Did you know one of the first games released by the developers of the STALKER series (GSC Game World) was a Warcraft 2 overhaul where they added aliens and nukes

The Ace Attorney Trilogy received the series' first official Latin American Spanish translation in 2025. It was a challenge, to say the least.

Really fun article about localization of a notoriously complicatedly localized game.

“Often what happens is, once a [guilty] character has a breakdown and starts lashing out at everybody, the character will obviously not do so formally, but rather switch to ‘tú’ in the process,” Di Carlo says.

Devolver said the unpredictable nature of indie publishing is not "readily compatible" with the reality of semi-annual public reporting, which places an emphasis on "predictable, sequential growth."

Good on Devolver for this one.

There is no “good” path in Tyranny which the player can take to extricate themselves from a crooked system. There is no happy ending for anyone in the game and certainly not for the player. If the player’s allies do not turn on and murder them during the game, it is sure to happen not long after the credits roll.

I am a huge fan of Obsidian's 2016 game Tyranny, and I think it's often overlooked. I don't think it's perfect but man when it hits it hits hard. A strange, unsettling little game.

I play a game like Vampire Survivors, and I think… where is the “play”? where is the joy, the creativity, hell, the “series of interesting decisions”? The time between level ups is just the time the reels spend spinning. After the first few, every level up is as automatic as pushing “spin again.”

You know, finally enough I had the exact same feeling as this author when I played Vampire Survivors. I knew I wasn't losing money but after a while it still felt slimy. The game relies on a LOT of stereotypical Dark Patterns, specifically those in the gambling space, to work.

I think the formula is not entirely unsalvageable -- imo, Terratech Legion iterates on it quite well and much more interestingly. But the raw, simple nature of Vampire Survivors just left a bad taste in my mouth.

It's funny and entertaining, sometimes, to play something terrible and weird or not-quite-fun. And there are people in my personal life whom I can talk to about that kind of thing, in face-to-face conversation. That's better than posting about it.

A textbook-like anthology of classic essays and articles about video game narrative design.

Amazing resource for games narrative and storytelling techniques.

Announcing a curated, thematic link page of important essays and articles about video game narrative.

Amazing resource from Bruno. Will link in upcoming post.

When I say that First Light is built for genre, I mean that every moment of the game feels like it is perfectly contoured over the model of the James Bond concept, folded and starched over the bodily form in ways that hundreds of professionals managed to accomplish over the course of several years. When I see the developing city emerge from the desert and the labyrinth of corporate managerial space capped with natural stone, I am prepared for genre to erupt at any moment.

Spectacular piece on First Light, James Bond, genre, and the current moment of IP acquisition and exploitation by Cameron.

The year baseball died and took everything else with it.

A beautiful little VN. Well worth your time. Gay and labor-interested and historical and heartbreaking.

Thus the video game writer is by nature a very political animal, whose job involves not only writing story but advocating for it and adapting it to changing circumstances as the project evolves. Often the role of producers and team leads in video game studios is to shield their teams from having to throw out work because of iteration; narrative really is no different.

Great post from Bruno about game narrative and how it functions. Highly recommend reading if you're interested in any of this.

The ninth console generation will be defined by corporate greed, mismanagement, and anti-consumer practices that could very well alter the course of the games industry itself.

Appreciate this piece a lot.

I truly don't know what the future holds for this industry if we continue down the path of the last five years, but I can tell you it won't be good.

I want to talk about games through crises and mass extinctions.

Outstanding piece from Paolo Pedercini analyzing the history of video games through an explicitly materialist lens of markets and populational trends. Pedercini makes the argument that games must be, ultimately, decommodified if we want the art form to survive, and moreover that that process of decommodification may already be underway. Excellent analysis and writing.

The writing I do for a game is our writing, not my writing; it's the game's writing. Its strengths and weaknesses emerge not from the strengths and weaknesses of my soul, but from the strengths and weaknesses in the relationships I have with the team.

laura putting it excellently of course, since she is a great writer.

In this post, I’ll be discussing some games that pull off tragic storylines, with varying degrees of success, and how they fit into strategies for addressing the wrong ending problem.

I still think this is one of the best pieces on how endings function in games and narrative more broadly.

Bluntly speaking, Bachelard said back in 1958 that games are not just graphics. They are architecture that create an experience. He would have made an excellent level designer.

More specifically, gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway.

Been poking through my old link docs from college. Will be posting a few classics. This is one of my favorite Bogost pieces -- he goes into why gamification is, most importantly, a method of ‘bullshit’. Not as just a generic slur, but as a method of obscuring labor with ‘games’.

communist construction under siege in a different twentieth century.

i made a video game. I will likely write about it on the Big Blog in the future

Dark Scrolls is a fantasy-themed action platformer that fuses shmup-style chaos with roguelite progression and is packed with charm, challenge, and secrets.

Dark Scrolls was made by some friends of mine! Check it out!

Agency and choice are slippery devils, and people are not always very good at pinning down and articulating their real concerns about them. Like ‘freedom’ in politics, I think that when people talk about ‘choice’ or ‘agency’ in games, they are often not talking about the same thing, or even about any single thing, and therefore don’t convey their concerns clearly enough to allow useful discussion.