ISSN 2572-5572

UNWINNABLE
MONTHLY Volume 4, Issue 11 - November 2017

TRASH AND TREASURE IN FALLOUT • PERFECT SIDE-SCROLLERS

U N
W I
N N
A B
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Monthly

97
 Editor in Chief | Stu Horvath

Managing Editor | James Fudge

Editor | Amanda Hudgins

Design | Stu Horvath

Asst. Editor | Jason McMaster

Social Editor | Melissa King

Copyright © 2017 by Unwinnable LLC Unwinnable

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 Shortform
a brief introduction to the issue Letter from the Editor | Stu Horvath
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
fictional companions and goth concerns This Mortal Coyle | Deirdre Coyle
ridiculing and revering everything Rookie of the Year | Matt Marrone
dissecting the world The Burnt Offering | Stu Horvath
three fingers of analysis when two will do The Heavy Pour | Sara Clemens
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 | Alex Flannery
our monthly recommendations Playlist | Reading List | Now Playing |

Longform
what does Fallout tell us about Industrial Waste is good for you |
our wasteful culture? Agustin Lopez
examples: Shovel Knight and Runbow The Successful Sidescroller | Aron Garst
the president displays some...unique problems A New Low | Michael Calia
a developer Q&A, sponsored Revving the Engine: Rite of Ilk |

Contributors
From the Desk of the Editor in Chief | Stu Horvath

F irst off, we had a bit of a kerfuffle over the weekend involving an internet
hate mob and, with Thanksgiving around the corner, it has put me in a
mindset of gratitude. I would like to thank you — writers, subscribers, readers
and editors — for continuing to make Unwinnable a vibrant place to read,
write and exchange ideas. We’re coming up on Issue 100 next year, as well as
our eighth birthday, and I can tell you, it has never been anything but a joy to
serve you as editor in chief.
Our cover story this month, by Agustin Lopez, investigates how the trash
of one world becomes treasure after the nuclear apocalypse of the Fallout
universe and what it says about the world we live in. Alex Flannery’s clean,
graphic style was a perfect choice for this — more on him in the Artist Spotlight.
Our second feature, by Aron Garst, takes on the question of how to make
a great sidescroller. He turns to the developers of Shovel Knight and Runbow
for insight. Michael Calia delivers a short story about the distressing behavior
of a totally fictional president and we round out the long form stories with a
sponsored Q&A with the developers of Rite of Ilk, an intriguing co-op game.
Our columnists are as eclectic as ever. Gavin Craig ponders the hollowness
of Mario. Meg Condis discovers a key problem in the growing world of
professional esports. Casey Lynch cherry-picks the best metal of the month
(my faves: Quicksand and the surprising Spook the Horses).
Brock Wilbur’s latest turns his horror-hunting sights on the classic 1992
Alone in the Dark. Deirdre Coyle talks about her first marriage to goth-warrior
Farkas of Skyrim fame. Matt Marrone gives us a final word on Twin Peaks.
Meanwhile, I get all my bile for the soundtrack to Stranger Things 2 out and
Sara Clemens finds an appealing sort of nostalgia in Thor Ragnarok. Rob Rich
uses the Persona series as an example of how videogame sequels should be done
and, finally, Jason McMaster digs deep into his past to explain the surprising
emotional toll of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.
Corey and Amanda will be back next month along with our crossword and
our newest columnist, Yussef Cole. You should read Yussef’s most recent essay
for us on the site: “Cuphead and the Racist Spectre of Fleisher Animation.” It’s
an amazing and informative read.
Lastly, if you’re in the North Jersey area this weekend, come hang out with
us at Geek Flea. If not, see you here in December!

Stu Horvath
Kearny, New Jersey
November 14, 2017
Backlog | Gavin Craig

Looking at Mario
I ’ve never really understood why Mario has a black mustache and brown
hair. On the box art from Super Mario Bros. 3, when the dichotomy first
became apparent, it was possible to read the difference as a coloring error, or
even as the result of the Super Leaf that has granted Mario an additional set
of brown fox ears sprouting from his hat and a matching auburn raccoon tail.
Within the 8-bit confines of the in-game graphics, both Mario’s mustache and
sideburns are black (and in the cover art for Super Mario Bros. 2, interestingly,
they are both a dark brown), but over the years this brown/black combination
has become codified, which gives Mario’s moustache something of a Groucho
Marx quality. It is fake, the affectation of a child playing dress-up.
Super Mario Bros. was not my first videogame. As near as I can remember,
the first games I played were plastic mini-cabinet versions of Pac-Man and
Frogger, and the classmate whose parents watched me after school had an Atari
2600 that we used to play Pole Position and Joust. I don’t even remember Super
Mario Bros. as my first Nintendo game. Even though it was packaged with the
Nintendo Entertainment System my grandparents gave my brother and me
for Christmas in 1988, they happened to give us a copy of Dragon Warrior as
well, and we loaded that game up first. It was an accidental preference at the
time, but it is one I carry to this day.
It is difficult, even for me, to take an unsentimental view of Mario. Even if
Super Mario Bros. was neither my first nor my favorite childhood game, it was
an experience that my friends and I shared together and talked about when
the console was turned off. Even our parents played the game and defeating
it conferred a certain briefly indelible renown. Never upon me, of course.
I could use the warp zones to cheat my way to World 8, but my death there
was almost instantaneous. I didn’t yet understand that the warp zones were
intended more as save points than shortcuts, not to allow players to bypass
the levels between the first and the last so much as to act as points of return.
I don’t think I ever played Worlds 6 or 7, which meant that I never learned the
skills or developed the reflexes to survive the final levels. Super Mario Bros.
is a masterpiece of design — a game which one is extremely unlikely to beat
accidentally.
Even so, as an experience, Super Mario Bros. always struck me as being a bit
empty. After seven false castles, rescuing the real princess in the glorious final
castle results in a single screen of text and the option to either accept the offer
of an effective reverse warp zone, throwing Mario back to an earlier point in
the game, or to stand up and turn off the console. There’s no emotional payoff
because there’s no narrative setup. The game is all there is and, based on the
legacy Nintendo built on these 8-bit foundations, that seems to be more than
enough, but there is a lesson in all of this about Mario.
Mario is not a character and he never was. Mario, more so even than most
videogame protagonists, is a digital shell into which the player can project
herself. Mario has no desires. He has no traits beyond those which are visible
and external. He wears a red hat. His hair is brown and his moustache is black.
This is what Mario is.
Mario is an ambulatory logo. This is not exactly a secret.
This is why it matters what Mario wears. In an October column criticizing
the apparent blindness of popular videogame discourse to the cultural
appropriation inherent in a stereotypical sombrero and poncho costume
Mario wears in Super Mario Odyssey, David Shimomura notes that the outfit
“fails the basic ‘my culture is not a costume’ test.” This, I think, is precisely
accurate.
As a non-character, everything that Mario wears is and must be a costume.
Furthermore, Mario games frequently make this reality a play mechanic.
In the earliest Super Mario games, Mario’s appearance changed as he gained
abilities: his size increases when he eats a mushroom and gains the ability to
smash brick blocks, and his hat and overalls turn white when he gains the
ability to throw fireballs. Starting with Super Mario Bros. 3, however, Mario is
able to put on costumes that carry special abilities of their own. This is a subtle
but important shift from Mario’s appearance changing as a result of new
abilities to new and specialized abilities being the result of Mario changing his
appearance.
 The majority of Mario’s in-game costumes are based on animals (like the frog,
penguin and tanooki suits) or refer to in-game elements such as the Hammer
Bros or the Goomba’s Shoe. Even Mario’s overalls and hat can be considered a
Mario costume more than any sort of part of even a fictional organic cultural
background. No one else in the Mushroom Kingdom dresses like Mario, except
for his brother Luigi, whose own comparatively more established character
traits (his height, his cowardice) function primarily to establish him as not-
Mario.
Mario is a content-free signifier in a fantasy world and even with the best
intentions, it would be difficult to respectfully transpose elements of real-
world cultures into such an environment. In some sense, the very placement
of external cultural markers (especially but not only when these markers
are stereotypes) in a fantasy environment is a statement that the culture
in question is an appropriate object of fantasy rather than something with
meaning on its own terms and in relation to a real social and historical context.
I am not trying to argue that it is impossible to respectfully and responsibly
take inspiration from other cultures in the construction of fantasy worlds. But
the construction of any fantasy is necessarily a fraught and delicate task, and
it may be impossible for Mario to be a vehicle for a rich and respectful cross-
cultural representation.
A culture, after all, is more than a set of visual markers, and Mario, ultimately,
is not. U
Documentary Sunday | Megan Condis

The Real World Series

I ’m writing this review during one of the most exciting World Series in
baseball history. The Houston Astros and the LA Dodgers are putting on a
show for the ages, trading the lead back and forth and, in their most recent
game as of this writing, spilling over into extra innings and playing late into
the night.
But can this athletic spectacle really call itself a “World” Series? Major
League Baseball is, after all, comprised only of teams from North America, all
but one of them are from the United States. What about the professional teams
from countries like Japan, Israel, Cuba, the Philippines and South Korea, all of
which have had success on the international stage?
Unlike baseball, the World Championships of the esports megalith League
of Legends is truly international. Right now, teams based in North America,
Europe, China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Brazil, Latin America,
Oceania, Turkey and Russia are all battling it out on Summoner’s Rift for a
piece of the $4,100,000 prize pool. And these keyboard jockeys are attracting
the interest of traditional pro sports institutions. For example, ESPN now has a
space on their website dedicated to esports news and NBA owners are starting
to buy purchase popular esports teams (perhaps because, as was reported
last year, more people tuned in to watch the world finals of the League of
Legends than did those who watched the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden
State Warriors in the NBA finals). There are even NCAA-style college teams
popping up all over the United States and at least five schools are now offering
scholarships to esports athletes.
 If esports are starting to be treated more and more like traditional sports,
then it is unsurprising that esports movies have started to look more and
more like traditional sports movies. All Work All Play: The Pursuit of Esports
Glory (Creadon, 2015) is a perfect example. Players fall easily into the expected
archetypes that are familiar to us from movies like Hoosiers or The Mighty
Ducks: the grizzled veteran and mentor, the flashy, cocksure up-and-comer,
the plucky underdog.
The only trouble is, while we have absorbed enough knowledge about sports
like basketball or hockey to follow along with those traditional sports movies,
esports does not yet have the same kind of cultural footprint. Therefore it
is difficult to follow the action onscreen if you aren’t already familiar with
League of Legends or with MOBA-style games in general. The movie could use
an introduction for newbies, explaining each team member’s role in a match,
the various objectives that teams might choose to prioritize, and what kinds
of strategies are feasible at different stages of the game (or so say my very
patient roommates, who sat through this film along with me and who have a
combined 20 minutes of League of Legends experience between them). Without
such a primer, the well-known emotional beats of the sports film seem a little
bit hollow. We know how we are supposed to feel at any given moment, but we
aren’t sure why.
As a result, the behind-the-scenes sequences about the producers working
hard to put together the tournament itself become much more compelling
than the esports action. In a way, they are also plucky underdogs, the Bad
News Bears of sports broadcasting who are doing their best to break into a
crowded industry. Their battle isn’t the titular battle for “glory.” It is the battle
for recognition and legitimacy.
In the two years since the film came out, great gains have been made on
this particular battlefield. The money is starting to pour in and, with it, the
possibility of building a franchise that can penetrate into the mainstream. In
the meantime, though, we still need someone to teach us just how to watch. U
Battle Jacket | Casey Lynch

Battle Jacket - \ˈba-təl\ \ˈja-kət\

noun

1. A denim or leather jacket or vest, usually covered with

sewn patches embroidered with the names/logos of killer
metal bands.

2. Unwinnable Monthly’s metal column, your best source for

what’s new, undiscovered and unholy in metal.

There’s plenty to be thankful for this November, including new music from
Converge, Godflesh, A Perfect Circle, Annihilator and Quicksand – and don’t
forget that mega Master of Puppets remastered deluxe box set. So grab a turkey
leg and check out this month’s best metal. And as always, tell me what you
think on Twitter, I’m @Lynchtacular.

