Welcome to SKILL ISSUE, the newsletter for the gamers, ravers, AFKers and haters. We may be delivered by unconventional means, with no discernible schedule or manifest so as to avoid American interference, but like a Ukrainian 10th-prestige Switchblade drone operator, we don’t miss. Join us on Discord, for infrequent updates and more!
We hope this finds you well. Here at SKILL ISSUE, in between a lot of the ol’ ignoring-all previous-instructions-and-writing-nice-cupcake-recipes, we’ve been having fun in communal outside spaces, enjoying these [terrifyingly] lovely elongated summers being punctuated with frequent film noir rainstorms, and frankly working too hard on all the other parts of life. You could say we’ve touched grass but we wouldn’t go that far. A screen was never too far away, reminding us of our inadequacies and/or imminent demise. What would we do without screens, eh? We certainly wouldn’t be able to force James Earl Jones to say Skibidi Toilet without trusty screens (it’s what he wanted). And parks. Parks are also good.
In fact, our future park hangs could revert back to an early 90’s pre screen oasis. At least that’s AI huckster Sam Altman’s new angle with his partnering, or rather $6.5Billion acquisition of Iphone designer Jony Ive and team. This deal, basically a multi billion sign-on fee, is so Altman and Ive can reinvent the smartphone with more AI this time and, as both have stated, probably no-screen.
So who could this no screen, always on, always recording, constantly monitoring pocket Alexa be for? Well, it’s almost entirely for the AI itself, obviously. Wrapped in a veneer of tech-mindfulness pseudo-shite to seem ‘good for you’, it’s conveniently going to be a pocket recorder, hoovering up any morsel of new context or new slang or possible error or new road sign or sudden bereavement it can. Our phones already have the capability to do a lot of this stuff if you piss off the right nation state, but phone companies at least have to make them work for it a little.
They have run out of E-junk and have their sites on your pockets, adjacent to your actual junk [ed: the one thing no one has any data on, amirite?]. It’s unclear whether this also will irradiate your balls a la the early phone scares, but when it arrives in 2027, it’s for sure going to boil your piss. A disembodied voice following you around all day, telling you it’s your friend, hallucinating every fourth idea or suggestion and sometimes accidentally speaking in riddles? That is simply the day to day life of a crackhead. It’s Catweazle as a Service, doesn’t sound much like progress.
Our Facebook posts cannot satiate the beast any longer. We are already feeding it its own tail there. Pokemon GO has completed its mission of mapping all major worldwide habitable zones, population density, and military base weaknesses. Reddit is now also suing Anthropic for scraping user comments to train their widely used Claude model. Reddit comments folks… the barrel has been emptied and they are going at the oak with tweezers. The real world is next. They want up-to-date tidbits, and that means real time. When that happens, it may actually be over. We could burn all Apple Watches, stamp on all the Chromecasts, melt all the Tamagotchis, but we’re not going to now, are we? They mean too much to us now, and until they perfect the schizo LLM implant all of Silicon Valley are jizzing over creating, screens will be about, even if you may see something that pisses you off while you're supposed to be touching grass. AI is simply not there yet, nor is it meaningfully improving any more and is no where near the level needed to be reliable on a palm sized device.
UPDATE: It turns out they won’t be reinventing anything, if a new lawsuit is to be beleived. (get ready for an insane sentence) Microsoft backed iyO are sueing Open Ai’s Io for basically stealing their whole idea.
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///SWITCH 2 LAUNCH
IT’S A HERE ! The Wii U 2. A Switch for the ages, or at least the next 48 or so business quarters. Nintendo has launch timing down to a fine science, with the new theme park in Orlando just opening and Trump throwing global trade into perpetual chaos, all eyes were on the Switch 2 as the first big tech launch post-Project 2025.
The focus seems to have worked, as Nintendo report the Switch 2 breaking its own record and selling over 3.5 million consoles in four days. This could also be down to all the other consoles becoming more like jumped up Ouya’s, with good new first-party games rarer than second round job interviews at the moment. And good new games we got! Well, we got one at least. A new Mario Kart: World. A momentous release, coming 11 years after the base Mario Kart 8 was released on the Wii U, it’s basically the autistic version of GTA VI fever, and maybe the most no-brainer bundled game since the PS2 Gran Turismo 3.
