I genuinely think Wilds has one of the all-time worst stories in both concept and execution. I wrote about it here (jmargaris.substack.com/p/monster-hu...) but TL;DR - the main character arc is that a kid who loves animals unlearns empathy in favor of "it's good to kill animals."

I think this and Shadow of the Colossus are good examples of games that the modern industry isn't suited to create. Not something a AAA studio would bother with but too ambitious and technically demanding for a small team.

It's a real bummer to hear that Starfleet Academy is a young adult show. (If this was known I somehow missed it) Star Trek was always a show teens could watch. (And the teen character in TNG, Wesley, was the worst character!) I don't think Trek needs separate CW-style content.

"I've got this **** on lock"

If you want a game dev to be mad at Jaime Griesemer has posted like 50 times mispresenting laws regarding officer involved jeopardy, praising ICE for "mag dumping" into that woman, and making people believe he's an Iraq / Afghanistan vet. (As part of defending mask-wearing by ICE agents)

Ok - I'm frustrated! And I'm all for cancelling these assholes. (Bring cancel culture back twice as bad!) That said, I see literally nothing on his feed that mentions ICE, and on Twitter I see him arguing with the people defending ICE. I need a one example before I hate someone.

I would suggest that, in addition to reaching out to steam (who will just ignore you), you also reach out to the Idle Thumbs / Campo Santo guys who work at Valve now. They have dozens of hours on tape patting themselves on the backs for being some of the good ones, performatively feminist, etc.

I ran into a guy vociferously defending the ICE killing. On his substack page he has a series of long screeds about how he hates all women. I looked him up and found he has a 10-year history of contacting women at random to gloat about other women being murdered by their ex-husbands.

I recently watched the SyFy show "Defiance" and thought I would post some positive thoughts on the reddit sub, as kind of a treat for sickos. It turns out the game (it was a TV show and an MMO) was flipped back on recently and all the posts there are about the game. Weird!

Miiverse was great. I had 7000 Miiverse followers (I will never be that popular again!) and people would just ask me random questions about other games or Nintendo or post silly pictures or whatever. Like the exact opposite of modern social media.

I'm terrible at this sort of thing - I assumed "ship" was like "they shipped them together" like...in a packing crate or shipping container. It took me years to realize that Arbok is Kobra backwards, even after I knew the Ekans is Snake.

I stumbled across a Twitter post from John Carmack about how all the game devs who left for silly ideological reasons should come back and all the quotes are like "this is a child porn site now bro." We made a huge mistake when we decided that guys who are good at computers are all-around smarties.

🌿Hello everyone🌿 I’m looking for new opportunities as a 3D Environment/Asset Artist and Level Artist positions 💫 My focus is Stylized Art and PBR texturing! I also have experience in Substance Designer 👽 I'd appreciate your support in sharing 🫶 🎨 artstation.com/helenthsh DM me if interested!

Waltz is stoically and heroically not being "baited" into any action beyond writing a stern email. Of course the lion's share of the blame goes towards Trump et al, but boy it's galling that these Dems have called themselves "the resistance" for 8+ years now and don't do *anything.*

Same publication and same author! There's a distinct lack of "Baby Steps needs an easy mode" discourse so this contradiction exists in games media as a whole, but it extends to individual viewpoints as well. All games need an easy mode except this game. Why though?

I've said for a while now that I don't like the "write evil characters as if they think they're good" advice because a lot of these people know they're evil and revel in it. Pretending that they believe they're doing the right thing is giving them way too much credit.

When games media people praise Baby Steps for "raising interesting questions about game difficulty" but also produce "all games need difficulty levels" opinion pieces whenever From releases a new game I wonder how they square that or if the contradiction occurs to them.

this isabelle with tits "discourse" is good because it reassures me that everyone on this site is insane and/or stupid and i'm the only normal & cool one

When this was announced I was going to snark on it but I figured I'd wait for the results. Anyway this is exactly what I expected - a list of favorite games created by very online bluesky types. Extremely heavily weighted towards posters.

I binge-watched Helix (mostly because it was set in the arctic I guess) and that has to be one of the all-time worst examples of the plot hinging on characters refusing to talk to each other or ask the most basic and obvious questions.

I was thinking of getting myself a new TV for Christmas as mine is quite old, but instead I got a new pair of glasses, which is basically the same thing. (Play Switch 2 with glasses off though so I still get free anti-aliasing)

Nobody hates free speech more than the "big free speech guys", which is makes it very awkward for people who genuinely are pretty libertarian on free speech.

There are a lot of Chinese comments on the Chinese trailer saying they're getting big Boss Baby vibes lol. Yes it's annoying when people do the "finally white people have perfected the JRPG" thing but sometimes a horse is a horse and calling it a horse isn't ignorance or cultural chauvinism.