Listen now to the Unwinnable Metal Playlist November 2017

METAL ALBUM OF THE MONTH

Converge – The Dusk In Us
CROSSOVER HARDCORE DOOM GOTH MATH

The 13 tracks on The Dusk In Us exude a ferocious hunger uncharacteristic for

a band’s ninth album in 27 years. Look no further than opener “A Single Tear”,
the mathy “Arkhipov Claim”, the old-school Epitaph-sounding “Eye of the
Quarrel”, and “Broken by Light”, which goes from a somber hardcore track to
a full on Slayer song in under 2 minutes. But it’s songs with a softer touch, like
title track “The Dusk In Us”, with its cacophonous neo-goth that’s evocative
of The Jesus and Mary Chain, that take Converge to a
new place. “Thousands of Miles Between Us” is similarly
effective, this time channeling some Crack the Skye-era
Mastodon vibes. Dusk’s production is altogether savage,
thanks to crushing God City Sound production from
guitarist and producer Kurt Ballou. File The Dusk in Us
under Instant Classic.
WATCH: “A SINGLE TEAR”; LISTEN: “THE DUSK IN US”;
LISTEN: “EYE OF THE QUARREL”; LISTEN: FULL ALBUM

BEST METAL OF THE MONTH

Toothgrinder – Phantom Armour
SUPER HEAVY GRUNGE GROOVE

I’m pretty sure Toothgrinder’s singer is Thor. I haven’t

been able to confirm that just yet, but I can confirm that
their new album is more polished and heavier than ever.
LISTEN: “THE SHADOW”

Annihilator – For the Demented

CLASSIC THRASH WORSHIP

Canada’s kings of metal du jour bring the goods on

their 16th studio album. There’s classic metal, rock, and
absolutely shredding thrash, all worthy of the band who
brought us Alice in Hell so many years ago.
LISTEN: “TWISTED LOBOTOMY”

A Perfect Circle – “The Doomed”

CATCHIER GOTHIER POPPIER TOOL

There’s reason to rejoice after waiting 13-years for a new

A Perfect Circle full length release. And even though we
need to wait a bit longer because this is only the first
single, the album is hopefully coming in 2018.
LISTEN: “THE DOOMED”

Godflesh – Post Self

HEAVY INDUSTRIAL DRONE

The band’s 8th studio album and first since 2014’s A

World Lit Only By Fire, Post Self subverts post-punk and
industrial traditions in this decidedly less metal but all-
around heavy release.
LISTEN: “POST SELF”
Quicksand – Interiors
NEO POST-ALT

Interiors is Quicksand’s first release in 22 years, beating

A Perfect Circle by almost a decade. Like 1995’s classic
Manic Compression, Interiors is still all about throbbing
bass and heady vocals. Welcome back!
LISTEN: “ILLUMINANT”

Electric Wizard – Wizard Bloody Wizard

NEO SABBATH

Surprise! Electric Wizard loves loud, slow, Sabbath

worship, with a healthy dose of ritualistic Satanism.
Expect lumbering riffs, boobs, and blood. In other
words, metal.
LISTEN: “SEE YOU IN HELL”

Spook the Horses – People Used to Live HereHEAVY

SOUNDSCAPE

This New Zealand six-piece of multi-instrumentalists

weave layers of atmospheric sound that often sounds
haunted, and sometimes triumphant.
LISTEN: “LURCH”

Cavalera Conspiracy – Psychosis

TRIBAL THRASH

Cavalera bros Max and Igor are back with their fourth
not-Sepultura record, which still sounds like some of the
heaviest thrash this side of Arise.
LISTEN: “INSANE”

Krallica (with Dave Edwardon) – Loum

BLAST JAZZ SLUDGE DEATH

Experimental blackened math masters Krallice return

with a surprise LP release featuring Neurosis’ Dave
Edwardon on synths and supporting vocals. If you
haven’t heard Krallice, prepare to have your mind (and
ears) opened.
LISTEN: “LOÜM”; LISTEN: FULL ALBUM U
Monster Closets | Brock Wilbur

P recious few titles in the backlog of historical

horror games scare me like Alone in the Dark.
The 1992 Infogrames title was the very first
3D horror title, built on an engine that powered
innumerable point-and-click adventures, but nothing
on this scale. It remains the absolute godfather of
modern horror, with titles like Resident Evil owing
their entire existence to the work done here by
director Frédérick Raynal.
My enthusiasm for finally taking on this title
is matched only by my trepidation. It is an aged
PC adventure with historically convoluted puzzle
elements, and I am a frustrated thirty-something
running low on patience for games in my busy
life. Plus, I’ve seen what happens when I’ve tried
to introduce friends to pop culture artifacts that are the godfathers of their
genre and no one has ever held the attention for Where Something Began if it
is in any way less shiny and engaging than its modern descendants. I’ve always
hated that in others, but what if I see where this begins and find it wanting?
Only one way to find out. And that’s because I was assigned this by my editor
Stu in much the same way the protagonist, Edward, was assigned to go check
out this spooky old house.
The intro sequence features Infogrames’ nearly patented voice over
performed well by an English speaking actor, but putting the “em-fa-sys” on
all the wrong words, exactly as a non-English speaking director might push
them to do. It’s a story of Edward Carnby, a 1920’s detective in Louisiana who
dictates his backstory of failure and debt. Already, I’m fascinated because
the story grounds our character in a realistic and broken place that serves to
explain why he would engage in this adventure, but without hinting that there
is anything even remotely askew, let alone involving unholy creatures of the
night. This is just some dude looking for a piano with a hidden compartment.
Totally normal stuff.
(It is worth noting that you can play this game as either Edward or as Emily
Hartwood, the niece in line to inherit the property. She plays exactly the same
way as Edward and has the same skill sets. This is 1992. Even the Alone in the Dark
series unlearns female representation.
Ugh. She does re-appear in Alone in the
Dark 3 as an actress now? You know
what, I’m not here to fight the lore of a
game series I haven’t played.)
There’s a sudden shift into the
world of the 3D. Every portion of this
introduction is edited and framed in
one of the most dazzling displays of
videogame storytelling I’ve ever seen.
There’s a Mr. Toad-esque old timey car
speeding through a swampland and
then a decidedly boxy yet clearly human figure enters a mansion through
a series of forced perspectives and I am here. for. it. You’re a mustachioed
detective who seems to have more terrifying features than any monster I could
expect the game to throw at us. The forced perspective changes constantly as
you move through the hallways, shifting often between individual footsteps.
Suddenly there’s an sequence in an attic or a basement (I’m already lost
in this house) and godawful noises permeate the space. From a disorienting
distanced third dimension view, I’m fighting the controls just as much as any
monster AND NO I was wrong about that. A bird-like shrieking scribble broke
through the window and killed me almost immediately. Cool. Cool. I’m going
to have to figure out these controls and fast.
After reloading, I blockade the window and then punch a zombie to death
before he explodes in blood that then evaporates into the sky. I have a lot of
questions already, mostly about gravity and bird monsters, but also why none
of the creatures here seem to be attached to their bodies. No time though, as
I have to dart about looking for items and breaking said items to find better
items inside of them. For some reason, I have a saber that keeps breaking and
aside from that, I have a mirror that I use to scare off two Draculas of some
kind. There’s a haunted shade in one of these rooms and a suit of armor and oh
my god this is just an entire haunted house come to life. I have no idea how to
stop any of these beings. The game seems to imply a set of puzzles for each, but
I am terrible at combat and even figuring out how to aim a weapon. Turning on
a gramophone in my inventory is beyond me. You can kill almost none of these
creatures directly and that feels very rewarding in a non-linear horror title.
By the time I hit a man-eating plant in a bathtub, I’m already at a loss for
what I should be doing here besides running around screaming at everything
I encounter. I have barely any sense of
control over this easily killable man and
I cannot see anything that’s happening
in the room around me. This is . . .
exactly what I wanted. My character
drinks himself well again and I start
the slightly dreary process of trial and
error in determining how to make it
room to room. Occasionally running
seems to wake up murderbeasts and
other times walking too slow dooms
me. There are notes detailing the
haunting of the house by a recent suicide but I’m actually too afraid to read
them because this game is old enough that maybe I’ll be eaten by darkness-
bastard by accident. I get stuck on walls as often as I get murdered by paintings
of cultural appropriation. This is a game from a particular time which defined
that time; each and every choice is something I once praised another game for
inventing.
Oops.
On top of everything else, there’s an inventory system that seems bizarrely
limited in that individual arrows for a bow take up the same amount of space
as an entire record player, but bullets are all in a shared location. I seem to keep
collecting books, as I do in real life, and I’m not sure if any of these actually
mean anything? Later, in a dark room, I’ll use a False Book to open a hidden
panel and take a haunted dagger and kill a poltergeist who looks like a playable
character from the Super Nintendo brawler Clayfighter.
A lot of these goblins seem to have a hard time chasing me out of the rooms
they start in, but also some of these rooms go dark and it takes me way too
long to figure out the lantern in-game, so I am getting very good at death. This
includes swinging swords and shooting guns at creatures directly in front of
me that I never seem to make contact with until they decide to eat me.
I find something called A Box of Shoes but it’s really a Shoe Box – but it’s
really a Gun Holding Box so that’s a delight of translation. Shortly after, a room
begins filling with smoke but I can’t tell because the smoke effect just appears
to be draining the color from everything around me. It’s such a disorienting
effect that I run away twice. This game is exceptional at what it chooses to
throw at the player because each moment feels like far too much but, when
arranged logically, this is all easy to overcome. The adventure game elements
are limited simply by how little logic exists in the first place. Hilariously, just
after a moment of peak-frustration here, I kill a pirate and pick up a key he was
carrying. I am supposed to use the key
on a door . . . right next to him. Fine.
Thanks for throwing me a bone here.
By far my least favorite part of the
game begins here with a series of
underground tunnels. The monsters
are suddenly much larger and much
more bewildering, including some
kind of spider-rat that is also wearing
glasses to indicate that it is blind,
perhaps? I’m hating this part because it
is overwhelmingly effective. The walls
become flesh and suddenly I’m dealing with bird’s-eye views of elaborate
underground ecosystems where darkness prevents me from knowing what
I’m doing a solid quarter of the time. These are all functional, excellent choices.
Dragging this down is the sudden inclusion of a jump function that, based on
the terrible functionality of the combat targeting, should let you know that
you’re going to be accidentally jumping to your death instead of solving a
number of puzzles.
It’s only now that I notice that Mr. Carnby throwing a book at a wall makes
the exact same sound as Mr. Carnby punching a gigantic spider in the face.
You find a gigantic Lovecraftian Old One down amongst some amphibious
Frog Men and you burn them all to death. While the underground world
begins to collapse, you have to make your way back through the entire system
of corridors and catacombs. This includes the godforsaken jumping puzzles.
Jesus. Jesus, why? Can’t you just let the hero blow up the bad guy and call it
good? No, you have to make him retrace every step of the entire game to this
point, like some last-minute dare to the player to be good enough to deserve
the credit screen. What do you get for the effort that adds almost a third to
the game’s runtime? Edward jumps for joy. Your character jumps for joy. Then
hails a car driven by a laughing zombie.
The End.
Holy cow. That was one of the most pleasurable trips into gaming past I’ve
undertaken, marred only by a final act that exists entirely after the final act.
For a huge chunk of this playthrough, I found it unconscionable how much
of this game has been ripped-off piecemeal by others. Now I get why. Anyone
burned that bad deserves their revenge.
As a post-script, there is footage online of a high-definition remake of the
game that was abandoned, but which sought to remake this title in the style
of Alan Wake. The forced perspectives remain and the initial attic scene with
its possibility for fight or flight or puzzle-solving really shines here, especially
when a late-2000s game demo is passing off 1992 game design as innovative.
That’s perhaps the best summary one can give for the experience here. The
core ideas of Alone in the Dark function with just as much satisfaction as they
did around the time I was born, and new packages are delightful but entirely
unneeded. This is what excited me so much about this style of game, and after
a streak of some unfortunate titles in this series, this has been a reminder of
what horror game origins can give us even now.
Thanks Edward. U
This Mortal Coyle | Deirdre Coyle

