Reconnect Recap - w/e 29th June
A weekly newsletter highlighting some of the best articles to feature on Reconnect in the past week.
Kia Ora folks
It’s been a busy week, and not just because I’m back at work, but because the most recent Steam Sale is destroying my inbox. All because I have a bad habit of wish listing far too many games.
Welcome to another issue of the Reconnect Recap, the companion newsletter to the website Reconnect. An aggregation platform of over 250 different game blogs covering a variety of topics, if you're even in the mood to read something interested head on over!
This week, we’re diving into Roblox, linguistics, Hitman, and my favourite yellow console!
Let’s dig in.
Great Write Ups
- reviews their experience with 2011’s L.A. Noire in a surprising homage to a great video essay.
When Square Enix Collapsed: TimeExtension has a neat insight from composer Nobuo Uematsu about how Square operated in the early 2000’s and what happened after Sakuguchi left.
Don’t Panic it’s Yellow: In an wonderful interview about my favourite yellow handheld gaming device,
had a conversation with Panic’s Director of Special Projects about how the the little handheld came to be.AI could invent new ways to experience games: I’ve not kept my thoughts on AI hidden, I’ve got plenty of concerns about Generative AI, but there are plenty of other uses for AI that stand to benefit the industry, one such idea posited by
talks us through a personalised experience layer that could improve the experience of gamers.Roblox is for protesting now: I’m too old for Roblox and it’s popularity is regularly reminding me of my age, however I find the subject matter interesting, apparently according to
, a newsletter about being a parent in the gaming space, anti-ICE and Trump game experiences are popping up in droves on the game creating platform.Roblox is still a haven for sexual abuse: As mentioned above, i’m too old for this game, but through osmosis I know three things about it. It’s played by a lot of kids, it contains games with millions of active daily players, and it’s a hotbed of sexual exploitation. Aftermath covers yet another round of lawsuits focussed around sexual misconduct towards children in the game.
Graph go up: My day job is data and analytics, and so it takes a lot for me to actually appreciate a good graph.
over at Gamefile shows us just how much EA CEO is getting paid in comparison to their workers. It’s not a pretty picture, but it is an impressive graph.The Duke, revisited: I never had an original Xbox, but played my friends regularly.
revisits and reviews the original big box Microsoft stepped into the gaming space with.Flushing game assets down the drain:
talks to IO CEO Hakan Abrak about their approach to the Hitman games and goal to reduce wasteful development.Trying to woo a date with an appliance with abandonment issues: GearsRealm talks us through their experience with Date Everything.
Acronyms as a service: Game Wisdom explains the difference between Games as a Service (GaaS) and Games as an Experience (GaaE), and how they overlap.
Fun Tidbits
Epic Games commissions a developer to create a game demo that’s identical across Unity and Unreal, to help Unity developers make the switch.
Bandai Namco is eager to preserve its history of arcade games and have gamers playing them again.
Get your head around grammar with Mario, a fun linguistic educational piece by
.Light guns have AI now, see this successful kickstarter bring back the arcade classic, with AI.
What does Street Fighter, Orville Peck, Jason Mamoa and 50 Cent have in common?
The game boy camera add on that has a focal distance of 3,000 meters.
I’m sad to report that the three original Game Boy cartridges I have in the house are not worth over $4000 usd, but these games are.
PSA: Game cartridges should be plugged in every 5-10 years. That is all.
A rare game, just for Japanese Flip phones, has been preserved.
AI told people that SUDA51 is dead, when he is in fact, very alive.
Final Fantasy Mythic Quest is coming to a Sega Mega Drive near you.
Writer Recap
This week I wanted to highlight
from Magnvs’ RPG Journey. Magnvs loves an RPG and pumps out an obscene amount of articles all about them. From their history of French RPGs to the illustrator behind some of Koei’s older games, there is always a fascinating level of detail in their articles.Go give them a follow.
Housekeeping
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Thanks a lot for your kindness, I'm really happy whenever I see more people interested in topics related to videogame RPG history.
Thank you so much for the shout-out, Alex, it means a lot. It's an honor to be in such good company 😊