I’m not ready to talk about records yet. There’s a lot I don’t understand about it, it’s not mine yet, and if I’m going to address it I need to approach that space and the topic mindfully. But I’m definitely starting to get weird about it. Weirder. I mean, think about my baseline.

Fanbyte had a really great article up showcasing a bunch of indie radness at PAX South, and so did USgamer. It really did my heart good. You would think that making something cool would be the hard part, but it doesn’t seem to be. Cool people, alone or together, shackled to weird appetites and beholden to strange and ephemeral Voices make cool things all the time. I’ve surrounded myself with them, and not just to give would be assassins a harder time of it. The problem is being heard, being differentiated from the wall of data we’re drowning in, being drowned in I should say, which is why it’s more incumbent on us than ever to make sure other people know whenever we find treasure.

It looks like we - all three of us - thought Petal Crash was worth emphasizing. Fundamentally, it’s about matching tiles on a grid by sliding them - and matches fling adjacent tiles around, offering the possibility for chains; the result is a kind of hyperkinetic slide puzzle. I talked with the creator for a while, and even got a chance to take a peek at the mobile version. One of my favorite genres of game is “game whose pixel art and primal yet rich mechanics make it seem like, not a retro game, but a true artifact of the era it’s meant to evoke,” and that’s Petal Crash to a tee. It has plenty of solo content, including Puzzle Modes, which I tend to spend a lot of time with in games like this - but playing competitively, as I did at the show, so perfectly captured the feeling of coming home from school and battling a friend that the urge to scrape Dorito accrual from my fingers with my incisors was keenly felt.

(CW)TB out.