I remember having a chat with my old barber last year about the Skate trailer. We weren't concerned with the popular gripes. We were just stoked to record new edits and re-enter the classic Skate flowstate on a new engine that would hopefully have more grounded physics. My barber happened to be the frontman of Syracuse straight-edge hardcore band All 4 All. This was a punk rock barbershop, and fittingly, we both shared a fixation on landing tricks in Skate 3 as sketchy as possible.

To land sketchy is to land imperfectly, to look as if not in control. The leather jacket-wearing, kitchen-tattooing pro skaters in Baker, Zero, and Emerica videos were famous for making sketchy look really cool in the early 00s. I no longer live in Syracuse, but I imagine my old barber (shout out Sam, hope you're well) is just as disappointed as I that the new Skate doesn't even allow players to land sketchy.

Read more

The Steam Frame, a new VR headset Valve just announced alongside a new Steam Machine and Steam Controller, is both a simpler and more complex virtual reality kit than 2019’s Valve Index. While it lacks the Index’s fancy finger-tracking controllers, the hybrid headset can run Steam games straight from its own onboard storage, aided by controllers that adopt a more conventional gamepad (or Steam Deck)-style layout. The Frame’s goal, therefore, is to let its wearers play as many VR and> non-VR games as possible – with its ARM-based Snapdragon chip posing both challenges and opportunities to spread that compatibility into Android VR games as well.

Read more

Back in December, the reveal of Sloclap’s Rematch sent me into spirals of introspection about the classist origins of my apathy for football. Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road is sending me into spirals of introspection about the fact that maybe football was a Dragon Quest RPG all along. Hypersonic penalty kicks that wreathe the ball in purple fire? Nobody told me football was this rad. So many years wasted, playing effing grass hockey.

Read more