A Retraction or Two (September 2026)
It’s September 21st as I write this sentence and I’ve written naff all. I’m over seeing Margaret and enjoying life. Boston has cool museums and restaurants and video game-forward places. We’ve enjoyed sitting in the flat and playing on the Nintendo Switch 2; I’m not yet going to say which game it is that’s held our attention so much, because I’ve already covered it. I will say that it requires a re-appraisal, however.
ALRIGHT I’LL TELL YOU review
I just read what I wrote about Mario Kart World, and I feel strange, because everything that I wrote about it in a negative light is still true: the connected continent ruins Grand Prix as a concept; I will never, ever, give a toss about the free roam challenges, and the emphasis on jumps and grinds on walls and whatever else in the environment is too complex for the casual crowd and anyone who values their own mortality. I’ve watched speedruns of Mario Kart World and it’s all very impressive stuff, but I’m not going to be comfortably tricking onto and off of rock formations any time soon. It’s finnicky, and dare I say not fun.
However, the review I wrote previously was me playing the game solo, and now I’ve been playing it with Margaret and anyone else we’ve been able to rope in, and - do you know what? We’ve been having fun. It’s still rock hard if you aren’t laser-focused on shortcuts, but we’ve had some success at winning and, when we haven’t, we’ve enjoyed repeat plays of the various Grand Prix’ and Knockout Tours. Knockout Tour has been the most fun for us; I maintain that it’s the best use of the new format.
Me noticing that Mario Kart World is a ‘new format’ feels crucial to the reappraisal. Margaret pointed out that my initial bouncing off of World (despite rinsing it for about a week of playing nothing else) could have been down to me expecting more of something like Mario Kart 8, and not getting it. I think there’s something in this; 8 Deluxe is the apex of the ‘classic’ Mario Kart setup of a linear track-based Grand Prix structure, and there’s nowhere that they could have gone from there, if I’m being honest. I’d have been disappointed if World ended up being ‘more of the same’. I wrote a load of shite before, is my point.
Only some of Mario Kart World works well, but I respect the new direction. Nintendo the company tried something else, which they had to. The only thing that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is missing at this point is an unlock progression system, and choosing not to put that into the re-release of 8 when the Wii U had it was and remains baffling. Mario Kart World, for all of its imperfections, has oodles and oodles of unlocks across the various modes. It’s unfortunate that I can’t be bothered with the free roam challenges for mirror mode, but there’s plenty of characters and costumes for the characters to unlock across Grand Prix and Knockout Tour, and I enjoy that the Special Cup requires you to rinse the rest of the cups and that additional routes in Knockout Tour require you to rinse the rest of the routes. When Rainbow Road is not on screen, players should be asking, ‘where’s Rainbow Road?’. The new Rainbow Road is as fun and frustrating as I’ve come to expect.
I looked it up and VS Mode is how you set up ‘classic’ 3-lap races. I’m a doo-doo. But I maintain that Mario Kart World is a tentative step towards whatever form Mario Kart is to take next. Nintendo are updating it, there are ????? listings for Knockout Tour routes that we didn’t unlock and we looked it up and supposedly they’re coming soon. That’s good! I’m excited for more routes, and, hopefully, cups.
Mario Kart World is more than okay. It’s not brilliant, or great, but it is good, and the multiplayer experience of ‘I love you, but we are at war’ that has been in Mario Kart’s DNA since forever has it pop the fuck off. In that sense, World is not, maybe, all that different to the other Mario Karts.
Forgive me Daddy, for I have sinned. Our Bowser, who art in castle, hallowed be thy name. By Mushroom Kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our lap-ly shell, and deliver us from the lightning that shrinks you down and proper kills your speed like and is piss annoying when it happens in mid-air and you fall off the map and respawn. Wahoo.
Shatter Remastered Deluxe impressions (Pikpok, 2022, Android, multiplatform)
I talked about the Steam version of this last month and how that’s a lot of colorful fun as Arkanoid but with bosses and bangers. All that remains true. I’ve been playing the Android version of the remaster, though, and it’s nice to have a pick-up-and-play version of it. I have nothing profound to say about Shatter, it’s a more-ish serial-numbers-filed-off spruce-up of a proper classic. I read reviews on Steam that suggested that the controls were less precise as a result of mobile supposedly being the lead platform, but I’ve been using a controller with the Android version, and it’s been fine to control.
Arkanoid now at Boston MA’s Versus, an arcade bar
The arcade bar Versus has long been a haunt of Margaret and I, but it’s also been a few months since we were last there. As a result, I was delighted to find that it now has an Arkanoid machine. One that, when we went, had wobbly graphics and a slightly too sensitive control knob (just like your dad has), but an Arkanoid machine nonetheless. Machines at Versus get maintenance weekly, but that doesn’t stop us from running into bad luck. There’s a lot of bad luck running around. Did you know, for example, that, until last week, the last evacuation of the Institute for Contemporary Art was two years ago?
Arkanoid itself is simple to run in MAME on anything, but, because of the control knob, a directional pad is too sensitive for it, so it’s not as much fun. I’ve had better luck with a Commodore 64 port, mind you, and it works the same.
