SKILL ISSUE 18
Sept '25 - A time of, whatever.
Welcome to SKILL ISSUE, a newsletter for the gamers, ravers and the haters. We’re writing this edition under the watchful eye of our lawyers, who have advised us that we’re one forced pun away from joining Palestine Action as a proscribed group in the UK. Not that we have any opinions on the matter of course. Why would you think that? We’re just a couple of pals writing about which Metroid game has the best map to listen to Modeselektor in! It’s a politics free zone here, and always has been, once we work out how to edit old issues from the Substack app. No dissent to be found, save for a controversial upcoming ranking of MCU phases and mixed thoughts about the career of Geoff Keighley.
Is that strong enough? I’m getting nervous to be honest. Maybe it needs more heft. We here at SKILL ISSUE actually think proscribing non-violent protest groups under anti-terror laws is exactly why those laws were designed. We’re not lawyers, but maybe direct action against genocide is the same as being a neo-nazi after all. The Labour Party is in government, and they’re left wing right? So really we’re all on the same side here, and there’s nothing to worry about. What does authoritarianism even mean anyway? It’s just something people online say when they don’t understand that facts aren’t your feelings and that JK Rowling has legitimate concerns. Don’t worry about it. The only people that are being arrested under these laws are bad people. Scruffy work-shy layabouts. Headteachers. Lawyers. Doctors. Pensioners with OBEs. You know the type.
In fact, maybe we should be proscribing even more. Proscribe Snyderverse fans. Any group able to convince a billion dollar company that the best way to save one of the worst superhero movies of all time was to double the length, make it black and white, and force it into a 4:3 aspect ratio is clearly too powerful to simply walk free. Just the other week they were crowdfunding vans with LED screens to protest the release of James Gunn’s Superman film, and no one without an extremely chequered search history could possibly have that much of a problem with Krypto the dog. Held without charge for 14 days please!
Proscribe people that comment “Who?” under articles about musicians they don’t like. We can wait a little bit for this one, but in the wake of the summer’s festival run it’s of utmost imperative that they are detained without family contact. If you don’t know who Billie Eilish is in the year of our lord 2025 that is a you problem, forcing me to read it surely violates some kind of convention. It doesn’t take a super-intelligence to realise it's always women and non-white artists either. It only seems fair that it has the same punishment as holding up a page from the famously extreme leftist magazine Private Eye at a protest.
Controversial one maybe, but as long as we’re proscribing people there’s a lot of Drake fans who I reckon could be added to the list. Not all of them, we’ll need a way to work out who just just loves a modern crooner and a funky house sample. But just this month I went to listen to Vybz Kartel’s first U.K. show in two decades from outside the walls of Wireless Festival, where Drake was headlining for three nights in a row. Within minutes I heard two groups of blokes trading pick up artist tips. It was the most Drake coded thing I could imagine. Surely we can at least proscribe anyone that thinks he won the Kendrick beef. No one would disagree that these are the kind of sick minds we should be placing on the same level as Al Qaeda.
Proscribe LBC. Proscribe numbered scores in reviews. Proscribe lootboxes. Proscribe thinking that your favourite genre of dance music is objectively better than other genres of dance music. Proscribe people that take the console wars seriously. Proscribe any one with really strong feelings about phones in nightclubs either way. Proscribe calling a club night a rave. Proscribe commercial, vaguely Bassline rehashes of 90s/00s Dance Pop hits. Proscribe Ofsted. Proscribe meteorology. Proscribe playing devil's advocate. Proscribe any conversation ranking the Star Wars trilogies that goes on for longer than 5 minutes. Proscribe neighbourhood whatsapp groups, and Potterheads, and cyclists that post videos of people not sufficiently respecting them on social media. Proscribe any podcast about CEO’s or men's mental health. Proscribe Labubus. Well, maybe Labubu can stay.
Oh, and proscribe Keir Starmer apologists. Now we’re getting somewhere!
SKILL ISSUE is written by [REDACTED] and [REDACTED]. 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.
/// HAMBURGLAR, WE HARDLY KNEW YE
American personality The Hamburglar was shot earlier this month whilst participating in a debate at a university in Utah.
