Sundays are for realising that it’s been years since you looked behind your wardrobe. You gently lean the unwieldy thing away from the wall, centuries worth of grey-faced dust kings cursing at you as they’re unseated from the thrones upon which they’ve stocially squatted since the last great cleansing. Oh, there he is. It’s Adrian Edmondson. You ask him if he still considers himself a young one in spirit. He bellows at you to call an ambulance. You gently manoueuvre the wardrobe back into place.
We’re starting off this week with the stuff of nightmares. Nightmare Kart, which you might know by its previous moniker Bloodborne Kart, has an arcade cabinet. GamesRadar’s Ashley Bardhan visited this game box’s creators, Arcade Commons, and lead developer Lilith Walther at their “small, windowless room” in East Williamsburg, New York.
Though its association with guitars and beer-sticky floors is technically behind it, Arcade Commons still operates with the black t-shirt cool I connect with DIY music in the 2010s. So much of it has vacated the city now, but my best days in high school were spent sweating somewhere in Williamsburg, waiting for some hardcore drummer to do the thing where he spits what’s in his water bottle out into the crowd. In this case, we have Walther, sitting in front of the Nightmare Kart cabinet wearing a witch’s hat, studying something on its screen.
Next up is Henry Stockdale for relatively freshly-formed independent site Rewinder, doing the sort of thing in a sports game that I’ve regularly been fond of trying to this point in my career. German F1 driver Nico Hulkenberg scored his first podium in the series last month from 19th on the grid, after yeeeeeeaaaaarssss of trying. Henry had a go at emulating the achievement, and touched on what makes live sports special, despite all the bollocks that can accompany it.
It’s a considerably different feeling from completing the ‘Race Moments’ that Frontier had released across F1 Manager 23 and 24, which are mostly based on key moments from the real-life races those years. By design, these are deliberately scripted to either match a particular outcome or allow you to change that destiny. Making these moments happen by chance is a strangely more satisfying thing.
What’s that buzzing noise? Oh, it’s Sarah Thwaites’ review of fly lifetime simulator Time Flies for The Guardian. This is a game I’ve written about, but not played yet, and this review’s certainly not blunted my enthusiasm to rectify that at some point soon.
Perhaps what makes Time Flies’ conceit so convincing is how infuriating it can be to control the fly, and how annoying it is to listen to its incessant buzzing as you endeavour to meet the criteria. Tapping and holding the arrow keys allows you to direct the fly, but during particularly dexterous activities – such as collecting coins while avoiding an incinerating lightbulb or flying through a statue’s intestines to make it fart – the controls feel appropriately unwieldy. Over time, the repetitious process of reincarnation becomes an uncanny mirror, reflecting our own futile desire for order in a world plagued with unpredictable obstacles.
Finally, something that’s not strictly games-related, but also kind of is. As we’ve covered here at RPS, Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza does have links to companies that make games and the hardware many of us use to play them. Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif was among four Al Jazeera staff Israel killed in an airstrike last week. A last will he wrote features in an article for the same publication by writer Hassan Abo Qamar. I first heard it read at the start of an episode of the Chapo Trap House podcast the other day.
I have lived pain in all its details and I have tasted pain and loss repeatedly. Despite this, I have never hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification. May God be a witness against those who remained silent and accepted our killing, and against those who choked our breath and whose hearts were not moved by the scattered remains of our children and women, and who did nothing to stop the massacre our people have faced for more than a year and a half.
Today’s music, because I’ve recently finished Mafia: The Old Country, is this version of Nino Rota’s The Immigrant from the second Godfather film’s soundtrack. It’s performed by Rota, Paul Bateman, and the Prague philharmonic orchestra.