W hile living in Seattle, I once asked my then-boyfriend, Jack, to carry my

bag. “It’s heavy,” I whined.
He groaned. “You just want me to be more like Farkas.”
“Yes. Please increase your carry weight.”
He declined.
Jack’s computer had a better graphics card than mine, so I often played
AAA games like Skyrim on his Steam account. While dating Jack, I was also
married to a lycanthropic warrior named Farkas in Skyrim. Farkas and I met
while working for a warriors’ guild in Whiterun. He was strong, simple-
minded, and wore eyeliner extremely well. I let him follow me around, and
at a certain point, realized how much I enjoyed watching him kill monsters
while carrying my stuff. I wanted us to be more than traveling companions.
My other prospects lacked Farkas’s thick eyeliner and dark, greasy hair. Farkas
was Skyrim’s most goth bachelor.
I put on my Amulet of Mara — the bauble that signals romantic availability —
and found my man dicking around behind the mead hall. “An Amulet of Mara,”
he said. “You’re looking for marriage, then?”
“Interested in me, are you?” I asked.
“Won’t lie, I am. And you?”
“I won’t lie, I am.”
“Then it’s settled,” he said. “You and me.”
I dream that one day a human man will say to me, in lieu of proposal, “Then
it’s settled. You and Me.” Just kidding! That sounds terrible.
 ***

I have a lifelong tendency to ask people to carry my things. Self-sufficiency

is great, but if someone else agrees — or offers — to hold my coat, purse,
suitcase, or coffee, I am going to say yes (exception: strange men on the street
who offer to “carry my purse and walk me home”). Once, on asking a guy to
carry my coat, I was accused of playing into gender stereotypes. I disagreed.
This tendency is not related to my gender identity. It’s just who I am: lazy.
Growing up, my parents expected me to help carry whatever was being
schlepped, and I took any opportunity to get out of it. In the winter, I never
wanted to wear a coat; sometimes, the only way for my mother to convince
me to wear one was to tell me she’d carry it after we reached our destination.
After shopping with my aunt and uncle one day, my uncle asked if I’d like to
help carry in our bags. Assuming it was a genuine request, I very politely said,
“No, thank you.” Not much has changed.
While my desire to have other people carry my things is not part of my gender
identity, it does play into gendered stereotypes. According to some Quality
Journalism, “It doesn’t matter how secure you are with your masculinity,
handbags are a girl’s accessory, period!” Another website argues that “A
woman needs to respect her man, to feel attracted to him and desire him. A
man carrying a women’s handbag has no part in that kind of relationship.”
According to Clark Wissler’s “Man and His Baggage,” a 1946 essay in Natural
History, “The popular belief is that the savage woman always carried the
heavier load, yet here the loads for women and men are about equal.” Looking
forward, Wissler wrote that “unless man casts off civilization and returns to
savagery [he really liked that word] . . . he must bravely face the future, striving
for more mechanical devices to carry and house the increasing load.” Wissler
meant “people,” but he didn’t mean me.
I ask people of all genders to carry my stuff. In the past week, my friend
Melissa held my wine while I went to the bathroom, my roommate Cecilia
brought my hamburger into a movie theatre, my boyfriend helped me carry
groceries, and the cat, Catboy, lifted my water glass by getting his head stuck
inside it. I’m lazy regardless of my company. When I married Farkas, I leveled
up his stamina at every opportunity. If I’d married a woman in Skyrim, it would
have been Aela the Huntress, and I’d have leveled up her carrying capacity
with equal fervor.

***
 I don’t need to spell out most fantasies fulfilled by marriageable game
companions. For me, the idea that a kind, handsome, eyelinered husband
would help shoulder my burdens (without saying “this is the problem with
feminists — they want it both ways!”) is a fantasy indeed.
After Jack and I broke up, I left Seattle — and Jack’s Steam account — behind.
Jack and I still hang out when we’re in the same city, but I never saw Farkas
again. U
Rookie of the Year | Matt Marrone

The Last Word on

When to Quit
One clear idea emerges from that crucible, forged and hard as
rolling steel:
We mustn’t give up.
Ever.

I went to L.A. for the World Series. 

I also went to Houston for the World Series, but I didn’t have coffee and
cherry pie with a Woodsman there, so for the purposes of this story it doesn’t
count. 
My trip to Los Angeles was a work trip and there was a lot of work and a lot of
baseball. There was also a ton of Twin Peaks. I had drinks at the bar where Diane
first appears in Season 3; ate lunch at the diner where the waitress passes out
in Part 8; took that aforementioned coffee and cherry pie – and a photo – with
one of the actual Woodsmen at the Double R Halloween pop-up in Hollywood;
and I even bought a package of jerky at the same deli in Burbank – the same
checkout counter, too – where Sarah Palmer had her chilling encounter with
dried, smoked vacuum-packed turkey.
I didn’t have time to get to Glastonbury Grove, about an hour’s cab ride each
way from my hotel, but I did have one last Twin Peaks treat waiting for me
when I got home. 
 Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier had arrived on Halloween, in an
Amazon box thousands of miles away in Queens, as I watched the Dodgers beat
the Astros to force a Game 7 at Chavez Ravine. 
When I got home two days later, I reintroduced myself to my family. But the
minute my wife left for work the next morning and I’d dispatched my son to
school, I tore it open. I burned through the surprisingly thin volume in a single
sitting. 
There are a couple twists and more answers than you might expect. And a
whole host of flaws, too, but my main takeaway wasn’t about any of that. 
What struck me most were the final words of the book, already excerpted
above, and now here again:

One clear idea emerges from that crucible, forged and hard as
rolling steel:
We mustn’t give up.
Ever.

When Part 18 of Season 3 ended in a Carrie Page/Laura Palmer scream, it left

me with a crushing, hopeless feeling that lingered for weeks.
I’ve written about it in this space before, about my interpretation, partly
conceived in self-defense at that knockout gut-punch. I love the ending –even,
if not especially, because of that pain. But damn. 
And then comes The Final Dossier, which goes so far as to put the owl cave
ring on the finger of our current president – little surprise if you follow Frost
on Twitter, or if you simply share his growing concern for the times we live
in – yet ends on a hopeful note.
The sentiment in those final three paragraphs is what seemingly dooms Dale
Cooper in Season 3. It’s the belief that betrays him into becoming the next
Philip Jeffries, untethered from time. It’s Cooper’s refusal to give up, long after
he seemingly should have folded a decent hand instead of going all-in against
the devil. After 25 years, it’s the same fatal flaw that traps him in another kind
of purgatory – if not hell itself – where the deepest trauma is played out on a
loop that lasts forever.
That, for me, is the feeling at the close of Season 3. But The Final Dossier
delivers one last voice – that of the increasingly confounded and confounding
Agent Tamara Preston, who hurriedly books her plane ticket back to
Philadelphia to escape Twin Peaks’ changed past, just as it begins to dictate a
disorienting future. She hints that maybe, just maybe, going all-in might not
be so catastrophic.
 I know I’m not alone in wanting to believe Cooper’s journey doesn’t lead to
endless, repeating failure, that there’s room for something more, something
less bitter. But as I watched him stagger at the end of Part 18, I didn’t feel that.
Not in my bones. But these words? Well, they don’t reveal an escape hatch. They
don’t promise a different outcome the next time through the cycle. Or even
that there will be a next time through the cycle. In fact, since Tamara Preston
doesn’t know about that scene outside the Palmer/Tremont house – though
the two timelines seem to be melding together as she speaks – her words don’t
seem to tell us anything at all about those final, harrowing moments. 
But Mark Frost knows about them. And while this is simply one of the two
co-creators’ arguably non-canonical account of the story, told through the
eyes of a newbie character who isn’t ostensibly referring here to the finale –
and perhaps is speaking more to us about the real world we as readers inhabit
– the book ends exactly as I might have hoped. 

One clear idea emerges from that crucible, forged and hard as
rolling steel:
We mustn’t give up.
Ever.

That’s 18 words — one for each part of Season 3, including the finale — and
one tiny crack, just wide enough to let a single beam of light get in. U
The Burnt Offering | Stu Horvath

Stranger Songs
I don’t know if you know this, but Netflix’s hit series Stranger Things is set in
the 1980s. Mind blown, right?
Stranger Things uses a number of, let’s be kind and call them techniques, to
let viewers know that the year the shadow falls on Hawkins, Indiana, is 1984.
There are Pintos and Oldsmobile Cutlasses on the road. There’s lots of denim.
There are mullets. Most of all, there are 80s pop tunes in the soundtrack.
Soundtracks are hard. More often than not, the songs in a film or TV show fade
into the background and become just one part facet of the experience. Every
once in a while, you get a masterpiece of curation that both stands on its own
and adds depth and nuance to the narrative (Natural Born Killers, Pretty in Pink
and The Harder They Come all come immediately spring to my mind). There’s
also a good deal of cliché in soundtracks. How many times have you heard
Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” playing under a reference to
Vietnam, or George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone” when someone, you know,
is being bad?
Then there’s Stranger Things 2, which approaches its soundtrack with all the
subtlety and meaning of a sledgehammer.
An early example in Season 2: “Whip It,” by Devo, is heard on two separate
occasions when the kids are at the local arcade. When the song was released
in 1980, it was an unlikely hit, partly because most people thought the song
was about sex. Songwriter Gerald Casale later explained that his intention
was to critique the slogans of American optimism and was inspired by
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Neither interpretation says “arcade” or
“videogames” to me.
 Contrast that with what is going on at the arcade. The kids – Dustin, Lucas,
Mike, Will and newcomer Max – have an obsession with the Dig Dug machine
and are competing for high scores. I am not a proponent of nostalgia as plot
point, but this is a nice bit of foreshadowing for the events of the season. Dig
Dug is a game about being chased through tunnels by monsters and, wouldn’t
you know it, that’s also what Stranger Things 2 is about.
Another example. Late in the season, Billy, a character genetically
engineered to be the apex of scummy 80s bully, is getting ready to go out with
his girlfriend. As he’s primping, he has Metallica’s “Four Horsemen” playing.
First off, Kill ‘em All wasn’t a widely distributed album in ’84 and Billy seems
much more like a Van Halen douche rather than a burnout, but let’s put that
to one side. “Four Horsemen” is about the riders of the apocalypse, which, as a
commentary on Billy, gives him a bit too much credit and is an odd choice when
the very next track on the album
is “Motorbreath,” a song that
perfectly sums up his character.
“Don’t stop for nothing it’s full
speed or nothing / I am taking
down you know whatever is in
my way”
In Stranger Things, songs seem
chosen expressly to jab you in
the ribs and say, “Hey, it’s the 80s.
Did you know? 1984. Eighties. We
love that decade’s musical output,
can you tell? Right? Yea.” Nearly
always, the song selections sit at the very front of the audio mix, demanding
you pay attention to them. Actors often wait around awkwardly for the music
cue to end before they start their dialogue. Several times, one song crashes
directly into another to no apparent purpose. It is as if the Duffer brothers
forgot the breakout success of Survive, the creators of the first season’s score.
This is all the more frustrating because Strange Things 2 ends with a brilliant
song cue. The epilogue is the winter dance and final song is “Every Breath You
Take,” by the Police. As the final heartfelt character beats play out, I assumed
that the creators of the show were among the countless fans who think it is a
love song. You see, the soft, romantic vibe hides disturbing lyrics written from
the point of view of a possessive lover – it is so sinister that songwriter Sting
has expressed horror upon learning couples have used it as their wedding
song.
 But no, the show not only knows how creepy the song is, it plays upon the
confusion that setting it to a mushy moment creates in a viewer like me. Then
the camera rotates and we find ourselves in the Upside Down. That stalker
song wasn’t playing for the kids; it was for the shadow monster hovering over
the school, watching . . . every move they make. It is perfect.
There are 60 songs played at various times over the course of Stranger Things
2’s nine episodes. One tells a great story and a handful of others do some
interesting character work. The rest range from forgettable to groan-worthy.
There are dozens of shows and movies set in the 80s that use music to great
effect – Donnie Darko, Freaks & Geeks, Halt and Catch Fire, House of the Devil
(just one song, such restraint!), to name a few. Ever the chameleon, perhaps
Stranger Things 3 can add those to the long list of things the show imitates. U
The Heavy Pour | Sara Clemens