The 80s child star turned controversial political commentator was fielding questions on processed meat's impact on health, as one attendee asked why Hamburglar thinks that people should be eating more unknown meat mixed patty and whether he would eat a mystery patty himself, Hamburglar replied "well, are we including chlorinated 'Coon meat-" at which point he was struck by a bullet fired from a high powered rifle. Hamburglar slumped over, as the gathered crowd ran for cover. The Hamburglar leaves behind a loving wife, and two junior meals, along with a trail of clues for schizophrenics to decipher.
It's unclear to us what is going on, as a whole ocean separates us and... the U.S.
For us mere Brits, Hamburglar was, at most, a niche internet character, the type of celebrity a co-worker would bring up on a fag break. Over the swamp, Originally a fast food mascot, he shot to a new found prominence through association with the Trump camp in its first term, organising conservative football sticker and Pokémon card swap tournaments and similar youth oriented events like which racist slurs are best to shout in a CoD lobby at his formerly affiliated restaurant venues.
The famous McDonald’s White House photoshoot is said to have been planned by the Hamburglar
But while the Hamburglar was a deft organiser, he was also always completely and totally racist. Recent award-winning Netflix exposé "Under Golden Arches" showed footage of The Hamburglar spitting on fellow mascot Grimace and spreading baseless racist rumours about the nature of his hiring to other staff. The documentary also cast doubt on the origin of Hamburglars wealth, driving speculation that the Hamburglar was once involved in a notorious Californian jewellery heist crew or indeed a Mossad intelligence asset. Continuous racist rhetoric and belligerent behaviour eventually led to his termination from ‘Mac Dee’s’. He was ostracised from much of the industry he knew, but he had gained an entirely new audience, one which would sustain him like prime adrenochrome, and grow to see him as a potential future leader of their movement.
After spending the 90s and early '00s on fringe right wing talk radio, relative wilderness compared to earlier highs, The Hamburglar rose to be somewhat of an unlikely Gen-Z media figure through his faith based Vine account where he speed-read bible versus in the front seat of his Charger. The Hamburglar was early to the podcasting scene and with years on the long waves, he was able to set up a network of conservative voices that would eventually coalesce into Flipping Patty USA, the biggest fast-food related youth conservative movement in the States.
Stirring eulogies from all over the right wing culinary world poured onto social media in the wake of the murder. Cracker Barrel released a statement saying patrons would have to “take a knee for the ‘Burglar” before being seated, chic-fil-et also declared sept 10th a ‘dark-meat free’ day whilst the Papa John’s CEO, known only as Ol’ Man Jonn, was filmed intensely punching dough while yelling in what sounds like a Norse dialect.
The assassination leaves a nation divided. Still reeling from the Sonic burger massacre, perpetrated by militant furries enraged by company filings revealing no involvement with Sonic (the Hedgehog). This was after the FBI had previously confirmed the existence of secret power rings. Fourteen sonics staffers, as well as the Hamburglar, were shot by massive deadly legal guns.
Experts this side of the Atlantic have advised that the Hamburglars death is to be completely ignored where at all possible.
///FLAG SHAGGIN’
Flags in games (and for most of human history) mainly tell you who to shoot. They’re also used textually to portray intimidation or domination of the world/map. When they pop up, you know there’s some dudes and those dudes will give you [X] reward if they either die, or worse, surrender. They are rarely used to foster a collective spirit. A lot of times you just have to capture a flag for the sake of it, in order to finally try and ask a mate how the separation is going. Flags in games are used to portray to what degree the world we’re playing differs from our own, you get a sense of how much the author is pulling us away from reality from the types of flags you get in games. From copies of real-world flags (the ‘You are here. THIS COULD BE REAL’ flag) to complete fantasy flags, games have flown many colours for us to hate or follow uneasily. Considering we’ve never really covered flags at all, and they rarely come up in conversation, we thought it’s about time we spoke on ‘em. Maybe rank them for overall looks, paint-ability, and shagability, something like that?