New consoles are always better with friends, even better with a bunch of siblings and we were not short of either, the Switch 2’s new owner had his two brothers round so we got to unlocking all the Luigi costumes right away. The console itself is sleek and less goofy looking. It feels more like a Steamdeck ‘Lite’ or ‘Air’, with its uniform dark slate colour and much larger 120hz display, only punctuated by flashes of neon when the controllers are removed. Oh, those guys are also little shitty mice now, so presumably you can develop Carpal Tunnel syndrome playing Civ the old fashioned way. They work surprisingly well over non-ideal surfaces, like a chair arm rest, which is impressive at the very least.
You can also use them to browse through an updated e-shop, which has had a necessary level up. The content of the shop, where you continue to buy licenses to games you don’t truly own, as well as the online service in general, is where the launch gripes creep in though. First of all, Nintendo are the first console maker to take the plunge and increase game prices, with Mario Kart being sold widely for £75, a new benchmark sure to be used by others to justify the price of your future download codes. As new Switch 2 games go, there is nothing you would really pick over new Mario Kart. There is Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, which shows off new features in an Astro Bot style, except it seems incredibly dry and they’re charging £10 for it. Other than that, there’s the slick looking Fast Fusion (a Wipeout-esque antigrav racer), and Toby Fox’s episodic Undertale sequel Deltarune dropping new chapters for release day, but most of the full fat *actually new* $$ releases are all either ports or remasters. So it goes. Perfect for the hardcore Nintendo heads who shun any other media until it has the Nintendo seal on it, for everyone else who hasn’t been in a brand-specific Faraday cage, the line-up will do little to tickle kippers.
Switch 2 is now the optimal way to play masterpieces like Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom, but we expect a bit more than reheating last generations prime cuts and serving them with a side of phone apps for a brand-new launch, that’s a Sony move. Hitman, Yakuza, Cyberpunk; these old games made shiny (or portable) and touted as launch titles are emblematic of the stasis the industry is in. Even the great blue ocean thinking Nintendo is not immune to the systemic turbulence in development and manufacturing pipelines. New games are on the way (Donkey Kong Bonanza is looking a destructible treat), but the launch line up feels severly lackin’.
Those old launch days, where everyone would get at least one game no one has ever heard of before or since, are just over now (with some of that also down to the old staggered region releases). The expanded online offerings, which could’ve been an easy win to placate gamers itching for something else, turned out to be disappointing too, with only 3 games launching on the Gamecube emulation and no added online reimagining’s ala F-Zero 99. This will all fill out as we go and Nintendo is never far from unleashing a new killer-app, but for a launch it’s not feeling classy, not classic. Not the worst Nintendo launch line up ever - Virtual Boys games being largely unplayable - but far from the epoch-defining days of booting up Mario 64.
So a pretty phoned-in but insanely successful launch then? Pretty in-line with 2025. A lot of fun is already being had worldwide it seems, not just at the SI south London outpost. Nintendo still has that certain something that wouldn’t make sense as a full on Sony/Microsoft SaaS. They don’t ever seem to take the obvious or easy route and are increasingly more bothered about theme park revenue and rivaling Disney. A fandom forged from innovative game design for a company iterating on the same games infinite times with a healthy smattering of price gouging. Stockholm syndrome is a perpetual earner in fandom.
This console is an obvious and much-needed upgrade to the Switch and, battery aside, one that seems to be effortlessly fitting into people's entertainment set ups already. We’ve just lost a bit of that launch…pizzazz y’know? The days of four-day queues and minor celebrities talking about playing games like your grandparents on red carpets, replaced with a smattering of semi-pro Smash Bros. streamers and a standing army worth of Amazon fulfillment workers on double shifts. Hey, we gotta play Goldeneye 64 at 120fps somehow!
///GIANT BOMBERMAN
Also while we’ve been away it seems online American games journalism got deported to El Salvador, led out back by porn barons, and shot with the “non-lethal” consolidation shrink-ray. Beloved gaming sites Giant Bomb and Polygon were paused or sold by their parent companies with little to no notice to staff, on practically the same day. With Polygon, they were sold by Vox media to slop shop Valnet—a company formed by the founders of Pornhub—who specialise in pumping out endless listicle shite via outlets like Collider, Screenrant and more. Polygon staff were still posting articles hours before finding out, and took to Bluesky to get on the freelance train.
