danbruno.net

March 2024 media

• Unicorn Overlord: I will evidently try any Japanese RPG with a sufficiently weird two-word title, between this, Bravely Default, Triangle Strategy, and Octopath Traveler. Unicorn Overlord is more of a tactics/strategy deal like a Tactics Ogre or Fire Emblem, but with some RTS elements and even customizable party AI similar to Final Fantasy XII’s Gambits. In practice the combination feels fresh, and carries the game for me despite its somewhat trope-heavy story and thin characters. Definitely an early 2024 favorite.

• Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture: This book by Rachel Lee Rubin, another one from the Game Studies Study Buddies backlog (episode 54), recounts just how underappreciated the impact of Renaissance faires has been. Several times per chapter I learned about some new cultural artifact that drew influence from them, from psychedelic rock posters to the imported beer market to Disney theme parks. It provides a missing piece of American cultural history that I didn’t know I was missing.

• Stardew Valley 1.6: There’s plenty of neat stuff in this latest update—new dialogue, festivals, and items that mitigate repetition and improve game balance—but honestly, I barely care about all of that. I’m just using the patch as an excuse to get back in after a couple of years; while there have been games I’ve loved more, nothing else puts me in the headspace that Stardew Valley does. When I’m in the thick of things it feels like a hot bath for my brain. If I only got one pick, this would probably be my desert island game.

February 2024 media

• Granblue Fantasy: Relink: I don’t play the Granblue Fantasy mobile game but have always admired its aesthetic from afar, so I was excited to try a game that’s more in my wheelhouse. Relink begins as a breezy action RPG in the vein of, say, a modern Ys game—and then, after a perfectly nice story of perhaps twenty hours, it reveals itself to have a protracted Monster Hunter-esque postgame grind. It’s a testament to how much I enjoyed the game that I stuck with that latter section as long as I did—it really does get brutally tedious—but even if you get off of that treadmill early I think there’s enough here to recommend.

• Lincoln in the Bardo: I enjoyed George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain but was mixed on the short stories of his that I’d read, so I figured I would try his novel instead—I seem to have a thing for long-form prose by people who generally write shorter things, even poetry. And it’s great! I suppose Lincoln in the Bardo is arguably bleeding-edge historical fiction: it includes real contemporary accounts of the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie, but weaves them into a story about the afterlife and the souls in Willie’s graveyard who have trouble moving on. I haven’t read anything quite like it before.

• Close to the Machine: This is a book I only vaguely knew of through prescient-sounding excerpts screenshotted in Twitter threads or blockquoted in blog posts. It turned out to indeed be prescient—it would probably still seem so if it were originally written in 2007 instead of 1997— but it’s also a much richer and more personal read than I expected based on the mental image I’d created. I really enjoyed the portraits Ellen Ullman paints of that specific sort of person who only exists in tech.

January 2024 media

• Immediate Family: A music documentary film. In The Wrecking Crew, director Danny Tedesco Tedesco covered a group underappreciated American session musicians from the 1960s; here, he covers a group from the 70s: Danny Kortchmar, Russ Kunkel, Leland Sklar, and Waddy Wachtel. You can feel the deep respect and gratitude that all of their collaborators have for their work. “In many documentaries,” Tedesco wrote, “you have to wait for interviews to be booked so that the artists and management can decide if they want to participate in a project. Not with this project. Within five days of taking the project on, we had Carole King, James Taylor, Linda Rondstadt, Jackson Browne, Phil Collins, Don Henley, Stevie Nicks and David Crosby booked.”

• The Associated Press on prison labor food production: Bit of a tonal whiplash here, but this is some essential reporting by Robin McDowell and Margie Mason. In a multi-year investigation, they’ve traced food produced by prisoners under inhumane conditions to various fast food and supermarket brands. They also put the exploitation of vulnerable labor forces in historical context, including the grim detail that some of the food literally comes from former slave plantations like Angola in Louisiana. As the media industry continues to struggle, I’m worried that this kind of detailed investigative reporting will only become rarer.

December 2023 media

This month I played two late contenders for my favorite small game of the year, if you’ll allow that categorization in order to sidestep the “what is an indie game” debate:

• Jusant: I like to imagine the seed for Jusant came from some developer’s frustration at the praise heaped on Breath of the Wild for its “realistic” climbing mechanics. That’s probably not exactly how it happened, but the upshot is something that models climbing more closely than most games would ever dream of: you move your arms individually, feel around for handholds and footholds, drive pitons into rock faces, and so on. It has some of the most satisfying traversal in anything I’ve played. The narrative didn’t do much for me, but it was slight enough that it wasn’t a distraction either.

• Chants of Sennaar: A puzzle game for linguistics nerds. You wander through a place whose languages you don’t know, and through reading text and speaking to NPCs you have to determine what various glyphs mean to work out how to progress. (The game elides the difference between speech and writing, so people “speak” in text and all language is parsed visually.) Some of the puzzles felt a bit abstruse to me, but I was amazed by how many of them worked as well as they did. I can’t help but love a game that makes me ask myself if I’m dealing with an SVO or SOV language!

November 2023 media

• The League: A fantastic documentary about the history of the Negro Leagues. It’ll of course mainly appeal to baseball fans—perhaps the sort who like to, as Deadspin used to say, remember some guys—but the story is compelling enough that I think non-sports people with an interest in African-American history, or American history generally, will find purchase as well. It’s not often that watching a documentary immediately makes me want to visit a museum!

• Venba: A short and sweet indie game about an Indian family’s experience as Canadian immigrants, told through vignette-sized cooking minigames (which are more textural than anything; they’re not mechanics to be rehearsed). It doesn’t try to do too much, and what it does do works extremely well. I have an embarrassing backlog of smaller-scope 2023 games that I’ve been meaning to work through, but I’m glad I made time for this one.

• Kimimi on Sega Ages 2500: This series has been going on for quite some time, but I figured I’d recommend it now that it’s wrapping up. Sega produced dozens of these PS2 rereleases with varying degrees of quality and success; Kimimi goes over each one with a fine-tooth comb and a retro game expert’s eye, providing insightful reviews and valuable historical context. It’s always a good sign when I enjoy reading this sort of thing for games I’m completely unfamiliar with, and that’s the experience I had here.