New California Republic – Fallout II / New Vegas
A Yao guai mutated bear half howling at a lone star, half gazing at us knowingly on the only untouched grass patch in the wasteland? A Bonafide classic, it shows a playful side to the survivors you only usually get with higher speech builds. Not many remember the old world, but those who do will be sure to share a laugh, maybe a tear under the gaze of the guai. It would be hard to do it justice on a windy A road junction but still, a twist on the traditional, with a nod to a hopeful future. Plus obviously very shaggable.
Looks - *****
Paintability *
Shaggability *****
Union of Yuktobanian Republics – Ace Combat 5
Not as immediately recognisable as the previous flag but still, wow! A flag vaguely meant to represent a sort of fictional USSR from the dogfighting Ace Combat series, this pearler wouldn’t be out of place on a fine pack of skinny cigarettes. “Twenty Leaping Deer, Gold”- bet that sounds amazing in Russian. A beautiful flag to glimpse as a Yuktobanian fighter jet shreds your F35 to pieces. Stencilling the deer could be done at a pinch on a small roundabout, but the colours involved risk upsetting local Catalonians.
Overall looks ****
Paintability **
Shaggability ***
Flag of the United Kingdom – Watch Dogs Legion
Well this is one we might actually have to get fuckin’ used to. With London and presumably most of the country taken over by PMC’s and tech firms after false flag hydrogen bombs were exploded underground, we’ve obviously gone to shit and somehow only the hackers can save us. Scotland may be gone? Not sure, but the yellows and black is giving some kind of Reform / DUP coalition, enough to give you the shivers. A recognisable pattern and the inclusion of black makes it a go for painting on local 4.8 star takeaways. “Luv Marmite, Ate ‘Ackers, ‘ate Minorities not ‘racialist, just don’t like em.”
Overall look *
Paintability ****
Shaggability ***
Albion – Fable
Ah Fable, a whimsical journey through our own Albion, sort of. Well, it’s an improvement from above – it’s a foil Joker version of the St Andrews, and the red and gold again just works. Could this be a progressive coalition of devolved national parties and a secret, third, possibly very left wing, unnamed party? We can dream. Peter Molyneux may come across as the posh Apprentice candidate that gets voted off for not being able to get a good deal on a bushel of gooseberries at a rural farmers market, but if this flag was flying at a second hand MG dealership, buddy, you may have just made a sale. Easiest paint job so far and any painting of this in public would just create a fantastic amount of confusion, which we’re all for here at Skill Issue.
Overall Looks **** (x1.5)
Paintability ****
Shaggability *****
Flag of Esperito – Just Cause
White sand and teal skies, the peaceful meeting of tropical earth and sky. An inverted Indonesia, Guardiola would blush. Any flag this easy going is marked for a tricky existence, it may as well be saying “We’re mineral rich and very open to outside investment!”. The only thing that could puncture the tranquil bliss of Just Cause’s Isle of Esperito is some kind of paramilitary coup, or perhaps foreign business interference, maybe a proxy militia? Would look brilliant daubed on the side of a Toby Carvery.
Overall looks ****
Paintability *****
Shaggability ***
End of Level Flag – Super Mario Bros.
The ol’ yeller of virtual flags, and the only one so far to not denote territory or allegiance, but sweet goomba clappin’ victory. Green shroom on white, tapered right angle triangle. For some the first and only victory flag they’ll grab in their whole life. Eco conscious and ahead of its time, obviously Nintendo were aware of the amazing properties of mycelium spores considering they were the first to colonise it and form a trademarkable kingdom. Painting this one may just think that french street artist SpaceInvader is visiting Houghton-le-Spring for some reason.
Overall looks ***
Paintability ****
Shaggability ***
Flags, who needs 'em? Well linesmen do. And the pit guys in F1. Semaphore operators on the Suez? We say leave ‘em in games, where their purposes are clear - They are simply used to divide us into factions or teams so we can better hate each other, what else would they fucking mean?? KEEP FLAGS FICTIONAL
///Steam Demo Diving
More present and future nuggets foraged from the steam database, served up fresh before they are cast into the whirlwind furnace of new releases and either obliterated from our consciousness or added to the ever lengthening penitent backlog.
///Spinny Dungeon x Rentlord x Insider Trading x Apokerlypse:
Bala -Bala-Blah - I am Become Balatro, Destroyer of breaks.