Polygon has long been loved for it’s long form writing and video content, which range from (semi)serious ludological examinations of game design to reading every fictional book in Skyrim and creating the most hideous things possible in different character creators. The mixture of humour and a more academic analysis made them a firm favourite for opinions and reviews, by 2025 you are never too far from a Polygon article if you search for a game. That’s where they went wrong, and now they are part of the above mentioned listicle conglomerate, with the majority of staff being let go.
For Giant Bomb, briefings from Fandom, another SEO monster of user-generated fan wikis, about editorial content led to throwaway comments on a podcast regarding fandom’s censorship. This led to a pause in all content and some of the main contributors ostensibly leaving the site, again announced via social media posts. Giant Bomb has been emblematic of the tumultuous media landscape since inception, with various changes of ownership over the years.
Created in 2008 by former Gamespot critics Jeff Gerstmann and Ryan Davis, the site grew in popularity due to its forward thinking gonzo video content and free form game-play previews of new video games in ‘Quick Looks’, an extensive user based wiki, regular Podcasts and extensive “Game of the Year” discussions. Over time, the site was bought by Whisky Media, CBS, Red Ventures and finally, Fandom. Recently, after huge fan backlash following the pause, staff mutiny and withdrawals of premium subscriptions, Fandom caved and miraculously struck a deal with the current staff to make Giant Bomb creator-owned and audience funded, much like most of the web now.
Giant bomb After Dark E3 2017, Heather Alexandra (formerly Kotaku), Patrick Klepeck (formerly Waypoint/Vice), Austin Walker(formerly Waypoint/Vice), Griffin McElroy, Chris Plante, Justin McElroy (all formerly Polygon). These sites all still exist - but mostly in name only.
This all happening in the run up to this summer’s “E3-not-E3” has made this years coverage resemble the Zoom / Discord Pandemic era more than a cohesive showcase, with the coverage silo’d off into now-independent reporters ‘talk over’ streams and and sub-only feeds. Sony and Microsoft’s middling to okay conferences are now viewable Ozymandias style simultaneously via 350 freelance journalists. Giant Bomb did manage to produce their live ‘…At night’ interview shows, with a raft of industry heads lined up a few beers deep and free to gab about gripes on or off-topic. New co-owner Dan Rykert got shot in the face with confetti immediately, and on the second night, they were joined by none other than Jeff Gerstmann returning as a guest after years in exile, maybe games journalism will be okay after all.
Games media continues to be a canary for the wider medium, as it has been throughout the digital migration. More and more prominent journalists, gaming or otherwise, are turning to subscriber / newsletter models, which in theory, is a great thing. Pulitzer prize winner Chris Hedges has a Substack, The Manchester Mill and London Centric are finding new working models via this platform, it is a potentially exciting evolution of journalism as a whole. Adverts really haven’t worked to sustain this kind of content, we’ve tried lads. Those with smaller platforms just have to hope the pie can sustain a continued influx of larger writers and creators.
Can people cope with multiple overlapping pies from your favourite creators? Each individually posted to you at a break time, seeing you through your commute of choice for at least the minimum engagement time threshold? ~All you need to do to help all your subbed content out is to sleep two less hours every night, keep a charger on your pillow hoping it doesn’t immolate and smashing the like button. There’s also really no reason stopping you from buying a waterproof shell for shower browsing. We’re working on an affiliate link.
///KKR SLIDER
Think we’d miss this one or something?? Yes, now Boiler Room is Hasbara alongside Field Day, Sonar Festival, Trainline, I Can’t Believe it’s not Butter, GoDaddy, WebMD and many more. Boiler Room is now owned by Superstruct, a massive portfolio glob of global day festivals, which in turn is owned by KKR, a massive investment firm and owner of all the above, with interests in business’ around the illegal settlements in the West Bank, oil pipelines and more besides
Their previous owners DICE were pumped full of Covid money by SoftBank - a presumably totally fine investment firm because they’re Japanese and everyone knows about honour and stuff over there. Plus most of the tech they invest in won’t be able to physically harm us for a few years at least. After it turned out no one wanted to live in the virtual gig Ready Player One dystopian promised hurriedly in 2020, DICE got antsy with the whole ‘not making any money’ thing and thus a sale to KKR owned global festival promotion company Superstruct was arranged. KKR ,or Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, likely have innumerable reasons to boycott but chiefly right now is their ties to weapons and defence manufacturing, and new data centers in Tel Aviv, all of which aid the genocidal state in furthering their goals.
