Some days you pop the hatch of your bathysphere and realise you’re about to head off on your 30th dive! Thank you so much to everyone who’s come along.

Today, Chris is pondering cities made up of pieces, while Florence waits for the leaves to change, and Keith reads up on sociolinguistics.

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The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

All the Time in the World is described as a “short environmental metroidvania” in which the core game mechanic is…waiting. Waiting for the lake to freeze in winter, for the buds to unfurl in spring. You wait for seasons to pass so that the landscape changes and you can traverse different areas. It’s a welcome change of pace. Even better, it’s free and playable in browser on itch. FSN

Not a game per se, but Fellow makes extremely expensive coffee equipment that often has video games built into it. I want this stuff very much, but not at that price. CD

Interesting things

I’m reading Surfing Samurai Robots at the moment. It’s a quirky-crime novel from the 1980s. I remember this book from when I was a kid, because the English editions had wonderful covers. The book - and the series - is a pastiche of Philip Marlowe, with a sci-fi twist. It’s extremely out of print, but for all its weirdness it’s a gateway to 1980s LA and being a kid and getting interested in outer space and all that stuff. It’s written by Mel Gilden, and it’s very easy to track down second hand. If you get a copy with a UK cover, ping me.

(Philip Marlowe was my introduction to literary style, BTW. My dad once read us kids a section from one of the books where Marlowe is driving along the coast and watching boats whip past, just because he loved the way the descriptions felt to read aloud. A five star memory.)CD

May I recommend Wheels & Heels, apparently the world’s largest collection of dolls and toy cars, located in Kraków. The walls are lined with every conceivable miniature car and Barbie doll; it’s a surreal experience. My favourite was “Alfred Hitchcock The Birds Barbie.” FSN

Recently, someone on Tiktok shared the suggested summer reading lists for incoming English Literature students at Oxford University. On the list was the book Sociolinguistics: An introduction to Language and Society by Peter Trudgill, which I immediately bought on eBay because it’s something I know nothing about, but which impacts on video games in a number of ways, including localisation of game dialogue, and the widespread use of jargon and slang in game development and fandom communities. It’s also a surprisingly easy and fascinating read. KS

Essay: A city, in pieces

This morning a friend sent me a link to a website called You are Listening to LAX, where... well, go and check it out for yourself. I love this kind of thing, taking elements of a city to spin them out into something new and unexpected and transporting.

And over the years I’ve started to think this is the best way to capture a city’s soul. I’ve been in love with cities as long as I’ve been in love with games, I reckon, and I spent years looking for the perfect videogame city. I found a bunch of candidates: Pacific City in Crackdown is an ideal imagined city, I think, a playground of verticality where individual neighborhoods reveal their character by the way you move across them. Jet Set Radio Future is a take on Tokyo so overpowering that the few times I’ve been to the actual city in question, I’ve felt like I was stumbling from one involuntary memory to another.

But Jet Set Radio Future actually put me onto a new path. This game’s version of Tokyo isn’t an open world. It’s a series of maps that connect. It’s discrete neighborhoods.  And these maps or neighborhoods all have their own moods, and even their own times of day. For me, this captures the reality of a city much better than an open world, because it seems to acknowledge the between-places in a city, the places you move through to reach somewhere else, and it acknowledges them by removing them from the game itself so they move into your imagination.

This has made me realise that maybe the videogame city isn’t one game and one city, but a bunch of aspects of cities that come from various games. A city is not one thing but a collection of things, like those weird deep ocean fish that are actually a gaggle of different fish who have come together with a common purpose.

You are Listening to LAX is not a game, not really, but it feels like it would be an ideal part of this jigsaw city. And just this week I found a couple of other parts too. Over the weekend my daughter and I got very much back into Tokyo Highway, which is probably our favourite boardgame. Tokyo Highway is a sort of balancing/planning/urban negotiation challenge in which you compete with other players to build highways, with the aim that your network crosses other networks, earning you points along the way. My daughter and I play with heavily modified rules, but it’s a treat to play and it captures the complexity of cities and their infrastructures. You always end up with a beautiful tangle.

Then, having been enjoying the new Skate quite a bit recently, I returned to The Ramp, a lovely minimalist skating game that doesn’t offer a city or complex levels, but instead gives you a few spots to skate around: a ramp, of course, but also an abandoned swimming pool and that kind of thing. 

Compared to Tokyo Highway, The Ramp felt like a close-up. I’d come here - on the highway - and now I was settling down for a bit to skate and immerse myself in a specific, highly limited space. It’s not even a neighborhood, but rather an aspect of a neighborhood, a single feature of the city that has captivated me and held me for a few hours.

The joy of this videogame city is that it is never complete. And it doesn’t have to be. I will keep adding new parts to it as long as I am playing games and being sent links and wandering the real cities of the world. It cannot be contained, or mapped, or fully owned or described. And that’s brilliant. CD

Retrospective adventures

Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, various games publishers produced catalogues to promote their latest titles for the Atari 2600, and they always shared a strong aesthetic with the legendary cartridge box art of the era. This is an Activision catalogue from 1981 featuring 12 new titles including Fishing Derby by David Crane (Pitfall, Little Computer People) and Bob Whitehead (Video Chess, Chopper Command). The catalogue also features short biographies of its game designers, which was rare at the time. I love how striking the cover is with the 3D effect making the games leap from the page. The website AtariAge has scans of many catalogues from the era. KS