I hope it didn’t feel like I was away too much or too long, but I’m back! As I touched on in the last newsletter, April’s a busy month for me, and especially so this year. Mostly baseball and birding, to be honest! I took a guided tour of Fenway Park and a day trip to Worcester to see the Red Sox’s Triple-A minor league team, the WooSox, play; the latter featuring both a grand slam as well as perhaps the last minor league start of Payton Tolle’s career! A great consolation prize for seeing the Boston Fleet lose and not getting a shot at any fun merch, since TD Garden carried so little (it was a great arena experience otherwise, though). I also saw the Corpus Christi Hooks as we took a road trip to my hometown and visited all the must-see sights, like the illustrious, two-story Whataburger by the Bay, the Texas State Aquarium (which is so expensive now, holy shit), and the Art Museum of South Texas. We patronized not one but two award-winning South Texas restaurants: LaVaca BBQ in Port Lavaca, with a jalapeño cream corn to die for, and Southside Barbacoa in Corpus Christi, whose carne guisada landed them on Texas Monthly’s 50 Best Tacos in Texas list. As for birding, we took a detour to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, where we were way too lucky and somehow managed to catch one of the last whooping cranes of the season, and one of less than nine hundred left in the world. There was a trio of painted buntings (and a rattler!) at the butterfly garden in the Oso Bay Wetlands Preserve, a park I frequented when I lived in Corpus, and the peak of spring migration treated me well here in Houston, too. Capping my time off was Little Craft Fest in Conroe, a stationery and home goods convention hosted by the local Little Craft Place. The place was absolutely packed and a little disorganized as one might expect of a small convention, but I had a great time, bought some great stuff (you can see some of it towards the end of VGBees 99), and ate some bangin’ guajillo enchiladas at Vida Mariscos before we went home. It’s been an awesome month in my life and I’m hoping to carry that energy forward, especially as I zero in on some new ideas…
New From Me
As the first third of the year passes us, I’m starting up a new blog series! This’ll be a more in-depth recap of all the games I’ve played or been playing during the given period, starting with January-April of this year. And by “more in-depth than usual,” I mean that this ended up being a collection of 200-600 word mini-reviews. I got into: Formless Star, Type Help, TR-49, Hermit and Pig, MOONROT, Horripilant, Fragile Feelings, Terraria, Lost and Found Co., Funi Raccoon Game, The Perfect Tower II, Lucid Blocks, The King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match, Flotsam, and CorgiSpace. Links to all those games (as well as the couple of full reviews in there) are on the page as per usual.
P.S. I’m often prostelytizing against social media and social media usage, but there’s really no way to have a conversation otherwise, is there? To that end, I’ve enabled logged-in comments on the above post as well as “A Bunch of Gaming(ish) Video Essays I Like” from a couple months ago. They seem like good starting candidates! I won’t have comments on every post from now on, but if y’all are into it, then I’ll make it a more regular thing.
It’s been a couple months, which means that Dani and I have amassed enough music to record n’ release another episode of K-YOS! This one is a juicy two hours, owing largely to the glut of late March releases. Keeping in mind that the YouTube version of the podcast has timestamps (not chapters though because they keep taking away our advanced features since I won’t give them my ID (again)), here’s the full list of artists we talked about: waterbaby, Blessing Jolie, Giant Claw & galen tipton, James Blake, The Scratch, The Sophs, BTS, Coco Jones, Naomi Scott, underscores, galen tipton (again!), Charlie Puth, Fetty Wap, Robyn, Slayyyter, Thundercat, The Strokes, Jessie Ware, the Foo Fighters, and Jam2go.
It’s a much shorter VGBees section this month, as I was away for most of our recording hours, but I did make it onto two episodes!
It’s Okay For The Boys To Be Childish: This episode takes its name from some unbelievably incriminating shit in Mr. Beast’s employee handbook, uncovered by a lawsuit levied against him/his company by a former employee. Ludum Dare Jam is entering its “Cher Farewell Tour” era, wherein it will be technically-kinda-sorta officially over. Some goofy corporate decisions: Playdate allows AI-generated coding but not AI-generated art, the BAFTAs pull a game trailer at the last second for “triggering” content, and Call of Duty will no longer be day one on Xbox Game Pass. John is poking around Titanium Court and I didn’t have time to play many games since I was doin all the stuff I talked bout in the intro!
Episode 100: GameStop Preps eBay Purchase, ustwo CEO’s Blunder, Paste Games Shuts Down: It’s episode 100, wow! We didn’t do anything in particular for it and kept it pushin’. GameStop is allegedly preparing to buy eBay, something they definitely have the money to do, while Saudi Arabia is seemingly slowing down on its many, many video game investments and Atari snapped up another emulation studio. The developers of Magic: The Gathering Arena have unionized, which I’m sure Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro will be happy to recognize! The CEO of Ustwo Fampany Ltd. put her foot right in her mouth during an interview with GameDeveloper, GameMaker gives the a-okay to vibe coding (WHY), and Paste has officially shuttered all of their games coverage. Rest in peace to the A.V. Club, Endless Mode, and Paste Games as a whole. Shoutouts to the food trucks in Niki’s area, kind of, the discussion of whom briefly interrupts the pod. I talk about Flotsam and CorgiSpace and Niki’s been playing Tomodachi Life proper, and is starting to find more of its strange and unique features!
Song of the Newsletter
Fuck it: 11-minute house song. “Fantasy (Def Club Mix)” by Mariah Carey and Def Mix Productions is the longest song in any of my playlists by a pretty wide margin, coming in at 11:16. Not every house track needs to be long, but house is one of the music genres that most makes use of repetition and progression, both of which take time to do right. The Def Club Mix makes use of every second of its gargantuan runtime, introducing epic builds and drops, anticipated highs and sudden lows, and brand new vocals recorded by Carey just for the remix. The whirlwind infatuation is more pronounced with those slightly sped-up vocals and driving percussion, while the romance also grows stronger juxtaposed against it, with the instrumentation stripped down beneath even sweeter singing than appears on the original single. It might be the perfect remix — not just of “Fantasy,” but ever.
News & Recommendations
I have now watched untold hours of Majuular’s videos. I’m sure he’s been recommended in my YouTube sidebar before — his videos are all about games, and he has a few in the million-plus club to boot — but it was only after seeing Super Lesbian Animal RPG developer Bobby Schroeder post about an Ultima Underworld II video that I went and checked him out. These kinds of “video essays,” where the creator gives a minute-by-minute recap of the Content in question, are normally quite disappointing; needlessly long, overly granular, chock full of crappy meme sounds, and without much to say at the end of the day. But not so with Majuular! While his videos are well on the long side, and while they do get very granular, it feels justified by the finished product. At their core, they’re extremely dense and extensive critiques of games with equally dense and extensive systems and narratives, conveyed with a broad review and full story recap as framing and organizational devices (to the detriment of their length, but rarely in an unentertaining way). He has several videos dedicated to FromSoftware’s King’s Field and Shadow Tower series. I’m sure that there’s quite a few of you perverts who might like that!