With Israel bombing Iran, deliberately breaking multiple ceasefire agreements as well as aid blockades, executing aid workers, and setting up kill zones to further systematically starve and torment 2M people, even LBC are finally starting to admit Israel is committing daily war crimes. So Ravers For Palestine - an activist movement-cum-spicy group chat, decided it was time to hit the Zionist entity where it really hurts, through boycotting Boiler Room.
Wall-E-esque is now the best thing ever written by a campaign group. It’s the kind of line that makes us want to go back in time to grab Gramsci Bill and Ted style to show him on an iPad while we take him bowling. “It’s saying that if we’re not careful, we will end up in a cage of convenience, unable to meaningfully do anything more than contribute to online commons we do not own, recycling ideas from one to another for pennies… it’s a little robot.” we’ll shout at Gramsci as the Hooters waitress drops off the Silli-Chilli Cheese loaded Mozza Poppers and we go back to watching Gladiators.
But “BDS-washing” is the real stickler. Calling out Boycott Divest Sanction itself, the movement led by PACBI (the largest coalition of Palestinian civil society orgs, the Palestinian Campaign For the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and leader of the BDS movement, active in applying pressure on the Israel regime since 2004) in public is not only a bit of a logical fallacy (clues in the name), but also a bold move. Incredibly bold for a European-based group of ravers if you ask us.
But how did we get here? It was originally the worker campaign to decolonise Flow Festival Helsinki, another Superstruct acquisition, who had brought the KKR connection into the spotlight. The fight would then be taken up by Wawog (Writers Against the War On Gaza), who organised pickets at Toronto Boiler Room shows. To Join these campaigns was completely on-brand for Ravers for Palestine, known for their hardline boycott-or-else calls. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, PACBI was doing exactly the same thing. With R4P refusing to talk to the PACBI for, reasons*, and PACBI sticking to its tried-and-tested strategy of building power by any (legal, winnable) means necessary, the two campaigns diverged.
On the surface, the discontent stems from a political disagreement in tactics - or lack thereof, depending who you talk to. R4P in the camp that anything less than a “boycott or bust” approach is a total sell-out, and PACBI silently getting on with the same strategy they’ve been using for decades was against this - setting winnable campaign demands and negotiating with the target as directly as possible. Of course, this tactic does leave a lot to be desired if the target in question can NOT divest from KKR, rendering most demands toothless.
What festival corporate enough to have sold itself to a conglomerate would somehow turn around and self-sabotage to a loss making degree? Field Day, and Sonar, not just sell-outs but both sold out tickets despite campaigning, once you accept the VC bag how much autonomy does anyone truly have?
The thing is most people, by now, if aware of it, have personal reasons to boycott Boiler Room, and it’s hard not to see older gripes wrapped up into this one. They haven’t exactly existed as an uncontroversial entity. Starting as a small webcam show highlighting emerging local and regional talent was a good thing, a cool thing, but the global expansion has led to Boiler Room shifting their focus from London/UK Berlin and NYC/US i.e. The West to a global reach and outlook. The cities where Boiler Room gained its global notoriety for sharing the hard-to-find underground have recently only really been used to conduct mega shows, sponsored by increasingly hard-to-buy alcohol and lifestyle brands looking for another infusion of youthful cultural blood plasma.
Unlike the original weekly London Boiler Room, these ‘home’ shows are now also irregular, meaning the swathes of local up and coming DJs feel continually passed over, and even resentful of those anointed with a filmed slot. This resentment for the Boiler Room industrial apparatus grows as press and promoters bake in video clips as essential pieces of content; a ten second clip of an artist playing the right drop can create buzz enough to support 3-4 people in medium industry positions comfortably for one nostalgia cycle at least. How are they all supposed to pay the rent in London Fields without a Sherrelle moment?
Last minute deals with Huel or whoever means Boiler Room producers are likely to opt for people easy for them to reach in a pinch, so much like in the day-festival circuit, a network of regular players quickly emerges. An intertwined web of agencies, festivals, and now Boiler Room, saving time (as is often said) by bulk-booking whole stages, rotating through the agencies’ rosters affiliated labels and nights. A lot of BR shows are now also ticketed, a change spearheaded by notorious London promoter Andy Peyton. Peyton has a background in Law and Finance and coincidentally ran a rival Nu Rave night to Blaise and Young Turk’s Caius Pawson, and that’s all we saying.
