SKILL ISSUE #15

Feb / Mar 25 - Dragon Age: The Heilguard

Welcome to SKILL ISSUE, a newsletter for the gamers, the ravers and the haters! It would be all too easy to kick off this issue with a rant about rising sea levels, encroaching facism, genocide as far as the eye can see and the death of the high street but we’ve had a sneak preview of the hottest drop of the 2025 and frankly it’s all we can think about.

“So go on boys, spill the beans!” we can almost hear you all shouting at the screen. What is this mysterious release that's got us so pumped? The Nintendo Switch 2? No, at this time neither Shuntaro Furukawa nor Doug Bowser have seen fit to unblock us on social media. A note to our readers: think twice about adding CEOs to Facebook event pages for squat raves.

GTA 6? Sure, we’d love to get our hands on it - who wouldn’t! But alas, the money men over at Rockstar politely declined our requests, claiming we were “either too woke or not woke enough” to give the game an objective playthrough. That new Thunderbolts movie? Of course it’s not the new Thunderbolts movie. SKILL ISSUE have had to send Kevin Feige a cease and desist - if you’re reading this Kevin, our terms are clear: either you can grow a spine and cast us as Gambit and Rogue, or you can leave us the hell alone.

No, this particular preview is one we’ve all been enjoying together. Spring has landed, and with it our dreams of summer pints, day parties, picnics and a festival season that we can’t actually afford to take part in. You can’t deny the call of spring, the blooming of its daffodils, its rapturous knock on your window in the morning. The light of the sun has returned to our faces, and with it our commutes just became that slight bit closer to bearable. It is astounding the change that a little good weather can bring to a city.

Now, onto what we’re all here for: a selection of negative thoughts and video games that we’ve been playing whilst lying on the sofa with the curtains drawn. Spring’s great and everything, but, until they patch it, reality is just too buggy to commit to.

SKILL ISSUE is written by Christopher Watson and Hue. You can get in touch if you’d like to contribute, if you’ve got anything you think we’d be interested in, should be covered, or if you're just looking for an Overcooked squad - hit us up at skillissuecrew@gmail.com.

///DAI INITIATIVES

There would probably be room every month for us to write a few hundred words on AI news in SKILL ISSUE. The primary reason we don’t just have a newsletter almost entirely about AI shithousery is because it would be absolutely devastating for our own brains, let alone yours. But it’s been a while, and we can’t get that “Trump’s Gaza” video out of our retinas.

If you were lucky enough to somehow miss it, but unlucky enough to be reading this, here’s a short primer. Over on the very normal “alternative social media platform” (that is, like all good alternative media, owned by the current President of United States of America) Truth Social, the big man himself shared an AI generated vision of Gaza’s future, complete with a topless Elon Musk drinking cocktails, a massive Trump tower, a statue of himself and bearded belly dancers. It was so repugnant that many hardcore red caps took umbrage with the clip. The story only got less appealing with the news that apparently the video’s creators had intended it to be satire, and not propaganda. But those creators had shared it with notorious satire understander Mel Gibson, who apparently thought that POTUS just had to see it, and dutifully sent it on.

Of course, whenever any politician releases something like this, it’s only natural and not at all paranoid to wonder just what it is they are trying to distract us from. The thing is, the Republican party, at least in their current form, haven’t exactly been shy about wild cuts or global evils. So it seems unlikely that it’s not their huge gender recognition rollbacks, government layoffs or massive cuts to Medicaid. It’s much more likely that it’s in response to a group of hackers that displayed another AI generated video on monitors in government buildings showing Trump sucking on Elon’s toes, and so that stupid stunt has now been been drowned out by a new one. Just as winter eases into spring, the cycle continues as we have always known it to.

At this stage, I’m not sure which video was the more unpleasant watch. Is it worse to be sick to your stomach or your soul? I guess if we spend the rest of our days permanently clutching both it doesn’t really matter. Perhaps one day some work of AI will pass our feeds that elicits more positive emotions, but for now, it’s all just rainforest for shitposts, on every shade of the political spectrum you can imagine.

