Sundays are for working out what to do with about 200 apples and 50 pears. The parks round here are full of semi-forgotten fruit trees, so we went out last weekend and gathered a few buckets. It has now dawned on me that if I don’t eat apples with every meal and also possibly light fires with them, bathe in their juices and pound them up to serve as a low-grade polyfiller, my flat will soon be overtaken by rats, weevils and feral brewers.

I’ll probably take a load to a food bank. I hear apples keep pretty well when they’re fresh-picked, at least, but pears are treacherous, adamantium-hard one day and a sopping disaster the next. Anyway, here is some internet writing that doesn’t significantly mention fruit at all.

Let’s begin with this brief but interesting essay from InFlux developer Joe Wintergreen about the Metal Gear Solid 3 remake’s use of photogrammetry.

The recent Metal Gear Solid 3 remake uses a lot of Quixel Megascans (a mostly-free library of ultra-high-fidelity photogrammetry), which I don’t think matters at all in itself, but it’s funny that the bit of wood Snake bites down on when he splints his elbow is 100% identical to a plank you roll over all the time in InFlux Redux, and it’s interesting how a game full of such bespoke assets gets a remake that isn’t.

In a photorealistic-ish style, maybe it doesn’t really matter anymore whose “photos” (or scans) you use for commonplace objects. But it doesn’t feel great that everything onscreen was once a bespoke work of art in itself, and now mostly is not, in what is notionally a faithful remake.

I’m going to sneak in a piece of videogame journalism from a little longer ago in August – Claire Evans on the surprisingly long history of “interactive cinema”. The second half is a mini-profile of Sam Barlow. I’m including this partly because Road To Empress came out this week, and partly because when I googled “interactive cinema” I came across this this 2012 paper by an author who seems familiar somehow. Anyway, here is Evans with some vintage Ebert:

Interfilm would go on to shoot four more interactive movie-games. The second, Mr. Payback, written by Back to the Future’s Bob Gale, starred soap star Billy Warlock as a bionic man who disciplines jerks: audiences could make Mr. Payback force an executive to eat from a dog dish full of monkey brains, for example. As with I’m Your Man, a ticket to Mr. Payback included repeat viewings of the movie, so audiences could try alternative punishments–although film critic Gene Siskel, of Siskel and Ebert, swore on their show he’d have paid twice as much to see it only once. “This is not a movie,” Ebert, who would later name Mr. Payback the worst film of 1995, agreed. “A movie acts on you.”

Rightwing figurehead and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was shot and killed this week. There has been a lot of misinformation and cynical speculation about the suspected killer’s identity and motives, some of it fomented by symbols reportedly found on the shooter’s bullets, which include an apparent Helldivers 2 reference. On reflection, I don’t want to include any analysis of the suspect here as the situation is evolving. But it seems important to spotlight Kirk’s well-heeled bigotry given his lionisation by the current US political establishment and accompanying efforts to portray criticism of him as “disrespectful”. Here is a withering obituary from Elizabeth Spiers in The Nation.

Many of the facile defenses of Kirk and his legacy are predicated on the idea that it’s acceptable to spread hateful ideas advocating for the persecution of perceived enemies as long you dress them up in a posture of debate. This is just class privilege. The man who said, “Black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot” said it while wearing a nice shirt and a tie on a podcast instead of tattered overalls in the parking lot of a rural Walmart. That does not make it any less racist.

Over on the London Review of Books blog, Helen Charman writes about a comparable far right swing in UK politics.

The new home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said in May (in an interview with Michael Gove for the Spectator) that she has a ‘natural affinity for the faith, flag and family element of Blue Labour’. Her predecessor, Yvette Cooper, now foreign secretary, told Times Radio last week that she has Union Jack bunting hanging up in her garden shed. ‘People should be coming together around our flags,’ she said. When asked if people should be putting them up on motorway gantries, she replied: ‘I would put them up anywhere.’ The flags that have been appearing on motorway gantries, lampposts and roundabouts across the country are part of a campaign, ‘Operation Raise the Colours’, organised by known far-right extremists. The BBC asked Keir Starmer if this was racist or patriotic. ‘I’m a supporter of flags,’ the prime minister said.

Downstairs at Eurogamer, Connor Makar writes about Saudi Arabia’s investment in Evo and other esports institutions in the context of the country’s track record for human rights abuses. Good sturdy beat reporter commentary.

There’s no regulatory body to stop this, and no bigger fish (or frankly given the state of esports’ profitability, greater fool) to buy the tournament from its new owners. And so this is unlikely to go away, at least unless the Saudi Arabian government decides competitive gaming isn’t worth the squeeze, or that only a mere handful of fighting game fans will ever actually travel to Qiddiya without getting paid to do so.

As reported by Endless Mode, Gorillaz have relaunched their Flash game site Kong Studios. I am a somewhat guilty Gorillaz fan. I occasionally think they’re a 6/10 impression of an 8/10 idea for a fake toon pop band, but they’ve put out some great songs, and have an unrivalled knack for big name collaborations. They’ve just announced an album heavily inspired by Hindu art. This could go many ways.

My streak of stumbling on new kinks while researching the on-going payment processor crackdown on “mature” videogames continues with mechsploitation, as described by Erin.

Key to understanding the history of mechsploitation is Empty Spaces, a community of trans women whose writing, heavily revolving around exploitative power dynamics in archetypal forms (witches and dolls, angels, demons, fae, spiders and moths, and more), explores themes of sex, trauma, abuse and much more. It was this fuzzy-bordered community and its output in the early 2020s that formed the primary inspiration for WARHOUND. Additionally, it and its sister “dollposting” scene had in their own rights developed via the concept of the “combat doll” and associated pieces of fiction such as Funeral into “mechposting”, a still-extant scene which has had a great deal of overlap with mechsploitation since its inception.

Got time for a small-ish academic tome? Here are the full proceedings from this year’s inaugural Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Game Studies Conference, including papers on Black millennial fans of Yu-Gi-Oh! and the writing of and reaction to Vivienne in Dragon Age: Inquisition.

One from the archives to finish: RPS founders plus The Boy Quinns rewrite the endings of their favourite games.