We wax philosophical at the Daydreamcast this week, touching on the state of modern game design, the trend of serialisation, the practice of modding, what really constitutes a video game, the ethics of stealing eggs out of monster brothels, and the severely phallic nature of Tetris – that’s right, all the questions that have been keeping you up at night. Brogan gets caught playing a Star Wars game with Jedi: Fallen Order but talks his way out of it by calling it a Sekiro-like. Meanwhile, Pavlos sings the praises of the best Pokémon game since Pokémon was good, Capcom’s genre experiment Monster Hunter Stories. The meat of the episode is dedicated to 2008’s Mirror’s Edge: We give a detailed breakdown of its striking aesthetical achievements, its Lola rennt-inspired runner/parcours-style gameplay, and the numerous contradictions within the – undoubtedly creative – design proposal it puts forward. Indicative of a lot of bigger indie games today, Mirror’s Edge represents a brief period in time where Electronic Arts mysteriously defied their pecuniary-minded nature and funded several original projects; a lot of them, like Skate or Dead Space, still revered creative successes. We contrast this late ’00s period in the company’s history with the dumpster fire state they choose to be in today. For the love of Sonic, won’t someone hose them down already?
Timestamps:
Whatcha Playing
00:00 Xbox Game Pass and Jedi: Fallen Order (2019)
09:05 Monster Hunter Stories (2016)
15:50 Tetris Effect (2018)
20:00 Hot Take Central (also known as The Hot Take Minute)
Featured Game
37:10 Mirror’s Edge