At this point it seems certain that, just like sliced bread and, somehow, bitcoin, AI and LLMs are here to stay. It doesn’t matter if you feel like, in the words of Hayao Miyazaki, it is an “insult to life itself”, the bed has been made. We can only hope that governments step up and try and control the technology - which is why 1,000 artists have teamed up to release “Is This What We Want?”, a compilation of the sounds of empty studios in protest against UK government plans to let artificial intelligence companies use copyright-protected work without permission, like 4’33” if it was less concerned with defining art and more about protecting it.

The compilation features massive acts like Kate Bush, Damon Albarn, Tori Amos, Billy Ocean and Hans Zimmer, and we were lucky enough to talk with one of the many credited musicians behind it: Adam Janota Bzowski, the composer behind Saint Maude, Here Before, Out of Darkness, Femme, and, rather fittingly, Black Mirror, for some thoughts on the project and the wider world of AI.

Hey Adam! Great to be talking to you about “Is This What We Want?”, an album dealing with something really very close to our hearts. How did the project come about, and how did you get involved with it?

The project was arranged en masse through Darell Alexander who runs the composer agency I am on: COOL music.

He was contacted by Ed Newton Rex who spearheaded the whole campaign. A company wide email was sent out asking us if we wanted to be involved and of course I said yes!

Was there a turning point, either politically or culturally, in AI that motivated you to be part of it?

Receiving the email about the project was actually how I found out about the government's proposal. I try to read the news everyday and was amazed I hadn’t heard about something so pernicious that directly affects me and all my peers. On a purely selfish note it was awesome to technically be on a collaborative album with Kate Bush, Tori Amos and Imogen Heap.

Have you seen AI affect your own work or livelihood so far?

Luckily not yet, but I met a fellow composer who said the era of music for shows like “Great British Bake Off” was in trouble. He witnessed a tech demonstration of an AI model where they typed in some cursory prompts e.g 'whimsical music with pizzicato strings’ and the output was indistinguishable from the music used on those shows. Many TV shows and films are controlled by non-creative people, if they can achieve the same results at a fraction of the cost then of course they are going to utilise these machines.

What legislation would you like to see in this area to protect artists?

The creative industry in the UK generates over £120 billion a year. Beyond the clearly spectacular monetary benefit, the UK is a cultural powerhouse in its global contribution. Why would any one want to disrupt that legacy? The arts have been consistently underfunded year on year so I’d love to see increase in funding across all arts sectors, protection for small independent live music venues and an opt-in contribution to AI rather than the opt-out that they are proposing.

Have you seen many good case uses of the technology, or anything that interests you personally?

AI is a very loose term that has a lot of nuance. The Beatles recent single sparked a conversation that showed the depth of the misunderstanding between machine learning, that allows you to separate instrument tracks from a single stereo file, and a completely brand new AI generated John Lennon vocal which is what many people believed had happened. Aside from that, basically anything Holly Herndon does is very very cool.

What is your own personal best case scenario for AI and the future? What’s the worst case?

AI is here so it can’t be stopped but should be managed. The perhaps utopian ideal is that it eases menial tasks and optimises peoples lives to combat poverty, inequality and gives us more free time focus on enriching our lives rather than working. I’m astonished that the focus is on using machine learning to actively replace human artistry. My personal experience is that I have not yet seen or heard anything purely AI generated that has moved me in a meaningful way, when that changes it will be an interesting and perhaps scary development.

My main fear is the complete homogenisation of creative output. This in effect is happening with streaming company monopolies. Everything is reduced to this horrific term ‘content’. They see data trends of what is popular, which encourages them to push that material more, which means similar material is created and so the cycle continues.

What are you working on right now, and what would you like our readers to check out the most?

A new mini-series I scored called FEAR is out now on Amazon Prime. It’s a taut 3 episode arc about a family moving to a new house, and their neighbour that unravels their idyllic life. It’s a great binge watch.

Huge thanks to Adam for his time! We didn’t have the necessary bandwidth to put together an interview where we can really dig into his career, music, and of course what bloody games he likes to play (and readers, we know for a fact there are many). So keep your eyes peeled for something more substantial at a later date.

