Five Things That Offer The Distraction We All Need Right Now
Looking through the gaming news this morning, and indeed every morning in recent times, I’m overwhelmed by just how grim this industry feels right now. In the wake of Microsoft’s latest enormity, I’m seeing incredible pieces analyzing the company’s hubris and incompetence, in-between ads cosplaying as news stories about Prime Day, and even then I’m sourcing my gaming news from an ever-shrinking number of games journalism outlets. Oh, and this is just me focusing in on gaming. God, don’t pull the camera back! No! Oh shit.
This can be so incredibly overwhelming. No, it’s not like there was a recent golden era where the news bulletins were packed with incessant good cheer, but we’re a species that’s still reeling from the trauma of covid, inundated by news of wars, suffering, and the inevitable consequences of capitalism’s unchecked overreach, all while major nations elect cruel people incapable of tying their own shoelaces.
As I looked through the feeds and wires this morning, it all just felt too heavy. And honestly, under that weight, I couldn’t bring myself to plaster on a smile and report the (genuinely fun) news that Crocs are partnering with Nintendo to make Animal Crossing-themed plastic shoes. But no! I’m not going to let all the bad news squish me, and I don’t want it to squish you either. So instead I’ve put together a bunch of things that make me smile, that I want to share and hopefully cause you to smile too.
Slings & Arrows
If you’ve met me in real life, there’s a very strong chance I’ve already recommended 2003’s Slings & Arrows to you, complete with terrible attempts on my part to deliver lines like main character Geoffrey Tennant (Paul Gross). Fortunately, you’ve likely been spared this, and instead I’ve put the scene I love to quote from above.
Slings & Arrows was a Canadian TV show, set in a fictional theater that hosts the annual New Burbage Shakespeare Festival. However, moments before the new season was due to start, director Oliver Welles (Stephen Ouimette) dies. The festival is forced to beg the return of Geoffrey Tennant, a former actor and director who left New Burbage after a massive falling out and a following stint in a psychiatric facility. Each of the three six-episode seasons follows Tennant’s attempts to put on a specific Shakespeare play, battling against money-men, egos, and perhaps most of all, the ghost of Oliver Welles.
It is one of the most extraordinary pieces of television ever made. Its love for and knowledge of Shakespeare makes it an education, and its dark humor ensures it always feels punchy and passionate. Alongside the incredible Paul Gross (Due South’s Benton Fraser) is Martha Burns as Ellen Fanshaw, an actor coming to terms with now playing Gertrude rather than Ophelia, and The Kids in the Hall’s Mark McKinney as Richard Smith-Jones, a desperately useless manager who fails to please everyone.
All three seasons are a joy. Nearly every relationship is antagonistic, especially those between Geoffrey and absolutely everyone else, and yet the love and care and depth of understanding from the cast shines through it all in every moment. It is a thing of beauty that’ll make you want to understand Shakespeare more, just so you can feel like part of the gang. And if not, you’ve always got the glorious Seán Cullen’s sot critic, Basil, to have your back.
It’s not always easy to find these days, but right now you can buy it via Amazon.
Saints Row IV
I will not tire of celebrating Saints Row IV in a world where I feel like this game gets short shrift. Here’s my declaration: Saints Row IV is funny in the most enormously elaborate ways. It’s a game that exists to make you laugh on a vast scale. It feels like something that shouldn’t have been able to happen in an industry that’s so focused on the necessity of producing massive hits that it tends to shave the corners off everything to appeal to the widest audience possible. But SRIV thrives in its stupidity.
This is a game that begins with you disarming a nuclear missile you’re clung to while it’s in flight, crashing through the roof of the White House to be president, and then watching helpless as the entire world is destroyed by invading aliens. That’s the opening sequence. The rest of the game is set in a digital reproduction of the city from Saints Row III, all for the amusement of a tiresome alien overlord who comes across like a gormless boss who has no idea how disliked he is by his employees. Oh, and you now have superpowers.
This is a game that asked, “What if you could just do what you like?” Some people found it too much, too un-serious. I find it just a complete joy. And it helps that it delivers all these histrionics with the most incredible dialogue and acting. It’s just so, so funny. This is a game that gets the original actors back to re-enact the classic fight scene from They Live for literally no sensible reason. It just exists to be daft. And its closing joke over the credits made me laugh so hard I had tears streaming down my face.
Saints Row IV is currently $5 in the Steam sale.
A Good Hang With Amy Poehler
I strongly suspect that A Good Hang With Amy Poehler exists for the very same reason this article does. Poehler makes clear her express wish that this new podcast offer friendly laughter in a world on fire. And it succeeds.
The weekly show is 18 episodes in, which means both that there’s an excellent pool to choose from, and that you’re not arriving so late as to be daunted by the backlog. Guests have included Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Michelle Obama, and Quinta Brunson. And Will Forte, Natasha Lyonne, Seth Meyers and Idris Elba. And Martin Short. Oh, and Kathryn Hahn. Look, she gets the best guests. And the purpose of the conversation is just to cheerfully reminisce, tell funny tales, and goof around.
It’s so low stakes as to be glorious, and Poehler’s positivity and eagerness to listen causes everyone to be incredibly human. In most episodes it’s two friends catching up, which removes all the Celebrity Interview nonsense, so much so that guests often forget to plug anything. The latest episode, which went up just moments before I started writing, features Andy Samberg, and I just cannot wait to hear the two of them fondly remembering SNL and making each other laugh.
Homestar Runner
You either know and adore Homestar Runner and are wondering why someone would even think this needed recommending, or you’ve not heard of it and are about to become the former.
HSR is, astonishingly, 25 years old now. It began as a Flash cartoon in 2000, an early internet phenomenon created by two brothers, Matt and Mike Chapman (The Brothers Chaps). It was, from the start, both incredibly funny and deeply strange. Its incredible cast of characters, almost entirely voiced by the incredibly versatile Matt Chapman, includes the eponymous doofus Homestar Runner, the wonderfully brash and cynical Strong Bad (and his pet, The Cheat), the greedy and corpulent King Of Town, and my favorite, the implausible and unbound-by-reality Homsar.
As well as being the most essential website of the early internet, it also spun off a series of Telltale-made episodic adventure games, and most recently a spoof point-and-click called Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate. The latter has so many layers of HSR in-jokes as to be impenetrable to anyone but long-term fans, but gosh, there are so many long-term fans.
The great thing is, nearly everything from the original Flash site has been preserved on YouTube, with new cartoons still occasionally being made and uploaded there. And more recently, the old website has been revived for the modern world, Flash-free but feature complete. Including all 209 Strong Bad Emails!
Whether you watched it all at the time or have never heard of it before, there are few better ways to distract yourself from all that.
The Beekeeper’s Picnic
I have gone on and on about this game this year, and for really good reason. This gorgeous point-and-click adventure tells a new tale of Sherlock Holmes, following the adventures chronicled in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels, living in retirement after the First World War. When his erstwhile partner Watson returns from the front lines, Holmes welcomes him to his new Sussex home. Both are now elderly men, and Holmes—living in his rural idyll—is reflecting on just what a complete shit he was to Watson throughout his life. He simply wants to put together a picnic for his lifelong friend, so he can have a moment to tell the doctor what their friendship means to him.
You could interpret this as quite twee, but creator Helen Greetham is an expert in all things Sherlock Holmes, and by rooting the game in the stories—most especially by cleverly evoking the events at the end of the short story “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs”—Holmes’s motivations are grounded and understandable.
Sherlock Holmes tales are one of my happy places—most nights I’ll fall asleep listening to 1960s radio plays based on the stories, because they’re the perfect mix of gently entertaining and soporific. So yes, this is my wheelhouse. But I’m hardly alone! The Beekeeper’s Picnic understands the underlying gentleness of Doyle’s writing which often lies concealed just beneath Holmes’s acerbic nature, how he gives us a world in which smartness and wit always outdo cruelty and greed. Part of the game’s genius is that it gives us a tale of Holmes that exists entirely without the latter.
The Beekeeper’s Picnic is currently $11 in the Steam sale.
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