When Bennett Foddy was a fellow at Oxford, the college sold off its wine cellar and let the fellows judge the bottles. After twenty-four samples, the one that stopped him tasted like gasoline. That is now roughly how he picks games, and it turns out to be a useful way to think about difficulty, taste and what a player is actually looking for.

Danny Snelson of UCLA joins for a new format: one piece from the Kill Screen archive, one long interview, and the news worth knowing from the past two weeks. From the archive, Brendan Keogh's "Game Type: Capture the School," the lead article in issue two, in which Keogh and his friends lose power mid-Halo and rebuild capture the flag across their school grounds, ceramic Jesus statue included. Written rules, invisible rules, and what happens to a space when someone finally says them out loud.

Then Bennett Foddy on Baby Steps, made with Gabe Cuzzillo and Maxi Boch. Why the mechanics came first and the story grew out of them, why Nate cannot use his hands, why there are no checkpoints, and what game designers mean when they talk about being in good hands. Danny reads the whole thing as Beckett, which is hard to argue with once you have watched the character crawl out of a pond.

In the news: Gareth Damian Martin reveals Signet City, a first-person fungalpunk RPG set in a monochrome Britain of 1978. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley releases I Didn't Realise You Thought Like That as a free browser game out of her Serpentine show. And Aidan Strong's TEXTURETOWN runs Toontown Online's source code with the assets of three other dead MMOs, which is preservation as collage rather than restoration.

Links

Brendan Keogh, "Game Type: Capture the School"

Bennett Foddy on the body, jadedness, and Baby Steps

Nikima Jagudajev's Like is a game about who we were

Gareth Damian Martin reveals Signet City

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley's Serpentine game hits the browser

The dead MMOs of your childhood, stitched into one game

Danny Snelson, The Little Database

Hosted by Jamin Warren with Danny Snelson. Music by Nick Sylvester.

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