winners!

Our intro and outro music for the Gimmick Awards 2024 is Afternoon After the Rain by Kazuki Kaneko, and our art is a commission from Sarracenian on Bluesky.

*A Hushed Night Begins/In High Spirits/Come One, Come All

Music is a weird category for us, or rather pair of categories thanks to it being split in twain. We aren't music crits, and we don't cover the music industry or its releases. Instead, we discuss music via its presence in other things we cover- games and anime. Anime openings and closings, themes in games, that sort of thing. We'll leave the record industry to the experts.

The Nominees Are:

Here's our write-up for the winners!

Our intro and outro music for the Gimmick Awards 2024 is Afternoon After the Rain by Kazuki Kaneko, and our art is a commission from Sarracenian on Bluesky. Hironobu Kageyama

2024 was full of surprises. Not all of them good! 2024 was a rough year, y'all. But sometimes surprises can be wonderful, and in this category we explore the things that caught us off guard in a good way. All sorts of things can be involved in this category, be it patches, games, DLC, or in one case, an entire restructuring of games distribution.

These are the Best Surprises of 2024.

The Nominees Are:

Here's our write-up for the winners!

Our intro and outro music for the Gimmick Awards 2024 is Afternoon After the Rain by Kazuki Kaneko, and our art is a commission from Sarracenian on Bluesky.

From Best Character, two phantoms were born. The spotlight-haver and the supporting act shouldn't be fighting with each other. It's not right. But I'll let the supporting acts brawl amongst themselves, that's just entertainment.

The Nominees Are:

Here's our write-up for the winners!

Our intro and outro music for the Gimmick Awards 2024 is Afternoon After the Rain by Kazuki Kaneko, and our art is a commission from Sarracenian on Bluesky. The rules summary music for this category is City of Reason by Alkemie from Pentiment, whose character Andreas won Best Game Character in the Gimmick Awards 2022.

This was a category separation we felt very good about when it occurred to us: why are we having leading characters going up against background characters? Why don't we separate this into Best Major Character and Best Side Character, so it's not "this character is cool but they aren't very important to the plot so they're cut?" I like this much better, and I hope y'all do too.

The Nominees Are:

Here's our write-up for the winners!

Our intro and outro music for the Gimmick Awards 2024 is Afternoon After the Rain by Kazuki Kaneko, and our art is a commission from Sarracenian on Bluesky. The rules summary music for this category is flanged drum by rj lake from EL PASO, ELSEWHERE, whose main character James Savage won our Best Character category in the Gimmick Awards 2023.

"Action Toolkit" is the best phrasing we could come up with, but it's like... you know when you play a game, and you push buttons, and it feels good? Yeah. That. A nice wall jump, a cool counter, a great set of tools that come together to form a playstyle and concept that feel good and engage your brain. Not everything on here is an action game. It does kinda exclude turn-based games, however.

The Nominees Are:

Here's our write-up for the winners!

Our intro and outro music for the Gimmick Awards 2024 is Afternoon After the Rain by Kazuki Kaneko, and our art is a commission from Sarracenian on Bluesky. The rules summary music for this category is Pizza Deluxe! from Pizza Tower, whose main playable character Peppino won our Best Action Toolkit category in the Gimmick Awards 2023.

It would be wonderful if all that was necessary to make a great work of art was a good idea. Unfortunately, this isn't so, and the road to making an idea into real art is full of pitfalls, and chances for things to go astray. Or perhaps not astray- perhaps these artists made exactly what they meant to, and it's on us for seeing a different, better possibility in them.

Whatever the case, these are good ideas gone wrong. These are the Most Misguided of 2024.

The Nominees Are:

Here's our write-up for the winners!

Our intro and outro music for the Gimmick Awards 2024 is Afternoon After the Rain by Kazuki Kaneko, and our art is a commission from Sarracenian on Bluesky. The rules summary music for this category is Faith to Face from AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative, our Biggest Disappointment "winner" from the Gimmick Awards 2022.

We're starting the Gimmick Awards with one of our most passionate, intensely discussed categories every year: Best Fighting Toolkit. We love fighting games around here, and we love to talk about character designs and movesets. God bless Jen, who is very patient with Kyrie and I every year in this category.

The Nominees Are:

Here's our write-up for the winners!

Our intro and outro music for the Gimmick Awards 2024 is Afternoon After the Rain by Kazuki Kaneko, and our art is a commission from Sarracenian on Bluesky.

This is the latest sampler for Novel Not New, our patron-only show! Want more like this? For just $5/month over at patreon.com/scanlinemedia, you can get access to monthly episodes of the show, as well as over 50 backlog episodes. All sorts of different games, a wild variety of guests, a bounty of tones and atmospheres. All yours: so check it out!

After months of internal discussion, we finally sat down to play the visual novel deckbuilder epic Library of Ruina. This tale of just the one City begins as it is simply the worst of times, with a society divided by class but united by the common language of systemic and personal violence. Into this mix we insert the Library: a supernatural place where a iron-hearted woman invites guests to their deaths, turning them into books to enrich her knowledge and draw her ever closer to her goal of becoming human. 

This is simply our starting point- because oh baby, beLIEVE me we are off to the races from here. If we didn't have an expert joining us in the form of kb, I shudder to think how lost we'd be.

Our Guest!

This Month's Game!

Next Month's Game!

Opening Segment