Hey! We're back! A new month already, wow these weeks are just flying by huh. In any case, we're delighted you are reading this. Hope everyone is having a nice day, all things considered. So go grab a snack, also a refreshing drink maybe, and dig into this brand new Checkpoint. We are once again bringing you a roundup of interesting stuff about and around video games plus we played some cool stuff we wanna tell you all about!
Link Assortment
Sorry no nice and organised lists this time but a somewhat scattered collection of all sorts of articles, videos and podcasts we've enjoyed over the past few weeks. All excellent stuff from across the web and totally worth checking out!
File these under Gaming in the Time of Corona: The Games That Let Me Have an Imaginary Social Life by Sarah Hagi, Play During Quarantine from the crew at FPS, The Doctor, The Disease, And The Division from Siddhartha via Kotaku, and Ewan Wilson digs through the rubble of video game apocalypses.
Final Fantasy, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Resident Evil,... plenty of remakes and remasters these days, Heather Alexandra examines what is lost and what is preserved in remaking games. Austin Flores asks why we keep going back to old games anyway.
@hotelbonestakes to Medium for a critical look at the implied prior experience inherit to these remakes, the gate-keepers of arbitrary lore, and also time travel.
Honestly some of the best writing on retro games is consistently produced by Kimimi, why would you not wanna read about Kaze no NOTAM, a lovely hot air ballooning game for the PS1.
Lewis Gordon continues to do some absolutely vital work on covering the games industry's impact on climate change.
Speaking of games and nature, on the latest episode of Game Studies Study Buddies Cameron and Michael discuss the book Playing Nature by Alenda Chang on ecology in video games.
The Paste Game Writers got together to share their picks for the Best Videogame Soundtracks of All Time, which is a good effort but they've forgotten about the best one!
Sea Of Thieves has gorgeous looking video game water but also a great bug that catapults ships into the air, so Imogen rated their techniques.
Enroll in the Game Maker's Toolkit School of Stealth and learn all about the ins and outs of sneaking around.
Here is an incredible collection of fictional videogame stills created by British artist Suzanne Treister in the late 1980s.
Jet Lancer
Vladimir Fedyushkin & Nicolai Danielsen
Switch / PC / macOS
A well timed dodge feels really good right? Like, there’s a lot of cool feeling video game moves/traits but peeerfectly side stepping some big sword swing or dashing through a big laser at the exact right moment and making this boss you’ve been banging your head against for weeks look real stupid feels.. fucking cool. There’s a helluva lot of things and lasers to dodge in the Jet Lancer, as you pilot your quick little red ship back ‘n forth across vibrant 90s anime lookin’ backdrops, and it feels that fucking cool every time. Everything feels cool in this game. Especially dodging through a massive beam of white energy coming out of this mech sea-serpent (fuck yeah) who’s writhing metal body is more or less spilling out of your switch screen, then intentionally stalling your engines (fucking cool) and delivering the final four rockets (unguided,it’s cooler) right in its mouth and then you get to sit back and watch a proper everything-turning-black-and-white anime explosion that makes you feel 12 again. Fuckin’ ace. — S
Void Bastards
Blue Manchu
PS4 / Switch / PC / macOS
Set sometime (hopefully a ways off) in a comic-book looking cel-shaded future, Void Bastards has you control a recently rehydrated prisoner tasked with robbing/raiding your way around a galaxy in the hope of collecting the right ingredients and materials to construct/repair what you need to... escape/re-integrate into regular society? I think? I am not sure I entirely trust the monocle’d Mr. Clippy-ass A.I. that serves as your guide, although I have found myself enjoying the posh-computer-assistant trope a bit more than I expected. The whole game is genuinely funny, whether it’s the “traits”that your randomly generated prisoner has (Overly-Formal being one example, meaning enemies are all referred to as Mr. and Mrs.) or the fact the aliens all have some form of regional accent and shout “dickbag” at you. Sneaking around a ship at low-health, cautiously peeking at your diminishing oxygen level as you frantically download the ships blueprints in an effort to find that one canister of fuel you need to make it to the next point on your map without running out of rations.. only to round a corner and be wiped out by something shrieking “wanker”. Should be frustrating, and in other games it absolutely would be, but here it just feels like a fitting end to that particular avatars adventure, and will have you excited to see what happens to the next one. It’s a wickedly absurd but stylishly-grounded spin on the roguelike genre, and it kicks ass. — S
Diorama Dungeoncrawl
Tales of the Renegade Sector
PC / macOS
This is your favourite 16-bit action platformer transformed into blocky low-poly 3D (who friggin' needs a billion triangles anyway). The little teensy screenshot above won't do it much justice but the game has such an excellent visual style going on, I instantly clicked the purchase button when seeing the cover art scroll by. The edges are super crisp and the vivid colour palette honestly just looks delicious, even tho the whole thing plays out in the mouldy corridors of a creepy crumbling castle. Every room you walk into looks like a lovely little cardboard diorama constructed out of vibrant pixel art. You get to swing your big hammer at all the baddies you'd expect to find in a dungeon: giant bats, angry skeletons, big knights with big swords, and goblins armed with loincloths and daggers. And what evil castle would be complete without bottomless pits, rolling boulders and spike traps. Delightful and tons of fun! — J
Swallow the Sea
ItsTheMaceo
PC / macOS / Linux
Look, I'm not a fan of the ocean. I've seen some of the messed-up things that live down there and I don't wanna be anywhere near that shit! If there are gods, they gave us legs to get as far away from the sea as possible, if there are gods they are staying the fuck away from the sea! If I ever end up drifting in the ocean I'll be pale, wimpy fish food in no time. Not in this game tho, in this game I get to be the scary thing the fish are afraid of! This is that gag of the big mean thing getting eaten by an even bigger meaner thing: the game. Sure, you start off as a tiny one-cell egg (?) scurrying away from the gross people-faced fish but eat enough prey that's smaller than you to grow big and show those fish whose boss! Suck it fish! — J
Guest Reccs
It’s our tenth edition so we figured why not celebrate by finding out what our favourite dev duo/ stream dream team Humblegrove (Cel & Hana) have been playing, in the spaces between working on the absolutely stunning look No Longer Home and exploring the effects of prolonged exposure to the Crash Bandicoot OST on Dark Souls fans.
Lately we’ve both been playing a lot of Minecraft together, helping each other with mining materials. Hana’s been working on miscellaneous projects: a garden terrace and a huge watchtower. I’ve be working on a ridiculous and ever-growing brutalist complex. I suspect now that Hana is back in Tokyo we’ll be playing it together a lot more often. — Cel
(Note from Sam: I honestly could not reccommend playing Minecraft with friends and family enough, it’s super accessible and easy to learn and you... can just do or make anything, together. A truly special and collaborative experience, and often surprisingly affecting and moving. That’s not to say it can’t be enjoyed solo, there is a heck tonne of satisfaction in finishing a big project or building a working circuit or machine. Deff the most motivated and accomplished I’ve felt in the past few weeks!)
Hey it’s Sam from the not-Joes half of Checkpoint here and I just wanted to say that nobodies gonna judge you if you play that game you really like over again. All this “free-time” is very.. it’s very tempting to think oh I should probably play Nier Automata up finally or beat that really hard Baba Is You level but you don’t. It’s super important that you use your downtime doing what you want, and that’s not often gonna be anything new or exciting. Otherwise you’re gonna spend your time either half-relaxed or half-working and that ain’t helping anyone.
If you wanna lay on the sofa and feel a bit worried or sad and play Boom Beach or some free-to-play marble game on your iPhone then do it! You really deserve it and you need it. Anyone who tells you otherwise or is telling you to “mAkeTHe mOst oF IT” needs to fix their heart.