ISSN 2572-5572 UNWINNABLE MONTHLY Volume 4, Issue 5 - May 2017 VIDEOGAMES VS CALIGULA • NEW GAMES FOR OLD CONSOLES U N W I N N A B L E Monthly 91 Editor in Chief | Stu Horvath Managing Editor | James Fudge Sr. Editor | Amanda Hudgins Design | Stu Horvath Asst. Editor | Jason McMaster Social Editor | Melissa King Copyright © 2017 by Unwinnable LLC Unwinnable All rights reserved. This book or any 820 Chestnut Street portion thereof may not be reproduced Kearny, NJ 07032 or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission www.unwinnable.com of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. For more information, email: [email protected] Unwinnable LLC does not claim copyright of the screenshots and promotional Subscribe | Store | Submissions imagery 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 a cryptic message from the airwaves the Cathode oraCLe | the games untouched on the shelf BaCkLog | gavin Craig must-watch streaming documentaries doCumentary Sunday | megan CondiS what’s new, undiscovered and unholy in metal BattLe JaCket | CaSey LynCh horror games of the 20th century monSter CLoSetS | BroCk WiLBur the intersection of games and world history CheCkpoint | Corey miLne ridiculing and revering everything rookie of the year | matt marrone dissecting the world the Burnt offering | Stu horvath a monthly soapbox here’S the thing | roB riCh board games and ennui the McMaSter fiLeS | JaSon McMaSter art, and words about making it artiSt SpotLight | graham CurfieLd our monthly recommendations PlayLiSt | reading LiSt | now Playing | our monthly crossword puzzle unSoLvable | Brian tayLor Longform using Caligula to understand videogames LittLe BootS to fiLL | edWard Smith a thing in your hands is still important SheLf worthy | daviS Cox a heist gone supernaturally wrong fiCtion | m. e. PurfieLd a developer Q&A, sponsored revving the engine: SkyLar & Plux | ContriButorS From the Desk of the Editor in Chief | Stu Horvath Happy May everybody! Here in Jersey the sun is warm and the breeze is cool. I hope the same is true wherever you may be. This month’s issue is also pretty cool, if perhaps a bit less breezy. In our cover story (dig that art by the amazing Justine Jones!), Ed Smith argues that everything we need to know about videogames is encoded in the sleazy trashiness of the 1979 Tinto Brass/Bob Guccione production of Caligula. I don’t entirely agree with Ed (I am not sure Ed entirely agrees with Ed, honestly), but I think it is an interesting thought exercise in why we enjoy what we enjoy. The second feature, by Davis Cox, digs into the return of physical media for games. Davis spoke to the folks behind Limited Run Games, who produce, guess what, limited run physical copies of digitially distributed games. On the other end of the market is Super Russian Roulette, a new game being produced as a cartridge for the very old Nintendo Entertainment System. Its a strange scene and it will be interesting to see if this is the start of a larger trend in games. Rounding out our features, we have a bit of urban horror fiction from M. E. Purfield which I am sure you will enjoy if you have ever had loud neighbors. Our regular pool of columnists is also in the house. Gavin Craig cheats on his backlog and plays a game that just came out (the scandal!). Meg Condis checks out the juvenile sports documentary At All Costs. Casey Lynch delivers his usual mountain of metal recommendations. Brock Wilbur’s second Monster Closet tackles the very first, very odd Ubisoft game. Corey Milne’s fed up with World War II games from the perspective of American heroes. Matt Marrone’s fed up with his local subway stop. I took a vacation on the spooky shores of Rusty Lake. Rob Rich defends the videogame pre-order. And, finally, Jason McMaster learns a valuable lesson about taking free samples and files a column about stimulants and videogames. All that, plus art from the fantastic Graham Curfield, Team Unwinnable’s monthly recommendations and a new crossword from Brian Taylor. That should keep you busy until June, right? Have a good one! Stu Horvath Kearny, New Jersey May 15, 2017 The Cathode Oracle | This TV is always unplugged. Backlog | Gavin Craig A Strange Hill to Die On ll appearances aside, What Remains of Edith Finch is not, in fact, a story A about a house. What Remains of Edith Finch is a story that wants to be about a house but which also wants to be about a castle and for all its pleasures is never quite able to bridge the gap between stories about people who live in houses and stories