I think if someone makes another CI animated movie about a baby that runs a corporation and wears a suit it's ok to say that it kinda looks like Boss Baby.

I've recently been playing a bit of Astral Chain and the other-dimensional environments look nicer than they should. One reason is that to get this nice specular effect from different directions there's basically 2 mirrored directional lights facing each other. Cheating is good. (in this context)

I find this a huge turnoff. This kind of setup is less a conversation than it's a depth-first search through a tree. It's surprising that more games don't try to gamify this in some way like giving you a limited number of "conversation points" to spend on options or disallowing backtracking.

It's interesting. We know that audiences watch movies with subtitles on largely because they can't understand the dialogue without them, but a Nolan will say that actually it's fine if the audience can't understand the dialogue - people are very stubborn about defending industry practices.

After writing my blog about player fantasies I now constantly see it abused by players as a buzzword they can use to sound like authoritative game devs. "My sniper player fantasy is that I can kill any enemy with one shot before they see me, the developers of this game need to honor my fantasy!"

What kills me about "who is the father of indie games?" discourse is that, if you mean only the 2008+ indie boom, the answer is whoever pushed Xbox Live Arcade, or someone like that. Not an indie game creator, a venue creator. Breakout game creators were inevitable thanks to venue availability.

Just the other day I saw a video for a Unity "make your own fighting game" package (Universal Fighting Engine) that swaps these terms so I can see why people are confused. (I tried to google for this image and the first result was my own blog post lol) Red = hitbox, blue = hurtbox, green = bounds

Come on now that's just a straight up lie. He also podcasts!

I still have most of these prints if anyone wants them? There's also Bandcamp: satellitesound.net and Ampwall: ampwall.com/a/andrewelmore

This is incredibly painful for me. I have never asked for help like this before. But I have had people reach out to me asking if they can help, so I am sharing my story and finally asking for help. I've been lucky to have a lovely group of followers here, please share if you can, anything helps <3

CPI is a metric designed to lowball inflation. Like most people I assumed CPI was a sensible metric. Then I did some research on how it works. Anyone pointing to a chart of CPI either doesn't know how it works or *likes* that it's misleading.

As part of my 2025 wrap-up I managed to cram in some stuff about Last Defense Academy and Virtue's Last Reward as "map games", a topic I find very interesting that I rarely (if ever) see discussed.

As part of my 2025 wrap-up I managed to cram in some stuff about Last Defense Academy and Virtue's Last Reward as "map games", a topic I find very interesting that I rarely (if ever) see discussed.

I didn't mention political punditry when I wrote this but it was an angle I'd thought about. Yglesias is doing "imagine a mom who loves Warhammer 40k." "Imagine a guy who agrees with me or makes my point" is not a great way to start an argument! You can imagine anything!

open.substack.com/pub/jmargari... (I swear I only used this as the lead image because I could only fit a few images in this post and this was the only one at all readable in terms of shape / color etc without context)

When we were making Lucadian Chronicles we wanted to use some public domain art which meant visiting various websites but also going to museums, something I previously saw as a vacation-only activity. The end result was I learned a lot about art history.

I'm shocked I don't see this image or some variant more often.

The key graphic of their trailer being "inspired" by Gustave Dore looks a little more suspicious in this light. GET 'EM BOYS!!! Ok in all seriousness, it does raise the question: "was this inspired by Gustave Dore or was Dore just hoovered in by an AI-driven process?"

1. Start reading this 2. Pretty much agree 3. Thing about RT'ing it 4. Realize that 1/167 means there are 167 images 5. Start clicking through them 6. See that #4 is me! Ha. I've always preferred "engrossing" to "immersive"

Relatable.

I've always contended that one of the subtle strengths of Dark Souls is that it has basically no dedicated traversal mechanics and combat takes place in the same weirdly-shaped spaces you explore - it's not combat in an arena and then explore a more exotic layout. (Same for Mario TBH)

This is exactly why I start so many sentences with "but" and "and." I know full well you're not supposed to, which only adds to the appeal and helps cement my reputation as "the bad boy of sentence starting."

I decided to write an end of year roundup, AKA a bunch of topics that I want to write about but that wouldn't fill up a full post, with the plausible deniability that they're all 2025 related

You guys are never going to crack "what counts as an indie game?" It worked for movies because there were 5 movie studios that had backlots etc. There are hundreds of video game publishers from all over the world with no clear dividing line between them

One of my personal highlights surrounding The Game Awards was the official Okami account clapping back and eviscerating this loser ☠️

I occasionally wonder if you could make a game like this today. You would *have* to do some "quality of life" stuff (at least vs the early days of FFXI) but what is the right amount that preserves the spirit without being too off-putting?

I've transcended to the next plane of human existence (basically a living beam of light, use your imagination) and now see TGA discourse as the concern of lesser beings, sorry everyone! (I will briefly de-evolve to say that City of the Wolves deserved the fighting game award)