Once in a while a game comes along that lights up a fire in game developers' loins, a creative flame that burns white hot. Not too creative though, as the idea is basically to copy the game as much as possible without creating something so close as to be legally actionable. Mario led to Sonic which led to Dynamite Heddy which led to Gex: Enter the Gecko… DayZ led to Pub G which led to Fortnite which led to Cod: Warzone which led to multiple break ups and a great pandemic for local weed dealers up and down the country.
After we all just about made it through the Vampires Survivors gold rush, now the all-conquering Balatro has birthed a cottage industry of broken, slightly evil feeling time-sinks, each one with it’s own flavour of banal evil. LocalThunk knows he has a lot to answer for already, hence the diligent anonymity he exercises, but I don’t think even they knew what they were doing to the gaming landscape.
It's easy to see the appeal of making a Balatro-Like. You take any game of chance or an everyday profession (of chance), add mental augmentation and rule-bending add-ons available from some enticing shops between rounds, a syrupy looping soundtrack and some hard to beat boss variables and bam you’ve just potentially just made someone miss an important meeting in a totally new way.
When we say totally new way, we mean Insider Trading takes the left to right score counting of balatro and applies it to the stock market. Now instead of Jokers, you are buying Bull, Bear and Hawk cards to multiply and combo your daily earnings in hopes of meeting the weekly target by Friday. Due diligence be damned, as you try and place your orders in combo’s to bounce your portfolio price ever higher. Sydney Sweeney just doing an ad for American Eagle made their stock price bounce 18% recently so this game may actually be solid practice for any budding Buffets out there.
Raccoin is a balatro coin pusher which is just as insidious as it sounds. You push coins onto an undulating machine, which soon spits out special coins with extra properties with lovely bouncy physics. Pig coins breed more coins if two touch, ufo coins rise up and fire a laser in the direction of the most valuable coin, scoring all it touches on the way. There are prize balls, which can have anything from a random coin shower to a black hole inside for you to deploy when needed. There’s a hell of a lot going on, with random spins unlocked if you keep the coins tumblin’ and pins to augment the pusher more. Early levels in the prerelease builds can be tricky but once you unlock a few coin slots with upgraded coins, the levels mainly play themselves.
The demo in general really did feel too easy, the coin pusher was a push over, the coins are only going one way after all and that's into the prize tray. Maybe it's by design as it did serve as a great second screen semi idler. Also this 100% gets the prize for most balatro-like earworm - a true head burrowing muzak banger making this seem even more like killing time in the worst services you’ve ever been to.
Rentlord adds the small housing portfolio of the average Reform voter to the mix. As you WFH from a country manor on your Windows 98 HP Pavilion, you’re treated to a Sim village 2000 simulation of your land acquisition. Watch as the abandoned patch you purchased next to a row of town houses is turned into a busy fulfilment facility. Marvel as you flip a lowly farmstead into a magnificent Call Centre. There are plugins to buy to bump tenants monthly rent up arbitrarily, which can sure help when you’re struggling to beat the total by Friday ! Go for a hospital build if you can, it’s basically easy mode because the government happily pays 10x rent and doesn’t complain.
Spinny Dungeon shows us how it feels to be an Australian having a heatstroke induced break from reality and go on a quest via the pokies. You add symbols to the spin to try and keep your resources up, adding weapons to attack oncoming orcs and skeletons. Very simple game with the charms of one of those 1000 in one carts that used to go round the Pub circuits with garbled mahjong etc. Its easy enough to sit there slack jawed spinning this thing endlessly, watching gems and food collect and opening chests. This felt like a gateway drug, possibly the most cracky bala-like/ Tro’vania I’ve played so far. Maybe best to avoid.
Apokerlypse is half Chinese so I didn’t get the full gist of what was going on, but It’s kind of an old school poker where you’re trying to get rid of your hand. This one is more of a traditional deck builder with a PVP slant but there’s obvious Balatro overtones now with the modifiers available from the shop in between rounds.
Get rid of your cards, if you can. There are frozen cards, cursed cards and mega bombs to play to help you ditch your hand before your opponents, if you mainly just use the tip button to form hands, we won’t blame you, the localisation is a little way off still with this one.