More Like RAD-narok

P ages of this magazine – and, I think, this very issue – have been devoted to
righteously criticizing the ubiquitous use of nostalgia as a marketing and/
or story angle, especially when it comes in the über-popular eighties flavor.
It can be effective, no doubt. A bunch of us are in our thirties or forties
and it’s bitchin’ to be reminded of the idylls of youth, though I’m not sure
spewing out a three-page laundry list of inconsequential references makes for
engaging or particularly entertaining reading, and attaching a track from the
“Bring Back the 80’s” Spotify playlist to the beginning of every. single. scene in
the first episode of your kid adventure series is enough to make a person click
out of there faster than a DeLorean heading back to the future. When done
well, though, it’s a whole other (Ender’s) game.
I sat through Thor: Ragnarok this weekend with a big ol’ dopey grin on my
face and it wasn’t just because it wears its comedic aspirations on its sleeve.
Taika Waititi’s particular aesthetic hits way more personal sweet spots than
the other retro-infused properties flooding our feeds these days. Truth be told,
I actually wasn’t super cognizant of the eighties – I was six in 1989 – but the
roller rink my middle-school YMCA camp would take us to was decorated like
Duran Duran was still in their heyday, or at least the DJ spun like they were.
The summers I spent cruising around the worn floors of the Roll-O-Rama
were the same ones I spent discovering and devouring comic books. Sometimes
I’d read them sitting off to the side of the rink, my mouth working a plug of
banana taffy and my feet rolling back and forth beneath a ketchup-smeared
table. I’d swap with my friends once I finished an issue and then we’d compare
and contrast the powers of our favorite heroes. We were young enough not to
care about the condition of the books, just the content. We hardly ever had two
issues from the same team, let alone the same story arc. The before and after of
each chapter was filled in by our imaginations, informed as they were by the
sound of The Bangles and the smell of fry-grease.
Thor: Ragnarok is as big and bright and colorful as the memories of my
skating days. It’s a perfect fit for a film featuring a place like Asgard, where the
main road to and from is an intergalactic rainbow highway. The score is full of
synthesizers, but in the hands of composer Mark Mothersbaugh, of Devo, it’s so
solidly retro it comes back around to futuristic. It’s what we thought the future
would sound like when we were little and now that we’re exploring the outer
bounds of the universe, the sonic present is exactly what we always knew it’d
be. There’s a whole planet where the inhabitants paint colored shapes on their
faces like they’re living Patrick Nagel illustrations and where, a direct elbow
to the audience’s ribs, a guy puts on a t-shirt with a Patrick Nagel illustration
printed on the front.

The whole thing is just plain fun, from the sound to the sets to the costumes
to the lighting to the special effects to the actors’ actual, genuine laughter.
Smiling and laughing are some of the hardest things to pull off as an actor.
Like a sociopath who mimics emotion precisely but not quite authentically,
an actor laughing on cue often carries a slight chill of unreality, bare as it may
be. It’s why watching a Saturday Night Live cast member naturally break can
result in cathartic giggles for the viewer and why she feels annoyed when the
same cast member forces the break in a retread of the sketch the next week.
I’d wager all or nearly all of the comedic bits in Thor: Ragnarok heavily feature
improvisation. I saw Chris Hemsworth crack a real grin at least half a dozen
times, letting his smile be both Thor’s and his, which means it’s true twice. He
was far from the only one.
It’s these scenes of actors cracking each other up that ignite the warmest
fires of nostalgia in me. Everything feels conversational. There’s none of the
too-quick pattering of slick, predetermined bon mots that’s the specialty of
so many modern comedic scripts. These characters are surprised by what
the others have to say. They’ll get tripped up before laughing, or even ask for
further clarification of an idea. They spin off in wild, absurd directions, talking
about riding hammers in order to fly, or a trickster’s meanest trick being when
he turned into a snake – not because snakes are scary, but because they’re very
cool, and who wouldn’t want to hold one to admire it? But then the cool snake
turns out to be your baby brother who says, “Ha, it’s me! Your brother!”
That was my friends and me at the roller rink: eating junk, reading comic
book stories piecemeal and riffing on each other’s ridiculous ideas about
supersonic farts being someone’s superpower, probably. We were still young
enough to believe we’d change the world someday and, gliding (flying) through
lasers, we’d each ask it to “Take On Me” at the top of our lungs. Out of all the
comic book movies and nostalgia bombs being tossed around these days, only
Ragnarok took me all the way back there and made me feel it all over again.
Feeling it all over again is kind of like laughing for real in a movie – it means
it’s true twice. I guess the world is still going to have to take me on. U
Here’s the Thing | Rob Rich

Refining Persona
V ideogame sequels. Ugh. Far too often, they end up being derivative
rehashes of earlier games in the same series that disappoint despite
having a successful (presumably, because why bother making another one if
not?) start. Sequels don’t always suck, of course, but many do have a tendency
to come up short. Here’s the thing: if you want some excellent examples of
games that do sequels right – by building off of and learning from what came
before – look no further than the latter half of the Persona series.
The first two games were good, don’t get me wrong, but it was Persona 3 that
really put the franchise in the spotlight. The poppy visual design, the style
(both fashion and otherwise), the balance between typical RPG turn-based
battles and “Social Links” – and of course that freaking amazing soundtrack –
were hard to ignore. It was a great game but little did we know at the time how
much better it could get.
Persona 4. My favorite JRPG of all time. God that game is fantastic. This is
where the cleverness of the series’ design improvements started to appear
– because duh, it’s a sequel, right? Persona 4 took the stylish combination of
relationship building and fantastical RPG combat, then refined the crap out of
it. The interfaces were even more slickly designed, the various text boxes and
other displays added even more to the cohesive visual design, the music was
even better, etc. And, my god, those cropped character portraits that pop up
when you hit enemies with whatever they’re weak against (and of course the
all-out-attack) look amazing. Even better than what we got in Persona 3.
 Better yet, Persona 4 made a number of mechanical improvements I didn’t
know the previous game needed. Quick travel was a thing, which made the
day-to-day tasks significantly more bearable since all the arbitrary and time-
consuming running was skippable. Symbols appeared next to spells to make
it easier to tell at a glance what was what. Party members no longer got tired
in dungeons – instead you were just limited by how well you could manage
SP and, eventually, you could even replenish it (for a fee). The combat menu
used a much more straightforward and easier to navigate vertical list of words
instead of a rotating circle of occasionally obtuse icons. Dungeons were better,
too, with more thematic areas representing different characters as opposed
to one big tower that didn’t mix the environments up all that much. It was
the best Persona had to offer (until P4 Golden, anyway). But then Persona 5
happened.
As I’ve said, Persona 4 is my favorite JRPG ever. This will never change.
However, from a purely objective standpoint I can’t deny that Persona 5 is the
better designed game. It improves on so many different bits and pieces I’m
not entirely sure where to begin so I’ll just start with the visuals. Holy shit. If
Persona 4 made Persona 3’s visual design look dated, Persona 5 makes Persona
4 look like the first game we got stateside on the original Playstation. My god,
this game looks slick. The level of graphical refinement to everything from
the text boxes to the status screen is jaw-dropping. This also extends to the
fashion, which is way too slick to be realistic but still incredible. The Phantom
Thief outfits in particular are a sight to behold.
The music is also fantastic, of course, though I still prefer what’s in Persona
4 Golden. I can admit that, on a technical level, the newer game’s soundtrack
is even more impressive. The seemingly jazz-inspired (I think?) tunes are all
great on their own, but the way that they grow and change ever so slightly as
the story progresses is brilliant. I can only hope that more games try something
similar in the future.
And then we come to the mechanics, which stand so far above what came
before there might as well be a two-generation gap in the hardware. Wait a
second . . . Kidding aside, as much as I adore Persona 4, I have to admit it’s
difficult to come back to after playing Persona 5. The combat menu does away
with directional navigation entirely and instead has each option (attack,
skill, guard, etc.) mapped to a specific button on the controller. This alone is
a revelation, as it makes combat flow so much better. Skill selection has also
gotten an upgrade thanks to similar symbols that accompanied the skill names
from Persona 4, but now the symbols are also color-coded (i.e. bufu/ice skills
have a blue icon, agi/fire have red, etc). Then there’s more subtle interface
changes like how you can swap personas from the Skill menu instead of having
a devoted Persona menu, or the inclusion of damage types like nuclear and
bullet that haven’t been in the series for several years.
The non-combat changes are just as big a deal. Now non-party Social Links
serve a purpose besides simply providing experience boosts to Persona fusions.
It’s great from a gameplay standpoint because it grants some useful perks like
being able to swap party members while in combat or let you perform actions
in the evening after spending the day dungeon crawling, and it’s great from a
thematic standpoint because it feeds in to the idea that you’re part of a team
of misfits fighting against society on the down low. Fast travel is even easier
as now you can jump to specific locations instead of more general landmarks,
plus when people want to do stuff you get texts that you can respond to in
order to immediately meet up with them rather than try to find them in the
city. Hell, you can save anywhere when you’re wandering around the city – no
more searching for glowing butterflies.
The sequels that fall flat tend to make no changes, super small changes or
really weird changes. What Persona 3, 4 and 5 do right is make changes that
matter. The big ones, like the visual design, work because they lend each game
a very distinct feel – you can look at a screen shot for any one of the three and
immediately know which one it is. The small changes, like the combat menus
and skill icons, are simple on the surface but make a significant impact to what
you could consider “quality of life.” And the weird decisions, well, they’re
weird in the right ways. Mostly. I’m pretty sure they should’ve put much more
thought behind Lala Escargot. U
The McMaster Files | Jason McMaster

The Pain is in the

Remembering
I remember being young, sometime in the early 80s, watching TV with my
sister. She is older than I am by 14 years, so I ended up being in her care quite
a bit. My dad had left and we were on food stamps while my mom scraped
everything she could together to keep food on the table and the power on.
I don’t have a lot of childhood memories, but I remember watching this
made-for-TV movie. In the movie, there’s a little girl with a basket of kittens
and this guy adopts one. The movie then implied he killed it. In retrospect,
I understand it was trying to show he was crazy and uncaring, but to little
Jason, this was upsetting. I couldn’t understand why someone would harm
something innocent. Where was the mom to stop this from happening? How
can this person exist? I’ve never mentioned that night to my sister – I doubt
she’d remember it – but it has stuck with me for years and, if she knew, she
would regret it.
Years later, when I was around 12 years old, we rented a home in a rural area.
The people that rented the home to us raised some livestock. They would pay
me to go feed the pigs. A twisty little creek ran by the house and people had
laid little bridges over all the twists, turns and branches. Later that summer,
we had a flash flood. The area around our house became a lake and all of the
animals got out. The pigs had escaped but then ended up drowning. After a
few days, the owners of the house brought out some bags of lime. My stepdad
volunteered me for the job. He didn’t like me, thought I was a “sissy.”
 I had taken care of these animals for a few months at this point and had
grown attached. I hefted the heavy bag of lime onto my shoulders and began
picking my way through the debris and slowly balancing across slightly
misplaced planks and bridges. The animals had been dead for a few days and
the smell was difficult. The air hung moistly around me and the bodies. I undid
the bag and covered the poor creatures with lime. I wouldn’t cry about it until
much later.
These moments have haunted me for years. There are more, but these two
are stark in my mind and I can talk about them. Not every memory is so easy.
As a child, I didn’t know where to put that sadness and anger. As an adult, I
can parse those feelings and appropriately handle them. That’s why I can play
videogames and watch entertainment that doesn’t always show the kinder
side of humanity. That’s why I didn’t expect my reaction to Wolfenstein II: The
New Colossus.
It’s not what you think. If you haven’t played the game, mostly you’ll know
that it’s alternate history and you kill a lot of Nazis. I’m not squeamish when it
comes to ending a Nazi. I’ve made a career of talking about and participating in
physical videogame violence. I was taken by surprise by violence of a different
kind – emotional violence. The part of the game that made me stop and think
was before you ever fire a shot.
Wolfenstein II follows William “B. J.” Blazkowicz as he fights the Nazi regime
that dropped an A-bomb on New York City and has taken over the West. The
game has an interesting and fun cast, but one of the major catalysts for the
story movement is B. J. himself. He keeps a running dialog with friends and
family as he tries to keep it together long enough to complete his mission. Not
all of it lands, but enough of it does to give some clarity to the character.
When we join B. J., he is falling in and out of consciousness after being
rescued by his comrades. During this reminiscing, we spend time with a young
William and his mother. These scenes take place in Texas before World War II
and are not easy to watch.
We see B.J. in his room, mostly, after his father beat him. B. J. and a young
African American girl are friends and, at one point, kissed. His mother tries to
comfort Billy, but his dad comes home and it doesn’t go well. After a shouting
match, he beats and chokes you, in B. J.’s skin, and your mother (you get to
control a young B. J. to throw things at your father).
After a few random scenes from the war, we rejoin B. J. as his dad is lashing
his hands to a sawhorse. He ties your dog in front of you and places a loaded
shotgun in your hands, pointed at your dog. As he does this, he goes on about
how if he can’t make you strong, he’s going to make it so you can take the
beatings. The game then forces you to shoot. You can opt to miss, but your
father just berates you and shoots the dog himself.
Billy’s childhood is one of the main themes of Wolfenstein II. It works. Most
of us have memories that shaped us and explain our underlying motivations.
B. J.’s memories, and his relationship with his father, do more than just set the
stage for the coming story. They define the reason B. J. keeps going.
B.J. is a man trapped by his past, stuck between a world of ghosts and flesh.
Everything before he met Anya is dead and gone. Everything after seems out
of reach. He lives in a world in which he can’t imagine a happy ending. His only
desire is to keep it together long enough to try to secure some manner of peace
and security for Anya and his unborn children. Personal hope cannot exist.
He’s the agent of revenge on those who made us powerless. He’s the dark,
disturbing fantasy that lives deep in all of us who have been neglected or
abused. It’s a power trip that we all envy, but that power has a serious trade-
off, which The New Colossus isn’t afraid to show.
The world toughens you up, one way or another. Over the years, I became
an adult and, with that change, came freedom and responsibility, along with
an understanding of the world. I’m not that scared kid any more, but he’s still
inside me. We work together to try to make sense of things. He reminds me
that everyone can be afraid and confused. He makes me think about the kind
of memories I leave for those around me.
Maybe that’s all you can do. U
Artist Spotlight | Alex Flannery

How’d you get into art?

Oh man, I’ve been drawing and crafting things for as long I
as can remember. Some of my earliest art-centric memories
are drawing my own little comic strips, cartoon characters
or sports logos/uniforms. There was also a great series of
“How to Draw” books by Ed Emberly that I remember being
totally enamored with when I was a kid. I filled so many
sheets of paper with those little drawings.
I think a lot of artistic influence also came from my parents
too – neither were professional creatives, but my mom was
a big quilter, baker and gardener while my dad spent a lot
of time building models and woodworking. I think growing
up around that definitely nurtured somewhat of an urge to
create.
As I got older, that all naturally progressed to an interest
in visual art, so I took art classes throughout my school years
and wound up going to a full-on art school once it came
time for college. My interest in graphic design actually came
about somewhat accidentally while I was in high school – I
was in a punk band with my brother and two friends and
when we started needing show flyers, t-shirts, stickers,
record covers and all that stuff, I just started making them.
I don’t think I’d even heard the term “graphic design” back
then nor knew that it was even a real career path. I had a
lot of fun making all of those things so it was almost a no-
brainer to pursue that it as a career once I found out that
one could actually do that for a living.

Your work is super clean. What about that look that appeals
to you?
For whatever reason, I’ve never been very good at capturing
realism. Didn’t matter if I was drawing, painting, sculpting
– you name it. As a result, I tended to go the other direction
with my projects and that typically meant incorporating
a lot of deconstructed, simpler elements. Ultimately, I
suppose that evolved into the style of work I create now.
I think what I find appealing about this style of work is
precisely the simplicity and neatness that goes along with
it. Generally speaking, I try to avoid overcomplicating
whatever I’m doing and that seems to carry over into my
design and illustration work as well.

Let’s talk puns. You’re a pretty punny guy. How do you craft
a good art pun?
Hmmm, great question. I can confidently say that I don’t
have a concrete approach to this, and that the idea for each
Red Robot Co. print was conceived in its own unique way.
For example, my “Fowl Play” screenprint [a rooster playing
Hamlet – Editor] is a pun on a pre-existing phrase (likewise
with my “Death Before Decaf” design), so the objective
with those designs was to deliver the punch line visually as
opposed to through the title of the piece. In contrast, I came
up with the title of my “Grubduction” print [a UFO beaming
up food from a pizza joint – Editor] long after the actual
imagery had been created, so the approach to tackling that
one was kind of the opposite.
That said, whenever I am trying to come up with ideas
for some new Red Robot Co. work I generally have at least
a vague idea of what I’d like to do, for example “I’d like the
next print to feature a cow” or “I want to take this phrase/
quote and make a funny illustration to go with it” and then
I’ll just go from there. It’s a fun process.

What do you hope folks take away from your art?

I think this is a two-parter since my graphic design work
and Red Robot Co. products sort of exist independently
of one another. I think with regards to my regular design
work, most importantly I’d like clients to walk away
happy that what I’ve created for them accurately conveys
what they’re trying to say. It’s very easy to put together a
great-looking design but failing to communicate the actual
message behind it – I still struggle with that, as I think most
designers do from time to time.
With the Red Robot Co. stuff, I’m just happy when people
like the work and find it as funny as I do – if it brightens
someone’s day even just a bit that’s great. In the three years
or so that I’ve been doing this, I’ve gotten overwhelmingly
positive reactions from folks when they see my work so its
been encouraging. I’ve been having a great time creating all
this stuff and it feels good when others get equally excited
about it. People also often ask me about how I got into
screenprinting and selling my own art in the first place,
which I’m always very happy to talk about with them. If
someone sees my stuff and is inspired to go out and start
creating their own art and putting it out there, then that’s
great – that’s essentially how I got started with all this stuff
anyway, so it’s nice to feel like I can sort of pass that along
to others.

***

You can see more of Alex’s work on his official site and his
Instagram. You can also buy your favorite punny prints at Red
Robot Co. U
plate 1.
plate 2.
plate 3.
plate 4.
plate 5.
plate 6.
Playlist |
“Moonchild,” by Iron Maiden
“Snitch Jacket,” by Two Inch Astronaut
“Romance Apocalypse,” by Oneohtrix Point
Never
“I Get Overwhelmed,” by Dark Rooms
“Disparate Youth,” by Santigold
“Who Do You Love?” by Marianas Trench
“D.O.W.N -Domination of Waiting Noise-,” by
Boris
“Shot by Both Sides,” by Magazine
“Always Ascending,” by Franz Ferdinand
“Los Ageless,” by St. Vincent
“Praying,” by Ke$ha
“There She Is,” by Frank Turner
Reading List |
The Changeling, by Victor Lavelle
Crash Override, by Zoë Quinn
Akira, by Katsuhiro Otomo
Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, by Mark
Frost
The Great and Secret Show, by Clive Barker
The Odyssey, by Homer, translated by
Emily Wilson
Stamped from the Beginning, by Ibram
Kendi
Provenance, by Ann Leckie
“No Friend,” by Paramore
“Le poinçonneur des Lilas,” by Serge Gainsbourg
“Witness,” by Makthaverskan
“ECNALUBMA,” by They Might be Giants
LISTEN NOW ON SPOTIFY
Selected by Stu Horvath, Jeremy Voss, Austin Price,
Matt Marrone, Gavin Craig, Gingy Gibson, Levi
Rubeck, Deirdre Coyle, Melissa King, Don Becker,
Amanda Hudgins, Erik Weinbrecht, Khee Hoon Chan,
Sara Clemens, Astrid Budgor and Alyse Stanley
Sonora, by Hannah Lillith Assadi
From a Certain Point of View (Star Wars), by
Renée Ahdieh, et al.
The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood
The Crimson Petal and the White, by Michel
Faber
Selected by Stu Horvath, Sara Clemens, Austin Price,
Matt Marrone, James Fudge, Gavin Craig, Gingy
Gibson, Levi Rubeck, Deirdre Coyle, Erik Weinbrecht,
Alyse Stanley, Astrid Budgor and Jeremy Voss
Now Playing |

Zelda/Mario/Wolfenstein II/Assassin’s Creed Origins - I know I’m only

supposed to pick one and I’m sure that at some point I’ll have to only focus on
one, but look - Wolf2 and ACO are the two games I’ve been looking forward to
the most this year, and having just bought a Switch I’m finally getting around
to playing Zelda and the just-released Mario. This is the juggling season, and I
am ready for it.
(Jeremy Voss)

Super Mario Odyssey - Nintendo is two for two on their open-world style
signature franchise releases. I’ve been a fan of this style of Mario game since
Mario 64. Nintendo has embraced change and created nostalgic, challenging
and wholly new experiences featuring characters we cherish. I’m looking
forward to spending hours combing through the levels after finishing the
campaign, leaving no stone unturned in the search for every single purple
coin and moon there is to get. Also, Mario looks pretty sweet in a baseball cap
instead of his normal, tried and true hat if you ask me.
(Erik Weinbrecht)

I have not enjoyed a 3D Mario game this much since Mario 64.
(Don Becker)

Final Fantasy V - I don’t know where I got this sudden urge to play the damn
game, but here it is in all its undeniable glory and I can’t help myself. I’ve only
just started it; I haven’t had time to read or watch or play much of anything I
truly wanted to. Ho buddy... I did miss this game.
(Austin Price)

Hollow Knight - Finally wrapped this one up and I don’t know if it’s me or
the game, but even though I took a significant 25 hours to finish, I never felt
bored. Many times in Super Metroid or Symphony of the Night, I would get lost
or bored, always forgetting where that one spot I couldn’t get to before but
now totally can is. And though this happened often in Hollow Knight, the game
felt so tight and its underworld so packed with little things to find in every
spot, each run through a hallway never felt like a chore, but rather a romp.
(Levi Rubeck)
A Mortician’s Tale - I anticipated this game’s release for months and was not
disappointed. The story deals sensitively with grief and the death industry, the
gameplay is soothing, the narrative thoughtful. And at one point, the option
exists to play a minigame of goth Minesweeper. Just saying.
(Deirdre Coyle)

Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness - Star Ocean 5 is fine, y’all. I was
fooled by the negative reviews by American outlets, when in fact it did great
in Japan. It could definitely use earlier fast travel and more plot, but have you
played Star Ocean 4? The series isn’t dead, and now I’m considering buying a
$40 plush mascot bunny. Star Ocean forever, baby.
(Melissa King)

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker - This game is hot fire. Seriously. This
is the single best Mario game to come out in years, if just because it has
personality and quality and actually presents an interesting challenge. My
kingdom for a Captain Toad’s Treasure Tracker 2.
(Amanda Hudgins)

Book of Demons – As I take on more responsibilities as a wannabe adult, it

becomes harder to devote time to playing games. The developers behind the
Diablo-like dungeon crawler Book of Demons understand and tried to help me
manage time by allowing me to set the length of each level, depending on how
much time I wish to burn. Sorry to say, this didn’t work too well; I ended up
binging more smaller levels at a go. I can’t just stop at one level, you know?
(Khee Hoon Chan)

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – I’m loving the main storyline,
but not since Red Dead Redemption have I been so tempted to just get on a horse
and ride around the digital countryside. The fact that I get to stand around
making up ridiculous recipes for hours is just a bonus.
(Sara Clemens)

Harmonia - Beautifully conceived IF game by Liza Daly, designed for the 2017
Interactive Fiction Competition. As someone constantly picking at my own
IF projects, it’s a real inspiration to see something this fully formed! Daly’s
writing and design work in perfect concert to create a fabulous hypertext. I
highly recommend this game.
(Astrid Budgor)
INDUSTRIAL WASTE
IS GOOD FOR YOU
Lessons Learned from Fallout’s Wasteland

By Agustin Lopez
H ave you ever attached a bouquet of
knives to the barrel of a minigun?
In Fallout 4, you can craft the Bayoneted
Shredding Minigun with just a bit of
steel, screws and adhesive. All it takes are
the right resources and there is a surplus
in the Commonwealth Wasteland.
The post-apocalyptic wastelands in
Bethesda’s Fallout series are heavily
populated, not with people, but
with items left behind from the pre-
apocalypse. They were everyday goods
mass-produced for mass consumption,
like a bottle of Nuka-Cola or a Vault-
Tec lunchbox for kids. After the nuclear
annihilation of the United States during
the Great War, large deposits of these
goods remain untouched in the ruins of
the country. Billions of consumers were
killed, after all. The overabundance of
old world items makes survival possible
for those unlucky few who survived the
blast and now live in a nuclear dust bowl.
The benefit is obvious for scavengers
who cannot farm their own sustenance.
They rely on the countless Fancy Lad
Snack Cakes and YumYum Deviled
Eggs scattered across the wasteland,
which is fortunately littered up to the
horizon. Overflowing garbage bins and
dumpsters, forgotten factories with
overstocked shelves and derelict pantries
for families of four – ironically, there is
enough waste to sustain life.
Yet, as you wander through vacant
houses, you will find items that appear
to be bona fide trash. Opening a metal
container might net you a clipboard or
an empty tin can. Unless you plan on
taking notes, how could a clipboard help
you survive? And why would Bethesda
dedicate so much disk space to worthless
junk?
Once you activate a workbench, you
start to understand the purpose of
worthless junk. Crafting new items is
one of the hallmarks of the Fallout series,
known for its byzantine menu system
detailing how you can re-appropriate
clipboards and tin cans into something
useful. In other words, one generation’s
trash is another generation’s treasure.
The wealth of options available at a
crafting bench proves that Bethesda
loads the wasteland with old world junk
to help you assimilate to the new world.
All it takes is a bit of imagination to put
something together. Below are a few
examples of low-tech innovation from
the Capital, Commonwealth and Mojave
Wastelands in Fallout 3, Fallout 4 and
Fallout: New Vegas.

Bottlecap Mine (Consists of
lunchbox, one cherry bomb,
sensor module and ten bottlecaps): The
Bottlecap Mine is similar to a pressure
cooker bomb. You dump a handful of
jagged-edged bottlecaps and one cherry
bomb into a lunchbox, the former acting
as shrapnel and the latter as an igniter.
With an innocent appearance, this makes
for the perfect booby trap.
Nuka Grenade (Consists of one Nuka-
Cola Quantum bottle, one tin can,
one turpentine bottle and one abraxo
cleaner box): Nuka-Cola Quantum, which
contains a mild radioactive isotope, is
poured into an empty tin can and mixed
with the flammable agents in turpentine
and cleaning powder. Once thrown at an
enemy, a minor fission reaction causes
the can to explode, spreading shrapnel
and even spewing a miniature mushroom
cloud.
Pipe Gun (Consists of numerous
combinations of steel, screws, oil, gears
and adhesives): This is the most primitive
gun found in the Commonwealth
Wasteland. Sawed-off metal pipes, wood
and a lot of duct tape can somehow be
woven into a functioning firearm. The
advantage of this Frankenstein gun is the
ability to modify it. Adding an improved
grip or barrel takes just a few more bits of
steel and adhesive. You can even fashion
a scope sight out of a small hollow pipe
and the reticle out of two screws.
one Shishkebab (Consists of one motorcycle
one gas tank, one motorcycle handbrake, one
lawn mower blade and one pilot light):
Crafting this item adds a flourish to an
already lethal weapon. The lawn mower
blade can be used as a simple knife, but
attaching a gas tank and pilot light onto
the handle turns the blade into a flaming
sword. Pumping the handbrake releases
gas from the tank at the user’s discretion.
Rock-It Launcher (Consists of one
vacuum cleaner, one leaf blower, one
firehose nozzle and one conductor): The
construction of the Rock-It Launcher
is simple: a firehose nozzle is fixed to
the leaf blower, with its horsepower
strengthened by the vacuum cleaner. Its
true ingenuity lies in the ammunition it
takes. You feed dinner plates, teddy bears,
clipboards, etc. into the leaf blower and it
propels them at a deadly speed.
latter, the Sorrows fully embrace their
new violent worldview and learn to solve
their problems with a trigger finger.
The Sorrows never had much use for
automatic rifles before the invasion
of the White Legs since metal has no

Y ou’ll notice every item in this list

is a weapon. That’s because the
inspiration for each design is born from
nutritional benefit, but, as mentioned
earlier, an object’s value changes based
on ever-shifting social forces. After you
a society defined by war and conquest, intervene in their conflict, the Sorrows’
instead of agriculture or religion, as demand for guns and ammunition
just two examples. It’s why a teddy bear skyrockets, continuing the trend that led
is employed as ammunition instead of to the apocalypse, even though they have
harvested for cotton. Conscious or not, already survived a generation without
settlers developed a social structure that war.
favors carnivores over scavengers, so If their economy recycles old world
the many tribes of raiders, slavers and a artifacts, then it’s no surprise that
Roman Legion allocate their resources to settlers recycle old world ideas. I cannot
weaponry. Any and every item has value blame them. In our own world, future
as long as it can kill. settlers will build off the society we
Fallout’s twisted economy proves that created for them today, and our foresight
the value of a good is subjective, and thus, is questionable.
a tin can might have different meanings
to different individuals and societies.
This distinction is demonstrated in the
Fallout: New Vegas add-on Honest Hearts.
The main quest introduces a hunter-
gatherer tribe called the Sorrows, who
peacefully reap what they sow in Zion
Canyon, while the nomadic White Legs
tribe raids caravans and settlements
outside of Zion to make a living. Both
want to occupy the fertile canyon, but
only the White Legs are willing to kill for
it. The player is forced to make a choice:
help evacuate the Sorrows from Zion and
maintain their purity, or corrupt their
culture and teach them warfare to protect
their promised land. If you choose the
 Our consumer society threatens
to pollute our planet to devastating
potential. According to a report from
The Guardian, we purchase one million
plastic bottles per minute, totaling 480
billion bottles per year as of 2016. More
than half of them end up in landfills or
in the ocean, where microplastics poison
fish, birds and the water itself.
If the oceans don’t kill us, the air
might. A paper in Ecological Indicators
describes the biological costs of fossil fuel
emissions, specifically in regard to the
colossal transportation infrastructure
that feeds the mighty appetites of billions
of consumers across the world. The fossil
fuel burning from cargo ships, trucks and
planes unleashes enough carbon dioxide
into the air that, if inhaled regularly,
can lead to cardiopulmonary illness that
cuts off 9 to 11 years from a victim’s life
expectancy.
If any of these scenarios become
reality, our social progress will grind to
a halt and we will have only history to
live off. Yet, as Fallout shows us, the cause
of our apocalypse might become our
salvation afterward as society rebuilds
itself with the plentiful wares and waste
of our industrial past. What is unknown
is what to do with all of this trash. Will
we replicate Fallout’s war society? An
agricultural one, perhaps? Or maybe
we will build castles to accommodate a
feudal system? If you’ve played Fallout,
you’ve learned to ask yourself the
question: what type of society can you
build with an empty tin can? U
 By Aron Garst

THE SUCCESSFUL
SIDESCROLLER
W ith what seems like a never-
ending supply of 2D side scrollers
out in the world, it’s becoming harder
the 1980s and 90s. It gives the impression
that there is a huge and expansive world
within all those pixels, even though it
for any of them to stand out. You can may not seem like that when playing at
find hundreds of them while browsing first. “That kind of freedom leaves a lot
through the back pages of Steam and the to the imagination,” Velasco says. “That’s
various console marketplaces. why we see all the art with Shovel Knight
“It’s hard to want to play more of these, drawn in different styles, from Japanese-
since I’ve played so many,” says 13AM style cutesy to Dark Souls-esque badass.”
Games CEO and game designer Alex That freedom let Yacht Club tap into the
Rushdy, one of the creators of Runbow. hearts of many older gamers without
“You need to show me why you stand alienating new players.
out and do something original to get my The team at 13AM Games had a
attention, and that’s hard to do.” similar line of thinking when creating
So how can game makers create a a campaign for Runbow. They wanted to
successful 2D platformer that stands out showcase the game’s party-centric utility
to people? In order to cut through the brought on by its frantic nine player
noise, they need to create a tonally and multiplayer mode. “It’s the kind of game
mechanically cohesive experience, then where you’re going to party in both the
get it in front of players with an honest physical meatspace
marketing campaign. and within the
The designers behind Shovel Knight
knew that they would need to get people’s
attention with something that harnessed
the games nostalgia factor. “Shovel Knight
is very devoted to the kind of experience
you have on the NES, including how the
screen transitions work, how weighted
the character feels, and so on,” says Sean
Velasco, a developer at Yacht Club. “The
advertising shows that without taking
advantage of the nostalgia.”
The posters and artwork that Yacht
Club created detailed elaborate
characters, goofy weapons and
treacherous landscapes while
the actual game itself is
pixilated, similar to all sorts of
classic game advertising from
game,” Rushdy says. Posters for the game
featured colorful characters clashing
in a crowded scene, mirroring what
people could be doing on the couch while
playing.
Rushdy and crew went through a lot of
trial and error before finally establishing
that colorful art style. “We didn’t know
where to start in the early stages of
the game,” Rushdy says. “We ended up
pulling from old 1960s movie posters and
opening sequences.” Inspiration came
from the famous graphic designer Saul
Bass, who created posters for classics
films like The Shining, Vertigo and The
Anatomy of a Murder. The rigid edges,
blocky shapes and heavy contrast in Bass’s
art is found all over the place in Runbow.
“Eventually it evolved into something
that was more distinctly Runbow but still
very reminiscent of that era.”
The success behind these two titles
proves that marketing is one of the most
important parts of making a game. What’s
the point in putting all that work in if
no one plays it? The key to a successful
campaign is to base your marketing
off everything that makes your game
unique, like nostalgia with Shovel Knight
and multiplayer craziness with Runbow.
The effort shouldn’t end with the
marketing campaign; game development
consists of many elements that all need to
work in tandem. “Making sure your game
is cohesive, making it feel thematically
and tonally unified is really important,”
Velasco says. “The worlds in games like
Super Meat Boy, Binding of Isaac and
even Shovel Knight resonate with people
–enough to even get tattoos sometimes.”
Boss battles tend to be a huge aspect
of sidescrollers that tend to break that
unification. “Boss battles have a great
potential to make the gameplay feel
poor,” Velasco says. “You devote lot of
time in development designing the
unnecessary parts of the boss like their
intro, unique moves and a special arena
to fight in.”
Boss battles often reflect this
development time sink in the final
product, turning out to be a long
and repetitive mess. These fights are
important milestones, meaning they
need to be engaging and memorable.
A fun boss can leave an impression for
weeks after playing, while a bad one can
push players away permanently. “Shovel
Knight’s bosses are mostly about who
can deplete whose health faster,” Velasco
says. “And how do you do that, by getting
in there and fighting him like Shovel
Knight would, you’re having a real duel
with that character.”
In a lot of other side-scrollers, you
don’t take the boss in straight one-on-
one battle, instead you have to complete
a handful of scripted actions before
defeating them, which is boring almost
every time. It’s the opposite in Shovel
Knight, “I didn’t knock three cannonballs
on the Black Knight’s head to defeat him”
Velasco adds. “I had to fight him toe-to-
toe.”
Shovel Knight’s bosses are taken down
just like the rest of the game’s enemies,
by beating them senseless with a blunt
shovel. Standing over a lifeless body
feels far more rewarding after actually
learning their fighting style, rather
than having to learn and abuse some
environmental quirk. Boss battles should
be fantastic challenges that really elevate
the level of fun you have when playing,
but in order for that to happen they
can’t be treated as separate parts of the
levels they are in. And sadly, that doesn’t
happen on a lot of development projects.
“You have to be willing to part with your
design as you originally envisioned it,”
says Velasco. “You’re gonna face criticism
and you have to be willing to cut things
based off feedback. Sometimes they’re
right – everyone else is right and you’re
wrong.”
Developers need to be able to cut
parts of their game that don’t mesh with
the entire project as a whole. You need
to make creative sacrifices in order to
have something stand out in a genre as
crowded as this. “There are so many
games that come out with a good story
and a cool new mechanic,” Rushdy says.
“But they come out and get forgotten so
quickly, being good isn’t good enough
anymore.”
“You need to be able to justify your
game’s existence,” Rushdy says. “If I have
already played Shovel Knight, Guacamelee,
Runbow and such – why should I pick up
your game?” With so many games on the
market, it’s important for developers to
consider who they are making their game
for and why they are making it. Even if
a project is solely based on passion, it
needs to be played.
“If no one plays it than the game itself
isn’t complete,” Rushdy says. “If no one
enjoys it then the game, as a work of art,
isn’t complete. U
Fiction |
A New Low
By MICHAEL CALIA
–You, you’re fake news, but I’ll take a
question from you because I want to
show that I can be fair, unlike you!
The president wasn’t supposed to
address the media, but he had a bone to
pick. He stormed into the briefing room,
taking his press secretary by surprise,
but she dutifully scooted to the side as
the president replaced her at the podium.
For the reporters gathered in the room,
however, this was a treat. They loved that
the president didn’t have a filter. They
loved that they could bait him into saying
the most outrageous things. Well, not all
of them. Several of the reporters were
genuinely afraid that the president was
wrecking the institutions that provided
the nation with its foundations and
connective tissue.
The reporter started to ask about some
controversial remarks the president
recently made about white supremacists
marching to protect a statue of a
Confederate general. It had been a new
low in the presidency’s brief history,
the pundits proclaimed. The reporter
was just about to get to the meat of his
question, but the president cut him off.
–Next! That’s fake news. You! Next!
The brief exchange was frustrating, but
the reporter knew it would nonetheless
make for good copy. The video was
already going viral online.
The next reporter asked about
infrastructure. The president thought
this was a respectful question, and so
he decided to give a full answer. Then
he sniffed, something he had done
during the debates back during the
fall campaign. Political observers and
body language experts asserted that the
president’s sniffing indicated he was
nervous or uncomfortable, and, perhaps,
intimidated.
The president didn’t look so well. His
face, already darkened by tanning cream,
was blotchy: furiously reddish orange in
some places, pale yellow in others.
He sniffed, and he sniffed again. Then
he coughed.
The president didn’t have all the
facts, but that didn’t matter. His wildly
inaccurate rhetoric played best on cable.
He got his message across. He spoke to
his supporters. And they loved him for it.
–SNIIIFFFFFF! You! You’re next. What’s
your question?
The reporter rose and doubled
back to the question about the white
supremacists, but she managed to get to
the point without the president cutting
her off. The president was furious.
–SNIIIIIIIIIFFFFFFF! FAKE NEWS!
–But, Mr. President, the reporter
pressed, do you stand by your remarks?
The former grand wiz–
 –FAKE NEWS! I disavow. Fake news.
SNIIIIFFFFFFF!!
The reporter sensed an opening.
–What does that mean? What do you
disavow? Whom do you disavow?
–SNIFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF!!
The president began to quiver.
–SNIIIIIIIIIFFFFFFFFFF!!!
He grimaced.
–SNIIIIFFFFFFFF!!! sniff SNIIIIIIIIFFFF
The president swayed. He convulsed.
There was a loud POP followed by
a gurgle. The reporters closest to the
president thought they heard a crunch
follow the pop, then some bubbling and
maybe some squishing. Pressurized air
whistled out. It was wet, whatever it
was. Toward the back, journalists heard
the president moan, but it sounded more
like a whine with some bass undertones
to reporters at the front of the room. His
face, already puffy and weathered and
loose, went slack. His eyes caught the
hot TV lights, but they were empty of
emotion. He thrust out his arm, jabbing
an accusatory finger toward the reporter
who had just sat down.
–FAAAAAKE NEEEEWWWSssssssss!!!!!
Then came the stench, redolent of
rotten eggs and feces left in the sun.
The reporters heard another pop, this
one even louder and wetter. The stench
intensified, and the president appeared
to be shrinking or, probably, slouching
– yes, that was the rational explanation
some reporters turned over in their
minds, conscious of the president’s base
and what they’d want to hear. Obviously,
some sudden malady gripped him.
–F–F–FAAAAAKE NEEWWWWSSSS …
SSSS … sss …
Quieter this time, but more guttural.
There was fluid in his throat, something
rich and gooey. The stink kept coming in
waves. Reporters in the front row noticed
a dark, shimmering pool gathering
behind the base of the podium, near
where the president was standing. Was
it blood? Was it – oh no – diarrhea? Had
the president become incontinent on
national television? The journalist from
the Christian news network blanched
and whispered the Lord’s Prayer.
Then the president’s head jerked
left and right, back and forth. Jets of
the black liquid squirted from fresh
cavities opening around the president’s
collar. His head swayed, and he started
to scream at an unearthly pitch. One
reporter, an especially clever writer
from one of the big broadsheets, jotted
down a hasty note: “comp. to monster
in JC’s THING.” Within minutes, some
deft cyber humorists had already acted
on this obvious comparison, mashing up
the raw footage of the press conference
with sound effects and footage from the
science fiction horror classic.
Some reporters leaned in to see more,
but no one got up from their seat, and no
one who was standing moved from their
spots other than to angle themselves ever
so slightly to improve their view. Most
of the reporters were tapping furiously
at their smartphones, either to dash off
notes to their editors or pepper Twitter
timelines with sharp, pithy insights and
descriptions. The briefing room had
never felt this quiet or apprehensive,
not in even in times of great national
mourning.
By now, the president’s head had
receded from sight, at least for the
reporters looking directly toward the
podium. Had he fallen? Was he vomiting?
Maybe it was a heart attack. Or a stroke.
The president was getting on in years,
after all, and his diet consisted mainly
of greasy red meat, fast food and ice
cream. Folks on his side of the podium,
particularly his aides, saw everything
that was happening, though. It looked
like the president had receded within
his body. His head and face grew darker,
and harder, but his body went loose. His
most loyal aides, the true believers in the
movement, gazed with reverence.
The president quivered, and then
there was a final pop, this time even
softer and moister. His torso sloughed off
and flopped on the floor like a load of wet
laundry. The president’s head lolled from
side to side. It wasn’t attached to what
had been his neck and torso, but it was
attached to something.
–Is this some kind of gag? asked the
reporter from the cable news network in
the middle.
–I bet it is, and the liberals are going to
fall for it, said the reporter from the cable
news network on the right.
–Just a stunt to distract from the
investigation, more like it, said the
reporter from the cable news network on
the left.
More moaning, or whining, depending
on where you were in the room.
The president started to gather himself,
his new body becoming sturdy. The
reporters and staffers off to the sides of
the podium saw that the president’s head
sat atop a long, chunky column of milky,
translucent flesh that was segmented
like a worm’s body. The people closest to
him could see veins and arteries strewn
wildly, in bursts and tangles of red and
green and blue, beneath his skin, some
bulging through the surface. There were
snot-yellow blobs floating in the gurgling
morass. The onlookers with the keenest
vision could make out impressions of
what would likely be organs, although
they didn’t possess forms anyone with
even a rudimentary knowledge of human
anatomy would recognize. Several valves
opened up and down the president’s
body, some thin, some wide, puckering
and expanding. Breathing. Expelling.
Dripping.
The president rose, his new body
forming a tight, solid coil. Two thin black
strands, like wires, began to poke out
of either side of where the president’s
neck and shoulders would have been.
They were skinny but strong, and they
were capped with tiny barbed claws that
glistened like fish hooks. The president
gripped the podium with his tiny new
hands, scraping the sides and top, and he
pushed his head back to the level where it
was when he had a normal human body.
He opened his mouth in an agonizing
yawn, and his teeth shot out like bloody
popcorn kernels, giving way to steely
blades jutting from his gums. Then he
puked. It was brown and studded with
fuzzy, gelatinous orange chunks, and it
overflowed from the podium. Plop, plop,
plop.
He gazed at the audience of reporters
with new eyes, black eyes, button-
mushroom voids, which neither caught
nor reflected light. The president opened
his mouth wide again and screamed.
– MAAAAAAGAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!
The press secretary waited for her
boss to finish and then yelled over the
reporters shouting fresh inquiries.
–The president can take two more
questions, and then we gotta put a lid on
it, folks.
***
Social media lit up with news of
the president’s latest scandalous
press conference. The hashtag
#impeachtheworm trended all afternoon
and into the evening, but #MAGA had a
pretty good run, too. Within hours, all the
big newspapers had “tick tocks” on their
websites, chronicling what actually went
down behind the scenes – depending on
unnamed sources, of course. One of the
more liberal news sites reported that
“people close to the White House” told
them that the president’s daughter and
her husband, both senior aides in the
administration, were concerned about
the president’s behavior and didn’t
necessarily approve of what he did that
afternoon.
The Dow dropped more than 100 points
over the course of about a half hour
while traders watched the spectacle, and
the big financial cable news network
hauled in a panel of market gurus to
ponder whether this would derail the
president’s investor-friendly agenda
of tax cuts and incentives for privately
run infrastructure projects. Markets
eventually turned around and closed
slightly higher after traders figured, hey,
the president’s party still had control of
both houses of Congress, so the future
still looked bright for at least another
quarter or two.
The hosts on the right-wing cable
news channel debated whether what
happened was the left’s fault for egging
the president on and obstructing his
policies, or if it was just the president
being the president: upending the
corrupt old system and doing exactly
what his supporters elected him to do.
One of the nation’s leading evangelical
ministers appeared in the 9 p.m. Eastern
hour to declare that he was praying for
the president to overcome his enemies.
Hosts on the cable news channel on the
left framed their debate in the context
of the ongoing investigation. Was the
pressure getting to the president? Was the
special counsel on to him? Just how soon
would this house of cards come crashing
down on the president and his cronies?
Some panelists, however, suggested
that it was wrongheaded to insult the
president or criticize him too much, lest
his supporters become offended.
On the cable network that positioned
itself in the middle, a special panel
consisting of 12 pundits, former
politicians, reporters and experts hashed
out what kind of “optics” were on display
during the press conference, although
they ultimately left the door open for
more definitive answers.
The nation’s great liberal publications,
meanwhile, dispatched their best, most
empathetic reporters to the vast middle
of the country, where they tracked down
the president’s most ardent supporters
and asked them whether the leader’s
behavior earlier in the day would change
their minds about him. No, they said, this
didn’t change a thing. This wasn’t his
fault. Look what They made him do.
The nation’s great conservative
publications, in turn, exclaimed that
they were embarrassed and ashamed by
the president’s actions that day, but there
was still a chance he could right the ship
– if only he listened to their advice.
The pollsters took to the phone lines,
which would yield some bad news for
the president. Once all the numbers were
tabulated, the data would show that the
president’s approval rate fell yet another
point, yet another new low for his young
administration.
***
The next morning, the president
greeted his day with a breakfast of three
poached eggs, five sausage patties, two
cans of Diet Coke and ten freshly skinned
Corgi puppies simmered in maple syrup.
Over night, he had developed a new
cavity, positioned five inches below his
mouth, which was a vortex of puckered
and folded skin that dilated and extended
to seize the food and suck it down. It
secreted a milky saliva that drizzled and
pooled in the segments down his belly.
The president didn’t wipe the mess from
his body, but, rather, he rubbed it into his
increasingly coarse skin.
He then had his routine intelligence
briefing. Things were getting tenser in
Asia, while the terrorists lost ground
in an oil-rich Middle Eastern nation.
Upon hearing the latter development,
the president hissed, then laughed, then
vomited a gray stew of mostly digested
food, although the secretary of defense
swore he saw something wiggling in
there, too. Like worms in ecstasy, he
would later tell his wife. Damnedest
thing. The president laughed again.
–MAAAAAGAAAAAAAA …
He had no public events scheduled that
day, but he welcomed leaders of both
parties to a pivotal meeting on spending
and debt around noon. The media widely
expected things to go badly, given the
president’s pattern of aggressively selfish
and ignorant behavior, but he struck the
first deal he could make – with the leaders
of the opposition party – triggering
resentment in members of his own party.
The press couldn’t believe it. They
greeted the “gentlemen’s agreement”
with shock at first, but then, with a few
exceptions, most of the mainstream
columnists and observers began to
suggest that, maybe, this was a new
president, a bipartisan president, an
independent president.
The following morning, as the
president slurped down four eggs-over-
easy, deep-fried hash browns and baked
tabby kittens stuffed with figs and diced
goat testicles, he read with glee the
newspapers of record from both New
York and Washington. Each featured
lengthy page-one stories about how the
president was more interested in getting
things done than he was in playing the
kind of petty partisan games that had
become the norm in the past twenty
years or so. This was the president Middle
America elected, they declared. This was
the president the country needed right
now. This was the pivot.
–MAAAAGAAAAA …
Now the media would watch for
whether the president could seize the
momentum. Two days after a widely
denounced press conference, the
president was off to see his public. Icy
cans of Diet Coke and urns of whole
pickled piglets awaited him on the plane.
The president left the newspapers
and slithered toward his limousine,
which would carry him toward a fully
fueled Air Force One headed for a rally
in Des Moines. As he approached the
car, a spot toward the end of his tail
began to bulge and blush. With nary a
grunt or a wince from the president, the
momentary tumor split open and pushed
out a cylindrical pudding the color of the
water in a three-days-clogged toilet. The
log, which gave the impression of sweaty
cheese left to fester for the flies, was
spiny with tiny bones. Its odor instantly
filled the surrounding staff and guards’
noses with a burning sensation that
could only be described as “turpentine
on fire in a chum bucket left under a dock
at low tide.”
Before the president even slid into the
car, the nearest steward, lacking a towel,
quickly snatched newspapers that the
president had left behind. He dashed over
to the commander-in-chief’s shit, which
was now oozing chunky beige worms,
and scooped it all up with the kind of
professional efficiency that comes from
years of serving absolute power in the
most genteel setting.
The steward didn’t grimace once, not
even when he tossed the oozing cluster
of newsprint and filth into a dumpster
already stacked high with the skins of
young dogs. U
REVVING THE ENGINE
A SERIES PROFILING THE RECIPIENTS OF
UNREAL DEV GRANTS

