America Archives

Lonely Star brings a lo-fi apocalypse to the Weird West

“FAIR FIGHTS ARE GOOD, IF YOU ARE IN A MOVIE, OR WOULD LIKE TO BECOME DEAD.” This is told to me by a crystal in the middle of a desert, surrounded on all sides by dust and cacti and one single, solitary highway. It’s the third of these I’ve found, sprouting carelessly out of the cracked earth, there for no other reason than to give advice, vehemently and repeatedly. Their surreality never comes into question. Lonely Star, it seems, doesn’t like to spell things out. I found the first crystal one map south of the demo’s introductory map, a conclave…

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Overland envisions Edward Hopper’s America as an altogether filthier place

America as depicted in the work of the American realist painter Edward Hopper is almost unbearably quaint. The majority of his paintings and prints involve remarkably calm, perhaps lonely, people leading blissfully mundane existences in vintage diners, full service gas stations, and excessively tidy drawing rooms. It is easy on the eye, but you can’t help but despise these privileged, perfectly normal human beings who had nothing better to do with their time but sit gazing out of windows, halfway nude, at skylines and crap. Thankfully then, Finji is introducing these quiet, placid Americans of our national heritage to the…

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Gone Home programmer announces a gorgeous game about manifest destiny

“One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory. You must remember this.” – Neil Gaiman, American Gods American roads tell stories. From Huck Finn’s trek across socioeconomic boundaries to Kerouac’s rhythmic ode to a…

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How to make soccer more entertaining? Add ragdoll physics

Americans insist that soccer is and always will be boring. And, admittedly, low-scoring games with few opportunities for commercial breaks isn’t the most ‘Murica thing ever. But defenders of soccer might point to the simple elegance of a well-executed pass, or the unparalleled tension of a final battle in the penalty box. Well, all of that—the good and the bad—gets thrown out the window in Footbrawl, a ragdoll soccer game being developed by designer Kevin Suckert. Right now, Footbrawl is just a basic prototype with lots of funny GIFs to show for it. But the potential seems, well, endless. “Its [sic] basically everything what FIFA street…

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Unsolicited shows us the begrudging lives behind junk mail

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Unsolicited (PC, Mac, Linux) BY Lucas Pope Given the vacuity of the junk mail that mailboxes regularly puke onto entrance mats, you’d be forgiven to think there wasn’t a single soul behind it. In one respect, you’re right, as the souls of the people who are paid to produce junk mail probably died a long time ago. Such is the nature of the job. This is something you’ll discover as you play Lucas Pope’s latest game, Unsolicited. Similar to Pope’s celebrated solo debut Papers, Please, Unsolicited has you sorting…