We’ll still probably play Balatro when we’re greeting people in Asda to secure dental insurance. These new pretenders, we’re not so sure. But one thing is guaranteed, there’ll be a new game soon enough that disturbs the meta and unleashes 100 steam clones, each with its own chance of ruining your next deadline. Stay safe out there.
///WildGate (multi platform,
PVEVP sounds like the name for the microplastics in your urinary tract but in fact, it’s the latest gaming gold rush and as we’ve seen with the Balatro-likes, gaming (like most art) thrives on imitation. Keep the gameplay / change the setting, change the gameplay / keep the setting. You don’t have to tweak much to get a Wildly (😉 ) different result. Human’s share 50% of their DNA with a Banana. What I’m trying to say is that WildGate is Sea of Thieves in Space.
You play in teams of four prospectors, in command of a ship heading to the Reach – the most dangerous sector of the galaxy and home to the ‘Artifact’ – a priceless prize that you must get through the (wild)gate to win. On the way to the vault you’ll be raiding alien lairs, robot prisons and the like to get upgrades for your ship and crew. Oh yeah, there are 4 other player controlled ships trying to do exactly the same thing, and as the orphans say on Tatooine ‘This is where the fun begins.’
There’s a lot to like about gaming's move towards ‘emergence’, even if it is a lot more generally prevalent in gameplay than the marketeers would like you to think. In essence, emergent gameplay basically means a dev generates a sandbox with some random modifiers, fills it with doohickies for players to find, gives them a loose goal and let’s them get at it. Battle Royales, extraction shooters, prison breaks and even climbing sims let the game emerge at you like a drunken wasp from behind an old can of cider, eager to sting with sweet, sweet dopamine.
The idea is that the real fun is the clashes on the way, and fun WildGate is. You and your crew are free to pilot the ship or one of its turrets, swapping freely as you fly through the Reach, looking for booty or bounties. The start of a round is quite chill, usually putting player ships far apart for the most part, giving you time to find upgrades and fuel for your silly named spacecraft. You all have jetpacks and can traverse zero-G with ease in a floaty but surprisingly precise way. As you find and raid the early outposts and alien hives, you are free to teleport back to the ship with the booty. A nice, serene space-walk with pals, for the most part.
It's when you first encounter a rival team’s ship that the game's hectic nature unfurls. Soon enough, your pilot will be swerving out of the way of enemy pulse cannons as someone on a turret returns volleys. You are running around below deck with your repair tool out, dousing fires and fixing ship systems. Once close, expect a boarding party to come knocking as both teams try and distract the other while they focus fire on depleting their shields. Oh, another ship just came into range of scanners. You plant a bomb trap on the first enemy ship, sending their crew haywire trying to defuse and, oh no, one of the third ships crew just used a tractor beam to pull our ship and now we’re heading for a collision. The reactor is about to overheat if you don’t find more ice to cool it. These encounters rarely ever seem to go exactly as any one team wants, and it takes thinking on your feet and good team communication to get through. It’s emerging, lads! I can see the tail!
The game, published by ex-Blizzard crew Dreamhaven, and developed by ex-Bungie led internal developer Moonshot Games, surprisingly feels a lot like if Blizzard and Bungie made a space PVP shooter – which is nice. It’s cartoonish but robust, with the Blizzard character quips and general polish, the bungie floatiness and tight gunplay added on top. It’s also NOT free to play, which gives us hope that the monetisation of this new ‘live service’ will stay less than egregious for the foreseeable.
And a live service it shall remain, until the newest shiniest live service emerges, at which point, do we abandon ship and seek refuge in the new, chosen lobby? Can we trust the solar winds to carry this game past the GTAVI horizon, or is this another game destined to crash on the rocky shores of the gamepass epoch? Can it siphon any players away from the resurgent Helldivers or the monolithic Fortnite? Will the price tag be too much to contend with the Behemoth Free2play titles that it’s gunning for? Will anyone else in the group chat / discord even get the game in the first place? Fuck knows, but it’s fun for now.
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 what we do, tell your similarly-minded mates and help get the word out.
Thanks, friends. Always check behind waterfalls, start with a half and remember:
