Joel Auterson

There was a thing about ten years ago in games crit circles (god, maybe it was more than that, time is an onmarching army etc.) where absolutely everyone seemed to be obsessed with the idea of ludonarrative dissonance.

So I rolled credits on Star Wars Outlaws today and I have come away from it feeling far more strongly than I ever expected.

This post contains spoilers for the end of Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC.

I do this every year and I need to stop writing “hope next year is better for the industry!”

Our next game, Dave’s Word Game, comes out tomorrow.

A friend got a MacBook recently and was asking for recommendations.

I wrote this time last year that I hoped 2024 was a better year for the games industry - this has turned out not to be the case.

Bluesky is having A Moment right now, and my feed is getting busier with games industry folks.

I once had an engineer, just a few years my junior, come to me quite annoyed.

I’ve been running this website on IndieWeb principles and tech for over a year now, so I thought it was time for an updated edition.

I have lived in England for over a decade but have yet to visit the famous cliffs.

I had my last day at Emitwise yesterday, and now I’m in the odd liminal space that happens before I start my new job next week.

I got back from Japan about a month ago, and in that time I’ve had lots of people ask me for tips on places to go and things to do.

My pal Zach has this ritual when we play D&D - before we start, he rolls the D20.

As many have written, 2023 was a great year for the games themselves and a pretty dire year for the industry and the people working in it.

My “weekend project” of implementing Bluesky support into Bridgy is finally, several months later, complete!

I do most of my daily work in Vim, and by this point I find it quite hard to use anything else, but for writing that isn’t code (or, let’s be real, mostly YAML these days) it could be a lot better.

I went to see Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City the other night.

I’ve gone down into the depths these last couple of weeks with IndieWeb, POSSE and a whole bunch of other arcane terminology.

I moved from East to South London in the summer of last year.

I had a really great year in 2022.

I struggled recently to work out how to build an APK out of a native Android app without using Gradle.

I use an app called Daylio as a diary and a mood tracker.

I’m genuinely impressed that 2021 managed to be a generally worse year than 2020, for a variety of fun reasons.

2020 has been hot garbage.

After six months and £11m of public money wasted, England and Wales finally have a functional contact tracing app for COVID-19.

Notarization is required as of macOS 10.15 (Catalina), and it’s a bit of a minefield - doubly so for a Java application, or anything built outside Xcode.

I finally got around to picking up Halo: The Master Chief Collection on PC.

The newest version of macOS (well, that’s out) has caused a lot of issues for a lot of people, game developers especially.

As has become a yearly tradition, here is my list of video games I played in 2019.

I don’t do game-of-the-year lists now because games are so varied it’s nigh impossible to compare two games from different genres.

Here follows the list of all the games I played in 2017, not including the ones I only played for a few minutes or the ones I bounced straight off.

Virginia is one of the best films I’ve played this year.

In my early teens, after experiencing my first death in the family, I developed an odd fascination with the preservation of spaces.

I love games.

What a great year, eh?

My flatmate/co-host Jake bangs on my door shortly after I wake up.

This isn’t really going to be a game review.

I’ve been reading a lot about PICO-8 recently, and found it really interesting.

I’d got a little bit bored with the design on this website, and that boredom gave me no desire to write on it.

It’s been a little while since I was really excited for the release of a game.

I had great fun last month writing a Reddit bot that pretended to be DJ Khaled.

I’d wanted to make a Reddit bot for a little while, really just as a toy project, and finding the excellent PRAW library for Python (as well as finally having some time off) gave me the kick I needed to get it done.

The game development landscape has changed significantly over the last few years (understatement of the century, but whatever).

Anyone who knows me will know that I’m not really a huge fan of the beautiful game.

“Put your hands in the air.

Before I begin, I should point out: Uplift isn’t dead.

Polytron’s XBLA hit (and personal favourite of Mojang’s Notch) has finally made in onto PC in the last couple of weeks.