Max Coombes

DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES (Terrence Davies, 1988)

my favorite 2025 music releases

Thank you all for your patience! Without further ado, it's This Year In Videogame Blogging 2025, complete with a bonus This Week In Videogame Blogging, December 28, 2025!

critical-distance.com/2026/01/01/t...

perhaps the most visually romantic film of the 2010's

Omg yes - Brisbane

and best first time reads

favourite first watches

favourite 2025 music releases (work in progress 'til i die??)

742617000027

Maggots in the Mix: Slipknot's Debut Remixed

None of the effort's mine, but I wrote an essay for it called 'Maggots in the Mix: the imPurity of the album, of the voice, of time' maxwcoombes.neocities.org/writing-art/...

Slipknot (2025 Maggot Remix) : stubblejumper : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive the purpose of this remix is to have the most complete & most violent version of the album. liberties have been taken only when necessary, edited in the...

High quality version here archive.org/details/slip...

YouTube video by stubblejumper Slipknot - Slipknot (2025 Maggot Remix) Full Album

Now that the Slipknot 25th Anniversary edition is out, I'd like to draw attention to the Slipknot Maggot Mix (2025) — a bootleg that uses demos, outtakes, live experiments, and studio notes to vitally *reimagine* the original instead of simply recontextualising it www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rSp...

VOLUME 6, ISSUE 1 (JANUARY 2026) The Wounds That Never Healed: Videoludic Trauma in Cry of Fear by Samuel Poirier-Poulin This article offers a conceptualization of trauma in horror video games, arguing that games can cut across the reality/fiction divide, deeply affect the emotional organization of the player, and leave them with wounds that take time to heal. More specifically, it develops the idea that Cry of Fear (Team Psykskallar, 2013) can induce a form of trauma in the player by putting them in horrifying and intense situations. Character Affectivity in Newton and the Apple Tree by Henri M. Nerg This paper studies character affectivity and temporality in the Japanese visual novel Newton and the Apple Tree (Laplacian, 2017). The paper analyzes different affects and emotions that game characters evoke in players. Importantly, affect is understood here as a neuropsychological concept. Black Sun in the Land of Shadow: DLCs and Textual Depletion in Shadow of the Erdtree (2024) by Max Coombes This article explores the relationship between downloadable content (DLC) and base games in producing ‘lack’ in the player and text, using Shadow of the Erdtree (2024) as its focus.

Investigating Development Crunch in Games and its Impact on Creative Expression by Shaif Hemraj This article explores the often negative and detrimental relationship between “crunch” and creative expression and synthesizes academic and industry conversations into a serious game prototype, Game Maker Mayhem A Contemporary Take on Victorian Lunacy: Representations of the Asylum in the Neo-Victorian Video Game Alice: Madness Returns by Jéssica Iolanda Costa Bispo Considering the historical reality of Victorian asylums, this article explores Alice: Madness Returns, as it encourages a critical look at these institutions through the lens of neo-Victorianism, demonstrating a potentiality for reinterpreting the Victorian historical narrative. Goblins for Slaughter: The Perpetuation of Racism and Classism in Baldur’s Gate 3 by Benjamin J.M. Horn This article explores how Baldur’s Gate 3 has perpetuated Victorian-era racism and classism. To demonstrate this, the article discusses current literature on racism and monstrosity, delves into the history of the goblin, and conducts a close reading of Baldur’s Gate 3’s first act.

The Journal of Games Criticism has published a new issue!! Come and read 6 great new open-access game studies articles!

gamescriticism.org/issue-6-1/
#gamestudies

A ★★★★ review of Die My Love (2025) Die My Love introduces itself to us as a film at once fussy and overwrought, and for the first fifteen minutes I wondered whether it would amount to one of those exploitative disasters nobody knows wh...

Less a redo of 'A Woman Under the Influence' (as people are saying), more 'Antichrist' by way of John Prine

Alright! Let's actually talk about this waterfall thing. It is an amazing showcase of many things that I adore from late 90s/early 2000s graphics.
I am replicating this in Blender through mere observation, so some things might not be fully accurate to the mind-boggling effects of the PS1.

Monster Party on the NES on a CRT TV

this closeup, casually deforming space-time, in the swimmer (1968)

that geese album from this year is no good at all. like if matt bellamy and x ambassadors got together to make a krautrock album

Omg I've been trying to explain it and that's exactly it 😱

watching the living dead at manchester morgue (1974), saw a sign reading "Climbers Hikers Served in Passage →," and thought about m john harrison's climbers (1989)

letterboxd.com/sisterlisa66...

I'm immediately wondering what implications this will have for preserving play and the contemporary archaeology of video games

And the genAI models that will be potentially trained on these upscaled videos

Good stuff! Share more writing!

Hands in Susan Te Kahurangi King Untitled 1974-79; 1975-79. Her work both makes you want to draw, and wonder why anybody ever tried to draw since