#8: 100 Carts and 100 Albums
A September dump of game related content and a cool demo
I started a new personal project. Historically, this short sentence was a curse. It doomed me to never finish. The detritus of Untitled Documents and unread books and clever domain registrations and empty repos lies in my wake. For once, this detritus has become fertile and I have the will to see it flower.
As someone that listens to a ton of music, a lot of it novel, I have never tried my hand at writing about it in any meaningful way. So I’m challenging myself to write about my favourite and most important (avoiding the word ‘best’ here) albums. 100 of them. I started collating the list already, with 62 definite and about 89 borderline maybes. There’s a spreadsheet, so you know it’s serious.
They say the best music is the music you heard when you were 16 and there is some of that. The spreadsheet charts, though, reveal a large swath of albums from the period between 2008 and 2012. It makes sense. It was a time of profound change in my life, and also in the broader electronic music scene (and online too.) This confluence produced many memorable albums for me, in strong defiance of that teenage music trope.
And because it’s music from a little over a decade ago, a lot of the musicians are still active. By pure coincidence, four1 of those artists released or announced new albums this week alone. Including the previously mentioned and somewhat anticipated Oli XL “album” — or first part of one – Lick the Lens Pt. 1.
Five if you count the Sherelle drum and bass remix of… a Metronomy track from 2008?! I did love that Metronomy album many years ago, though it remains on the borderline list.
It is September. Back to school tomorrow morning. I’ve been playing UFO 50 a lot and accumulating browser tabs, so here is a dump of some on-theme links:
A nice little photo essay, with video, about an old, surviving arcade in China’s Shenyang. This isn’t rhythm games and card scanners; it’s remnants from the 90s, battered and worn, played by equally battered and worn oldtimers.
Read Only Memo is a nice little digest about emulation which comes a little over once a month and the latest issue digs into the first ever emulator of the (obscure) Pioneer LaserActive.
The mid-'90s promise of FULL MOTION VIDEO GAMEPLAY may be quaint as hell today, but it's the reason the LaserActive has been impossible to emulate for 30 years. And it still would be today, if Nemesis hadn't spent much of the 21st century proactively collecting Sega hardware and Mega LD games with the goal of one day preserving them.
I Bought 100 Copies of Mario Paint for the Art
Putting it upfront that I did not like this video. The way it was put together, starting off with a lack of basic knowledge about how Mario Paint works, was tedious. Yet, the concept of digging out long lost art and music from forgotten Mario Paint carts is great. Even if most of it was a failure.
That said, I do wonder what kinds of cities one can find on the many SNES SimCity carts out there.
The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made (archive link)
Duncan Fyfe wrote about Disco Elysium for FT earlier this month:
Klindžić, a cheerful Croatian with vibrant purple hair, said she was starting to wonder if there is a scientific basis for curses. “Everyone who has had an encounter with this gravitational field of Disco Elysium has been damaged in some way,” she explained. “I do believe that when you have an object so powerful, probabilities in its surroundings are no longer random.” She said Disco’s creators used to talk about the game as an “event”, in the same sense that a war or the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb are events. “When you’re gambling with Disco Elysium, you’re more likely to roll snake eyes.”
Maybe a somewhat unpopular opinion, but I didn’t like Disco Elysium. I liked the world building, the writing, the inner monologues all right. I get how it drew people in. The actual experience of playing the game, which it ostensibly is, never gripped me.
There’s about a half dozen spiritual successors to Disco in the works currently. I hope one of them has more game.
Why 'Silksong,' Team Cherry's Sequel to 'Hollow Knight,' Took So Long to Make - Bloomberg
I have not played Hollow Knight so I have no skin in the game, though seeing the years of unreasonable fan excitement combined with this article’s revelations of the dev process has left me with whiplash:
Staying small also meant eschewing the production practices commonplace at many game-development studios.
“What is Jira?” Gibson said when I asked if they used the task-management application.
“Is it a software?” Pellen said, adding that they’d briefly used Trello before their account was deactivated because they didn’t use it enough.
Oh the luxury! To be free to build and refine without process and deadline. In an industry being plagued by layoffs and cost cutting! Good for them.
Anyway, here’s a wicked old school demo from assembly 2025
Surprisingly, it was second in its category. First place was technically proficient too, I just don’t think it’s as cool.
Welcome to the season.
Signing off, sometimes.