Assassin's Creed: Origins

ISSN 2572-5572 UNWINNABLE MONTHLY Volume 7, Issue 6 - June 2020

DataErase U N W I N N A B L E

Monthly

128 Editor in Chief | Stu Horvath

Managing Editor | Amanda Hudgins

Design | Stu Horvath

Social Editor | Melissa King

Copyright © 2020 by Unwinnable LLC Unwinnable All rights reserved. This book or any por- 820 Chestnut Street tion thereof may not be reproduced or Kearny, NJ 07032 used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the www.unwinnable.com publisher except for the use of brief quo- tations in a book review. For more information, email: [email protected] Unwinnable LLC does not claim copyright of the screenshots and promotional imag- Subscribe | Store | Submissions ery herein. Copyright of all screenshots within this publication are owned by their respective companies This machine kills fascists. Shortform a brief introduction to the issue Letter from the Editor | Stu Horvath selections of noteworthy hip hop The Beat Box | Noah Springer your next favorite comic Try Reading... | Harry Rabinowitz looking at the world and finding it confusing MUSINGS | BLAKE HESTER examining trends in fanfiction Self Insert | Amanda Hudgins a videogames deep soak The Fail Cycle | Declan Taggart fictional companions and goth concerns This Mortal Coyle | Deirdre Coyle where videogames meet real life Collision Detection | Ben Sailer ridiculing and revering everything Rookie of the Year | Matt Marrone finding deeper meaning Another Look | Yussef Cole dissecting the world The Burnt Offering | Stu Horvath three fingers of analysis when two will do The Heavy Pour | Sara Clemens architecture and games Forms in Light | Justin Reeve a monthly soapbox Here’s the Thing | Rob Rich bucking the consensus No Accounting for Taste | Adam Boffa art, and words about making it Artist Spotlight | Mike Pennekamp

Longform a sthe glitch art of DataErase Digital Phantasmagoria | Phantom a developer Q&A, sponsored Revving the Engine: REVOIDER |

Contributors D From the Desk of the Editor in Chief | Stu Horvath

ool thing: on June 3, Unwinnable turned ten years old. That’s pretty neat C(also disorienting, baffling and difficult to comprehend). I’ll spare you a link to the first post. I’ll just say that we’ve come a long way since 2010. I am un- believably proud of all the writers – past and present (and future, since I know some of the column changes coming in the next few months) – who have contributed over the years. I’m also eternally grateful to every reader, subscriber and otherwise, who has given us a look. All this is for you.

This month, we’re packed to the gills, despite having just one feature for you. That would be Phantom’s deep dive into the art (and context) of glitch artist DataErase (AKA Maddison Morgenstern). It’s a thoroughly engrossing read, stuffed with Maddison’s amazing glitch witchery (and we got her on the cover, which has been a goal since she was the subject of an Artist Spotlight last year). Printmaker Mike Pennekamp is in the Artist’s Spotlight this month, deliver- ing one of the longest and most thoughtful interviews we’ve had to date. Our sponsored story this month was a bit of a surprise. We went in looking for Mini Goliath’s Dropship and discovered their larger game project Revoider and their novel approach to indie development. In the columns, Noah Springer has some hip hop fueled by the current movement for racial justice. Harry Rabinowitz checks out the parkour-themed graphic novel The Nameless City. Blake Hester says goodbye to his friends in Persona 5 Royal. Amanda Hudgins fills us in on “no beta we die like men.” De- clan Taggart determines we owe Vikings nothing. Deirdre Coyle plays some truly heinous Beauty and the Beast themed games. Ben Sailer fires upDemo - cratic Socialism Simulator. Pause for a deep breath. Matt Marrone finds some similarities between our current historical moment and Stephen King’s Under the Dome. Yussef Cole picks at trying to understand the reason he’s a sucker for Souls games. Sara Clemens muses on dogs and death. Justin Reeve goes deep into the pyramids of Egypt (as portrayed in Assassin’s Creed: Origins). Rob Rich offers up a potpourri of short essays on Final Fantasy VII Remake and Animal Crossing. Finally, Adam Boffa examines Final Fantasy XII’s unique approach to narrative. Like I said: packed. * * *

We’ll celebrate Unwinnable’s first decade at some point. For now, though, help sustain the the movement for racial justice, practice socially distancing, wear your masks and stay safe.

Stu Horvath Kearny, New Jersy June 15, 2020 The Beat Box | Noah Springer

t’s a strange time to write this column like normal this month. As the Ipandemic and protests rage, giving traditional recommendations just seems kind of pointless. But then Twitter reminded me that “a well placed riot bard can buff the entire crowd,” so now I want to buff all the people on the streets. Plus, there’s some impressive, aggressive music released over the last month or so, that feels almost too relevant for the current moment. With that in mind, this month I’m sending out some music for the revolution. Blast these beats while you’re clowning on the police! Beyond these awesome new releases, I also made a Spotify playlist of some other tracks that’ll keep their heads ringin’.

#BLM – #ACAB – #FTP

Freddie Gibbs X Alchemist – Alfredo One of the unique features of gangsta rap is the genre’s ability to combine hyperviolent lyrics about street life with real, clear political critique. Freddie Gibbs, while not always the most conscious rapper, clearly feels the current mood on Alfredo and brings his gangsta style to the moment, with lyrics like “the revolution is the genocide, my execution might be televised.” Gibbs has one of the smoothest flows in history and Alchemist’s beats give him a spacious canvas to paint his lyrics about 1990s NBA stars, cocaine slang and the police state. Together, Al and Fredo blend the street and the political, dropping an album that feels well placed in a world where the thug life is the moral life. Go buy an Alfredo t-shirt, and the proceeds will go to the families of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

Drakeo the Ruler – Thank You For Using GTL A month after he released his first mixtape in January 2017, Drakeo the Ruler was arrested for illegal possession of a firearm and spent the majority of the next year in jail. Less than a year after his release, he was charged with murder and arrested again, only to be acquitted in 2019. Now, Drakeo is back in prison on charges of criminal conspiracy, which has already resulted in two hung juries. Given this history, it’s probably no surprise that Thank You For Using GTL was recorded behind bars (Global Tel Link is a billion-dollar monopoly that controls telecommunications for many American prisons). Nevertheless, Drakeo’s phone-distorted, playful flow is on point, buoyed by the west-coast Mustard influenced production by JOOGSZN. While the lyrical content of this album moves more in the party/ gangsta zone of hip hop than in the political activism realm, the production of this album is political in itself. This is the work of a black man who has been held behind bars without conviction for the better part of three years. Drakeo’s experience speaks to the specific problems that people are protesting in the street, and every time the production reminds us “thank you for using GTL” or “this call is being recorded,” you can’t help but think about the abuses of the American police state.

Pink Siifu – NEGRO Do you ever wonder how you could mix industrial noise, punk and jazz together, with a hip hop twist? Well wonder no longer because Pink Siifu is here to show you the way on his new album, NEGRO. Across this intentionally aggressive album, Siifu reflects on the black experience in America by sonically assaulting his audience and verbally lashing out at the police. His rage is palpable, grounded in his own identity and experience under the brutal thumb of the American dream. Unlike that gangsta charm of Gibbs and Drakeo that let the audience coast on easy flow and rhymes, Siifu wrecks your eardrums and rarely lets you relax. He puts the black experience with the police state and systemic racism in the US directly in your face without any filter. As he told Bandcamp,“this [album] is for black people, but I know white people are going to fuck with it. I’m mad cool with that. I just want everyone to know, before they come through the door, that this is a black house and you have to respect my people.” NEGRO sounds like the soundtrack to the uprising, and I hope that I can help and be respectful at the same time.

Armand Hammer – Shrines Elucid and billy woods return just in time to spin eclectic beats and surreal rhymes for the movement. Their sense of bleakness certainly feels real on Shrines (especially in some of the production), but Elucid and woods bring a slightly brighter and sunnier disposition than some of their previous work, building in some laughs alongside the tragedy. With the help of some underground friends (including Pink Siifu, Quelle Chris and R.A.P. Ferreira, among others), the pair flit nimbly back and forth, rapping to and around each other with cryptic phrases and eccentric poetry. While their last album (2018’s Parrafin) was more explicitly aggressive, Shrines expounds on the same themes, but also lets a little fantasy into the struggle for liberation.

Run the Jewels – RTJ4 Ya’ll knew this one was coming. El-P and Killer Mike are two of the most popular, unapologetically political rappers out there today, and RTJ4 continues their trademark sound. For a while, I thought I was kind of bored with RTJ. With the same producer and rapping styles, their unique sound sometimes feels consistent to a fault. But now, as we’re in the midst of a grass-roots uprising against the oppressive American power structures, their music brings a new sense of urgency and potency. El-P’s tight-knit production and idiosyncratic flow bounce off Killer Mike’s biting attacks on the system. They have finessed their chemistry into a finely-tuned machine that spits straight fire and venom at capitalism, carcerialism, Republicans, Democrats, white supremacy . . . the list of their targets goes on, but the message is clear: END THE POLICE STATE U Try Reading... | Harry Rabinowitz

The Power of Perspective

he Nameless City, a squarely middle grade/YA graphic Harry Recommends: novel by Faith Erin Hicks (Friends with Boys, The T The Nameless City. Adventures of Superhero Girl), has some very heavy themes. Written and Illustrated Power, privilege, militarism, oppression, and history’s bias by Faith Erin Hicks. are all important to the core message of the novel. Hell, even Colors by Jordie its title, The Nameless City, refers to how the name of a place Bellaire. is different depending on who you ask, and who is in power. Genre: Adventure, But The Nameless City is also about two kids doing a bunch Fantasy of parkour. Rating: Middle Grade We primarily follow Kai, a young teenager moving to 232 pp. Published by the aforementioned Nameless City. Located at the end of First Second an important river, and at a chokepoint leading to the sea, Available at: the city has been conquered many times, by many different BookShop, IndieBound, nations. The Dao people are the most recent conquerors, Your Local Comics and Kai is a Dao of great status and privilege. His estranged Store father is a high ranking general in the army, and his mother We earn an affiliate commission is a tribe leader. Kai decides to move to the city to meet his from purchases made through father, and discover his place in Dao society. Bookshop. Anything earned goes back What he discovers is something else entirely: the vastness to our writers. of his privilege. He learns what Dao society looks like from the opposite perspective, that of Dao oppression and rule. While exploring the city, Kai meets Rat, a seemingly homeless teenager who immediately hates him. Their first encounter goes poorly, with Rat trying to steal from Kai, and the two going on an elaborate chase scene. Rat quickly outdoes Kai, dashing through the streets, leaping onto rooftops, and generally showing off. Kai, envious of Rat’s parkour abilities, and Rat, wanting more free stuff, strike a partnership of sorts. Rat agrees to teach Kai parkour, and Kai agrees to buy Rat whatever she wants. This is how The Nameless City is about two kids parkouring around as well as privilege and oppression. Alongside learning parkour, Kai also learns a crucial outside perspective, a non-Dao perspective. The learning process is realistically messy. Kai and Rat argue about the city, its history, Dao rulership and life in general. They’re coming from two opposite perspectives and, while they do eventually begin to learn from each other, there are growing pains along the way. The book’s chapters are broken up into “Days,” with each day consisting of (among other things) Kai learning something that changes his perspective. Like its themes, Hicks’ depicts the city in a respectful, detailed and consistent way. The easiest way to describe the city, and The Nameless City’s aesthetic in general, is historical fantasy. It’s similar to that of Avatar: The Last Airbender: thoroughly historical and clearly Asia-inspired, but very much a fantasy world with its own detailed fantastical history. (Hicks went on to write the Avatar: The Last Airbender: Imbalance series after The Nameless City trilogy.) While this sort of cultural lifting is problematic, I think writer/reviewer Sabaa Tahir addressed the issue best in her review, where she stated, “In Hicks’ sweeping scenes of the city, as well as her respectful attention to invented details of architecture, armor and clothing, she avoids the pitfall of creating a ‘vaguely’ Asian world that is insultingly monolithic.” Hicks’ strongest artistic talent, however, lies in her ability to depict movement. Scenes like Kai and his fellow military trainees facing off against an instructor in unarmed combat, or the many scenes of Kai and Rat dashing and leaping from rooftop to rooftop, feel kinetic, weighty, speedy and cared for. Similarly, Hicks does a great job of anticipation and follow through in her panels, making all the action easy to follow and fun to read. The color work, done by Jordie Bellaire (Pretty Deadly, The Manhattan Projects), deserves special mention. Her gorgeous and consistent colorwork elevates everything, from the city and its architecture, to its people and their fashion. One takeaway I had after finishing the book was that some plot arcs make The Nameless City feel like an introduction for the rest of the trilogy. There are larger plot arcs involving political intrigue, coalition building, faction tensions and assassination attempts, but only a few of these are resolved, let alone explored in detailed. Looking briefly at the rest of the trilogy, these high stakes arcs take center stage, with Kai and Rat working together to keep the city whole. The Nameless City is wonderfully detailed, beautifully imagined and realistically grounded in honest characters with real flaws of perspective regarding oppression and privilege. It has me excited to read the rest of the trilogy, and discover how Kai and Rat’s friendship helps to shape the future of the Nameless City. U Musings | Blake Hester

