March Update: Back To Normal

Hey team!

The End of March

The primary goal of this month was to get back on schedule with the videos. At press time, we are juuuuuust about there.

I got Endnote 1 up on the 14th, just before the Ides, and I'm in the home stretch on the next video now. If I manage to get this online before the month is over (which I'd give about 70/30 odds), we'll be back on schedule. Most likely outcome is that I'll have a rough cut to you in March and a finalized version public in early April, but we'll see which way the wind blows on this one.

These Alt-Right Playbook videos just keep getting longer. I had aimed to keep each one under 10 minutes, and I haven't pulled it of once! This new one is pushing 15. I'm telling myself that it's just because these early episodes are foundational to arguments we'll make down the line, and once that groundwork is laid they'll get shorter, but who the heck knows? Someday I'll learn how to be succinct.

The upshot of putting two videos out this month is that I haven't had time to script the next video or work on overdue perks, so it feels like I still haven't had a "normal" month of work since the Patreon success last year. One might hope that April will be normal, and yet...

Gearing Up For April

As you may remember, I'm paneling at PAX East early next month. If you're going to PAX East, please come!

If you click that link, you'll notice that Matt Conn of MidBoss is listed as one of my co-panelists. Keep this under your hats for now, because I don't think an official announcement has been made, but Matt is no longer on the panel. Amid quite a number of allegations of employee exploitation, abuse, and sexual misconduct, Matt has stepped down as CEO of MidBoss, has been disinvited from the panel, and I suspect will not be attending PAX at all.

I'm glad that Matt isn't on the panel, because as soon as I heard the accusations I was not interested in sharing a stage with him, and I prefer the scenario where he's not there at all to the one where I withdraw because I won't be on a panel with a known harasser. I hope Matt is able to make amends to the people he's hurt in time, and hope this is the wake-up call he needs, but, until such time those changes are made, I don't want to associate with him.

But the current scenario is the one where I have a four-day badge for PAX and don't even have to leave my state. Woo!

Hopefully PAX doesn't sap too much energy out of the month (con drop is definitely a thing), because I'd like to maybe, just maybe, have that normal month I keep talking about.

Game Recommendations

Hey, this is the kind of thing we used to do, isn't it?!

Iconoclasts
I'd been following this frequently-cancelled game by Konjak for years, and it was absolutely worth the wait. A lot of people are comparing it to Metroid, Konjak says his chief inspiration is Monster World 4, but, honestly? I feel like the biggest comparison is Cave Story. It's got that same feeling of a medium-sized, narrative-rich, interconnected world with a surprising number of late-game secrets for the ones who go looking for them. But it's also got Konjak's brand of epic boss fights and excellent game feel (see also: Noitu Love 2), not to mention some pretty good puzzles. The narrative can be, at times, a bit hard to follow, but I love the characters, and there are some very emotional beats in the late game. There are also a lot of themes around the tensions between religious dogma and individual selfishness that are surprisingly rich. Also the game is absolutely gorgeous and has been robbed of the art award at the IGF several times.

Celeste
I was really into masocore games when indie games were younger. The first thing I ever wrote about games talked about Andi Mcclure's Jumpman, but also mentioned Matt Thorson's Give Up, Robot 2. When I recently bounced off The End is Nigh, I wondered if maybe I had lost my taste for the genre, but then I sat down with Matt Thorson's newest game, Celeste, and I knew I was home. Thorson is most famous for making Towerfall, but his precise and hard-as-nails single-player games are what I know him for, and Celeste is the best one I've played. It's also the first that has a proper story, and it startled me in how thematically resonant it was. I did not expect Celeste to be about depression, anxiety, and self-doubt, and the way it handled those things was exactly what I needed when I played it. (I was having a rough week.) So far I've beaten the game, beaten the bonus level, and beaten all the B-side levels, and am working my way through the C-sides, which all have about the same arc, taking you from "this isn't so bad" to "how is this even possible?!?!?!" I think I'll be done after the C-sides, getting all the strawberries is real speedrunner stuff (and don't get me started on the golden strawberries). But this is a really special game.

Tales from the Borderlands
After reading this article on Telltale's stagnation in the wake of The Walking Dead, and finally getting around to this article on how Tales from the Borderlands snuck in as a labor of love wholly unlike The Walking Dead, and realizing that Telltale would probably never make a second season for what is unabashedly one of the best adventure games ever made by anyone... I am replaying Tales from the Borderlands. Nothing will ever be as good as my first time through, but it is still just such a good game. If you never read my profane love letter to it, you may not know how much I adore this game. If any of you haven't played it, you need to do that, like... now.

That's all for this month, babes. If any of you are going to PAX East, let me know in the comments and maybe we can say hi!

-I