It is HOT the days are LONG and I am thriving and dying in equal measure!
New From Me
As promised I did a whole bunch of showcase watching in the first two weeks of June, and have collated the 50 games that really interested me!
K-YOS this bi-month (podcast master link, YouTube) is pretty varied, with Dani and I having almost no overlap in what we had planned to listen to, only converging to catch up on and discuss each other’s picks. Artists discussed: KNEECAP, The Space Ocean, La Roux, Lykke Li, MUNA, Ray Bull, El Dusty, ONEWE, Iceage, Kim Petras, SHINee, horsegiirL, Mon Laferte, and Carly Rae Jepsen.
This is technically not new from me yet, but next week will be the debut episode of the Dialed Indie podcast! For the first in this game developer interview series I’ll be talking to musician 2Mello about his path into the industry, creative process, inspirations, and what it’s like to make music for so many games! There should actually be a few episodes out by the time the next newsletter rolls around, before slowing down to a twice monthly cadence, but I’ll leave the other guests as a surprise. Are there any developers you’d like to see me interview? Feel free to leave a comment on the site or reply to this email with your wishlist and we’ll see what I can do!
VGBees!
Episode 105: Hey Summer Game Fest was barely a month ago, huh folks? John and Niki called in from John’s Toyota Sienna on site at SGF in what must be the most ramshackle episode in VGBees history. It’s also much shorter than usual, firing straight from the hip with our first impressions of the SGF shows.
Episode 106: Everyone’s back home, yay! There’s a brief portend of Xbox’s grim doom, a persistent curiosity on the creation of waffle fries, and a smattering of extra SGF news, mostly regarding the late-coming Nintendo Direct and a bit of extra information on existing announcements. For big news pieces there’s the RPGMaker forums being wiped from the face of the planet and Pokémon Go using user data to train military drones, which is news to some people! If you give something your location it’s being used to train military machines, folks! John and Niki give us the scoop on the games they played at SGF (that they’re allowed to talk about so far) and I talk about my no good, very bad experience at Distant Worlds, a Final Fantasy live concert series.
Episode 107: As layoff reports continue to swirl around Xbox, Niki comes in swinging by introducing the topic of games media’s role in all this, and especially the industry’s short memory and obsession with labelling extremely predictable events as “unprecedented.” We get into the setup for what will be record layoffs for Xbox: what are they doing, what are the rumors, and how did we get here? Also, Electronic Arts is introducing a new in-game advertisement platform we definitely thought they already had, and the UK government “bans” social media for teenagers, which will cause widespread harm despite being completely unenforcable and inefficacious overall.
Episode 109: The big news of the week is that Sony PlayStation is discontinuing game disc production and support come 2028 — a move that will hurt the most dedicated and the least privileged players alike to save Sony money that they will do nothing with. No one on the show falls into the category of “collector,” so we focus on the more harmful aspect of the physical media conversation, where low budget players will inevitably be forced out, because Sony is voluntarily and loudly cutting off the ladder that gets people into their ecosystem. With the embargo lifted (last week actually oops), John and Niki discuss their time with Star Wars: Galactic Racer back at SGF, which they loved! I’m loving Anode Heart: Layer Null, John is loving his brand new 3DS-like AYN Thor, and Niki continues to love spending some time in Slay the Spire 2!
Song of the Newsletter
Dani bought me a Puella Magi Madoka Magica gachapon pull as penance for my driving us to an anime figure store (I got Kyoko btw), so this month’s song of the newsletter is the ICONIC “Magia” by Kalafina. Where do you start with this song? “J-Pop” and “Anime ED” don’t cut it to even start to explain this classically-infused rock track. Its ritualistic, dark wave melodies are nevertheless performed by j-pop trio Kalafina in a ceasless chant about precious flowers and duplicitous wishes, the core of Madoka Magica. It’s awesome.
News & Recommendations
As tends to happen to me in the summer with those longer days, I’m back in my nonfiction bag. 1491 by Charles C. Mann is one title you’ll see recommended over and over again, but it can be easy to dismiss on the grounds of its release date and subject matter; it’s a book about the Pre-Columbian Americas published in 2005. The many sciences used to make up our picture of historical, often unwritten life — anthropology, climatology, botany, epidemiology, and genetics, to name only a few — have advanced so far that 1491 must be an outdated relic, right? Yes and no! But it’s always presented as a new wave of old science, and so dogs disproven-but-entrenched ideas and ponders new ones with (usually) equal scientific rigor. Lots of “so-and-so believes” and “it seems” and “research suggests,” though the author’s worldview is empathetic and curious enough to maintain that position without exhausting the reader. It’s particularly interesting to read as a retrospective convergence point to contemporary anthropology, where scientific proof increasingly mounts in favor of Indigenous knowledge and oral history. It can certainly let down in its anecdotes and quotations of Indigenous activists, which are infrequent and one-note, but I was overall impressed by how much information it packs in, and how much I still learned, despite the book’s relative age and so many theoreticals.