A while ago I wrote about management sims. They’re video games that are designed with one goal in mind: to have the player continually manage things, be they space colonies or theme parks or whole civilisations, while striving to make the process as efficient or grand as possible. These games basically end when you’ve completed what you set out to do. Once you’ve successfully enabled life on Mars, what other worlds are there to conquer?

The holiday season has led me to reflect on tradition, or rather, the seemingly random deployment of tradition despite, perhaps, the getting-tired of said tradition. One might conclude that one isn’t tired of said tradition after all, since it continues to be perpetuated. Needless to say, that led me to think about zombies.

Well, I like the Dead or Alive series of fighting games. I don’t know if it’s my favourite — Mortal Kombat or Injustice might take that spot in my mind palace — but Dead or Alive is up there. My first exposure to the series was in a YouTube video about it; it was about how the first game in the series was made. Lo and behold, the next time I was at the local game store, I found DoA2 for the PS2 right there, ripe for the picking. And I found it pretty fun.

It’s not news that Pokémon is weirdly dark. Odd Pokédex entries involving kidnappings and children’s souls aside, the very concept of getting slave animals to fight each other is troubling, especially when the Mystery Dungeon games have shown us that they’re sentient enough to form societies and engage in commerce. I bet Kecleon doesn’t appreciate having to abandon their thriving store in order to be forced into combat. And not only that, various criminal organisations are always out to steal the slave animals as well, and that’s another layer of mess — not to mention the apparent Pokémon war that happened at some point.

Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower is a DLC boss in Bloodborne, a FromSoftware game. That studio’s name means something in the gaming world, namely “tightly-designed action games that are cruel but fair, with insanely obscure lore.” That’s the gist of FromSoftware’s reputation. Opinions may vary, but these games are hard. People take great pride in completing them, and to complete them, you have to beat loads of bosses.

I was very late to the The Last of Us party, mainly because I didn’t have a PS4 till around when the PS5 was about to come out. I also only got the game because it was on sale, and COVID lockdowns were a harsh time until I really tried to be more productive. But I ended up enjoying it a lot, and a lot of that was because of Ellie.

Human interaction is a difficult thing to understand at the best of times. When Among Us blew up in 2018, it was an unstoppable phenomenon across the gaming and streaming worlds. Everyone wanted to play it with their friends, and as such it obviously become more and more popular. 

Dear Elden Ring,