I wrote this article for an arts publication – unfortunately, at the last moment they weren’t about to publish it for reasons, but the upshot of this is that I can publish it here! While it’s not specifically about video games, AI and Gen-AI in particular is going to have an ever-bigger impact on the games industry, so it’s still…
If you’re on a certain social media platform owned by a ketamine-addicted fascist (and you know all know which one I’m talking about – ask yourself why we all know that), then you’ve probably seen a new phenomenon sweeping across the techbro accounts. One of that mob released a new…
I’ve actually had a couple of people ask about this, so I…
I was tempted to resist writing anything about the announcement of Ghost…
AI has really taken the world by storm over the last year or so, and now developers are actively using it for everything from script writing, to art, and code generation. The problem is… this is not good at all for the creativity and artfulness of games. At all. That’s…
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“My job is different now since Midjourney v5 came out last week,” an artist at an independent game developer wrote in a recent Reddit post. “I am now able to create, rig, and animate a character that’s spat out from MJ in two or three days. Before it took us…
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I was almost going to skip past this year’s MLB the Show 23. Partly because I’m still playing last year’s edition, and… well, no, that was the only reason. I am still playing last year’s iteration and I don’t see any value in the iterative annual upgrades of sports games…
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Now that Fire Emblem Engage has settled down a bit, I wanted to talk about the series as a whole, because Nintendo’s inability to see the value of making these games accessible on modern platforms is starting to get frustrating. Related reading: All Fire Emblem titles released in English, ranked!…
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Over in the world of literature, there has been quite the kerfuffle over the last week or so. News broke that the estate of Roald Dahl, and the publisher of his books, Puffin, would be taking the author’s body of work and, on the advice of sensitivity readers, making several…
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A high-profile and very controversial game released this week. I’ve been loathe to mention it by name, because we made the decision very early on that we wouldn’t be covering it, but Hogwarts Legacy has created a lot of discourse this week, and there is something of tangential relevance to…
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Today, the Australian Minister for the Arts, Tony Burke, announced the Revive National Cultural Policy, which outlines the new(ish) Labor government’s position on the arts and the investments that it will make as part of that. Buried within it is some support for the games industry, but calling it a…
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“We’re screwed. Writing is over. That’s it. It’s time to pack away your quill, your biro, and your shiny iPad: The computers will soon be here to do it better.” This quote came from a writer for The Spectator, and it was in an article talking about the explosive growth…
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Whenever Americans tackle Japanese material or attempt to situate a film, TV series or otherwise in Japan, there’s an inherent tension between what works in American cinema and entertainment, and what is representing Japanese culture and aesthetics accurately. Too often, under these circumstances, the work turns out to be something…
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Fire Emblem Engage releases this month as the latest in Nintendo and Intelligent Systems’ long-running and highly lauded properties. I want to use this opportunity to go back to the very first Fire Emblem to be released in English, Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade (simply called “Fire Emblem” for the…
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