about people who live in castles. Similarly, even though What Remains of Edith Finch is a game driven by death, it is not a game about death any more than Super Mario Bros. is a game about death. It is not even a game about grief and the way it becomes a distinct and sometimes intolerable presence that fills the space left by the loss of someone we love. To tell stories about grief requires intimacy and as much time as What Remains of Edith Finch asks the player to spend exploring the open wounds of the Finch family, it always keeps them at a distance. In another game, this remove might operate as a re-enactment of a family whose losses keep each of its members emotionally isolated, but What Remains of Edith Finch isn’t telling a story about anything as banal as seeking closure or catharsis in a day-to-day existence that offers neither, or even how human beings carry on in that absence. Every story in Edith Finch is a fairy tale and if the game is intended as a requiem, it operates as a fantasia. At times, that fantasia is magnificent. One member of the Finch family, Lewis, creates a fully-realized imaginary kingdom while working a rote job in a salmon cannery. While the player performs Lewis’ story, they have to simultaneously guide Lewis through his fantasy world while feeding fish into a mechanical processor. It is a compelling depiction of the tragedy and reality of the divided self—the ongoing experience of the distance between who we are and who we want to be — but is one of the few moments in the game where its gestures toward magical realism succeed in reaching beyond the impersonal terror and wonder of the fairy tale. More often, Edith Finch is content to offer up an eleven-year-old’s take on the Icarus fable, asking the player to read both tragedy and triumph in a boy who wants to swing so high that he comes back around the other side. He gets his wish, and dies, apparently. On some level, one of the best qualities of What Remains of Edith Finch is the way it seems to defeat critical intervention. In the week or so since its release, the game has inspired praise of the “lived-in” feeling of its primary set piece, the way it allows the player to “get to know” each of the members of the Finch family, and even a sidelong debate over whether games are wasting the unique potential of their medium by focusing on stories. I have issues with each of these assertions — the Finch house is constructed as a mausoleum both by the game’s developers and the Finch family themselves, where the most vibrant spaces are the sealed-up rooms of the dead. The game never really lets the player know any of the members of the Finch family, each of whom is a reconstruction in Edith’s mind based frequently on secondhand descriptions — a legal deposition from the infant Gregory’s father, who wasn’t present at his death, a poem by Gus’s sister, a horror comic imagining the unknowable circumstances of Barbara’s apparent unsolved murder, a letter from Lewis’s therapist. And finally, no medium exists for the sole purpose of telling stories, and nearly every medium has a fascinating tradition of works that foreground its formal aspects either to defeat narrative conventions or to disregard them entirely. No medium is naturally suited to the demands of storytelling because both media and storytelling are artificial — ways in which we seek to make sense of or impose ourselves on the “natural” world. We have a tendency to forget this, perhaps because we wish that the world — and even other people, even our own families — reflected us better. But it’s also, I suspect, because of stories like What Remains of Edith Finch that seem to work somehow even though their pieces don’t fit together, almost like magic.U Documentary Sunday | Megan Condis At All Costs merica loves it when little kids do grown-up things. From cooking Acompetitions to dance offs to fashion design contests, a good reality TV show is only ever improved when the contestants are pint-sized precocious pre-teens. When immense talent comes in a cute little freckle-faced packaged, what’s not to like? But for some reason, the spell is broken when the subject shifts to kids’ amateur athletics. Sitting down to watch an episode of Friday Night Tykes (which FoxSports calls “the most depressing show on television”) is like volunteering to vicariously re-live your worst school bully nightmares only the bullies are adults who are desperate to recapture their own youth and who don’t care how many children they have to psychologically torture to do so.