///BEANS, CHITLINS AND SALAD SPINNERS

Hey, you said it was a pot-luck! This is what we’re working with. We’ve had transatlantic online beef concerning the colonial demerits of beans of toast and/or Chitlins and grits plus, as you are surely well aware by now, woke is dead - and it was Ash Sarkar in the Kitchen, with the Salad Spinners.The Novara Media host has released the book Minority Rule, which I haven’t read yet but from the blurb sounds like it will be something along the lines of Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s 2022 instant classic Elite Capture, with more references to Spurs and GB news.

In an interview with Aaron Grasstani, they go further into the book and its themes around the right successfully driving a wedge between the white and marginalised working class, helped along the way by the liberal HR machinery of cynical corporate IdPol. Originally the Combahee River Collective created Identity Politics around political inclusion and collaboration regardless of race, with many people and organisations benefiting from the core tenets devised by the Collective. This framework has long been co-opted / corrupted by capital, validating and uplifting the individual whilst granularly categorising groups and fostering conditions for a woke tribalism to fester and derail .“Identity Politics”. As O. Táíwò suggests, It is this “elite capture”—not identity politics itself that stands between us and a transformative, nonsectarian, coalitional politics. (p.9)

Regardless of the no-doubt good points inside, deciding to self-promote the book on your own show in a Grasstani meets… segment was a Partridge-esque choice. AB also does a great job of “putting [his racist right wing] hat on”, utilising his time undercover on GBNEWs to brew up some incredibly genuine sounding bigoted views. And of course, there is the anecdote of the white national salad spinner. Firstly, I was under the impression a salad is tossed, secondly whoever said salad spinners are racist could’ve had a point.

Regardless of motion and orientation this sound bite feels cooked up by a Bloomsbury press team eager to, ironically, capitalise on the author's position as an openly Marxist (radical?) Brown (marginalised) woman in the media, basically telling everyone who won’t ever read the book the crib notes are that it’s true, yes, the left are totally insane. Why Ash Sarkar is fine with essentially gifting this caricature to the online right - other than simply book sales - is up for debate. I’m 100% sure that anecdote is true, and fine to critique. Include it in the book, sure, but to trot it out on the press tour as the soundbite is a choice. To continue to amplify incredibly niche tweets to an audience eagerly awaiting the left to be sensible is a choice. To be fair, the podcasters probably only read the first chapter, (which is where Sarkar talks about the state of the left).

Bloomsbury and Sarkar's profile, I assume, leads the publisher to go their usual route of the centrist podcast tour, perhaps a sit down with James O’Brien followed by a phone-in where the general public tell you how much this was all actually Jeremy Corbyn’s fault. Given the topics in the book, this should’ve been obvious to Sarkar and had she chosen to publish her book with say the publisher, Pluto Press, I’m sure the rollout would’ve elicited a much warmer response from her contemporaries, obviously with way less money on the table.

Many on the left understand the situations she describes (in detail, to a very pleased looking Lewis Goodall who is happy to mention he knows Engels a couple of times). Constructive discussion can be derailed with well-intentioned but ill-timed protest, and sometimes facetious purity tests but at their core Identity Politics are not antithetical to class struggle, they aim to create a greater class unity through empathy and responsibility, not less. In a way however, Sarkar's recurring use of these micro incidents is like someone telling a crowded lift that someone just farted. We all know it, anyone can pull a stinker, but it doesn’t need someone exclaiming it, let alone someone running out into the office shouting about how bad all the people in the lift smell. Again this is nothing against a book we haven’t read (and quite sure has decent points from good research), just a read on the way the book is being presented to us, and a clear example of Elite Capture at work.

For a much better rundown of DEI, the Death of Woke and more, we strongly suggest you subscribe to Shanice McBean’s essential ‘stack - On Revolution' where she recently also opined on all of the above.

(stop the press - according to Shanice, the book is definitely alright, too! Which makes the pod tour even more disappointing…)

///WHAT WE’VE BEEN PLAYING

Where we will shout out anything that's been resonating lately, regardless of format or release date. Because there's not enough time in the world to keep up with everything.

Common Side Effects
Steve Hely, Joe Bennett, Adult Swim, available on 4OD

Big Pharma deep state espionage thriller featuring Mike Judge amongst other top voice talent. Common Side Effects could be the new new best thing on tv. Created by Steve Hely and Joseph Bennett, the latter being SKILL ISSUE favourite Scavenger’s Reign’s co-writer, it’s a frantic, funny, intricately animated and surprisingly touching story of Marshall and Frances, two estranged high school friends brought together via Marshall’s discovery of a miracle mushroom and the struggle for control of its amazing properties.

