Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread.

While I imagine it came up in Thursday’s thread and I missed it (or participated in and forgot about it), I feel the need to discuss a rather painful loss in the industry: the delisting of Spec Ops: The Line. A game whose marketing and outward appearance showed nothing but a generic, violent, jingoistic modern military shooter belied a dark deconstruction of American intervention and the exploitative nature of war games. The atrocities you are forced to commit, and the agency (and lack thereof) you had in committing them, became a major topic of discussion in the emerging discourse of games as art in the 2010s. It is a true cult classic, and its unannounced removal from storefronts just one more bit of bad news to come from this year.

There isn’t really a prompt here (I’ll keep saving that other prompt for a rainy day). If you’ve played Spec Ops and want to talk about it, please do. If you have a different favorite game that’s been delisted, or have some thoughts on player agency or ludonarrative dissonance, have at it. But I wanted to pay tribute to a good game, and the kind of games that make me like writing about games—even if I’m not sure I’ve got a Spec Ops article in me.

Of course, there are good things too: Lovely Bones has published her Game News Roundup! And I’d love to hear about what you’ve been playing this weekend. I have, like, too much personal playing stories to discuss.