This is without talking about disgruntled ex-employees, with a few seemingly happy to air it all out via Glassdoor. With complaints ranging from ‘not enough POC in higher positions’ to ‘Great Platform – if It Wasn’t Run Disgracefully !’. That these comments / departures all came in 2018/19, after the fiasco that was the Boiler Room Notting hill Carnival isn’t surprising, that being their first major cultural misstep and all.
So yeah, there are many reasons to have a personal vendetta against the platform Boiler Room, but is it worthy of boycott? Although the company does add value to the sinisterly diverse KKR portfolio, the live music industry is a fickle beast. As a company that has rarely shown profits, Boiler Room’s value in a fund worth 115 billion is but a blip on the bottom line (shouts to blip discs). This could’ve changed with their ticketing ramp up, but it has never been an amazing idea to introduce a paywall to a previously free feature. A definite sign of decline, unless we end up doing it at Skill Issue of course, in which case it’s a brave new tomorrow.
Boiler Room, to try and be fair, has been directly talking to PACBI etc on how to move forward. It still gives unparalleled industry experience to its always young and knowledgeable staff, evident from positions ex-Boiler Room workers have taken up elsewhere. The majority staff are honest to god genuine music nerds, passionate about showcasing burgeoning scenes or giving flowers to legends - something many of similar sized agencies / music industry intermediaries cannot say, despite landing page claims. Away from the Global North, it still does shine the 4k beam on scenes, working with local crews to document sounds, time, and musical movements.
They are now in the business of breaking genres, not artists (though they’ve done a fair bit of that also), and that is always going to be a loss leading pursuit, especially now these scenes can easily reproduce the formula without the touring production crew - check out Chicago’s Elevator Music (or literally every local online radio station now). It’s a surprise it’s taken as long as it has for more provincial ..Room’s to start recording, especially given the crowded scene Boiler Room sprang up in, Tim and Barry et. al
In the end, and with this particular piece having let ruminate for several weeks now, it seems the Ravers For Palestine have actually succeeded in escalating a much wider conversation around Superstruct and KKR, with Kneecap donating their entire headliner fee at Wide Awake, 15 acts pulling out of the recent Field Day and over 50 artists withdrawing from Sonar Festival. And given the festivals under the Superstruct umbrella will have varying responses to the demands of artists, this could really spell trouble for the festival beast. So what the fuck do we know, eh? It seems it doesn’t matter if you kick up a fuss in the right way or for totally sound reasons, just kick up the fuss in the first place.
(This piece put together with help from Jlte - all the good bits were them)
///SATURDAY NIGHT BILE
With news that Saturday Night Live is poised to launch a UK version, it seems the chance of any real satire has totally vanished from the traditional screens of this nasty little isle for good. The country of Brass Eye, The Day Today, Spike Milligan and Alexie Sayle has gone. We’re now Panelshowville, population 68.35 million, with twelve thoroughly-vetted-by-MI5 rotating members of the UK’s comedy circuit as our guides to the wonders of mild and meaningless banter. If you are looking for anything close to the bone you have to go online, where the far-right’s rise have laid bare the inadequate role of liberal comedy as well as liberal politics, and created a need for a more hard(punch)line approach. Memes got Trump elected twice and played a huge roll in ‘delivering’ Brexit. Memes matter now, cats aren’t just has’ing cheeseburgers anymore. Pepe may as well have protected status. This is the time of the shitebag left and I’m loving every minute of it, Jerry!
Online, leftist users such as Eyup Lovely and Bad Empenada have managed to rile up everyone imaginable with incredibly close to the bone posts and videos regarding Israel, America, White Britain and the entire fourth estate (especially Owen Jones). The style of posts and display pictures ape the hordes of pseudo anonymous ‘politically homeless’ British ‘patriot’ accounts that sprung up around the time Russia was helping Brexit go through. They are very crass, sometimes puerile but never are targeting anyone not part of or accepting of the ruling class. They do not write to get in people’s good books or for business opportunities or to get on Eight Out of Ten Cats. The un-PC nature of these posts poses a trolley problem for the middle class and the lukewarm Fleabag liberal ideology. Their posts are made to make you wince, because to not wince is to ignore the world we are living in. Many posts ape the style of emotional pleas and deranged demands of the online right, even if it’s not obvious to those with no real-life problems who can’t view themselves as anything but oppressed (ahem…Terfs).