The 120 Hour Goodbye

wo issues of Unwinnable ago, I wrote about playing Persona 5 Royal and the Tway it wonderfully captures what it’s like to be a teenager. Well, reader, I regret to inform you I’m going to write about Persona 5 again. It took me 124 hours and 22 minutes to finally finishPersona 5 Royal – or 5.16 real world days of my actual life. By the end, I gotta be honest, I was ready to be done with the game. In case I didn’t make it clear two sentences ago, this game is long. Like, longer than any game I’ve ever played. In fact, it’s one of the only games I can think of that I’ve spent over 100 hours playing. That’s too much time to spend in one make believe universe! Hell, most days, that’s too much time to spend in the real universe. When I knew I was about to be done with this journey – one that took me months to finish – I was ready. The day after I beat Persona 5 Royal, I was sad. As I sat outside drinking my morning coffee, I thought to myself, “I don’t get to see my friends anymore. It’s been 12 hours and I already miss them.” This was a peculiar feeling for me because, by and large, I don’t get very emotionally invested in make-believe characters in make-believe worlds. But here I was genuinely upset I couldn’t load up Persona 5 and hang out with Ryuiji, Ann, Morgana, Futaba, Makoto, Haru, Akechi, Sojiro, Mishima, Kasumi or Takemi. I was happy I’d never see Yusuke again, though. Fuck Yusuke. Fuck everything about Yusuke. I’ve had cancer twice – once in 2018 and again in 2019. The latter of those two times I had to undergo chemotherapy treatment. I’ve been in remission since then and have had nothing but positive test results. However, cancer never leaves you. Besides just the general anxiety of now being more susceptible to having the disease again, and more relevant to our current world situation, I’m immunocompromised. Or immunodeficient. One of them, I’m not sure which. Maybe both. Point being, with COVID, I’m extremely quarantined. I’m not sure when I’ll get to see my friends and loved ones again. Maybe next year? It’s hard to say. The current pandemic means I haven’t seen my significant other – who works in the service industry, therefore is constantly exposed to other people – in months. As I wrote last issue, same goes with my friends. Dude, I can’t even leave the house. If I got COVID, that’d be a wrap for me. As dumbfucks continue to not take this LITERAL PANDEMIC THAT HAS KILLED MORE THAN 100,000 PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES ALONE seriously, I wrestle with the idea that I won’t be able to see a lot of my loved ones for . . . a year? Longer? At least longer than the average person because I just won’t recover from this thing.

It’s worth saying, I’m an only child and I already worked from home before all this went down. I was – perhaps literally – born for this life of seclusion. I’m not bad at it. Also, like, I’m not dead. So that’s good. But still, it sucks. When I look at the big picture, grappling with the idea that I can’t see my significant other, my friends, or my family for an indeterminate amount of time is really difficult. I can talk to them on the phone or over Xbox party chat and all that, yeah, but that’s not the same. In Persona 5 Royal, COVID does not exist. I can leave the house, walk around, take the subway, go to stores and, best of all, hang out with my loved ones. A common criticism lobbied at both Royal and the base game is that it’s too long. Which I think is fair. 100 hours just to beat a game is a lot. I’d probably agree with those criticisms if, well, I didn’t have dick else to do right now. But also, that long run time affords Persona 5 Royal’s large cast of characters to develop in ways shorter games just cannot. Which is obvious; I will know a lot more about a person if I spent 100 hours with them than if I spend 10, 15, 20 hours with them. Except Yusuke. Who I spent no time with. The characters in this game are also just really, really well written. They’re complex, flawed, fun and a bunch of other adjectives. A lot of progression is tied to spending time with them and getting to know them. The game encourages you to take them to do fun stuff – go out to eat, go shopping, ride a Ferris wheel and the like. As in real life, to have meaningful relationships with your friends, in Persona 5, you must spend time with these people. Except for Yusuke. It’s so corny, so dumb, the type of the hyperbole lobbed at videogame characters by bad critics, but I loved spending time with these people because they were my friends. But circumstantially so. In the game, you only meet these people because you’re, for reasons I don’t totally understand, ordered by your probation officer to move to Tokyo. Your reputation as a criminal makes you an outcast. The people you befriend are also outcasts. Your circumstances bring you together. Similarly, if it weren’t for my circumstances during the pandemic, I’m really not sure I’d have ever seen this game through. But I did, and I loved these characters. Honestly, I didn’t care that much at all about the overall story of the game. As I wrote a few months ago, it was spending time in this world with these people that attracted me to this game. Because I had nothing else going on, I let myself really get invested in this world in a way I never do with videogames. But things change. Persona 5 ends with the main character moving home, his friends also going their separate ways. For me, I beat the game and, aside from restarting it, I can’t just load it up and keep hanging out in its world. I had to say goodbye. It’s really dramatic, but I needed Persona 5 Royal. I thought I was ready for it to be over, but when it was, I immediately missed it. Because I miss my friends. Real or imaginary. U Self Insert | Amanda Hudgins

No Beta We Die Like Men

n fanfiction there are two types of betas. I We’re talking specifically in this case about the writing variety. In fanfiction there’s no such thing as assigned editors. Because by nature derivative works are self-published, they are self-edited, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find someone to take a look first. A friend, a fellow writer. In the world of fanfiction these editors have a name: betareaders, betas or beta readers. Forums for fanfiction have long had homes for finding beta readers, etiquette for how to request assistance from a beta, what kinds of help you can expect from someone, etc. You’ll find all sorts; from fics with multiple betas to an author who has one beta that they tend to use for years, to a story that is already live and has a request in the notes for someone to act as a beta after the fact. Then there’s “No Beta We Die Like Men.” This is warning your reader up front that you didn’t bother with a beta reader, didn’t have any second glance to see if your writing was up to snuff; this is your writing and it’s ready to go. Whatever’s on the screen, that’s your responsibility, and you take the hits for it. It’s hard to get precise numbers on how frequently people will use this tag. AO3, and their phenomenal tagging system, resorts these all into “Not Beta Read,” alongside every other variation of the tag from simply “No Beta” to the more specific variations for each individual fandom. InFire Emblem: Three Houses there’s a further variation of “No Beta We Die Like Glenn,” because apparently Glenn’s only character trait is “dead” or in Mó Dào Zu Shī you have “no beta we die like wwx” for the up front death of main character Wei Wuxian (often abbreviated down to wwx). There’s an implicit warning to No Beta We Die Like Men, but it’s not always deserved. Not every piece of work is better edited, as not every Beta is created equal. There’s no way to know without taking a peek inside. U The Fail Cycle | Declan Taggart

What Do We Owe a Viking?

hat do we owe a Viking? W What do we owe any person who lived and died so long ago that they have become a myth? Recognition? Not to mess up their stories and lives too badly when we shape them into new forms? Statues and street names? I’ve lived a small life. I come from a small corner of a small country, and I’ve been educated and worked in places that, if they weren’t the small corners of small countries, were the modestly sized bits in the middle. Nowhere I’ve ever called home could claim to be culturally, racially or spiritually di- verse. I’m white. I’m a cis male. I’m straight. I don’t know much, and there are a lot of urgent and ongoing cultural conversations for which it makes more sense for me to amplify more knowledgeable voices than to add my own. But I do know Vikings, and I know that a lot of them were, by today’s standards, absolute cunts. Over the last 30 years or so, researchers have been careful to emphasize the totality of the Viking experience. The peoples we call Vikings, who came out of Scandinavia between, very roughly, 793 CE and 1066 CE, weren’t just raiders. Their societies were rich and complex and heterogeneous, and Vi- kings themselves could be sophisticated and fascinating individuals. They were artists, poets and philosophical thinkers, with the capacity to be as kind or as vicious as anyone else. Some medieval Scandinavians enslaved others and/or were enslaved themselves. They loved, hated and mourned. Those who weren’t Christians occasionally brutally sacrificed humans to their gods, gods whom they named as friends. They were a medley of communities and cul- tures with many similarities to the others around them in Europe at the time, but who were maybe better at sailing and had more effective branding. Their history is a mixed one, and it’s only getting more mixed. Since long before we started putting the Vikings on our TVs, in our comic books and in our videogames, humans have been memorializing them as the heroes (and sometimes the villains) of a non-existent Golden Age – just as the Vikings themselves did for the eras that preceded them. Those false narratives have given strength to many Nationalist and Romantic causes over the years, but none more hor- rific than the self-flattering and self-mythologizing mystical histories cobbled together over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to strengthen racist and anti-Semitic ideologies. That is a story that deserves more room than I can provide for it, but one that bottoms out by contributing heavily to the rise of Na- zism, in Heinrich Himmler’s bizarrely misguided attempt to manifest Thor’s hammer Mjolnir as an electrical superweapon and with the thousands of idi- ots who still ink themselves with misshapen runes around a Celtic cross or swastika. Ultimately, all of this has proven even more damaging to the image of the peoples of the ancient North and to our modern social fabric than all the adaptations of Beowulf combined. We don’t need to memorialize the Vikings. Memorializing is just a fancy way of deliberately lying to yourself about someone else. Sometimes there are good reasons for doing it, but the Vikings are long enough dead that we shouldn’t feel the need to hold any more funerals for them. All the same, their history is our responsibility. History doesn’t exist in a 1:1 relationship with the past. It isn’t a set of facts or events or people. History is the perception of those people and events. It is something every historian – every person perceiving the past, really – is continually involved in creating and maintaining. It should be both nuanced and wide- ranging, going beyond the fascination with heroism and masculinity and conflict that I, as much as anyone and probably more than most, end up pri- oritizing. So, what do we owe a Viking? Their history. All of it. And above all, a bit of context. Context in itself doesn’t ex- cuse violence or shitty sexual politics, but it does bring understanding. It’s part of learning and progress for all of us, all of the custodians of the Vikings’ history, and in the end that process is what’s most important. We should think about what we owe ourselves, not just what we owe the Vikings. We are not Vikings, no matter how much people like me might enjoy playing at being them, try to eat like them or, somehow, work out like them. Their philosophy, their morality and their sexual politics are alien to all of us – even to the people who still populate the northern reaches of Eu- rope. I like to feel we’ve moved on, but then, as a white, straight, cis male, I have the luxury of feeling that way. I know, at least, that we have to keep trying to progress away from them, rather than laboring to capture the essence of some past that never even really existed. I think that’s what we owe to them and to each other.

* * *

I only touched on the abuses of Iron Age and early medieval Scandinavian history over the last 200 years. Old Norse studies (and similar, related fields) has had a problematic history as well, involving some of its very own Nazis. For voices in the fight against these twin legacies, seek out researchers like those ofMe - dievalists of Color, Amy Jefford Franks and her podcastVikings are Gay!, Heather O’Donoghue, Mary Rambaran-Olm and Andrea Freund (whose paper on the enter- tainingly pathetic philosophies of runic gymnastics and runic architecture at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds in July 2019 kicked off this column). U This Mortal Coyle | Deirdre Coyle

Belle

used to fall asleep in my Minnie Mouse Isheets thinking, When I wake up, I’m going to be Belle. I was five, and believed my transformation into the cartoon heroine from Beauty and the Beast could happen literally. The “how” was uninteresting. Even before Disney’s 1991 animated feature, I insisted my mother read, over and over, the picture book retellings by Jan Brett and Mary Pope Os- borne. It wasn’t until much later that I read the Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont fairy tale on which they were based, and I still haven’t read the original, much longer, novella by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Vil- leneuve on which Beaumont based her fairy tale. Last month, I took a folklore class from The Carterhaugh School and found myself thinking about the eighteenth century story all over again. So, with my long-term literary and cinematic obsession, why did it take me until now to investigate Beauty and the Beast-inspired videogames? Probably because they’re fucking terrible. I’m as disappointed to report this as you are to hear it. And, okay, I have absolutely not played every Beauty and the Beast game (Disney made quite a few in the ’90s). But I’m here to give you a breakdown of the ones I have played over the past month. Reader, I played these games so you don’t have to. Beauty and the Silent Beast, an app from Lady Wizard, may be the most confusing game I have ever played. The Beast appears as different anthropomor- phic animals (first a panda, then a horse . . .), and you level up by . . . tapping on roses . . . until he turns into a different animal? It’s difficult to progress without watching a lot of ads, and my pointer finger was getting tired, so I gave up after level three. The Beast was a sheep at the time, which seemed like a good stopping point.

Do you ever start playing a game and think, “Holy shit, I could be drunk right now?” That’s how I felt upon discovering Dress Up Who: Beauty and the Beast on Girl Games dot com. The description: “What it takes [sic] for this fierce beast to conquer sweet Belle?s [sic] kind heart? A lot of attention to details and a bit of something else? but let?s [sic] join them in to find out some more!” This flash-powered treasure only becomes a dress-up game if you, playing as the Beast, give Belle the correct presents leading up to the ball. The Beast shows Belle a dog, a horse, and – I don’t know, some other animal – and says, “I want to give you pet [sic]. With him you will not be lonely in this big castle.” If you succeed in wooing Belle by remembering that she’s a tulip- hating horse girl, you get to pick her outfit for the ball. Wild. If that’s not adventurous enough for you, why not try Baby Belle Dress Up? A totally normal thing to exist. I tried more Beauty and the Beast dress-up games than I feel the need to reveal but, despite my best efforts, I could not create a truly goth Belle. The closest I came was giving an Emma Watson-like Belle a pair of black horns and a bustier. Okay, enough dress-up. There’s more, and it’s still bad. Are there Beauty and the Beast-inspired hidden object games? Yes, obviously. The first I tried was calledBeauty and the Beast: Hidden Object Fairy Tale. Between hidden object scenes, you receive vague narrative updates about a woman in a floral crown referred to as “Belle” or sometimes “Bell.” The syntax leaves something to be desired: “The girl developed a feeling for the Beast and the spell got broken. The prince turned into a handsome young man over again [sic] and the plants started blossoming in the garden, the birds started singing.” Tap to continue, loser, we’re going puzzling. The next hidden object game I played was Big Fish’s Mystery Legends: Beauty and the Beast. This had more money and design work behind it than Hidden Object Fairy Tale, and also told a different story. The Beast sexually rejected a hot enchantress; the enchantress broke his soul into pieces and said, “It shall remain as broken as my own heart until you come to love me!” As Belle, you naturally have to go find his soul shards by solving puzzles, just like Jeanne- Marie Leprince de Beaumont would have wanted. Okay, okay, let’s go in a different direction. Path untaken, Beauty and the Beast is a text-based game on itch.io by Mélissa Rousseau. It begins with a content warning: “Some of the paths contain violence and abuse. This is not a game for children.” The narrative centers around Belle’s attempts to escape from the Beast, and the endings vary. After navigating Belle’s escape, I once landed on this finale: “Every week, you travel a little further. You never feel safe. You feel alone, you miss your father.” That’s it. It’s dark, even in its successful conclu- sion. In Mélissa Rousseau’s post-game explanation, she writes, “This game cri- tiques the evolution of morals in our society. Because a film was well received in 1991 and has received awards, doesn’t mean it is not problematic today. My goal was to show the abusive relationship between Belle and the Beast.” Whether or not you believe Belle had Stockholm Syndrome, I think we all know what she’d want to do in 2020: donate to legal aid funds and sign a peti- tion to replace a Robert E. Lee statue with Oderus Urungus, a much more metal Beast. U Collision Detection | Ben Sailer

Between Progress and Pragmatism in Democratic Socialism Simulator

y first foray into running the United States as a socialist president didn’t Mexactly transform America into a utopia. After reigning in defense spending, nationalizing healthcare, liberalizing immigration and subsidizing organic farming, citizen engagement in the economy was strong and the nation built a substantial surplus. However, my environmental efforts lacked teeth and carbon emissions remained perilously high. The Democratic Party also lost seats in Congress, with no telling whether a potential successor could maintain power, let alone build upon the progress I’d made. Fortunately, all of this happened within 20 minutes, and trying to right my wrongs took little more than starting another round of Democratic Socialism Simulator (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android). Developed by Carnegie Mellon professor Paolo Pedercini under his development label Molleindustria, it’s a simple strategy game that puts players in the shoes of a Bernie Sanders-esque president after winning the White House. My initial experience was just one of an effectively endless number of outcomes, but rather than quickly fixing my first shortcomings, subsequent playthroughs took me deeper through an exploration of the tension between idealism and compromise. The game isn’t intended to offer a scientifically accurate model of how social democracy would work in the United States, but it is based on research around how social democracies have functioned in the past and may function in the future, and so offers an interactive look into what a progressive presidency in America might achieve. After a brief introductory tutorial, the player is presented with a randomly generated succession of policy proposals from an array of different advisers, activists, government departments and lobbyist groups, each represented by an anthropomorphized animal avatar (which are all laid out in this public spreadsheet). You then swipe left or right to pass or reject each one, affecting your approval level among members of the electorate. Decisions also impact the national debt, greenhouse gas emissions and “people power” (a measure of equality in society and the economy). Balancing popularity with principles without losing seats in the House (which makes passing progressive legislation more difficult in your second term, should you be reelected) is key to success. Think of something like the popular medieval monarchy franchise Reigns, but built around a theme of progressive politics and current events. Responding based on your beliefs feels easy at first, and some proposals are worded in a way that leads you towards an answer. For example, your defense secretary may request funding for the Space Force while openly acknowledging its purpose is a mystery, or an immigration adviser might recommend taking brazenly inhumane actions to shut out immigrants. Others may use threats or intimidation to sway your opinion.

But as you progress, your path forward will likely start to look less clear. Since many of the choices you’re asked to make impact other policies, it’s possible to work yourself into a position where getting things passed becomes unfeasible due to political and/or logistical limitations. In those instances, you might be presented with a policy you want to support yet will only be given two different ways to say “no” or “not right now” (one more emphatically negative than the other). The player also has no choice in which policies are proposed or in which order, which as Gita Jackson points out for Vice, leads to a level of randomness that undermines how much influence players really have on outcomes. Results are affected by chance as much as they are by choice, and the inability to prioritize an agenda and attempt to implement it from the start takes away from the sense that you’re leading a government rather than vaguely managing one. Making matters more complicated, the electorate’s response to decisions doesn’t always feel like it’s following a clear logic. If an issue doesn’t directly clash with their priorities, compromises can sometimes slide past them seemingly without their notice (though they’d likely object if they had more awareness).

That’s not to say the game never favors the bold outright though, and after trying to push the game’s logic by passing policies left, right, and erratically either way, it seemed to reward some level of consistency. Getting pushback on a policy? Doubling down can sometimes be better than kowtowing to lobbyist pressure, and it might even let you work toward a solution that renders the complaint toothless. You might catch some heat from the predictably pretentious New Pork Times, stridently progressive Jackalin, or the scare- mongering FOX News (which is notably non-parodied), but you might also be rewarded with broad public support. However, ending the game with a healthy balance sheet, an engaged public and strong environmental policy without hurting anyone isn’t easy to pull off consistently. After several playthroughs, I mostly failed to avoid uncomfortable compromises without consequences, resulting in difficult decisions around which trade-offs to accept to stay in power and whose rights would be inadvertently trampled. What I found most compelling about Democratic Socialism Simulator are not just the questions it addresses about what could happen under a Sanders-style presidency, but also the ones it leaves unanswered after a round is over. How would certain compromises feel (like abandoning criminal justice reform to spare the political capital necessary to achieve Medicare for All and free public college) feel if I would be directly impacted by them in real life, whether they were intentional or not? As a white college-educated male with a mortgage and a white-collar job, I’m playing real life with every cheat code turned on, and there’s a wide gap between problems that exist as abstract realities I read in the news versus the lived experience of oppressed people who cannot afford to wait for their rights. When nearly nothing the government does affects your material comfort, “compromise” doesn’t always land with the appropriate level of anxious urgency, and “pragmatic” often becomes a code word for “wait your turn.” If electoral politics are essential yet transactional and insufficient for progress on their own, it is imperative to consider what is said and done as a result of my own actions and inactions, and what concrete steps must be taken to build a just and equitable future. This is not a groundbreaking revelation, nor is it something new the game planted in my mind on its own. It is, however, a reality that the game has brought into sharper focus in my own consciousness, narrowing the gap between what I might have thought as morally correct, politically possible and immediately necessary to fight for. That examination of my own privilege is worth much more than the price of a cup of coffee, as the brutal realities of systemic oppression have landed near my own doorstep. U

Rookie of the Year | Matt Marrone

America is Under the Dome

hen this terrible year started, I thought of Stephen King’s The Stand and Whow maybe I should read that book again, instead of the random King tome I’d grabbed off the shelf and cracked open for the first time. But now here we are. And in the world of the past few weeks, Under the Dome is proving to be a lot more relevant. In Under the Dome, an almost-exclusively white town in Maine, Chester’s Mill, becomes trapped under an impenetrable force field. Its residents are divorced from the outside world, excepting a rare cell phone call and all the cable TV news coverage. There is an ostensibly benevolent President and government and military outside trying to help them escape, but otherwise, all they have is a power-hungry, drug-running, murderous elected official called Big Jim Rennie and a corrupt, vigilante police force, headed by Rennie’s imbecile puppet, Chief Randolph and featuring Big Rennie’s psycho-killer son, Junior, who enjoys cuddling up with the decaying corpses of his victims. I’m well into it but far from finished. Rennie’s cops have burned down the local newspaper office and pinned that act, plus Junior’s crimes against nature, on one of the good guys, Dale Barbara, who the police plan to put in front of a firing squad ASAP – despite no medical examiner’s report or motive, despite his alibi, and despite evidence so obviously planted all the characters with integrity in the story know it’s phony. Under the Dome is a work of fiction. I can read it and get lost, and then put it down, shut off my reading lamp and fall peacefully to sleep, a few hours after my children down the hallway have done the same. I have never felt stuck in any kind of Dome and even though I see now the one all around us, I still don’t feel stuck in it. At least not yet. I still feel protected, safe, the power of my privilege. I’m also furious – and embarrassed – that my privilege exists at the peril of others. But none of us – save for the Bunker King – is truly safe as long as so many of us aren’t. Watching the news and seeing new acts of police brutality every day, I feel the Dome closing in. For people of color in our country, it’s never been fiction, never been a thought experiment, never just a fun escape in the pages of a Stephen King novel or the TV show adaptation of it I just learned about two minutes ago. I don’t know yet how they break the Dome in the book. For the purposes of this column, it doesn’t matter. Until we break the actual Dome, fixing our country and saving black lives, we all know what matters. U Another Look | Yussef Cole

The Grind

ere’s your warning: I’m going to spend my column this month writing Habout how much I love Souls games. These games are part of a limited, if ever-expanding (and continuously remastered), roster of games released by the Japanese developer From Software, which follow the lineage established by Demon’s Souls in 2009, and which were made popular in the West by its widely successful sequel, Dark Souls. This is, perhaps, the most uncontroversial opinion to have in the sphere of games criticism, rehashed endlessly in forums, on social media and through essays like mine. But I like the games. One of my favorite things to think about is why I like them, and what liking their peculiarly bristly and uncompromising style says about me. The Souls games, despite having a growing number of contemporaries, are relatively unique in the field of interactive media. They’re not cinematic rollercoaster-like experiences, like the big, crowd-pleasing tentpoles, which provide just enough tension and excitement to players without jostling them off the rails and into the crowds below. They’re also not maliciously difficult, or twitchy, relying on superhuman (read: under 25 years of age) reflexes to excel at, like tough platformers and online shooters. Nor do they punish you through the mechanism of time, sending you all the way back to the beginning of the run when you die, as your average rogue-like might. After all, in Souls games you are provided with plentiful save points in the form of bonfires (or lamps, or shrines), usually just a stone’s throw away from the boss’ front door: that mysterious and forbidding fog gate. The games thus provide a helpful cushion for the player, by removing all distraction and letting you focus on what is, ultimately, the primary axis around which the Souls style revolves: the boss run. Any well-heeled Souls player is familiar with the boss run. Embedded into nearly every iteration of these games, and into every boss encounter within each game, is the invisible path stringing from the closest bonfire to the boss, threading through enemies who futilely swing after you as you dash and flit among their unimportant ranks on your way to the more pressing and immediate challenge.

Facing the boss is its own recognizable loop, regardless of whether you’re experiencing it through the sword and board approach of the original games or the dashing, gunslinging and grappling hooked style of their spiritual successors. For all the cushioning leading up to this loop, there is precious little protection afforded to the player once they step into the arena. Those first encounters are often overwhelming and short lived. The next half-dozen are barely any different. You feint desperately or cower under relentless blows, but it’s all so fresh and new that it reads mostly as static and noise, a tidal wave of inputs that you lag helplessly behind, to disastrous and mortifying effect. Eventually, however, you become able to discern the patterns within the noise. The monster’s arms flex ever so slightly before he leans into that overhead swing, his right and left foot switch places if it’s going to be a lateral one. When he leaps back a few feet, you know it’s because he’s getting ready to rush forward with an unblockable assault. What at first seemed utterly impossible, totally unreadable, is now approachable, digestible, like so much ruffage chewed and broken down through hours of patient, steadfast mastication. I admit this sort of thing probably doesn’t sound appealing to everyone. As a process which cannot be rushed, (though there are usually ways to gain advantage, whether through invoking the help of an AI or human companion, or discovering strategies which allow you to “cheese” the boss and strike it without it being able to hit back) it can be frustrating to wait out a victory that hardly feels assured. But I know, in fact I have unshakable faith, that no matter how impossible an encounter might at first feel, I will always reach a threshold, an invisible boundary that when shed will lead all the tension and frustration to loosen and wash away in a geat euphoric tide, leaving only a satisfied sense of accomplishment behind. I am forced to wonder what it says about my personality that I am OK with, and even seek out this form of play. In life, I can be a diligent worker, though not necessarily at everything. I get distracted while working on tasks I don’t care about, often leaving things half-done and unfinished. But when I find something that interests and excites me I’m often able to lend it near-infinite focus and limitless patience. It’s a form of selective perfectionism. I like to find specific causes to give my time and energy to, causes which dutifully reward that time and energy once it’s all over.

There’s a pleasure in getting measurably better at something, it scratches a very specific itch: to enter into a situation with total ignorance, unsure of the rules, unsure about the expectations, and to be able to come out vastly improved and full of confidence on the other end. This amounts to a unique and gratifying journey; one I chase in life just as much as I do in games. And yet it’s so much harder to judge your progress in life, to make neat stories out of the late nights, the stress snacking or the early gray hairs. There’s nothing resembling the reward structure built into games, nor the pacing or benchmarks. Once you land the final blow on a Souls boss, the fog gates clear and a bonfire usually appears. “Rest,” the game appears to be telling you, “you’ve earned it.” Nothing like this exists in real life. As much praise and as many rewards as I am showered with, there is rarely ever space afforded for rest. To rest, in most industries, in most lifestyles, is seen as embracing failure. If I am resting, I’m no longer striving, I’m no longer improving and, worse, it begins to feel as if I’m backsliding. Far from my accomplishments being a hill upon which I can sit and gaze over like a medieval dragon would his treasure hoard, they instead feel more like weight added to the burden I must carry (for… reasons) up an endless incline with no peak in sight. Every so often, there are Souls game boss loops that feel more impossible than usual. Your most daring and inventive strategies are slapped down as unceremoniously as your tiny ragdolling character just before the screen fades and the giant red letters assemble above your sad corpse. Enemy animations blend and blur together, their dodges and their telegraphs feel so subtle it seems as if you’re seeing them for the first time, every time. In these moments the only thing to do is put the controller down and step away. These moments are when I remind myself to rest, even as the game beckons me to burn out my energy on an impossible task with diminishing returns. If I can do that with a videogame, if I can remind myself that the best laid plans are meaningless when stacked up against fatigue and hopelessness, then I can make sure to take that space for myself in life as well. Not just to rest, but to look back on what I’ve been able to accomplish so far and take pleasure and pride in those accomplishments. To look back without feeling anxious about not looking forward. To rest at the bonfire and let the swirling fog wash everything away, if only for that solitary moment.

All images in this column were taken from the bot @nounverbed. U The Heavy Pour | Sara Clemens

Journal of a Plague Year

March 11, 2020

You were screaming at us when we first met you, so angry that we even dared to inhabit any space next to yours. You made it clear that we should get to gettin’ on if we knew half of what was good for us, but we stood and stared you down until you ran out of steam. We walked to the next room and you eventually showed up too, led by a shelter volunteer, docile as a lamb. We played out this moment in miniature again and again in the first months you lived with us – you’d decide a space was yours and threaten and shout until we showed you that yes, yes, it was yours – and sometimes ours, too – but definitely yours and definitely for keeps. You slow-learned to share with us and sometimes even tried to be in the exact same space as one of us, covering our whole head with your longing for a secure affection. We let you and gave it. You kept it too; kept it close and stopped screaming at us entirely once you knew you had it, which is why you barely blinked when we took you to the place at the end, to the space that was brighter and cleaner than the first place we met you, but had the exact same smell. This time I tried to occupy the same space as you, trying to will any fear you felt into myself – I wanted to take it all on and scream for you, just the way you used to scream for yourself. But you just let me hold your whole head until you were sleepy then silent, no breath to scream or laugh or cry, so I held your head and cried for you and for me and for your papa and everyone else who ever had or ever would lose their best friend this way. I held your whole head and stayed in your space for as long as I could until you were all the way gone – and then some more time after that – and let you go from my hands and that space and this world.

April 1, 2020

One small thing I’d do right now is run to the reservoir near my apartment and lie in the grass. I can’t remember where we are regarding outdoor exercise – I’ve been holed up inside since I realized this was serious, which was a few days before everyone else – more than a few days for some. My asthma’s bad enough that I’ve gone to the ER for breathing treatments from complications from a run-of-the-mill cold or flu, and when I was fourteen I was sick enough for the respiratory therapists to consider intubation. I’m terrified of getting Covid and dying. I used to run because it made me feel like I was beating the weakness out of my body, like every race complete was a deposit in the bank of my pulmonary health, like every step was a step away from the disease ruling my life. But then I hurt my knee and couldn’t run for months, and I was reminded that I’m just a body after all. This virus wants to remind me that I’m just a body after all – I’ve been searching for a first-hand account of an asthmatic treating Covid successfully at home – what would a “mild” case look like for one of us? But it seems such a thing doesn’t exist. My best bet seems to be to stay healthy for as long as possible, until there’s a good treatment or a vaccine, though those things seem a world away and unattainable. So now I wonder when I’ll run again and focus on the fact that my knee got better. I was weak but now I’m stronger. Maybe I can still bend and not break.

April 22, 2020

Someone recently asked me if I ever revealed a secret I was never supposed to tell. The only ones of those I can think of are my own, which is not to say I’ve never betrayed anyone’s trust because I’m sure I have, I just can’t recall the specifics. Okay, there’s one instance I remember where I told someone’s secret and all hell broke loose but the person in question wouldn’t want me spilling the beans about it now, even in a silly little notebook that no one is going to read. Probably. I suppose I could become famous for something (hopefully writing, but it seems famous people don’t always get to choose what they actually get famous for), but I suppose I could become famous for something in the next few months and then die from Covid-19 or whatever the next worse thing is and then my husband will find this notebook and sell it to Penguin Classics – (listen, they published Morrissey’s memoir under the imprint, the standards are broad) – he could sell it to Penguin Classics and they could package it Sara Clemens: Letters and Journals and put one of my drawings on the cover (note to Babe: make sure it’s a cool one, not one where I messed up and there’s a ton of eraser marks), so they’ll put one of my drawings on the cover and get someone like Paul Reubens to write the preface because I’ve been obsessed with Pee-wee for over three decades and won’t shut up about it (note to Babe: please make them get Paul Reubens, I would just die – well, I mean I would just die if I were still alive, but obviously that clown has left the circus, so), so someone like Paul Reubens would write the preface and then it would go off like gangbusters because I would have been super famous and the cover would have a cool drawing and Pee-wee has a way of grabbing attention even now, and then people will read this and think, oh wow what was the secret and who was it about, kicking off a literary mystery for my fans to puzzle over long into the future, or at least until the next worse thing hits and everyone has to worry about that and the next famous pandemic/WWIII/climate-disaster writer gets their journal published in a Penguin Classics anthology with a cool drawing on the cover and a preface written by someone maybe more current than Paul Reubens (or maybe a cybernetic Paul Reubens) and it turns out in a satisfying twist that they were the person whose secret I told before the world turned upside down and they’ve put pen to paper to finally set that record straight and satisfy readers the post-apocalyptic world over. And Penguin Classics will repackage the two volumes together in a handsome hardcover slipcase, available Spring 2025. Preorder now!

June 10, 2020

My dog George has breath that smells of overripe onions and shit. When we adopted him from the shelter he was fourteen years young and the front half of his mouth was spiked with rotten teeth. We were worried the cost to have them pulled would wipe us out financially, but fortunately the shelter had a friendly relationship with a neighborhood vet and were so enthusiastic about seeing a senior adopted that they had it taken care of before we picked him up to take home. They also had a soft spot for us, since we had successfully become the proud dog parents of Monty, George’s big-younger brother (RIP) who was a real handful and proved to be hard to place before we entered the scene with a potent mix of first-dog-owners naivete and, in my case, a videogamer’s tenacity for puzzle-solving. We picked George up right after the surgery, while he was still sleepy and marble-eyed, wondering if this was real life. As he healed his personality fully emerged, and it became clear a consummate flirt had joined the family. When my husband takes him to the dog park, he returns with dispatches of George’s peacocking. “He tried to go home with two ladies today, just started following behind them as they walked out of the park,” he’ll say, throwing George some side- eye, “are you our dog or not?” They still go to the park, even now, and the stay-at-home order has afforded them the luxury of going nearly every morning. We’re so very careful, so if he gets pet by anyone outside the house – and he will vigorously make the rounds demanding pets, throwing his body down dramatically at the feet of anyone willing to deliver belly rubs – he goes straight into the bath when they get home. Five days out of seven, I emerge from my dreams to the sound of the kitchen sink, where my husband is spraying down a trembling George. The shivers are mostly for show – he knows he’ll be wrapped in a soft blanket and get extra cuddles from me. Afterwards his coat smells of heaven. The shampoo we use is scented by something so achingly familiar that my inability to place it drove me nuts for weeks, until finally I recognized it as lily of the valley, the flower for May babies like me. Now I smell those blooms on his coat every day until his breath, which remained rotten and raw even after his surgery, brings me back to the world and him and our home, reminding me we’re all still bodies, alive and stinking. U Forms in Light | Justin Reeve

Pyramid Schemes

ake a while to explore the game world in Assassin’s Creed: Origins and Tyou’ll see some pretty impressive sights. The best one in my personal opinion is just south of Letopolis. Three pyramids emerge from the dunes of the surrounding desert like mountains in a sea of sand. These are of course the pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure. They’re in Giza. These aren’t the only pyramids in the game world. You’ll come across a couple more of them if you keep heading south. Giza is definitely great. You’d be missing out on a lot if you stopped exploring in Giza, though. The pyramids of Djoser, Huni and Sneferu are in Saqqara. The pyramid of Amenemhat is just a little bit further south in Haueris. They’re pretty similar in appearance, but none of these pyramids are actually the same. They come in a variety of shapes. They have different subsidiary structures. What exactly is the reason for this lack of consistency? The answer is that each one of them represents a separate stage in the development of the pyramids. I’m an archaeologist with a specialization in the architecture of ancient Egypt. Similar to most people who played the game, I was blown away by the buildings in Assassin’s Creed: Origins. They were easy for me to appreciate because I already knew all about them, though. The pyramids in particular. This puts me at a bit of an unfair advantage when it comes to exploring the game world, so I’d like to bring you up to speed by giving you an introduction to the development of the pyramids. I hope that you’ll come away from our discussion with a better appreciation for these wonders of the ancient world. Without any further ado, let’s talk about some pyramid schemes. You can trace the origins of the pyramids back to the Early Dynastic Period. This was the point in time when the ancient Egyptians began making structures with sloping walls and flat roofs known asmastabas . These tended to be made with mudbrick. The size of these structures varied, but the average was about 80 feet in length by 40 feet in width and 20 feet in height. People entered mastabas through a door on the longest side of the structure which led them to a room where they could worship or leave presents before a statue of the deceased. The statue was almost always placed inside a particular type of chamber with a window called a serdab. There was a vertical shaft behind the serdab which ran about 30 feet into the bedrock below the mastaba. This was of course connected to the burial chamber where the body of the deceased was preserved. Walk around the game world in Assassin’s Creed: Origins for long enough and you’ll come across quite a few mastabas, but you’ll find a whole bunch of these buildings in Giza. While most of them are in poor condition, they still provide a pretty good idea of what a mastaba looks like.

The second stage in the development of the pyramids came in the Old Kingdom. The idea was basically to make a really big building by stacking a series of mastabas on top of each other. Since the mastabas decreased in size towards the top, this type of structure became known as a step pyramid. The first one was built by Djoser. He made a couple more changes to the mastaba than just adding some stories, though. The burial chamber was left in the bedrock below the structure and the core was still made with mudbrick. The shell on the other hand was made from stone. The room where people could worship or leave presents in front of a statue of the deceased was also turned into a separate structure. This came to be called a mortuary temple. Turning this room into a separate structure presented some problems of security, so Djoser surrounded everything with a series of walls and towers. In this way, he created the first pyramid compound. You can see a reconstruction of this pyramid compound in Assassin’s Creed: Origins if you head over to Saqqara. You’ll find a step pyramid and a mortuary temple that are surrounded by a series of walls and towers. Pyramid compounds remained pretty much the same during the third stage of development. There was always a mortuary temple. There were always walls and towers. The pyramids didn’t remain the same, though. There were four significant changes. The first was that pyramids came to be completely made from stone. The second was that burial chambers were built into the core. The third was that pyramids were given a shell which was shaped into a flat surface. In other words, they became what are known as true pyramids. The fourth was that pyramids were built at steeper angles. While the pyramid of Djoser was angled at 49 degrees, the pyramid of Huni for example was angled at 51 degrees. This actually caused the shell to slide off. The pyramid of Sneferu was even angled at 54 degrees. While the shell didn’t slide off, the structure became unstable during construction, so the angle was changed to 43 degrees. This would explain why the building is often referred to as the Bent Pyramid. Similar to the pyramid of Djoser, you can see reconstructions of these two structures in Assassin’s Creed: Origins. Both of them are in Saqqara. You should really check out these bizarre buildings.

The fourth stage in the development of the pyramids was mostly a matter of standardization. Pyramids were always angled at about 50 degrees. Pyramid compounds no longer had towers, but they always had walls. They always had a mortuary temple, too. The most significant change was the addition of a structure next to the Nile River that was connected to the mortuary temple by a covered causeway. This became known as a valley temple. The purpose of these remains mysterious, but they seem to have been used for some sort of ceremony related to the practice of mummification. The body of the deceased was taken down the Nile River to the valley temple where it was mummified. The body of the deceased was then brought up the covered causeway to the mortuary temple. The pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure provide a good example of how this worked. You can see for yourself in Assassin’s Creed: Origins if you spend some time in Giza. You’ll come across the famous pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure in this part of the game world, but you’ll find a bunch of mortuary and valley temples that are connected by covered causeways, too.

The last pyramids were built in the Middle Kingdom. When it comes to shape, they were still being angled at about 50 degrees. In terms of subsidiary structures, they still had mortuary and valley temples that were connected to each other by a covered causeway. There were two significant changes, though. The first was that mortuary temples changed in size. These buildings were made much bigger than ever before. Amenemhat for example made a mortuary temple so massive that it seems to have inspired the myth about the minotaur and labyrinth. You can actually see a reconstruction of this mortuary temple in Assassin’s Creed: Origins if you take some time to explore Haueris. The structure definitely looks like the sort of place where you might come across a minotaur. The second was that cores went back to being made using mudbrick. Since the shells were taken off over time, the result was that most of these pyramids were reduced to piles of rubble. The pyramid of Amenemhat is a really good example. The structure is basically just one more dune in the desert at this point. You can see what it looked like on the other hand in Assassin’s Creed: Origins. You can even climb all over it. You might be wondering what happened to the pyramids. The answer is that people quite simply stopped making them. What exactly did the ancient Egyptians replace them with? Tombs. In terms of both time and resources, pyramids were incredibly costly to construct. These buildings were significant investments. This caused the ancient Egyptians to look for some other solution to the problem of burying the bodies of their deceased, so they started making tombs rather than pyramids in the New Kingdom. These were mostly placed in the Valley of the Kings. You’ll come across quite a few tombs in Assassin’s Creed: Origins, but the Valley of the Kings doesn’t happen to be in the game world, so there’s only so much that you can learn about these tombs. Supposing that you’re interested in learning more about the Valley of the Kings, this means that you’ll just have to pick up some books. The best one in my personal opinion is The Complete Valley of the Kings by Nicholas Reeves and Richard Wilkinson. This will teach you pretty much everything that you ever wanted to know about them. U Here’s the Thing | Rob Rich

Three Quick Ones

The first two of these three short essays were originally written for the Unwinnable Quarranzine, but were cut for space. We decided to run them, along with a third new short essay (because three is better than two) this month. – Editor

It’s Okay to Share an Island

hen Animal Crossing: New Horizons launched I saw a ton of praise, but Walso a lot of complaints that only one island is allowed per Switch console. And, I mean, I get it. Families with several kids; siblings who can’t get along; other scenarios I can’t think of at the moment; all valid reasons to get grumpy about not being able to have an overgrown dirt pile in the middle of the ocean to call your own. But for some of us, which does include me, sharing one island is actually really cool. I definitely have my gripes about the way the game handles couch co-op on a single console (i.e. extremely limited interaction options for whoever isn’t “the leader”) but simply having one island that I share with my wife has been a blast. We collaborate on all the infrastructure and outside decor. We both have a say in who we do or don’t want to invite to live with us. We share fossil finds. We share DIY recipes or make stuff for each other if we can’t find a duplicate recipe card. It’s a fun way for us to play together, in a virtual space that we can both change. Together. And we have separate houses we can do whatever the heck we want to with, so we still get to do our own thing. Again, I understand there are valid reasons to dislike being “forced” to share one island if you only (heh, “only”) have one Switch, but it’s worth remembering there are also valid reasons to like that limitation. Obviously having the option to share one island or have separate ones would be preferable because it would accommodate everyone, but right now this is what we got. So maybe give it another try? Maybe think of it as yet another game limitation that adheres to the series’ extremely intense “you will be chill and fucking like it” vibe?

The Final Fantasy VII Remake Made Me Like RPG Arenas

kay, so, I’m probably not alone in thinking that battle arenas in RPGs are Omore annoying than fun, right? When the game you’re playing is turn- based it really starts to become a slog after a while, at least until you get to a special tough enemy or a boss or something. I mean I know there are definitely people out there who do like that kind of stuff but I get tired of it real fast. Which is why the Final Fantasy VII Remake caught me so off guard. It definitely helps to like the combat system, which I do.A lot. But also having more action-based gameplay is a huge factor. Now I see every arena fight as a fun sort of mini-game on my way to unlocking some special gear or filling out my bestiary or something. Plus it makes for good practice because there’s a surprising amount of nuance to the tougher battles that are generally possible to brute force your way through, but figuring out how to make everything click together and turn your team into a finely tuned engine of destruction feels fantastic. Which isn’t a feeling I ever really got from turn-based arena slogs in the past. There are plenty of criticisms that could be leveled at this remake, including aspects of the combat I love so much, but I can’t help appreciating how it’s turned one of my least favorite common RPG things into something I actually look forward to taking part in. Wow They Made Some Bad Decisions With Animal Crossing

’m assuming a large percentage of the folks reading this have played or have Ibeen playing the latest Animal Crossing, because what better time than now right? Me, too. It’s been a very pleasant and adorable escape from reality for us over the past couple of months. But holy wow are there some design decisions in this game that completely baffle (and often annoy) me. First off, why the hell do clothing items assigned to wand outfits effectively disappear from your inventory? They’re basically magic holograms at that point I shouldn’t have to buy 5 pairs of glasses if I want to be wearing the same glasses for all my saved outfits. Also, why can’t we use items that are in storage when we craft at home? It’s all right there! How come sometimes a fish will immediately turn 180 degrees to look at my lure the second it hits the water but other times will completely ignore my lure when it lands ever so slightly to the side of the front of its face? Why are there so many god damn sea bass? Why do squids get two different jokes when you catch them but most/all of the other bugs and fish you catch only get one? Why don’t visiting players show up on the mini map? Why can’t I walk around with a cup of tea in my hand when all the other islanders can? Why do some hats remove my beard but not others? Why are you only allowed to manually select how many turnips you buy at once and not literally any other thing you can get at the shop? Why can’t you pick more than one of the same type of clothing item at a time (i.e., 2 different pairs of pants) when using the dressing room at the clothing shop? Why do some shells stack but not others? Why is there an arbitrary limit of 99,999 bells you can hold in your wallet and any extra ends up as a bag in your inventory? Again, I’ve been having a great time with Animal Crossing and it’s been a much-needed escape, but what the ever-loving hell were they thinking? U No Accounting for Taste | Adam Boffa

The Shadow of the Past

y the early 2000’s, the Final Fantasy series had reached a level of success Bunrivaled by any of its genre peers up to that point, thanks in particular to breakout hit Final Fantasy VII and its successors. Which is why the decisions made by creator Squaresoft (now Square Enix) after the release of the tenth title in the series remain so interesting and contentious. Rather than continue on the path it had taken over the previous 14 years, Square took a detour after FFX: it released a massively multiplayer online game (FFXI) and then produced the first direct sequel in the series X-2( ). When the company finally returned to the precedent established earlier – single-player games unconnected narratively despite sharing a franchise title – it was after the longest gap between main entries in the series, and with a new director at the helm. Yasumi Matsuno, who’d previously directed Final Fantasy Tactics, took over after the departure of Hironobu Sakaguchi. Though Matsuno would leave production before the game was completed, the final product still feels thoroughly indebted to his distinct creative voice. At release in 2006, Final Fantasy XII didn’t sit well with all audiences. Some loved it, but others were frustrated at its design and narrative decisions. Its battle system abandoned a majority of the mechanics established in the series up to that point, instead resembling something like a mix of Knights of the Old Republic with strategy game elements. There are no random battles. There’s no world map in the conventional sense (“Tiny Characters in a Huge World,” as Suikoden’s soundtrack called it), a choice FFX had already made but was still controversial at the time. And, perhaps most bewildering to longtime series fans, FFXII’s storyline decentered its heroes and dealt far more with political development than character development. Despite the fact that the game introduces its main six-person cast early and keeps them consistent over the next few dozen hours, their personal journeys aren’t the real focus of the narrative. (The strength of the characterization in the series’ best entries is something Levi Rubeck recently covered in his great column on FFVI.) There are relatively few memorable moments between characters in FFXII compared to its predecessors. Instead, the game opts for an approach in which the world itself, Ivalice (also featured in the Final Fantasy Tactics games), becomes its own kind of main character. Cultural and political histories take center stage whenever possible, and the main cast becomes a vehicle for learning and relating these histories. Rather than driving major dramatic events forward, the cast of FFXII often finds itself at the crossroads of centuries-long tensions and conflicts, inhabiting a peripheral role until things erupt and demand a response.

This can make for a slightly awkward narrative structure, however, as maintaining interest in a story for 40 or so hours requires some amount of forward momentum for its protagonists. As a result, a significant amount of the game’s content – maybe even a majority – is not contained within the main storyline. FFXII instead offers players freedom early on to explore its world at their preferred pace. It encourages this principally through its hunt system, which tasks the player with finding and defeating unique monsters. These hunts often incorporate significant backstories, additional side quests and new parts of the world. There’s also an encyclopedia of lore that gradually expands as the player defeats common enemies and bosses. Killing 10 of a certain enemy type might unlock a description of a particular historical event, or a folktale, or research notes from a scholar, or something else; in many cases, these pieces of lore hint at further quests and locations. It’s an approach to worldbuilding that’s distinct from other games in the series, and it means that FFXII doesn’t quite make sense unless the freedom it offers is embraced. It also means that much of the game’s most striking material, thematically and mechanically, is entirely optional. The Battle of Nabudis, which takes place a few years before the events of FFXII, hangs over much of the game’s narrative, for example. The Archadian Empire invaded the city of Nabudis and used it as a testing ground for a new weapon it had recently developed, a weapon which was so effective it obliterated the population in moments and left a toxic wasteland in its wake. The event becomes a formative moment in the story both politically and personally, and the cast of FFXII makes frequent reference to the Battle when discussing their own motivations and their strategies going forward.

The game never requires that the player actually visit the region decimated by the Battle. They can experience the entire main narrative without realizing that these locations are even in the game at all. But they’re in there. Through side quests or aimless exploration, the player can find themselves in the Nabreus Deadlands and the Necrohol of Nabudis, enormous areas with unique characters and storylines that speak, through muted colors and lingering phantoms, to the enduring horrors of war. These areas don’t offer a complete, fully detailed portrait of the lost kingdom, which is in accordance with the way the game renders history throughout. For as many artifacts and folktales and recipes from centuries ago that the player can read about in fine detail, the game makes clear that there are multitudes more that are irretrievable. The sheer force of time has pushed many things once held as common knowledge beyond the grasp of the world’s current inhabitants, leaving only educated guesses to fill in the gaps. Some remaining details can still be scrutinized and studied, while many more, like the meanings of so many ruins scattered across the map, are lost forever. In either case, though, this history continually shapes the present. Taken together, all of this leaves an impression on the player that’s unique within the series. Despite the fact that the player controls the heroes of this particular story, FFXII gives the audience the sense that these aren’t the most important people in the world of the game. Ivalice isn’t waiting on the player’s actions to keep moving forward, and these characters are not at the center of everyone’s attention or ambition. The cast of FFXII is just one group that has, along with innumerable others across generations, contributed to the creation of a rich history that is at once shared and painful, complicated and celebrated. This approach to storytelling is fortified by a really stellar translation – both the script and vocal performances remain among the strongest in the medium. In a similar way, nearly 15 years later, there are still very few games that provide the kind of experience FFXII does. Some of its mechanics have influenced the design of later games, but its tone remains distinct. Anyone looking for a conventional Final Fantasy experience will likely want to look elsewhere. The disappointment in response to the game’s release from some series enthusiasts is understandable in this context. But this also means that, for fans of the game, there still isn’t anything quite like it. U Artist Spotlight | Mike Pennekamp

How’d you get into art?

As cliché as it sounds, I’ve always been into art. My creative side was nurtured from an early age. As a kid, most of my “toys” were art kits and sketchbooks. Don’t get me wrong, I had some Ninja Turtles too . . . but it was mostly art kits and sketchbooks. My basic drawing skills came from a video series called Captain Mark and the Draw Squad. Basical- ly, it was a video series that taught kids how to draw – duh, right? A guy named Mark Kistler released these educational videos for schools. He had a PBS show before that which basically did the same thing, but I never saw it. I think I was too young. I don’t know how I got a hold of those tapes – it wasn’t from school, maybe the library? I don’t remember. Anyway I watched those tapes over and over and over. “Commander Mark” had a jumpsuit with a bandolero of pencils, if I remember correctly, and a cohort of friends that he drew into existence. That series kind of gave me a boost at such an early age. They taught me things like basic perspective and value (shading) and told me to “Say ‘yeeeeeah’ to drawing, and ‘nooooo‘ to drugs!” I absorbed every word he said . . . Well, almost every word.

Where do you draw your inspiration from? (Is that the demon from Night of the Demon I see?)

Yeah! That’s the demon from Night of the Demon. Not only is the movie brilliant, but that weird puppet they put together is perfection. To put it simply, my influences range from fringe beliefs and the occult to art history and the weirder bits of pop culture. I try to use elements of those influences as puzzle pieces to build broader narratives and, more times than not, those narratives discuss belief structures be they political, spiritual, social, etc. Actually, that print with the Night of the Demon character also references another weird element from pop culture: the trad- ing card series, Dinosaurs Attack! The title of the print is “Su- preme Evil” which is also the title of arguably the most brutal card from the whole franchise. It kicks off the third act, where humankind triumphs over the dinosaurs who have pushed the human race to almost total annihilation. Up until that point in the series, the cards depict carnage from an outside perspective. You see people falling prey to dinosaurs in some remarkably gruesome ways, but it’s all voyeuristic. It isn’t until “Supreme Evil” that the cards start to show the emotional toll of the destruction and you start to see a pain that’s different from dying a gruesome death at the hands of prehistoric monsters. As a kid I was either drawing, watching scary movies, or reading. I would spend countless hours in the “paranormal” section of my local library (it was on the second floor, under the stairs, back, and to the left – get it?). I’d ride my bike there after school and read about UFOs, ghosts, monsters and psychics predicting the end of the world. At first I was reading those Mysterious Universe books by Time Maga- zine but, the older I got, the more I branched out. Oh, and I kept what I called a “UFO documentation kit.” I remember it so vividly! It was a briefcase holding nothing more than one permanent marker, one ballpoint pen, one wide-ruled notebook, a pair of binoculars and a whistle. Now I know what you’re thinking, “Why the whistle?” That’s a very good question, and I don’t have a good answer, but I will point out that what makes the least sense is actually the briefcase. When I turned 13, I was exposed to punk rock and started skateboarding. Those subcultures go hand-in-hand and both are steeped in highly graphic artwork. The work of artists like Raymond Pettibon continue to influence me today. Then I got to high school, where I was introduced to other subjects like politics and psychology, which are ever-present in what I make, but also art history. I mean, I had a rough understanding of art history, but this was my first introduction to art history as a whole field of study, you know? Anyway, that helped me see art from a historical and intel- lectual viewpoint, which I find absolutely fascinating. Art history is rad as hell!

What’s your process like?

I’m a printmaker – more specifically, I’m a traditional re- lief printmaker. That means, in a very simplistic sense, I create big stamps. I use shaped chisels (called “gouges”) to selectively remove material from the surface of a sheet of plywood or other flat, even surfaces. Then I use a roller, to apply a layer of ink to the surface of the plywood the stuff I didn’t carve away. Next, using tons of pressure (either by hand of with a specialized machine) I transfer that ink from the plywood, to a sheet of paper. Sometimes I use other methods in conjunction to add slight elements of color, but I usually rely on the tone of the paper and the color of the ink. I know lots of printmakers who create beautiful full- color prints but, when I use color, things tend to get really gawdy really quick. So basically, I use a pencil to draw out everything and then I use black ink to define everything more clearly. Next I use those gouges to carve away the areas I haven’t drawn. The finished print basically looks like a drawing but I can make multiples. I love the process, and it results in works that can be disseminated pretty easily but are still limited and unique. You know? I’m not running 100+ pictures off of a copy machine, I’m still creating each one by hand. There are several processes that fall under the umbrella term “printmaking” and I recommend everyone learn about them! Printmaking is the whole reason we have books. Printmaking is how people disseminated information before computers. Read about the history of printmaking, everyone, it was a revolution!

I see a lot of hands. What’s with the hands?

Ah yes, the hands. I love drawing hands but I’m not sure when I started making the conscious decision to incorporate them into my artwork. To me, hands reference a first- person perspective. Sort of like that video game Doom. They also imply interaction. I rarely use human faces in my work – I don’t like to idea of depicting an identifiable person unless it’s critical to the work itself – I can use hands to add a human presence. Also, those hands are always gentle, regardless of how they’re drawn, carved or printed. Even in that print (“Ghosts”) of two hands holding knives, the hands are soft and actually cradling those knives really gently. That kind of obscures direct action and intent, which fur- thers that anonymity. It’s that anonymity that allows the viewer to place themselves into the work, in a sense. Think of it like that trope of Anytown U.S.A. in those classic movies about alien invasion – or Smallville from Superman, or that Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” or even Springfield on The Simpsons. The intent is to make a town that can act as a stand-in. It’s a way for the viewer to imaging their town, right? In the same way, those hands can belong to anyone – they can be your hands. It’s another avenue for connection between the work and the viewer.

What do you hope folks take away from your art?

This is an incredibly difficult question to answer. Art can be really intimidating. There are entire institutions designed specifically to encourage a kind of exclusivity and hierarchy around “good” and “bad” art. Lowbrow vs Highbrow, Art vs Craft, etc . . . Spoiler alert: It’s all subjective and none of it matters. Exclusivity is boring. There’s this quote, I think it’s from Charles Bukowski, “Find what you love and let it kill you.” He’s basically en- couraging you to give yourself entirely to your passion – but it’s Bukowski so he’s got to be weird about it. Anyway, I’m one of those very lucky people who has been able to find what they love – and that’s rare. Regardless of anyone catch- ing historical references, reading narratives, or recognizing the character from Night of the Demon, I hope that people look my art and see time and care and consideration and an expression of genuine passion. Obviously selling work is important – you can’t pay rent with good vibes (something they don’t tell you that in art school) – but if what I make encourages someone else to pursue their own interests just as passionately – I’ll consider it a win. Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to share a little about myself and what I make. I sincerely appreciate it. That said, it would be irresponsible of me to have this platform and not remind everyone that we are current- ly experiencing an incredible shift in power, perspective and personhood (during what most advertising agencies will describe as “these uncertain times”) and I feel that it is my responsibility to unapologetically express that black lives matter, trans rights are human rights and love is love.

* * *

For more of Michael’s work, follow him on Instagram @Mikefacekillah or visit his website. U 1. Ghosts 2. Supreme Evil 3. Coyote 4. Psychopomp II 5. Snippy 6. Three Spheres Digital Phantasmagoria On the Art of DataErase - Glitch Witch, Anime Porn Historian and DIP Switch Devil

By Phantom “Kumiko” (DataErase, 2013)

hat does it look like when a com- as their pointillist creator intended. Wputer cries? When it bleeds, when Text vomit and datagore, garish, coarse, it screams and shudders in pain? When shredded by scanlines and dusted with it is compromised, when it is asked to black noise, the song of the siren from do unspeakable things? If it could reflect dot matrix hell. upon the uses to which it had been put, I first heard this song several years ago, how wretched would we find its look of on Tumblr in the early-mid ‘10s. During despairing disdain, how contorted its my long nightly walks from blog to blog, face? How long would we find the trails there was a certain kind of stark, vague- running down its cheeks, what color its ly intimidating “aesthetic” blog I loved tears? stumbling onto at three in the morning, Picture if you will the moment the tears the cyborges-es, contaqs and postmodern- flow forth, a kernel panic attack. The Corruptions that had become one of its subject: Hentai Adventure #8801. VRAM calling cards. DataErase was among them. is melting; Kumiko’s body is glitched to DataErase, full name Maddison “Maddi” pieces, flipped, chopped, inverted, pulled Morgenstern. The image described at apart at the seams, buzzed-out fragments length above was one of hers, among the scattered across a misaligned grid. Soft first she ever posted. I never saw it then; legs languidly spread, naked, straddling if I did, I don’t remember it. These blogs a chipped messagebox, her skin a check- all blended together to me, DataErase to ered grain of pixels, yellows and reds ms-dos5 to fmtownsmarty and so on and and pinks zoomed in too close to blend so forth, not because they were unre- markable or interchangeable – far from the tilemapped Frankenstein of flesh and it! – but because my tastes were still de- text that composed the menacing “DIP veloping, and because I lacked the con- Switch Deity.” The red, the flooding red, text that would make them click. It was the drowning-in-red, the overwhelming, only later, much later, when I could tell overbearing, unbearable, oppressive red: an FM Towns Marty from an FMV and “I Wish I Was the Prey and I Wish They knew what the 5 in “ms-dos5” stood for, Would Kill Me.” And of course, Kumiko, that I could return to them with a new who headlines two pictures (“Kumiko,” understanding and a new appreciation. “Kumiko @ the Racetrack”) and is hidden DataErase, rediscovered and reappraised, in several others; finding her was a game. transformed before my eyes. Though later images are simply num- (By this time she had also transformed bered, all are unique. Far from random, in another sense: from “DataErase,” an the words, faces, bodies and body parts anonymous, disembodied voice in the (be they disrobed or merely dismem- shadow of a Berkeley socket, to “Maddi,” bered) that emerge from the murky sea the violet-haired “glitch witch” most who of twisted pixels, like a memory from a follow her will recognize today, looking mist, express by suggestion, inviting you very much like she’d stepped out of a PC- to construct a narrative around them, 98 game herself.) daring you to read between the lines and She recently curated two collections of use your imagination to fill in the blanks, her glitch art, Imperfection End (2012-13) as good pixel art tends to do. and Nightmare Disk/I Will Destroy Your The public image of pixel art is defined Mind (2014-15). Inside the former is a fold- by the triple-I indies of the Darlingzone, er containing her earliest compositions, whose single-minded pursuit of nicecore and for a while I’d set my wallpaper to a nostalgia is instantly recognizable in a slideshow of those “First 14.” Eventually Shovel Knight or a Celeste. For them and I’d seen them so many times that I could for many others, “pixel art” conjures up name each of them on sight: the bursting, images of childhood afternoons spent in blazing viscera of the “Dissection;” the front of an old Nintendo console, awash dark earth-tones of “Secret” and its se- in a wave of innocent good feeling. But cret garden; the pastel pinks and violets pixel art is in fact much more than that. of the “Magical Girl Transformation;” The glowing pixel in its coarse grid is a Jean-Jacques Gibson (or rather, what remains of him) in Snatcher (Hideo Kojima, 1988) visual medium rich with possibilities, 10 SECONDS. She draws inspiration from and can express horror, sinking dread, Ero Guro artists, outsider artists, Surre- alienation, righteous rage, grit and grime alists and body horror specialists, among just as well as joy, as it has from Splat- them Shintaro Kago, Maruo Suehiro and terhouse and Sweet Home to Yume Nikki, Hans Bellmer with his dolls. And the from Jean-Jacques Gibson’s beady-eyed games she takes under her knife are, to blue severed head to the monsters of sac- dramatically understate it, worth noting. rament iv or FAITH. Many and multiply- “Kumiko” is not an invention of the ing are the artists and players exploring artist. It’s the canonical name of the the depths of its depths, to whom this character, who stars in the game Maken- need not be said. shi Kumiko, an erotic adventure game re- Yet it does need to be said, as the night- leased by System House Oh! for a handful mare collages of DataErase are the last of Japanese PCs in 1988, including NEC’s thing you’d expect to see at the yearly PC-98 and PC-88 families. It was one of a Pixel Art Park expo in Chiyoda, Japan (if handful of games (including Cosmic Psy- it is being held at all this year). She em- cho, Last Armageddon and Branmarker) ploys a variety of techniques, cutting and that Maddi was playing at the time. In the pasting screencaps, bending and break- readme for Imperfection End, she says: “I ing games, using both standard tools like think I initially envisioned DataErase as Photoshop and obscure ones like Andi a PC-98 screencap archive of stuff I was McClure’s BECOME A GREAT ARTIST IN playing at the time (mostly screencaps of Cosmic Psycho), but at some point I started known today, such as Touhou, YU-NO, making these collage images with glitchy Corpse Party, RPG Maker and Hideo Ko- elements/aesthetics and that’s how the jima’s Snatcher and Policenauts. (For the first 14 images happened.” Kumiko is an rest of this piece, I’ll be using the term interesting case in herself, as I’d learn “PC-98” to refer to both the PC-98 and from Maddi in an email leading up to PC-88 product lines to save words, unless this piece: “I think the image of the girl otherwise specified.Snatcher was a PC-88 in Kumiko is so generic and archetypal to game, for instance, though its later MSX2 me as like that 80s moe look, it struck a and Sega CD ports are better-known by chord and I wanted to work with it.” English-speaking players today.) Some context should be established. But those are the exceptions. The PC- The PC-98 line began in the early 1980s 98 was a Japan-only machine, and most and eventually rose to a level of ubiq- of its games were never discovered by uity comparable to that of the IBM-Com- the world outside due to the language patible in North America (before being barrier. What little we do know is thanks muscled out by those same IBM-Compat- to decades of effort by fan translators ibles at the close of the ‘90s,) in part due worldwide, from groups like 46 OkuMen to their native and robust support for to individuals like Nana and Slowbeef. Japanese kanji at a time when Western As a result, the platform has built up competitors were stuck with ASCII and a mysterious cachet among a small but Unicode hadn’t yet been conceived. Nat- fiercely loyal group of enthusiasts (my- urally, its software library was massive, self included) dating all the way back and includes many names that are well- to specialty sites like Tokugawa Corpo-

The PC-98 in action PC-98 glitched (screenshot by the author) rate Labs (whose forums are still going with a grain of salt. It’s no surprise, after strong today.) Part of its appeal is the all, that the extreme should stick out of way the Japanese PC dev scene evolved its library like a sore nipple; a picture of a in isolation, developing more regional woman lying naked on her back with legs quirks than an Australian marsupial. raised to her shoulders and a Pepsi can The art of the PC-98 (and other Japa- shoved up her vagina needs no transla- nese PCs popular in its day) is marked tion (please don’t ask.) It’s a gross exag- by an immaculate slickness, painstak- geration to say that this is all the PC-98 ingly dithered hues and ornate borders, had to offer, given the sheer wealth of cityscapes that glittered and glowed software developed over its lifespan. In- like the crystal eyes of a 16-color catgirl cluding games for all ages like Melpool on a CRT screen, beat-heavy FM synth Land and Sengoku Turb, educational and slam-jams and fantastic stories typed business applications, and even a couple in ＦＵＬＬＷＩＤＴＨＴＥＸＴ. In the versions of Windows. pantheon of Japanese games, the PC-98 That said, it was there, and it was prom- is the epitome of polish. To its fans, it is inent, and an inclination towards the the epitome of aesthetic. erotic, from suggestively short skirts to …And with all this out of the way, I am out-and-out smut, certainly does appear now obligated to talk about the porn. to have held a special place in the PC-98’s It’s incredible, really, seeing so much otaku-driven hobbyist dev culture. Some of it in one place. The PC-98 gets called of it is harmless and funny, some of it a “hentai machine” from time to time, fascinating, some of it legitimately hot, though the moniker should be taken but a lot of it ranges from suspicious to contentious to downright creepy, from rendered and well-scored, overflowing the rape fetish-fueled 177 to the frankly with dedication in all its forms, for better self-explanatory Final Lolita. This ten- or for worse. Yes, even Patty McPepsis- dency paradoxically pervades even its natch is beautifully drawn. most brilliant work. To take two ex- What’s more, the neotenous charms amples already mentioned, Kojima’s de- of moe were a recurring theme in PC-98 tective games are both considered clas- games both work-safe and not, in forms sics of cyberpunk sci-fi, but one has you work-safe and not. It gives me pause; sniffing the panties of a 14-year-old girl here the tightrope is at its most slippery. and the other has you groping breasts There’s a strange tension underlying the left and right. Meanwhile, YU-NO, a deli- big eyes, the blushing cheeks, the frills ciously atmospheric time-travel mystery and precocious curves. Cute things are and one of the platform’s definitive ad- cute, and I’m far from immune to the joys venture games, closes out on a one-two of the cloyingly adorable (I’m quite par- punch of cannibalism and parental incest tial to Adeleine, kid artist from Kirby 64), (and that’s the short version). The flipside but the burning longing associated with of this, on the other hand, is that PC-98 these characters, with the projection of porn, an area where one might naively that longing, that love, those hopes and expect cheaply cut corners and lazy ex- fears onto these proxies pixelated and ecution is, on average, shockingly well- hand-drawn alike has been ground zero

From the DataErase Tumblr blog From the DataErase Tumblr blog for a menagerie of maladaptive tenden- obsession and fixation and all-consum- cies, from 2D love and merchandise ma- ing consumption that surges just below nia to predilections more pointedly sin- the surface of it all. Again the tension. ister (there is graphic porn of Adeleine, Again the tension. What looks like pu- kid artist from Kirby 64. [On that note! rity reads like a sexuality made wink- Please let me never have to type the ingly conspicuous by its absence. What phrase “precocious curves” ever again.]) looks like safety and comfort reads like This phenomenon, this shadow, has a muffled scream. It’s as plain on the PC- been analyzed to death, in voices alter- 98 as it would be on the platforms of the nately academic and popular, alternately present. It doesn’t touch every game, of patronizing and lenient to a fault, from course, but it’s always there, ambient, Tamaki to Murakami, from Daicon IV to nagging, hanging over the proceedings, Database Animals to Moe Manifesto, from thick enough thick to cut with a knife. Genshiken to Giffany, from the triumpha- It’s a messy legacy, and I don’t mean that lism of Otaku no Video to the bleakness euphemistically. Engaging critically with of Me!Me!Me! Oh, how the ink has been it, celebrating the good without trivial- spilled! And who can blame them? I love izing the bad, steering clear of outright the PC-98, but there is a latent horror to dismissal on one end and outright ro- it, an unavoidable unignorable horror manticism on the other, takes patience to it and to the subculture surrounding and care. it and supporting it, to the bone-chilling All the shadows and all the dark cor- current of loneliness, of alienation, of ners, and the shell of Superflat gloss that envelops it all. It’s a veneer that practi- those places got lost to the transition to cally begs to be taken apart, to be hacked Web 2.0 (where I believe a lot of that is to pieces. I think of this when I see “Roses just people’s pixiv or Twitter accounts are Red Red Red,” or “Kumiko,” or any coupled with a blog now?). So I think my of the other images where the shadows work is also informed by this relation- seem to boil over the surface and tear the ship that a lot of that early 90s and late entire frame inside out in an explosion of 80s otaku culture imprinted onto me as blood and pixels, horror and despair. The a lonely alienated kid. Those spaces were glitch is the failure of a system of illusion a sorta safespace away from everything to maintain its facade. Everything comes weighing on me, it was always a place out all at once, and it won’t stop, it won’t of comfort? Misplaced nostalgia I guess? stop, it won’t stop. The PC-98 and jp retro computer stuff is Trauma, then, is the word. DataErase interesting precisely because it’s kind of says in Imperfection End: “These were a window back to that stuff for me?” made during a particularly bad time in She mentions, in both the readme my life as I was still processing a lot of and our correspondence, spending a lot trauma and I think that’s reflected here a of time with Kisekae Set System (KiSS) lot.” Just as telling are the places she went dolls, a type of drag-and-drop digital for comfort, which likewise inform her paper doll that has appeared on vari- work: ous platforms over the years, from Java “I grew up partly with a lot of the gen- (where she first found them) to Flash (as eral anime stuff people of my genera- Kisekae2) to, fittingly enough, the PC- tion were into but I also explored a lot of 98 (on which it got its start.) Dolls are a doujin webrings and circles before all of common thread in her work, by her own

From the DataErase Tumblr blog From Nightmare Disk admission. I mentioned earlier that Da- much so well so easily (at the peak of her taErase drew inspiration for her collages productivity she was pushing out a new from, among other things, the dollwork picture every day.) She’s no detached Pop of Hans Bellmer, and it’s easy to see in artist; she even mentioned in a recent his anatomically splintered and twisted tweet that she wants to be an “anime ball-joint creations the ghost of Kumikos porn historian.” In jest, perhaps, but I’m yet to come. Bellmer is commonly said holding her to it. And yes, I am going to to have built his dolls in opposition to send her a picture of this article’s title. the “cult of the perfect body” that had Most importantly, she was (and is) taken hold of Nazi Germany in the 1930s hardly alone in her relationship to the and 40s, countering the perfect with the wave of Japanese media arriving with a perfectly grotesque; Likewise DataEr- splash on Western shores in the late ‘80s ase’s deconstructed, lacerated Licca-chan and early ‘90s, that shadowy era of vid- dolls give the lie to the silver-slick flaw- eotaped fansubs, Usenet threads, doujin lessness of their originals. webrings and bishoujo webshrines. On Yet they are also unmistakably an act DataErase’s website, she says that one of of love, a love letter, to the PC-98 and the themes explored in her work is “the to Japanese retrocomputing as a whole, West’s relationship with Japanese pop warts and all. It’s obvious when you con- culture.” sider that she can list sources for all the But all this is just the tip of the iceberg. pictures she scrambles, that you’d have Although the fan culture of late-20th to be several layers deep into the fan- century Japan was once seen as incom- dom you were using as a canvas to do so prehensibly exotic to outsiders, and as uniquely Japanese to commentators on through which to peer into our collective either side of the Pacific, its contours memory. become more familiar every year as fan- And is the memory that emerges from dom-building, fanservice and parasocial our murky sea nostalgia or trauma? engagement gradually become the pri- Sometimes the line is unclear. Sometimes mary drivers of the Western entertain- it can’t be drawn at all. Kumiko lives in ment industry. In time, it begins to look the space between. more prophetic than foreign. And as this Superflat never died. It just became happens, we find ourselves having to en- our reality. gage with the iconography of the magi- All the glitch art thus described is from cal girl and the dating sim as if they were several years ago. DataErase would step fragments of our own culture, because away from the format of Imperfection they are now. End and Nightmare Disk after 2014. In the We draw on the vocabulary of this past readme for the latter, she says: “I think to articulate our present. Vaporwave was the emotional + psychological space I one form of this. Glitch-witchery is an- would be creating stuff in would be very other. We do this, and then we turn in different onward from here. Although the other direction, assembling these bits general traits of my work would stay the and pieces, these still-ticking doll arms same.” She’d go on to experiment with 3D and twintailed ciphers and pastel-pink graphics, as well as put together a short shards of love and fear and innocence game called RX77R for the locusjam game and bitterness and hope, into a lens jam in 2016.

From the DataErase Tumblr blog Labyrinth.OS

Cast as a wanderer amid a field of you and a team of stylish dungeoneers noise-textured “space ruins,” RX77R’s – including the Technomancer, the Psy- PS1-inspired aesthetic and intimidating chic Detective and the Bondage Pala- architecture straddle the line between din – into a digital underworld where 2D and 3D thanks to scripts running on programs are your magic, files are your the RPG Maker XP runtime package to armor, malware bites (please let me push it beyond its intended, strictly flat have this one) and pyramid-headed AI functionality; there’s a whole communi- mannequins double as living elevators. ty dedicated to experimenting with it in Though the game is far from finished, this and other ways. You might imagine a short, promising demo is available yourself wandering through the ruins of on her site. Glimpses of the final game the now thoroughly broken engine. After through her twitter show a medley of discussing the game, she added, “I think other sights, like dusty mazes of junk I’d like to explore making a kind of Yume and a library framed by golden statues Nikki clone in that engine some day? I of Takashi Murakami’s Miss Ko2. think it could be neat!” A tweet promoting the game opens More recently, DataErase has been with “Hey! Do you like SMT [Shin Megami busy developing Labyrinth.os, a “3D cy- Tensei] and Persona but hate how fucking ber dungeon crawler about deleting the stupid Atlus is constantly?” Asking her universe and fighting god” which sends about it later, she had this to say: “I generally just find some of Atlus’s emonially hexbent, scrambled by black writing choices to leave a bad taste in my magic and networked across the chasm mouth. Recent poor handling of a trans between life, death and the horrors hu- character in Catherine comes to mind man and inhuman that lie beyond the and the entire mishandling they did with reach of both. The power of the glitch, talking about gender and sexuality with and of glitch art, is that it bridges the gap a number of characters in Persona 4 is between synthetic purity and organic uncomfortable? Especially since earlier decay. It opens the computer to the pos- Persona games seem to have a better grip sibility of mystery, as death is mystery. It on this stuff (although obviously still not connects the computer, the “perfect, im- perfect). I don’t want to make Labyrinth.os mortal machine,” to rotting things, stink- to be a game that prizes itself on it’s like ing things, dying things, to things that un-problematicness or whatever but I’d return to the earth. at least want to make a game that speaks To us. to me and speaks to people I care about? What does it look like when a comput- SMT’s design choices always feel like er cries? Closing out our correspondence, they’re gesturing towards it’s queerness I asked DataErase this very question. Her but never really engaging with it? Sort of response? wearing it as a costume? Which is complicated for people playing those games who exist outside gender and sexuality norms.” Fitting that the influence ofShin Me- gami Tensei rings clear in this game and in her art. When I think SMT, I think of the scene in the Digital Devil Story OVA where troubled student Akemi Nakajima summons a demon onto the mortal plane using a FORTRAN program, a computer It is now safe to turn off your computer. seance that twists signal into sigil, cer-

For more of DataErase’s art, visit her Tumblr. U CHIPPING AWAY

By Stu Horvath, with Amanda Hudgins This series of articles is made possible through the generous spon- sorship of Epic's Unreal Engine 4. While Epic puts us in touch with our subjects, they have no input or approval in the final story. Click here to learn more.

urn to the left, hit the thruster. Strafe a bit right, avoid that out- Tcropping. No, more right. Tap the thruster. No, no, too much. Ac- cidentally turn more to the left. Wait, no. Thrust? No, strafe? No! The wall is too close! BOOM. When I first saw Dropship, from indie studio Mini Goliath, I was immediately attracted to its glitched out aesthetic. Everything is fuzzed out, text dances, collapse seems imminent. The glitch aesthetic does for digital what offset errors do for print and ruins do for architecture: reveal a fragility in things we often casually ascribe with characteristics of perfection and permanence. Decay appeals to me on a fundamental level and I generally think an occasional dose of entropy is good for maintaining a realistic perspective in your life. Entropy, of course, is generally accepted to be a gradual decline into disorder. In Dropship, the decline is pre- cipitous, often only requiring a split second mistake to send you tumbling into oblivion. The game is a clear homage to the old Atari game Lunar Lander. You’re in control of a small space module equipped with the ability to turn, strafe and fire a thruster as you navigate narrow passages to collect stranded astronauts and safely return to a landing pad. Unfortunately, you hull seems to be made of tinfoil, the rock walls of diamonds and gravity is relative to the dropship’s position, which spins the camera and makes an already challenging task of maneu- vering that much worse. When you inevitably knock into something, the dropship ignites into a glitchy explosion and the game insults your performance. There is probably more to the game, but I can’t get past the third level. Yet. “We have deliberately kept the difficulty curve steep,” says Paul Larger, “Games like VVVVVV and Super Meat Boy had us absolutely raging and we wanted to make a game like that.” Yup. Mission accom- plished, Paul. “Hopefully players will be able to eventually master it and get through the levels,” he continues. “People who like a challenge should enjoy it, and we included our times for each level in there as well so you can see if you can best us on a speed run. If it causes people to rage quit though we are cool with that as well.”

* * *

Mini Goliath is just two people, Paul Large and Gary Whitton, Scot- tish developers with day jobs at Ruffian Games. While they work together at a larger studio, Mini Goliath is the place they can pour themselves into their indie impulses. “We have always been proto- typing and making little games on the side that never saw the light of day,” says Paul. “Mini Goliath is a chance for us to put ourselves out there. We got a chance to make some small games at the studio and it just felt more right to us than the usual AAA work we do.”

Surprisingly, though, the pair got their first taste of indie-style development at their day job, with Fragmental, a competitive couch multiplayer game – “like a cross between Hotline Miami and Towerfall Ascension.” The game was developed by a small team, which required folks to work on aspects of the game they wouldn’t normally have a hand in. “The whole thing was prototyped from our initial ideas meetings within a week or two and we decided on the vibrant neon art style from playing and testing the prototype,” says Paul. “That is a process [Mini Goliath likes] to stick to quite a bit; prototype it quick and see if it works – if not, move on.” The next Ruffian Games project, RadTV – pitched as WarioWare in VR – was developed with a similar ethos, though it drifted from its initial concept. After that, Ruffian focused more on contract work. “That stopped us from making any more little games with the studio,” says Paul, “So [we] started Mini Goliath so we could make Revoider on the side and keep learning different things outside of the day job. I’m a 3D artist and Gary is an animator, but from our experiences on Fragmental and RadTV, we were confident we could make full games by ourselves.”

* * *

Revoider looks to be a gorgeous dreamscape of a game about a boy wandering a surreal landscape dotted with strange ruins and reality- bending doorways. In some ways, it makes me think of several obscure European cartoons from the 80s that probably only exist in my own mind. It also reminds of the space-bending indie storybook game Gorogoa, though more in general vibe than execution – after all, Re- voider features a fully detailed 3D world to explore.

Revoider is Mini Goliath’s end goal, a game in a larger scale that chal- lenges their abilities. “Revoider really just started with the two of us wanting to make something pretty and push ourselves artistically,” says Paul. “From there it’s all been organic. At the heart of it, it’s about exploration. We want to encourage playfulness and evoke a sense of childlike wonder and curiosity in the player. It’s quite serene right now but we’d definitely like to explore some darker elements in future.” Judging from the development demos they’ve released so far, they’ve definitely succeeded at nailing pretty. There are huge desert vistas punctuated by mysterious monoliths. Clouds take on the shapes of bears and dinosaurs. Kaleidoscopes dance. For me, its the portals that really get my synapses firing – through the arch of a doorway you can see locations that are different from your current surround- ings; walk through and you’re in an entirely new place. It is one of those things that you can only really do with videogames, when aesthetic and mechanic combine to give you that “Eureka!” moment of understanding (Gorogoa does this, as does the forthcoming Maquette).

Despite all this allure, it is the boy himself who dominates Revoider, specifically the entrancing way he moves. “The animation style is inspired by Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” says Paul. “The stepped animation with a smooth camera had such a unique look that we were curious to see if we could replicate a little bit of that in Unreal. It’s definitely the thing that people have been most curious about. Our solution is all done at runtime, works with physics and can be adjust- ed dynamically. “It’s strange, we’ve gotten so used to the way it looks now, this handcrafted look reminiscent of stop-motion, that if we ever turn it off it looks so artificial.” That the boy’s movement itself is so engrossing seems apt when the game is about him journeying to find his way home.

* * * Early looks at Revoider got Mini Goliath more attention than they ever expected. But rather than embrace that outside enthusiasm and single-mindedly pursue developing it, they’ve taken breaks to work on smaller projects. Dropship is one of them. Another is The House in the Woods, a horror exploration game made in 48 hours for the Haunted PS1 Wretched Weekend 1. “You are lost in an endless forest and you have to follow your friends cries for help to find your way around,” explains Paul. “Given the time constraint we tried to do as much as we could with the setting and atmosphere to build tension. The initial jam version was well received, so we spent a few more days polishing it up and the final version ended up being played by a lot of the big YouTubers and managed to retain the top spot on itch for a few weeks.”

These other projects are important for the development of Revoid- er. They raise Mini Goliath’s profile and provide a lower stakes way to figure out the pitfalls of shipping games. Not only does it allow them to fiddle with concepts that can later be baked into the larger game, they get to see how people play with them, too, which not only pro- vides a certain amount of beta testing, but helps grow the studio’s following as well. “We had been working on Revoider in our spare time for about a year and it just felt a bit overwhelming,” says Paul. “Chipping away at something of that scale with whatever time you have left in the day could feel like you weren’t making a ton of progress. That’s where the smaller games came in and where Mini Goliath was born. “While it means progress on Revoider takes a hit, it gives us an opportunity to try different things, prototype certain mechanics and hopefully become better game makers. Our first few games under Mini Goliath all demonstrate concepts we can feed back into Revoider; Dropship’s dynamic gravity system, The House in the Woods looping forest and our latest, unreleased game is an opportunity to further test our stepped physics on a character. They may not all be like that but there’s no doubt Revoider will end up a better game in the long run.” ”We’ve worked with loads of different engines over the years and I don’t think any of this would really be feasible for us without Unreal. All our games are built with blueprints and the speed at which it lets us create and iterate makes a huge difference when you have limited time and resources.”

* * *

You can follow Mini Goliath on Twitter for updates, or check out their website. Dropship and The House in the Woods are available now.

Updates on Mini Goliath’s next small game will be rolling out this month. Revoider’s development will resume after that game’s release. U Contributors

MADDISON MORGENSTERN is a digi- JUSTIN REEVE is an archaeologist special- tal multimedia artist residing in the ruins of izing in architecture, urbanism and spatial the old internet. You can follow her Twitter theory, but he can frequently be found writing @dataerase about videogames, too. You can follow him on Twitter @JustinAndyReeve STU HORVATH is the editor in chief of Un- winnable. He also runs @VintageRPG on Insta- ROB RICH has loved videogames since the gram. Follow him on Twitter @StuHorvath 80s and has the good fortune to be able to write about them. Catch his rants on Twitter at NOAH SPRINGER is a writer and editor @RobsteinOne based in Boston. You can follow him on Twitter @noahjspringer ADAM BOFFA is a writer and musician from New Jersey. You can follow him on Twitter HARRY RABINOWITZ is a writer and editor @ambinate focused on technology and entertainment. You can find him on Twitter, probably talking about MIKE PENNEKAMP is an artist, printmaker Dungeons & Dragons, @harryrabinowitz and open book living in Chicago, Illinois. For more, check out his Instagram @mikefacekillah BLAKE HESTER is a Kentucky-based writer focusing on the videogame industry. His PHANTOM is a is a purely digital, low-poly work has appeared on Polygon, Vice and entity who writes about videogames at the site Rolling Stone. Keep up with him on Twitter SYSTEM/LABRINTH, with an emphasis on ob- @metallicaisrad scure games and esoteric analysis. Likes man- goes. Haunts Twitter @radicalhelmet AMANDA HUDGINS is an occasional writer, former rugby player, and wearer of incredibly tall shoes.

DECLAN TAGGART is a doctor of viking gods. He lives in a faraway land, but you can probably find him on Twitter@DCTaggart

DEIRDRE COYLE is a goth living in Brook- lyn. Find her at deirdrecoyle.com or on Twitter @DeirdreKoala

BEN SAILER is a writer based out of Fargo, ND, where he survives the cold with his wife and dog. His writing also regularly appears in New Noise Magazine.

MATT MARRONE is a senior MLB editor at ESPN.com. He has been Unwinnable’s reigning Rookie of the Year since 2011. You can follow Illustrations him on Twitter @thebigm. All screenshots, film stills and promo- YUSSEF COLE is a writer and visual artist tional images courtesy of their copyright from the Bronx, NY. His specialty is graphic de- holders. All photography is in the public sign for television but he also enjoys thinking domain unless otherwise noted. Original and writing about games. works and Creative Commons licenses below. SARA CLEMENS thinks too much about things, generally. She runs a site called Cover, all imagery in “Digital Phantasma- Videodame and retweets stuff on Twitter goria: Maddison Morgenstern @thesaraclemens Page 33: Liz West