I'm a fan of the weekly pinball newsletter This Week In Pinball, and one of the things I really like about it is the decision to open every newsletter with a song of the week, which is a cute way to provide some music you can stick on in the background while you read the newsletter (or not, if you've already got something on, or you just love silence.) Well, I'm nicking the idea, as a low stakes way to share some music I like when I feel like it.
This month I've been voting in the People's Pop Poll's "Pop World Cup" on Bluesky, which has been a really fascinating way to get exposed to music from a lot of countries that I just otherwise wouldn't—or to try and push deeper cuts from the more ubiquitous Western countries on other people, like I did by nominating Secession's The Magician. Rather than pick that though I thought I'd share this absolutely joyful bit of... uh, to be honest, I'm not quite sure what it is, but it's from Cote D'Ivoire, a country I doubt I've ever heard a song from, and it's great fun. If that's not your speed, I'll also highlight the Austrian entry, Dani Lia's schwindelig (omgomgomg) which I just can't stop listening to. Feel free to check out the whole playlist though!
My highlight of the month—of any month—is when they let me on The Insert Credit Show, and I'm slowly earning those credits so one day I can force the panel to play a game on the Amstrad CPC or something.
This was a tough one to write, because I really wanted to like this so much more than I did, and the state of the industry these days really can make you second-guess yourself as a critic. But better to be honest.
Technically a hat-trick of Taito releases, unintended but with the sad passing of Yoshihisa Kishimoto it felt right to share these pieces, even if in at least the second one I'm hard on Double Dragon. It really is close to unplayable in 2026 though.
As the Famicom version hit Switch Online, I thought it was worth sharing my coverage of the original and its Famicom version, because the game is simultaneously incredibly important and utterly baffling to the uninitiated. It's more a game that's for learning about rather than playing—at least, don't feel like you have to complete it. There's a reason I've only done it the once...
exp. Du Cinéma
Can't embed direct from the NFB ;_;
An unusual month in which nothing I saw graduated to front page status and I avoided writing about a few movies that I didn't feel like I had anything particularly useful to say about. So why don't I share Ripple Rock, which I watched on the NFB's website, which informed me that once in Canada they used over a thousand tons of explosive to blow up an underwater mountain, and reminded me that the NFB is an incredible resource that Canadians including myself mostly forget about but which should be cherished.
"~6000 words (and lots of images) on the 90s games that shaped my gender identity, including windows 3.1 amazons, sapphic crpg romances, and my own teenage fetish games."
And Finally…
Click through. It's worth it.
I think this might be the greatest piece of writing in the Onion, ever. I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe. It's just a masterpiece of tone and phrasing.
Relatedly, I didn't realise you could subscribe internationally for no additional postage costs. I should do that when I'm not skint, especially to support their great work making Alex Jones even more of a laughing stock than he already is.
Next week on exp.: The first vertically scrolling shooter?
This Month On exp. The exp. Game Awards 2025 / The exp. Culture Awards 2025 Took a little time off from the relentless grind of new articles to celebrate my favourites of the previous year. It gave me an opportunity to talk up Evil Egg in advance of me writing it up, because it'll probably be a long time before I do—I've been busy and had to put it down for a while, so when I return to it I'll have to grind my skills back up if I want to eventually beat the boss. Subscriber Posts: Head On...
I think we're settling into a monthly dispatch after all; it seems like the correct frequency, for my own sanity at least... This Month On exp. Subscriber Posts: Öoo (NamaTakahashi, 2025) / UFO 50 #2: Bug Hunter (Perry, 2024) / Plug & Play (Frei/Rickenbach, 2015) / KIDS (Playables, 2019) Dang, big month for subs! Öoo will unlock in a week, as is the tradition for the monthly posts, but the other two will remain locked up ~forever~. The Plug & Play and KIDS article is a minor bonus to follow...
Oof, haven’t done one of these for a month. Well, let’s get to it. This Month On exp. Subscriber Posts: Thirty Flights Of Loving (Blendo Games, 2012) / UFO 50 #1: Barbuta (Suhrke, 2024) Thirty Flights Of Loving continues my slow Blendo Games retrospective (see Gravity Bone, Flotilla) but I’m pleased to finally start doing something I’ve been meaning to do for ages, which is work through UFO 50 (similarly slowly). I’m always looking for reasons to make my subscription seem worth it, so these...