If only every random scroll through Reddit was as productive as the one that changed Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 lead writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen’s entire life. Not too long after ditching the finance world to pursue creative dreams, but in the thick of the COVID-19 lockdown, Svedberg-Yen was wasting away an...
‘Let’s just live here awhile’: The Sherman-Palladinos on Gilmore Girls’ Twin Peaks reference
People have been noticing the similarities between Twin Peaks’ eccentric small town and Gilmore Girls’ Stars Hollow for years. There’s the shared cast (Sherilyn Fenn and Mädchen Amick, in Gilmore’s original run, with Ray Wise joining later in the revival). There’s the direct callouts to David Lynch’s work (now a...
The Scottish Gaelic translation of Still Wakes the Deep is deeply political
In the opening hour of Still Wakes the Deep, the acclaimed horror game set aboard a perilous oil rig in the North Sea, we hear the C-bomb no less than six times. Most come from the mouth of gruff protagonist Caz McLeary, an electrician, or “leccy,” from Glasgow. Caz possesses...
Lucasfilm is now shamelessly owning the Star Wars Holiday Special
For decades, the Star Wars Holiday Special was a misbegotten artifact of a specific era of network TV variety-show thinking, and Lucasfilm seemed content to pretend it never happened. Fans considered it a black mark on George Lucas’ franchise, and made it the butt of endless fandom jokes. But that’s...
50 years of game history, as told through 60 games
Julian “Jaz” Rignall has been playing games for nearly 50 years, and writing about them for most of those. The former competitive arcade game player and Mean Machines editor has seen the games industry morph through more generations than are easy to count, and now he’s written a book about...
Wicked tackled ‘one of the most difficult things you can do in CG’
From plucky talking bears to motion-capture apes, from Avatar’s sentient space whales to Toho’s relentless Godzilla, computer generated creatures take center stage in movies more and more often these days. If there’s a big-budget film coming out, you’ll likely find a mountainous sandworm or a sound-hunting alien in it. The...
For Humberly González, Star Wars Outlaws wasn’t a stepping stone, it was the dream
Do or do not — there is no try when you’re an actor leading a game like Star Wars Outlaws.First, it’s Star Wars, a franchise whose most ardent fans fight daily battles over the legacy of the series, often at the expense of the talent involved. The actual work —...