As with most output featuring Mike Judge, the observational everyday stuff wincingly pinpoint, the characters all feel almost too real. The DEA agents Copano and Harrington (played by Joseph Lee Anderson and comedian Martha Kelly) miming to the radio on stakeouts, Judge’s Blackberry-coded quarterly review CEO, and Frances’s devoted-but-useless boyfriend all puncture some of the hefty philosophical and political ideas of the miracle mushroom plot with grounded levity, letting the visuals give you clues and threads to follow as much as the dialogue, and since many of the same animators from Scavengers Reign also worked on this, the animation is incredible.

And as much as Scavengers Reign was one of the best animated series in yonks, the introduction of humour really elevates Bennett’s writing to the next level. Whether it’s the clueless CEO addicted to free to play phone games or the DEA agents espousing the virtues of Italo Disco, it’s consistently funny, intriguing and menacing all at once. There’s a lot to take in and I’m sure repeat viewings are necessary to catch all the plot easter eggs and sight gags hidden in each scene. The first episode is free to watch via Adult Swim’s Youtube, the rest is well worth tracking down.

Sully - Model Collapse
FABRICLIVE

As we've touched on here before, model collapse occurs mostly when a large language model is trained on other generative model data, the model degrades and soon is just hallucinating unusable nonsense. This almost universally happens once the training data is polluted with dodgy information gathered from other Large Language Models

We can also see model collapse occurring in the real world too, not least the vinyl industry, which simultaneously seems to make more money every year with less overall releases. The disc has become solely object, we’ve more than hit boxset territory here, folks. Sully’s new single on FABRICLIVE to me, is an admission from the underground that the use of functional dance records is nearing its end. The record is beautifully crafted, with an etched design with the geometrics of a vintage Pez flyer and locked grooves to boot – the sleeve, also bang tidy in its own right, all Bankhead meets Lozano. This is a very lovely object indeed, is it not.

It's also £22 for the two tracks. Two of the best tracks you’ll hear all year to be fair. Model Collapse itself feels like a comment on the last 34 years of continuum, usually a tough ask and easy to cringe up. Sully, however, is a genre-fluid chameleon type, able to instinctively latch on to what makes a genre tick, without being rigid about it. It’s gonna be played and played this year and for good reason, it’s bonkers. The Baddest of Companies would be proud of this’un. It’s as equal parts BMrecords and Basement as it is Rupture or Distant Planet. Future VIPs and edits will do well to leave much of the vibes untouched, because it's really got everything a DnB dancefloor could ever want. Backed with ‘The Wash’, a techie fragmented, ring mod, neighbour bothering song that sounds like it should be soundtracking an early 2000s Toonami OVA compilation. Proper tackle here, lids.

£22 for the two tracks, however, seems antithetical to Sully being ‘influenced by his formative years on the free party scene’ – no DJ in their right mind would bring this to the squat, or most free parties for that matter. They will happily play the same tracks off a digi stick, and why not??? Well I mean, then why make this record in the first place? Obviously it’s FABRICLIVE, so a digi only release seems beneath them or something… especially for the inaugural artists release (a fact that seems insane but true).

It will be interesting to see how many further releases get the disc treatment, as with many other large labels in the underground scene – fewer and fewer labels are willing to print dance records (or 12’ singles in general) anymore, and when they do the order numbers could be a fraction of the old totals. Picture discs and coloured vinyl are older than we are, but they were generally either pop singles or albums, usually very similarly priced. Rising prices and special editions are a move towards fetishism, which the industry turns to as a remedy whenever threatened by existential forces (home-taping, napster, consolidated streaming services). This means emphasis on the ‘product’ and ‘new industrial techniques’ over simply the music (or god forbid the artist) contained therein. Overly designed releases of the past such as Blue Monday on Factory record at least had the decency to sell every copy at a loss (although Tony Wilson wouldn’t have loved to charge double given the chance).

Outside of LLMs, Model Collapse doesn’t have to happen, but capital naturally tends towards consolidation, so this is what we get. An incredible release, out of reach of most the crowd who would utilise it best, reserved on a shelf space for a party that will never come, only to ever get played through DSPs or Digital to analogue converters. 10/10. Real Deejays buy two copies instead of eating lunch for a week.

Avowed
Obsidian Entertainment, available on PC and XBox

As fans of Obsidian’s slightly janky but boundlessly characterful adventures of the past we were eagerly anticipating Avowed here at SKILL ISSUE, and with the amount of anti-woke sentiment around the game, we couldn’t wait to get our hands on the depraved filthy unearthly DEI-lights Avowed had to offer.

Well, fortunately enough, a wild Game Pass appeared, and we can safely tell you that this game is pretty fun! It’s a world rendered with the contrast cranked up, much like the Outer Worlds, the biomes have deposits of bioluminous vegetation, mushroom lava lamps and neon veins running through caves- all much like Outer Worlds. This is all rendered with the power of Nanite and Unreal Engine 5 – making the lighting and foliage in this game particularly lush. You yourself, envoy to the emperor, can choose to be human or human-mushroom hybrid – a godlike. You’ve been touched by a shroomy god and now, in an unexpected Disco Elysium reference, talk to them via dreams whenever you rest. People are very suspicious of these growths, as there is some kind of blight mushroom plague twisting the inhabitants of the Living Land into low to mid level boss encounters for you to kill later on, boss encounters a little bit like Outer Worlds.

Yes, this game is a lot like Outer World’s. Much more so than Fallout: New Vegas or even Skyrim, this aint that, but for our money, the fantasy setting fits the scope of an Outer World’s size production much better. In space, having limited biomes on planets gives the experience of Goku doing laps of King Kai’s planet, at times it had a Super Mario Galaxy quality, and not in the best way. Make it a swords and shields land and that goes away, a cave is a cave, a valley is a valley, with no space ports distorting the size and scope of the terrain.

Combat, which felt pretty spongy in past Obsidian games, has been fine-tuned. Swords and axes feel chunky, and spells (which you unlock via a grimoire quickly) all have volume and a weight that makes it hard not to want to specialise in magic. The squad combat is limited but the AI is improved and your companions will more often than not be doing something useful and not getting in the way, at least when they stay alive long enough. Enemies are a little more cheesy, with animations closing the distance to you and copious amounts of ranged enemies making some encounters feel tiresome

Some aspects of the world which pull you out of the experience and leave you feeling a little underwhelmed. One thing, picked up on by a lot of Steam reviews, is that all the NPCs seem to be pretty much stationary outside of very specific dialogue scenes or scripted events. This gives the cities a dead artificial feel, technically it probably has something to do with lighting or something UE5 related. It works in a diablo where you really just have to visit vendors and group up, or the Soulsbournes, where you get so used to people being in the same spot that when one moves it leads to a 5 hour rabbit hole, here with the cities so dense with verticality, side streets and nooks for ‘life’ to occur, it does stick out

Avowed then at times ends up feeling like an elaborate diorama more than a living world, which looks amazing and runs well - performance has been incredibly steady, especially for a new Obsidian title. This all lessens the impact of your (well written) dialogue choices, much like Outer Worlds, and the fact you’re the emperor's envoy doesn’t really help – you’re already feared and revered from the get-go. Oh, and you’re going to be fighting a lot of bears, they’re fucking everywhere. So yeah, a very nice looking game, with a great spell system and a lot of fun to be had exploring. Pick up a quest, go for a fight, laugh at Garrus from Mass Effect being a silly blue guy again, Just don’t scratch too much below the surface, or get too invested - it ain’t that deep (and not that woke either!) !

///NEXT FEST DEMO DIVING

More Stream Nextfest gubbins for you to drool over like the joy deficient husk you are. This edition featured a huge influx of artificially generated nonsense as well as the usual dubiously legal asset flips alongside the obligatory influx of hentai dating sims, but the cream still rises to the top! Or at the very least some interesting stuff bubbles below the surface. Below are a few oddball bits and future go-to’s we stumbled upon last month.

Run Tavernquest
Silicon Sundial

Ever thought what your childhood computer thought of you as you fumbled through an adventure game missing the obvious puzzle for hours pixel clicking irrelevant picture frames? Run Tavernquest does just that and puts you in the role of adventure game program, being played by a very dumb player. The aim is to get him to beat the game, but it really isn’t that easy and cajoling Steve around the fantasy text is an amusing idea. As a 20 min piece it’s great, we wonder what the scope is going to end up being on this one. Worth a look !

HASTE: Broken Worlds
Landfall

Gotta go fast in this speedster physics racer. Pass through gates and gain speed by landing perfectly, you have some kind of board for boost and can glide through the air, which all feels very satisfying to pull off. It’s not as easy as it sounds though, using your tiny shadow on the ground as an indicator of when to precisely nose-dive into an oncoming hill can be quite tough to judge as you hurtle through the air. Further down the line, with the difficulty up, it plays more like an Entrapment Bullet Hell, with you having to avoid the ever increasing foliage and scenery as you try to maintain maximum velocity. This one looks great, plays smoothly and is quick to get you up to full speed. This is one for the Sonic sicko’s, and SSX fans alike, something very few games can claim I guess.

Cheaters Cheetahs
Acmore Games

This one wasn’t playable in the next fest but we clicked a dodgy email and were persuaded to include it. As the Steam page description reads “Everyone will be given ACTUAL CHEATS in this multiplayer shooter. Use wallhacks and aimbots to your advantage and dominate the other cheetahs. The winner will get to BAN all losers!” Yes, all cheats are enabled and encouraged in this online shooter we’re frankly surprised has never been tried before. Banhammer incoming later in March !

Fear FA 98
Celery Emblem™, Jacob Jazz

“I want your skulls, I need your skulls” the AI theme tune sings as you pick between non-friendly match or 2 player mode in this preview of survival horror arcade football title Fear FA 98. Playing a lot like the International Superstar Soccer arcade games of the past, but with skeletons, zombies and sword power ups, it’s better played first hand than described on paper I feel. This is a passion project from solo developer Jacob Jazz, surely there’s someone out there who’s up for making some pub grub Zombie Vindaloo knock off title music for him??

Starless Abyss
Konafa Games, No More Robots

If you like your turn-based deck-building rogue-likes with a grim-dark sci-fi flavour, you’re in luck. Starless Abyss is a kind of melding of Into the Breach’s time displaced grid gameplay with the ship management of FTL, which sounds tricky to pull off, but this is demo already feels polished, with a real nice loop that got me going back in time to wishlist this before I’d even heard of it. There’s a lot of systems here to get into, with new tech beyond our comprehension unlocked via cosmic dice rolls, shop purchases and from beyond the void itself. In combat, the grid gets cramped quickly and juggling your resources every turn has been a fun challenge so far. Every run, successful or not, unlocks more cards and specials which can help past-you give future-you a helping hand, from this present or the day after the present past – or at least your next run.

Wheel World
Messhof, Annapurna Interactive

As much as it looks and plays like it, this is not the new game from recently dissolved Roll7 ! Wheel World feels like a spiritual successor, albeit with a cosier vibe than Rollerdrome’s Running Man punishment spectacle aesthetic. This is an open world biking game and it feels pretty good, you start with a rusty bike and some kind of Bike genie that you must help change the gears of the world or something?? Not sure why we need much more of an excuse to race downhill on bikes, presumably with friends, but it’s a video game, why not help a bicycle ghost while you’re at it? This one has a very chill vibe and with controller support only, expect this to hit consoles at the same time as PC – it looks great and the biking is smooth, definitely worth a shout later in the year.

Despelote
Julián Cordero, Sebastian Valbuena

A completely different take on football here in Despelote, a lovely little narrative game surrounding a young football mad kid in Ecuador and its country qualifying for the world cup in 2001. Fuzzed memories of skipping school and daydreaming of hoofing balls at tea time, all the while with naturalistic dialogue in Spanish, really helps you feel like you’re reliving someone’s childhood dreams of cup glory. The dialogue is the standout in the Despelote demo at least, it's incredibly refreshing to hear everyday dialogue with no over the top direction, sometimes messy and often overlapping lines but honest and recognisable.

That’s it for this SKILL ISSUE #15! Do get in touch at skillissuecrew@gmail.com with any thoughts and please, if you’re into it, tell your similarly-minded mates and help get the word out.

Thanks, friends. Always check behind waterfalls, start with a half and remember: