Tuesday IV (11/6/20) | main/menu with nicholas grayson

// Hello, welcome to main/menu, a weekly newsletter about video games. Last week it said The Tutorial in here. That’s something else that isn’t this. Every Friday, Fanbyte Social Editor+ Nicholas Grayson will hand deliver a bunch of words about the intersection between games and culture to your inbox. If you have questions or comments, you can hit me at niki@fanbyte.com.

Okay, time to do the newsletter! I hope John opens this one. //

It’s gonna rain in LA this weekend and my back already hurts. I used to think that the whole “joints know about the weather” thing was a bunch of jenkem/hokum/horseapples/bullshit but no, it’s real. My back hurts in a very specific way – right where they did the spinal taps and up to the like, T12/L1 zone – and that means that it’s going to rain.

The consoles have been reviewed and they’re good! Mostly! Some people don’t think the menu system on the PS5 is any good and the launch game selection on the Xbox Series leaves much to be desired, but hey! They got reviewed, people like them, and they’ll be in the hands of the public next week. Super exciting. Incredibly, that was the only thing that happened this week! Anyway, time for Now Playing. :)

Massholes rejoice! It really looks like the fabled Mass Effect Remastered package is coming, with an announcement teased by both Bioshock and VentureBeat’s Jeff Grubb. Our resident Masshole Kenneth Shepard wrote all about it in the piece above. Remember remember the birth of Destiel two days prior to the 7th of November, where my SuperWhoLockEffecters at??? ;)

merritt uh… made a vampire angry? And then the vampire was like “listen if I hadn’t just sucked someone’s blood I would’ve come and got you,” which is a wild thing to send in an email? This is one of my favorite things we’ve put on the site in a minute, you should read this.

If you’re in the market for a brand new television to go with your PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X, I wrote a guide just for you! It’s an incredible guide because it only features 3 televisions. You don’t have to sift through anything, just scroll down. Easy.

Over at Waypoint, Gita Jackson‘s review of Spider-Man: Miles Morales is a must read.

I can finally tell y'all about some of the games we’ve had in house the last couple of weeks! I’ve been playing Bugsnax, Fuser, and Dirt 5. Steven’s had their hands on Yakuza: Like A Dragon. Coverage of all of these games will hit Fanbyte.com early next week.

We’ll be streaming Fuser tonight (9/4/20) at 6:00pm PDT [time converter] on Twitch, so head over to bongodingus.com if you want a little concert.

Kahlief and I teamed up for a review podcast on Spider-Man: Miles Morales! He got his hands on it early, and we had a great time chatting about the game, its interpretation of NYC, and the fact that no one knows what Peter Parker does for fun.

This week in the Good Stuff Zone we––

“nothing else happened this week” foh. have you seen the “oh no, oh no, oh no no no no no” tiktoks? the one at 1:36 (below) is the funniest thing i’ve ever seen.

Not good enough? Alright fuckin’ fine. We’ll talk about the election, as we enter the fourth consecutive Tuesday this week.

Joe Biden’s probably gonna pull this out and I’m not… jazzed? Like, I’m happy that Trump will not be president anymore, sure. But the issue with Trump was not just that he was a fucking dumbass, it was that he was a fucking dumbass with fascist tendencies who also enabled, aided, and abetted a resurgence in white nationalism and police violence. Just because Donald Trump will not be in office doesn’t mean that the ideas that Donald Trump has – the ideas that America has – will go away. It actually means the opposite. They’ll get louder and louder. And in four years? Who knows what the fuck is going to happen.

That’s why we do the work though, right? We advocate, we protest, we defend, we provide mutual aid. We continue to stay involved at the local level, too. (Los Angeles just elected George Garcon and Nithya Raman to the D.A.‘s office and L.A. City Council, respectively. I’m so proud of my city.) We’re battling a hegemony that actively has proven that it would rather not have us here. That work can’t stop just because there’s a new guy in the White House. Especially when we already know he doesn’t have a… particularly robust connection the cause.

So we revel in this for just a second. This is less of a victory and more of an opportunity for a soft reset. And then, once (if) this dust settles – after we’ve all spent the morning of January 20, 2021 with a little less existential dread on the TL – we organize, we strategize, we educate ourselves on how we can become better engaged.

We fight.

Have a good weekend.