2243: Issue 2 of the Digitally Downloaded Magazine is Now Available

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Hello! I’m rather pleased to announce that, as the header says, the second edition of the Digitally Downloaded magazine, put together by me and Mr Matt Sainsbury (from the site of the same name), is now available. You can read it here, or hopefully it will embed correctly below.

The topic is “fanservice”, but we’re not limiting ourselves to the tits and ass variety of fanservice; no, we take on fanservice in all its forms, including life and hometown as a deliberate aesthetic choice, continuity fanservice, plain ol’ titillation and fanservice as characterisation.

The specific games we cover in the magazine range from Senran Kagura to Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F via Final Fantasy XIV and Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing Transformed — quite an eclectic mix of games to cover, I think you’ll agree. There’s also an interesting interview with some Aussie developers who are making their own take on the Zero Escape/Danganronpa formula and deliberately incorporating fanservice for an authentically Japanese-style feel, plus some lovely pictures of Digitally Downloaded mascot Danica “DeeDee” Dee.

I’m really pleased with how this project is coming together, and response to the magazine so far has been good. With each issue, we’ll try something new, and hopefully we’ll be able to make this a long-running feature. I’m certainly having a blast doing games writing the way it used to be done… or rather, a distinctly 21st century take on print format games writing.

Next issue we’ll be covering the thorny topic of “not-games” — those experiences that critics are quick to (often unreasonably) brand “not a game” for not falling into neat genre categories, or perhaps not incorporating traditional “gameplay” in the way you might expect. Yes, we’ll be exploring the walking simulators, software toys, visual novels and other interesting interactive entertainment experiences of the world in an attempt to figure out why these titles “not being games” bothers some people quite so much.

Matt and I hope you enjoy the magazine; please share it around and let people know about it! If you like what you see, please consider throwing us a few quid via Patreon; you can find Matt’s page here, and mine here.

2207: Proudly Flying the Flag for the Magazine Format

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Ladies and gents, I’m pleased to announce the very first issue of Digitally Downloaded: The Magazine, put together as a collaborative effort between me and Matt Sainsbury, head honcho of the site of the same name.

You can read the issue here for free, or hopefully it will embed below if the magic of the Internet does its thing properly:

The magazine is something Matt and I have been kicking around for a while now. We both have a background in print publications, and both have a strong preference towards the sort of long-form pieces you get in magazines. This kind of format is something which clickbait sites tend to discourage these days unless they’re being particularly provocative with the things they’re saying at length, so really starting this magazine was an opportunity for us to create something that we would want to read.

The broad intention behind the magazine is to “theme” each issue around a particular subject, then focus in on that subject with a main feature and a series of articles about games that typify the subject. In the inaugural issue, we went for the concept of the unreliable narrator: an established trope in literature, but one that games are just starting to get to grips with. Our investigations took us across the world, from Japanese visual novel Steins;Gate to “walking simulator” Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture via the chaotic genius of Deadly Premonition.

There are doubtless some kinks to work out (most notably the fact that the web-based reader appears to inexplicably cut some of the letters off on some of the page footers, seemingly at random, despite the source PDF looking just fine) but we’re planning on making this a regular — hopefully monthly — thing going forward, and we hope you’ll support and enjoy it.

A pre-emptive thank you for taking the time to read through our hard work, then, and we look forward to having more to share with you in the near future!

1268: Printing Press

Print media is very much on the way out, particularly in the games industry, but I enjoy keeping some around for old times’ sake.

Specifically, as I’ve probably mentioned a few times before, I have several back issues of the now defunct PC Zone magazine on my shelf, each of which contains a single article that I wrote on a freelance basis — mostly game walkthroughs, because no-one likes writing those.

Occasionally I like to have a flip through those old magazines. It’s nice to look back on what the games industry looked like nearly 20 years ago (jeez) and see what people were excited about. It’s also interesting to ponder which grand plans came to fruition and which didn’t; which supposedly “big games” ended up being massive successes, and which were big wet farts.

One of the most interesting things about reading an old magazine in 2013, though, is realising what an impact the Internet has had on our brains. More than once I caught myself reading something in one of these old Zones and habitually looking to the end of the article for the comments section. Of course, being a magazine, there is no comments section (unless you scribble on the page yourself) and thus this is a stupid thing to do, but I found it interesting that the way The Internet works is now so firmly ingrained into my brain that I just do things like that on reflex.

The letters pages are also interesting to look at. One of the most fascinating things I rediscovered recently is that people have been whingeing about tacked-on multiplayer modes ever since 1997 — one chap got a Letter of the Month award for complaining about how X-Wing vs Tie Fighter wasn’t as good as either X-Wing or Tie Fighter because it didn’t have the story-driven campaigns of its predecessors. (He had a point.)

The other one that raised a bit of a smile was a selection of gentlemen defending the fact that they found Lara Croft attractive — yes, the low-poly, big-lipped, pyramid-breasted Lara from 1997, not the gritty one from the recent reboot. Of all things, it brought to mind the popular otaku discussion of whether “2D” or “3D” is better. (Inevitably, to most otaku, the answer is “2D”, but that’s a topic for another day, I think.) “Lara is a collection of pixels,” runs the slightly flawed argument, “and Pamela Anderson is just a collection of pixels or ink on a page, because none of us are ever likely to actually meet her.” Well, true, I guess, but… oh, let’s not get into that now.

Anyway. If you happen to have any old magazines lying around, think twice before you throw them out; they make interesting cultural artifacts to look back on, as they take a snapshot of how people thought and felt at a particular point in time. They’re also something to do on the toilet on the off-chance all the electronic devices in your house are out of battery.