The worst thing about them axing Game Informer is that they immediately took down the whole goddamn thing. No archives or anything left for posterity, everything just redirects to that ChatGPT-ass statement page. And with no heads-up so employees could back up their writing/videos/etc., either.
(CEO of GameStop also endorsed Trump this week, so it seems on-brand. Good luck with your shitty Funko Pop warehouses, I guess.)
Iām really looking forward to trying World of Goo 2. At the moment, purchase options are limited. Two platforms I donāt have (Epic and Nintendo Switch) and Humble, where itās DRM-free but the Windows download isnāt working.
I thought the download might be fixed by morning, but not yet. Hopefully sometime over the weekend, but if not I can wait a little longer since I didnāt realize the release was coming so soon anyway.
hey fuck you too
They put up an alternate download link. I played through most of the first area, and there are already a couple of fun new mechanics.
https://x.com/Wario64/status/1820278382480802210
https://x.com/SEEEGA_1982/status/1819841583610564675
Next Yakuza game finally living up to the erroneous GTA comparison
this thing is even botw/totk-ier than it seemed
Not a huge fan of the TotK sidequest interface showing up in every Zelda game now but Bind looks cool
Demo out now
I used to feel some animosity for Waypoint at times, particularly the poptimism and the Klepek pieces: the Kingdom Hearts apologia, the praise of that PS5 activities thing, etc. Iād sustain all those complaints but does feel a bit different now.
Thinking back to that time prior and during lockdowns I was in a pretty against-the-world Huysmans āAu Reboursā kind of headspace. The world was full of traitor culturati and leftists doing leftism wrong. I couldnāt handle any whiff of narcissism or hypocrisy.
Nowadays, Iām questioning the impulse to paint everyone black, especially if thereās common ground - whether aesthetically, politically. In my state (Vic, Australia) there are currently two socialist parties sharing a miniscule percentage of the vote, because one split off the other citing a lack of confidence in the other party to āunite the leftā. Ironic and sad, if they canāt get it together to work with other socialists, how are we going to do actual politics with real power, bargaining, etc?
Anyway, I revisited Klepekās Cruelty Squad article the other day, and found it to be a pretty well-crafted, researched report that got at something about what that phenomenon was. Whatever their sins, (and without wanting to dismiss anyoneās criticisms) Iām not sure I can shrug off the closure and decimation of Waypoint etc as lossless events, like I did at the time. I guess itās easy to nostalgise once something is gone, (and doing so doesnāt really fix anything), but itās also easy to take something for granted when itās there.
Unfortunately Iāve aged out of the demographic that can unconditionally enjoy a game whose main obstacles are black and purple geometric shapes.
my issue with Klepeck specifically is he was one of those guys who seemed very
āindustry realismā-pilled and was very skeptical of more structural/lefty critiques some of the more niche blogger people people like me were making prior to 2016ish. then suddenly when like Bernie/Chapo happened he changed his tune and he became a lefty. it feels like there were a lot of guys in particular who it seemed like they were borderline sympathetic to GG and certainly were hostile to outsiders critiquing industry structures who suddenly changed their tune around 2016/2017. it was more than a bit frustrating to me to feel like suddenly some of these people who felt like they were in opposition to me rebrand themselves as lefty and then get tons of attention for it when the more niche stuff had already been decimated by that point.
i will say that time has also shifted enough now that a lot of the more opportunistic guys from that era have gotten off that train and/or been exposed, so i donāt feel quite the same way about that sort of thing. but it goes back to what i was saying about a lot of these media people perpetually seeing themselves as victims of both angry gamers and idiot CEOs and not people who were also helping consolidate the games media space into our current reality where everything is a bunch of fandom fiefdoms. the idea that something could even exist to cover the more niche games or discourses that were happening was just not even considered to be possible, so itās not something anyone even bothered to defend. a lot of shit just got so thoroughly thrown under the bus especially post-gamergate and these pubs were part of that.
Waypoint at least felt like it was trying to do a good job within their context of bringing in different perspectives but it was very clear for me from the getgo that it and other prestige pubs like it had an expiration date. once the 2017 MTV News debacle happened you knew a lot of other similar pubs were going in that direction. how do you even have something that squares the circle of being a traditional game outlet that is overly in thrall to the big game companies while throwing in some token critiques here and there? that felt not particularly compatible or sustainable. and i donāt think it ever was. there were at least a few youtube video essayists out there doing a better job at that point, which is unfortunate to say given our current video essay-saturated reality.
i wrote for Waypoint once because i had generally positive opinions of Austin Walker and Danielle Riendeau and iām glad they ran my article. but it did feel like it was headed in the direction of these people as personality cult/fandom that Giant Bomb started. and i guess i find that whole approach pretty anathema to writing or talking about art in an interesting or compelling way. and games people seem to not understand how it helped create the current reality of 25-30 year old youtube guys who donāt know anything about anything having tons of power and influence.
Iām very curious what leads to long running franchises like this becoming so conservative in their aesthetics.
Is it just that expensive to make up new designs? Are they afraid theyāll lose out on merch sales if media comes out with designs that are different from the current merch? Do they just stick with designs that they know have cleared legal? Do they want to limit the possible popularity of new designs from junior staff to prevent that staff from gaining bargaining power/getting headhunted?
to be fair botw was a powerful enough visual aesthetic to become sort of a visual open world template for other games to rip off and i assume reusing engines/assets at minimum was what allowed them to release a kind of unprecedented four-ish new zelda games this console gen/decade. but yes your point still stands that link between worlds/awakening/echoes are all just variations on āwhat if lttp was toysā
Plus Nintendo as a developer/publisher has a pretty established brand: nostalgic, gameplay-centric, polished, accessible , etcā¦ Since interpreting visual/aesthetic information is a form of difficulty in games, standardizing UI design, styles, characters etc. across the console & within franchises makes them more accessible while doubling down on branding, not just for the individual franchises but for Nintendo themselves as the patriarch brand or w/e.
e: compare to the reception around Cadence of Hyrule as ānot a real Zelda gameā and Nintendoās evil anti-labor bit theyāve recently doubled down on where they dont acknowledge specific developers of big franchises.
Is there anything in game criticism that gives you hope at the moment?
I thought the blog Bennett Foddy was writing a few years ago was probably the best Iād ever read, though he seems to have stopped - I wonder if he felt discouraged or just got busy? Really intelligent and unpretentious.