So Very Wrong About Games

It is a well-known fact, observed by Infinity: the Game, Across the Spider-Verse, and Undaunted: Battle of Britain, that a Sikh man in uniform is always a good look. So here's to pilot Singh in his Hurricane! Not to mention Sergeant Singh in his power armour, and Captain Singh in his Spider-Man movie (in my heart, it is his film). Games Played Last Week: 01:01 -The Defence of Procyon III (Dávid Tu...

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents and everyone is running a Kickstarter. It is trivially easy to string together quotations going back to the dawn of human civilization lamenting how the youth are ruining everything, how the good old days were so great, and wishing we could go back to the golden age. See, I blame it on the baby boomers aging and succumbing more and more to nosta...

Mark's enthusiasm for Dungeon Scrawlers is telling. Whereas most children enjoy mazes, drawing, or even colouring, Mark instead as a child enjoyed the programmatic, deterministic mundanity of connect-the-dots. Straight(ish) lines and ascending natural numbers only, please. No doubt at a similar age Walker was already pursuing his jock/theatre kid synthesis, doing a number from Gilbert & Sullivan a...

We are very proud of our strict editorial standards here at SVWAG. Among them is our firm stance on Monty Python references, which are very firmly circumscribed. Philosophers are mentioned all the time, but never the song; and similarly we discuss Mozart here (in two different media!) without any kind of passing gesture to his decomposition. People have tried to smuggle in other references to the...

The episode notes will be released in installments. The base pledge, "Generic Non-Sequiturs," will give you the first two sentences and the last sentence. But don't miss out on the "Forced Macross Reference" add-on pack, which gives you sentence five; or the "Austen Allusion" pack featuring sentence four. The ultra-limited "Stupid Kant Wordplay" pack will never be reprinted (until, let's face it,...

It is a truth universally acknowledged in eurogames that every famous historical man (it's almost always a man, of course) had a retinue of about 2-5 hangers-on whose sole job was to impress him. They did this mostly by doing stuff he did; maybe after he did them, maybe running states he conquered, maybe even by doing the stuff he was credited with. Their names are lost to antiquity. All we know i...

"L'enfer, c'est les autres," wrote Sartre, which translates into "why don't nobody wanna play with me?" You see, Sartre only liked his consims and other historical wargames, but people didn't want to join him--possibly on account of there having been less history back in his old-timey days. His angst over unplayed games was the key inspiration of his existentialist philosophy. Camus tried to show...

In the show Ted Lasso (possibly the subject of a future Masterpiece Theatre?), French-Canadian goaltender Zoreaux asks to be called Van Damme. This is partly because people kept mispronouncing his name as "Zorro," and also because he admired the Muscles from Brussels. The point is that even people who thought it was stupid respected his wishes and called him what he wanted to be called, because th...

We get introspective this week, or at least as much as the editorial gibbons allow. If we get too deep they get nervous, and as every podcaster will tell you, nervous gibbons are bad for the show. Walker, Mark alleges, is a masochist who sacrifices himself on the altar of speed, which may or may not mean game flow; Walker counters that Mark abuses the takesies-backsies.  01:50 AYURIS: Imperium: Cl...

Is there a difference between a fruit salad and a fruit cup? I mean, the first question is whether a fruit cup contains a fruit salad, or if the contents are some other substance; then one can query whether the cup and its contents are a gestalt whole. Let us not forget the prospect of a fruit cup of Theseus, whereby each fruit piece is removed and replaced with an equivalent fruit (I would ask wh...

From Wikipedia: "Boglins were a series of toy puppets distributed by Mattel. They were created by Tim Clarke, Maureen Trotto, and Larry Mass, and licensed by Seven Towns. The original run of Boglins was released in 1987, coinciding with a "creatures" craze that included Ghoulies, Critters, and Gremlins. Boglins were goblin-themed hand puppets made of flexible rubber and could be manipulated to rep...

And I said, I don't care if they lay me off either, because I told, I told Huey that if Walker moves my games one more time, then, then I'm, I'm quitting, I'm going to quit. And, and I told Dewey too, because Walker's moved my games four times already this year, and they used to be over by the window, and they could see the squirrels, and they were merry, but then, Walker switched from the Swingli...

The mighty weremoose is a solitary creature, peaceable until roused to anger. Its only known predator is the American military deciding to once again invade Canada for reasons. When threatened, the weremoose rises to its full bipedal height of 6 meters, whereupon its sheer Chad-esque magnificence causes other creatures of the forest to quail and flee. Soldiers in the presence of this manifestation...

Everything's gotta be a competition. "I've seen better walls," scoffs the ingrate. "I've had darker ages," insists the depressive. "Well, I'm a Time Duke," growls the superstar Duke (esq., O.B.E.). It's all right, people. We can accept the superlatives without making it a contest. Games Played Last Week: 00:58 -Dark Ages: Heritage of Charlemagne (Adam Kwapiński & Andrei Novac, Board&Dice, 2021) 08...

This episode, as all episodes, is brought to you by our crack editorial team of semi-trained gibbons. Always go with gibbons. Cheaper than interns! More personable than rhesus! Less violent than capuchins! Better hygiene than Mark! Games Played Last Week: 01:05 -Votes for Women (Tory Brown, Fort Circle Games, 2022) 05:19 -Joan of Arc: Orléans Draw & Write (Ryan Hendrickson and Reiner Stockhausen,...

"And Blass is reeling from Yves Saint-Laurent's inverted atomic drop! But wait, who's that running towards the ring? IT'S THE BIG O! Oscar de la Renta is coming to the assistance of his tag-team partner! We thought Pierre Cardin had locked him backstage in his dressing room but no, here he is, steel chair in hand! And he levels YSL with one perfect shot to the head!!! Can you believe it? This the...

As employers, we gamers are a strange lot. We are expected to feed our workers, house them, give them their raw materials; we tell them where to go, when to work,a nd for how long; we subject them to fires, predation, starvation... and on top of all this, in some games we appear to confiscate all their wages! At least in Food Chain Magnate we occasionally allow them to go to the beach. Under stric...

You like SVWAG? Their early work was a little too negative for my taste. But when SHUX came out in '20, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically. The whole podcast has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the episodes a big boost. They've been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think SVWAG has a far more bitter, cynical...

I once saw a video of a woman driving a Shelby GT350 Mustang on the Autobahn. It hit 275 kph without breaking a figurative sweat, roaring its primal power the entire way. I was petrified even watching the video. This is to say nothing of the terror I felt seeing it take offramps at roughly 100 kph, which is not terribly advisable with a vehicle that is not known for its cornering. Of course, there...

A comprehensive list of what transpires in RRR would sound like the incoherent ramblings of someone undergoing a very potent trip, which is why we merely indulge in a curated list. While Mark does not retract his naming Decision to Leave as his favourite film of 2022, he will concede that it leads to a less absurdist discussion. It also features slightly fewer dance numbers. Games Played Last Week...

Our favourite Serge Laget game is Senji. "Senji" is a contraction of "Sengoku Jidai," or Warring States Period, which refers to over a century of near total civil war in Japan that started in 1467. Scholars differ as to when it ended, but mostly we can agree that it started when I traded Huey my grandpa in exchange for boats and then he shipped ol' gramps to Louis' estate. I found this out the har...

Ah, you dear internet pedants, I can hear your rapid and ever-present desire for infinite emendations and futile attempts to be comprehensive! "What of the expansion, uhm actually," you demand. We have little experience with the Ginkgopolis expansion, and while it adds several modules, they don't add much to the game--if you catch my subtle distinction. Games Played Last Week:01:18 -The Quest for...

Welcome to our year-end eleganza extravaganza! Lists are compiled. Harsh truths confronted. For example, while one generally takes a while to acclimatize to the using the new year in dates, 2022 seemed immediately apt and people switched over effortlessly. 2023 still seems weird, though--as evidenced by the fact that we forgot to change our tags for our 2023 episodes thus far! How embarrassing. Ga...

"I'm head of the classI'm popularI'm a quarter backI'm popularMy mom says I'm a catchI'm popularI'm never last pickedI'm in the Green Team cliqueBeing attractive is the most important thing there isIf you wanna catch the biggest fish in your pondYou have to be as attractive as possibleMake sure to keep your hair spotless and cleanWash it at least every two weeksOnce every two weeksAnd if you see J...

After much popular demand, we present to you the much-anticipated return of Masterpiece Theatre. Our esteemed patron--who is utterly unaware of our existence, such is his focus on his twin demesnes of fastness and furiousness--deserves no less. Of course, should His Grace, the Reverend Doktor Doktor Vincent, Duke of Diesel, Esq. O.B.E. ever condescend to acknowledge us plebs, we would no doubt swo...