I did a dozy and bought an iPad Air for art
In a former life, I made zines. I’m not good at art, I’m at the level of ‘impressionism because anything else is beyond me’, but it brings me great joy to do art for art’s sake. A while ago, I bought a cheap Wacom tablet, and it was okay, and I did some things with it, but I wanted something portable, that I didn’t have to plug in anywhere else, with a colorful screen. The Wacom had the texture of paper, and I grew to viscerally hate it, because I viscerally hate the texture of paper.
I spent far too much on the iPad, but I’ve stuck Procreate on it, and I now know why Procreate on an iPad is the thing that artists use to do digital work. I’ve done a couple of things that I’m quietly happy with. I’m not thrilled that it’s an Apple device, but I like that it’s enabling me to make things purely for me. That I’m doing things for me; the art, this newsletter, makes me happy.
An industrial revolution
Does it? When I’m away with Margaret, I prefer enjoying our time together, or, when we’re apart and I’m feeling listless, I prefer feeling listless to putting the newsletter together. I started this project to play more games at a time in my life where there wasn’t much going on in it. Now, there’s plenty going on in my life, and other things to take up my attention, and to apply myself to. Back then, a monthly newsletter project kept me on track when I needed it, whereas now, a monthly newsletter keeps me on track, and away from anything else.
Will the newsletter continue? Not on a strict schedule. The decomposing remains of society necessitate that I move it to a weekly schedule, but I neither have the energy, will, or subscription audience to justify it. I first noticed this when I couldn’t be fucked watching or covering Gamescom starring Geoff Keighley, a man who, after abandoning all pretense of caring about nurturing young game development talent in winding down the Game Awards’ Future Class initiative, giving Hideo Kojima’s tiresome auteur image an ounce of credence, and adding dreadful character appearances in the Game Awards to the Muppets canon, I have no time for him, and no interest in his work. This was, and is, a video game newsletter, but I can’t abide the video game culture cycle, and the paragraph above this one illustrates why the newsletter isn’t wall-to-wall licenced Game Boy Advance platformers; I’d never leave the house.
I often think about the writers tossed from a regular wage at a going concern and forced into structuring and legally registering a business by the heavy hand of local tax authorities. We can call this ‘going independent’, in an attempt to convince ourselves that we have control amidst ongoing efforts from the singularly obscenely rich individuals, and corporations, to make the planet first unaffordable and then uninhabitable, but it still is what it is. I empathize with those of us ejected from the going concerns that have been twisted into these shambling corporations, with a singularly obscene focus on profit pushed forward by ever-rightward politics poorly disguised as apolitics, but no-one should have to file their own taxes in order to live. For the Americans nesting amongst us, no-one should have to file their own taxes with irregular, unreliable income, in order to live.
No matter how inhabitable and unaffordable the world, a passion project needs passion. My passion comes and goes, and so will the newsletter. The Rosenbergs were framed. Universal basic income now. Smuggle radical ideas into mainstream work. Sever cables under deep sea.
As I leap out of the window.
See you at some stage.
Although, as parting, anticlimactic developments, it’s worth pointing out that, out there in fan project land, there’s an Android port of the IOS version of The Binding of Isaac knocking out there on a Discord server.
What I’m excited about is STEP ON IT, a fan remake of Lego Racers (High Voltage Software, 1999, PC, multiplatform) from itch dot eye oh user Navigator Sharp (I don’t know, I don’t name them). I’ve had a go on the Android version and, though trace amounts of nostalgia may be influencing me on this, I think it’s lovely. There is a bug where the controller presets of Modern and Classic don’t work on both an AYN Thor and a Retroid Pocket Nova, but you can map the controls yourself, and bob’s your knob.
But enough about that; LEGO Racers is a delightful kart racer that lets you build a kart out of LEGO (no!) and play as silly minifigures with named all silly like Joan of Kart. Up against your Mario Kart Worlds and your Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, it might appear to lack a certain whizz and a bang, but fun me if ‘LEGO Kart racer’ isn’t something that this dastard world needed, needs; and now you can play it on anything. In a web browser, for goodness sake. This particular take on it is nice, because any visual improvements come from how the original assets are rendered, not from changes to the assets themselves.
I can’t, in all good honesty, claim to care or be excited by promises of cut content, or six player online multiplayer. I’m thrilled that a delightful game is being exhumed for a new audience.
Margaret is a LEGO-head. I write this beside and behind stacks of unboxed and boxed sets. She’s bought me the LEGO Game Boy as a gift, and I’ve seeded that the PlayStation set would be a wonderful follow-up. I had one as a wee urchin, I played LEGO Racers on it in situ, and as I stray further and further from the point in my life where I could sit and play LEGO Racers all day, and further from the point now where I can sit and write about it, it makes me reflect on how good LEGO Racers was, how much I’m happy to have shared it with you, and how happy I’ll be to share it with Margaret.
That’s it, really; I don’t want to think about everything that Geoff Keighley and Hideo Kojima signify about the video game industry; its hollywood-ification, its relentless march of technological progress, its have-your-spoonful-of-artificial intelligence-so-you-can’t-afford-the-hobby-ness of it all. I want to play some good games, as and when is timely and appropriate, and I don’t feel the need to hold myself accountable to produce regular thin-as-paste opinions at this time.
Capitalist Overlord Raccoons will return at irregular intervals. Probably.