RITE OF ILK

This series of articles is made possible through the generous sponsorship

of Epic's Unreal Engine 4. Every month, we profile the recipient of an
Unreal Dev Grant. While Epic puts us in touch with our subjects, they
have no input or approval in the final story. Click here to learn more.
O ne night, way back in 1999, I got a phone call from a friend. He
was playing a new game called Silent Hill and he was wondering
if my girlfriend at the time and I would like to come over and watch.
He wasn’t asking out of a desire to be social, but rather because the
game was scaring the crap out of him and he didn’t want to be alone.
We went over and, as the game wore out our nerves (with that siren
and those creepy child ghosts, it was scary!), we’d pass the controller
back and forth. We went back the next night and every night after,
until we were finished the game.
If there is one thing I miss about videogames these days, it’s playing
them with friends – not online, but together on the couch. Yet, while
there were the occasional co-op games like X-Men Legends and Castle
Crashers, most of my couch co-op involved single player narrative
games and a passed controller – one person playing and everyone else
watching. It was always fun, but actual co-op, with everyone playing,
was a rare treat.
With the advent of online multiplayer and the explosion of giant
competitive games like League of Legends and PlayerUnknown’s
Battlegrounds, you’d think that co-op, already a rarity, would be falling
to the wayside. But that isn’t the case. There’s a small renaissance of
co-op games of many different flavors finding release in the last five
years. Rite of Ilk is set to enter the mix with its unique design sense
and play constraints.
Rite of Ilk was developed by Turtleneck Studios, formed by
university friends who came together after going separate ways
for several years in the game industry. Appropriately for a group of
reunited friends, the game is a cooperative exploration-adventure
played entirely by two players (both local and online, which is a big
plus).
At its core, it is a journey of two distinctly different people, for
two distinctly different people. It’s about co-operating with another
person and overcoming challenges together – even when, sometimes,
the challenge originates from your forced partnership (the characters,
Mokh and Tarh, are bound together by a single rope).
We spoke to Alanay Cekic, the game’s creative director, about the
challenges and joys of developing a cooperative exploration of…
cooperation.
These days, it seems like co-op is usually an add-on of a larger game
and also limits your potential audience. What made you want to
develop a co-op game?

We’re building a narrative-driven, two-player-only co-op. It’s an

immersive experience which is unusual within the exploration genre
itself.
People are scared of what they don’t know and by developing
a co-op only game, in a sense, we are delving into a wide and deep
unknown. Just because it’s rare or unusual doesn’t mean it can’t be
fruitful. There are tons of games out there that are co-op only, most
of those games are party games or small in size - some successful and
some not. We don’t think we’re redefining the co-op genre by being
different, but rather we are adding to it with what we feel is a unique
disposition and a next step for co-op play.
We started this adventure by simply grabbing something we wish
for ourselves: an experience we love that we could play and share
with a friend or partner. There are many games I would love to play
with my girlfriend, but can’t. Often the games that do have co-op
play treat it as an add-on or don’t offer the immersion we would like.
In our game it’s not an add-on, couples who play games and even
friends, siblings or grandparents with their grandchildren can bask
themselves entirely in the Rite of Ilk universe.
It’s an experience that doesn’t simply allow for co-op play, but
embraces it as a backbone of gaming. And if you can’t find someone to
play with, there will also be online play available.
 The rope binding the two characters together is an obvious
metaphor for the power of teamwork. I was wondering what other
messages you might be trying to impart through a game about
constraint and connection?
Constraint can be either a positive or a negative experience, a
source of security as well as frustration. With the rope’s constraint
you are forced to be together with another person. Although
teamwork is definitely the defining factor, it’s about more than just
working together. We factor in acceptance and individuality. The
character you play with, as well as your teammate - the other player
- will be different from you. Your teammate’s play style, personality,
physical appearance, gender and nationality, just to name a few, can
have many differences and/or similarities and it is up to you two to
cooperate in order to find solutions and overcome challenges within
the game.

It seems like tying the players together would create double the
problems in terms of mechanics and puzzle balance. Is this the case?
And, if so, how have you overcome the challenge?

It’s challenging to consider two people at the same time, exactly

because they are two different people. There are moments where
you want to make a puzzle interesting for both players despite their
roles in the puzzle being different. To give you an example: one player
might have to pull levers and control machines to create a path, while
the other player will have to platform and traverse himself over that
created path. They are both doing different things within the same
challenge, but both players need to find their role enjoyable. Now . . .
how do you go about that? We don’t have a sure key to victory in terms
of creating puzzles or obstructions, it comes down to experience, a lot
of trial and error and figuring out what works and what doesn’t. It is
earnest hard work! But in a way, it’s also double the fun.

The world you’ve created is sumptuous. What inspired your aesthetic

choices and what are you trying to convey through the portrayal of
Mokh and Tarh’s culture?

Thank you! We’re keen on innovation, experimentation and aspire

to create a world that draws you in and is worth discovering. We
decided to go with a fantasy setting and an elaborate shape language
very early on in our pre-development cycle. It needed to feel earthly
enough to be recognizable, but unique enough to represent a vastly
different planet.
With Mokh and Tarh’s culture, we are using a lot of real life
references to make it tangible for development. To us, they’re
tribesmen with little knowledge of the outside world who are sent out
on a journey and stumble onto these grandiose ruins and mysteries of
their ancestors.
When I say those names together, it sounds like something I should
know, like it is a reference to something. Is it?
This is an interesting question that I didn’t see coming! The answer
is yes, it is a reference to something. We are using a lot of different
cultures and symbolisms from real life to inspire Rite of Ilk’s meanings
and definitions and. quite frankly, a lot of stuff in the RITE of ILK
universe has subtle or straightforward stories to it.
In the same vein, we chose the names Mokh and Tarh for our heroes.
Although our game isn’t influenced that much by Arabia, the title
“mukhtar” (spelled slightly different than Mokh + Tarh) holds a very
significant definition. It means “chosen” in Arabic and mukhtars are
usually selected by some consensual or participatory method in their
village. The meaning stands somewhat true because Mokh and Tarh
are chosen by their tribe to undergo a very important Rite. We feel it’s
a nice touch to their names.

The trailer is narrated by a voice using what sounds like a Native

American language and there seems to be an elaborate symbolic
language on display in the environments. How did you approach
language in Rite of Ilk and what role does it play in the game?

We really want to dip the game in an unusual flavor. Part of the

game’s uniqueness drips from the story and our approach to it. The
characters talk a language that we have created ourselves, which is
heavily inspired by a variety of African languages, such as, Swahili,
Sesotho, Ndebele, Xitsonga and IsiXhosa. There are also Arabic and
Native American influences. The cultures behind these languages are
significant to our visual approach for Mokh, Tarh and the world. We
pinned down on a self-made language because they’re not inhabiting
Earth.
 Rather than telling a story entirely with subtitles or strange,
unidentifiable made-up lettering on walls, we wanted to tie in a visual
symbolism to make certain elements clear to players without having
to rely on text. Although we’ll also have text, the symbolic language
in our game is kind of like images from a picture book or comic and a
means to tell stories non-textually.

The story of Rite of Ilk – two children sent to redeem an entire

culture in the eyes of the gods – is a heavy one. What do you hope
players take away from it?

Although their Ilk, ancestors, and the Gods all paved out Mokh and
Tarh’s road for them to take, the real journey is about finding yourself
and your own path, together with someone else. When it really comes
down to it, albeit likely a lot less dramatic, it’s not all that different
from your journey to maturity in the real world.

Why did you choose Unreal Engine 4? Are there any unexpected
benefits or challenges to using the engine?

Unreal Engine 4 is powerful and gives us plenty of options to work

with. If it’s about creating shaders or working with Blueprints, to a
certain extent, it’s all doable by designers and artists. Prototyping
is done quickly and there is a lot of optimization that is done by the
engine itself under the hood. It gives us enough freedom without
making us feel helpless. We like to create high quality games and
Unreal Engine provides you with the ability to create high quality
content.
Has the Dev Grant allowed you to do anything you otherwise would
not have been able to?
It allowed us to pay for our trip to GDC in San Francisco and offered
us a bit of financial leeway. It’s expensive to develop games, which
rings truer the bigger your team is. We’re a crew of 6+ people and
the financial support from a grant clearly doesn’t pay for all of our
expenses, but sure as hell bites off parts.
At that point in time, we wouldn’t have been able to attend GDC
without the Dev Grant. We are very grateful and feel that the grant has
not only helped us financially, but it also instilled us with confidence.

***

For more on Rite of Ilk, follow the team on Twitter and Facebook, or check
out their development blog.
 Contributors
ALEX FLANNERY is a graphic designer and
illustrator from New Jersey. In addition to his
graphic work, he screenprints original art,
apparel and others wares under the moniker
Red Robot Co. Alex can be found at a New Jersey
Devils game or binge-watching The X-Files.
Follow him on Instragram @ohflannery
STU HORVATH is the editor in chief of
Unwinnable. He reads a lot, drinks whiskey and
spends his free time calling up demons. Follow
him on Twitter @StuHorvath
GAVIN CRAIG is a writer and critic who lives
outside of Washington, D.C. Follow him on
Twitter @CraigGav
MEGAN CONDIS is an Assistant Professor of
English at Stephen F. Austin State University.
Her book project, Gaming Masculinity: Trolls,
Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online
Culture, is under contract with the University
of Iowa Press.
CASEY LYNCH is editorial director of Square
Enix where he works on Tomb Raider, Deus Ex,
Hitman and more. His first metal show was
Anthrax, Testament, and Metal Church in 1987.
Djent with him on Twitter @Lynchtacular
BROCK WILBUR is an author and comedian
from Los Angeles who you can follow
@brockwilbur on most social media platforms
and at brockwilbur.com
JASON MCMASTER is a writer and editor
with a lifelong passion for games. When he isn’t
working on Unwinnable, he’s either on his PC
or playing a board game. Follow him on Twitter
@mcmaster
AGUSTIN LOPEZ is an author, designer and
educator living in Brooklyn, New York. He
has been published in Motherboard, Thought
Catalog, and more. You can see his work at
agustinlopez.com.
ARON GARST is a Los Angeles-based writer
who loves everything about gaming, garlic bell
pepper chicken and the San Francisco Giants.
He also loves the idea of inside jokes and hopes
to be part of one someday.
MICHAEL CALIA lives in New Jersey with his
preternaturally patient wife and their son and
dog.
Illustrations
All screenshots, film stills and promotional
images courtesy of their copyright
holders. All photography is in the public
domain unless otherwise noted. Original
works and Creative Commons licenses
below.
Cover: Alex Flannery

DEIRDRE COYLE is a goth living in Brooklyn.

Find her at deirdrecoyle.com or on Twitter
@DeirdreKoala. October Unsolvable Solution
MATT MARRONE is a senior MLB editor at
ESPN.com. He has been Unwinnable’s reigning
Rookie of the Year since 2011. You can follow
him on Twitter @thebigm.

SARA CLEMENS thinks too much about

things, generally. She runs a site called
Videodame and retweets stuff on Twitter
@thesaraclemens

ROB RICH has loved videogames since the

80s and has the good fortune to be able to
write about them. Catch his rants on Twitter at
@RobsteinOne