There are multiple extremist ideologies that are so dangerous, vile and stupid that they have no right to be treated seriously by anyone. Anyone who allows civil discussion or attempts to find common ground should be treated as badly as the most extreme cases. The online center-left have decried this harder left shitposting as detrimental. For many, it seems hard for them not to also be classist about it, referring to posters being unemployed or laughing at credit scores, their curtain-twitching insides plain for all to see. For too long has the center left thought a high horse was all they needed to overcome the rising tide of fascism, bending over to describe it as alt-right, a new friendly less hysterical flavour of white supremacy. In reality, they were taking a high horse led by donkeys to a drag race. The right have known for years the power of passionate and evocative online posting. The left are done shitposting in the dark.
Many online content creators have had to grapple with how they approach ‘sensitive’ issues, all being exacerbated by the ongoing genocide occurring in Palestine. Commerce loves the middle ground, it loves the largest possible audience, and it never likes to exclude a possible wallet from parting with its Pepe coin. The reality is that these should not be sensitive issues, but clear-cut moral cases even a child soldier could decipher. If a country destroys all hospitals, blocks aid and routinely and systematically kills children, it is a historically evil vile regime, backed entirely by white Western imperialism, not worth countenancing. Gary Lineker gets it for fucks sake. RIP his television career.
We have been grey-pilled by decades of prestige television to think that there is no easy answer, every good team actually has a bad guy in it and we end up hoping a bad guy ‘wins’ by merit of them showing humanity in some respect. ‘Thanos had a point!’ ‘Tony is a Geez.’ ‘Skylar was a bitch!’ No, no and no. Walter White was a murderous meth dealer, Tony Soprano was a sociopathic psycho willing to kill his best friends and Thanos was always meant to be comically evil, even stooping as low as ruining a random guy called David’s birthday every year, just for fun. They’re all terrible bastards you relate to through slithers of their humanity poking through, they’re not actually good. That’s actually what made them great characters, ya pillocks !
Right-wingers on both sides of the Atlantic see themselves as freedom fighters via the medium of piss-coloured slop.
This is to say that the pearl clutching that comes along with this second wave of terror-left posting is totally misplaced and underlines a real hollowness to a lot of the new media ‘progressive’ centre left. It is more concerned with seeming impartial, and ultimately allowing concessions to dangerous rhetoric, than advancing a concrete agenda of any kind. When called out, it screams foul of a fractured, unrealistic left. While purity test politics can be exclusionary, it does foster actual ideology, or the firm moral stances which voters actually do tend to resonate with. When the entire media class is owned and operated by the billionaire class, to attempt to gain a seat at the table is an acknowledgement of watered down morals and empty rhetoric, designed to titillate more than probe, to side step rather than progress.
The anti-heroes of the early 2000s have melted away, a new prominent genre has taken its palce, what Youtuber Voice Memo’s in the Void calls WokeSploitation, a term for the glut of films and television that seems to be getting at a societal issue, but without actually commenting on much of anything other than that it occurs in the first place. As …The Void puts it, there’s usually an isolated protagonist thrust into a world they’re more than capable in but not socially a part of and unravel the scheme of some hellish personification of an institution they were almost a part of.
For white supremacy, Get Out gave way to the Candyman remake and the recent Opus. There’s Alex Garland’s Men and (to a lesser extent) Ex Machina. Always focused on the individual, and amazing circumstances, not indicative of the wider problems alluded to. For the 1% satire we got Glass Onion, Triangle of Sadness, Succession and Saltburn. All of these, while sometimes enjoyable in their own ways, wash over us with little meaningful happening to point to any change in the systems involved. How the other half live voyeurism is the main and only draw. It’s sociopolitical issues as content, with a singular evil baddie on the fringes to see off so our protagonist can stumble back into the working world and never speak of it again.
‘The problem is we’ve got used to a kind of satire which essentially placates the court’ Chris Morris famously said in the press tour for his last film The Day Shall Come. Since then the biggest “water cooler” film and TV has done exactly that and been widely praised for it. There have been some bright spots. Boots Riley’s films ask further questions in the abstract, The Menu has a clear class consciousness throughout the narrative that other CEOsploitation miss, and American Fiction is an incredibly human film about family grief and general ennui in the guise of a commentary on (black)‘sploitation itself.
So where the fuck is the British cohort? All of our comedians were either Eton boys who read PPE at New College, married a columnist and have four businesses in the Cayman’s or are two steps away from a Bernard Manning turn on GB News . But online, there are still vestiges of underground comedy, people who truly just want to take a massive shit in the middle of the court and use the king's robes to wipe it up. However nasty it may be, we must support these efforts wholeheartedly and repost into relevant group chats forthwith.
