The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for more Space Marine 2 operations. Ah, I see you’ve combined incredibly slow progression XP with worthwhile upgrades, forcing me to play for hours. I hate you for this, but I will not stop. Before I pour yet more of my life into making a fake number go up, let’s read some of this week’s writing I personally found interesting about videogames (and game related things!)

For Unlosing Writer, Brendan Sinclair put together a bad quote hall of fame.

Other times, a transparently Bad Quote – like John Riccitiello calling a big chunk of his customers fucking idiots – could look considerably worse a few years down the road. Riccitiello dropped that bomb in 2022, but given the Unity Runtime Fee debacle that followed last year, the complete overhaul in the company's executive ranks since, and whether or not the new crew can right the ship, it's still too early to tell where that quote lies on the spectrum of "ill-advised" to "company-sinking."

If we are going to preserve the sanctity of the Hall and ensure it means something, we can't let in just any old rancid flavor of the week; we need to know it will age like that gallon of milk my dad lost in one of the nooks of the car trunk for a couple weeks. The one that made the car smell like vomit in the summers forever more, even though it was never opened and we cleaned and sanitized everything as best we could. I still get a phantom whiff of it when I get into any car that's been parked in direct sunlight on a hot day.

Why Do We Even Want to Be Space Marines?, asks Dia Lacina for Paste

Consider for a moment the Space Marine’s relation to both the Doomguy and B.J. Blazkowicz. Both are straightforward: One punches holes in literal demons. One punches holes in literal Nazis. In the case of demons, who could argue with shooting make-believe demons? In the case of shooting Nazis, we take for granted how much of an overused cartoon we’ve made them. Doom as it’s grown has attempted to add layers of meaning to shooting demons externally through the origination of Demons. Wolfenstein has attempted to make connections between its comic book Nazis and the banality of American white supremacy. It’s not much, it’s not really successful and both fail in other areas, but it’s attempting to do something with the fantasy. The two Space Marine games both so completely remove the titular force from its thematic and symbolic place in the world-building of 40K that it can’t articulate the relationship to fascism the Adeptus Astartes occupies. The Inquisition is only a bad thing when it’s done to the player character, Titus, and only because we can point to the screen and say “but he’s not a heretic.”

Here’s a huge report by Chris Tapsell at Eurogamer on Cyberpunk 2077’s recovery.

The backdrop at the time was the Christmas period, as Covid continued to rage. "Lots of festivities. It's almost cringey," Nowakowski says, "because you feel super sad inside and everybody - you know on the TV and around the whole world, yes it's Covid and everybody's at home, but it's joyful music. Home Alone is on the TV. And you're feeling like crap inside.

"I think it was, actually, one of the worst moments of my life to be honest, on a personal level. And I definitely wouldn't want to go back to that place. It was not a pretty place. And it was really, personally, hitting, you know, my soul. But I think it was more so [a dark place] - or on a similar level if not more - for everybody in this company. When you wake up and you read just the worst in the media, social media, and so on. It doesn't make you feel happy."

Music this week is Mad Care by Drug Church. Have a great weekend!