///WHAT NEXT AFTER NAZIS?
Nazis and game protagonists are perennial adversaries, a blood bond so entrenched that even in the absence of actual Nazi enemies, Nazism is invoked by the player towards whoever they are playing against. We’ve had space Nazis, elf Nazis, future and robot Nazis, eldritch Nazi’s and obviously plain old regular honest-to-god German Nazis.
Nazis in Hollywood have often been allowed a certain preposterous camp energy on screen as a dramatic juxtaposition to the implied atrocities, a release valve for levity. Christoph Waltz as Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds, Arnold Ernst Toht and his melty face in Raiders, Laurence Olivier and his totally reliable dental practice in Marathon Man, all caricature the idea of a Nazi, more so than replicating actual Nazism.
In games, we’ve scuppered their schemes and seen them fail, shot them in the dick (and solo testicle), burned them with their own pipe bombs, outran, out jumped and out-maneuvered every (singular) shade of aryan prick imaginable. After the triumph that was Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, itself hot on the heels of Starship Troopers aping Helldivers II, our fists are rattled from all the krauts we’ve bashed, in game or online. Far be it from me to say we should be punching any less Nazis right now - in fact, the new Indiana Jones is a fantastically cathartic way to do just that - it kind of feels like we’re reaching a Nazi saturation point.
When faced with an increasingly vocal cohort of openly white supremacist gamers, some of which are literally in US government (as well as defence companies like Palantir), the Nazi becomes mainstream, and the far right knows its close to losing all meaning. We can call a spade a Spaten and cry lebensraum to obvious imperialist expansions all we like but it will be DOGE’d and deflected by the sneering pseudo anonymous accounts as well as leaders of the pissing world. We collectively need to realise that there is barely anyone left who witnessed World War Two, we need to move on and come to terms with whatever the hell this new crypto-fascism is. We need a new Nazi to punch, at least in Gaming (for now)
We could opt for proud boys, or wealth preachers or any number of other fringe American far right and religious groups. Surely GTAVI will have at least two or three douchebags wearing black and yellow polos or all white robes to sideswipe with a stolen truck, but really it’s much of a muchness, same old nazis really, no matter what user patriot_cuck1776 says. Mecha Hitler remains the apex of what we’ve got evil bastard-wise… we need a proper new enemy to vaporise on the regular.
Landlords could be a great way to cleanse the pallet, perhaps? The consciousness of silent generation patriarchs downloaded into Boston Dynamic dogs, able to inspect the property from five miles away, can barely hold a screwdriver and doesn’t know how to set the boiler. Final boss is the 56th Duke of Beaufort: Eldrich Defiler of Agreements [final form], able to control rent prices from high above the sprawl with his black mould tendrils and acid rot breath.
What about Adrenochrome mutated mega yacht mecha tech CEOs? Able to sustain immense pressure after horrific yogi augmentation and an ayahuasca induced corporeal uncoupling, filter feeding the deep ocean for trace precious metals. They emit a piercing psychic shriek on an 8G frequency only available via quantum Bloomberg terminal. 100 staff lived trapped in its bowls, processing the day's intake into viable components. Every new crew birth signals a quarterly review. The least productive worker is consumed by the yacht to feed its hydroponic bio farm, with a commemorative plaque mounted on the plot, showing overall productivity stats, human vs fertiliser.
There's been a resurgence in baddies from the past in popcorn flicks of late, vampires are hot right now, but not hot like in the 90s, more grim and horrifying like the good ol’ days really were. Nosferatu and Sinners both use a looming vampiric threat to explain some of the horrors of life back in’t day where rats, racists or both could sweep through a town at any time.
Maybe money itself could be the enemy, Brennan Lee Mulligan style? Mammon the Wedged - eroder of principles and enabler of suffering, the zero-sum boss where the biggest challenge is not immediately becoming Mammon yourself once you defeat it. Evil Cash Idol or no, we probably just need our threats to be a bit more existential right now. As we’ve seen in Hollywood recently in Thunderbolts* and the impending unwinding of multiple multiverses where everything can and has happened anyway, we’re all more scared by all the hypotheticals in our heads over this week’s Big Bad. Whether we can meaningfully do anything about it is hopefully easier in a game environment, but hopefully dealing with some of these things virtually could make us less susceptible to media manipulation. We also should never stop punching Nazi’s of course, for it truly is what our grandparents would’ve wanted.
WHAT WE’VE BEEN PLAYING
A duo of new and upcoming games that piqued the right receptors and blocked out the voices for at least a short while. For those still undecided, fear not - a bumper edition of gaming and music thoughts en route for next issue!
Drop Duchy
[Sleepy Mill Studio, available on Steam, 2025]
Remember when video game genre’s were simple? A shoot’em up was a game where you shot (mostly) up and a puzzler would usually be a never ending conundrum. Now that the idea reservoir is at an all-time low. Genres are smashed together, reconfigured into unwieldy word snakes to slither into a niche time-sink you don’t see coming until it’s too late. Didn’t realise you needed a turn-based-Tetris-deck-building rogue-like in your life? Us neither, until we played the block-happy Drop Duchy recently. A little gem of an idea, crafted from tried and tested systems, brought together like an ex-media creative / chef at a pan-global fusion pop-up, but with less of the culturally insensitive puns and a more functional menu.
You have Tetris shaped terrain to drop. Each block has resources or structures for you to try and arrange in the most beneficial way. The landscape changes as, say, you drop a wood clearing shack next to forest tiles, and filling a ‘line’ (Tetris style) grants more resources. This is not Tetris though, you’re gonna have to fill up most of the screen, especially as you also get to place the enemy camps strategically. After you’ve tiled up a nice little battlefield, it’s time to get down to some lovely expansionism.
The combat becomes a rock paper scissors type affair, but you must order troops in one flowing move by stringing together all your outposts into one unified attack with every skirmish along your path chipping away at your total which forces some quick maths as you decide the best way to spread your brand of feudal control. The order of attacks has a big Into The Breach vibe, and this brew is becoming heady indeed.
Speaking of Slay the Spire (or any of the many other pretenders since), you’re going to be losing a lot, with each loss giving you a chance to add cards to your deck to use in future campaigns. Surely by now you know if this is going to be your thing or not. If you’re into deck building rogue-likes you already are a sicko and have probably already played this. If you’d rather gargle piss than play Carcassonne, let alone a one-player version, this will be one of those things your sicko friends talk about in the corner of the party for three hours while the rest of the crew discuss families, retirement pots or how best to lowball the mums on eBay for old lego sets.
CAST & CHILL
[Wombat Brawler, PC, demo]
Beautiful pixel art in a cosy fishing game. You cast, and you chill. Until something below grabs your lure, you’re just sitting in a boat with your dog, taking in the beautiful faux 16bit vistas and listening to the ambience of a North American river. Don’t worry, you’re not fighting much. This is fishing, you understand? Hopping into a little boat you go out with a dog and some line, the demo only lets you visit the first lake but it’s a vibe. First you get a bobbing lure and after casting out you have to time your reels when you think the bait got something. Once you unlock a slightly longer line, you’ll be treated to a serene view under the surface, complete with low pass filter on the atmosphere. Here you can see where best to try and cast, with schools of different species of fish preferring either shallows or the deep.
With a few fresh catches in hand you can go to the shop to upgrade your lures, rod and boat ready for the bigger guppies. It’s a simple idea done well, kind of the opposite approach that Drop Duchy takes, but both follow through on their initial ideas. The only omission from Cast & Chill I can see is the distinct lack of Stella cans, and elaborate sleeping bag beds filled with hot rock holes. It also doesn’t let you pose for a tinder picture with your prized catches or talk to an ageing comedian about their angina, but the full game does have an Idle mode, so assumedly you will also be able to fall asleep while fishing for the true to life experience.
That’s it for this issue, true believers, or is it?? If you’ve made it to this mid-credit roll, we have a treat for you :) the best little/big festival in the world, Field Maneuvers, is a couple of months away and they’ve given us some mates rates tix for you, the reader ! This years edition looks mega, with Skill Issue favourites Ahadadream, Jeremy Sylvester, Tasha, Yazzus, Florentino as well as takeovers from seasoned crews and FM faithful.
We’ve been given 10 discounted tickets first come - first served for anyone who fancies getting loose with us in Norfolk this August. Click below and start preppin’
!! SECRET SKILL ISSUE FM TICKETS !!
Skill Issue will be representing at the Pingers takeover. Come play some SNES games with DJ Ping on the mainstage as we warm up for the Hyperdub takeover, there may be prizes 😈😈
That’s truly it - Join us next time for more rambled thoughts, side eyes, and chat about records, games and general entropy.
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:
