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

Surprising absolutely no one who comes here regularly, I have been absolutely infatuated with Donkey Kong Bananza ever since it came out on… Thursday. Dear god, I’ve only been playing this for four days?! I can’t even remember what it was like to play games that weren’t this one. It is an absolute delight, nesting doll of sediment and gimmickry, and one of Nintendo’s absolutely cleverest works of art. My god, is it a marvel of game design. I’m coming close to the end – I have to be, the levels are literally a gigantic line going deeper into the Earth, and I’m near the core – though I’m sure I’ll play around with the game afterwards.

Anyway, the big gimmick of Bananza is its emphasis on destruction, i.e. Donkey Kong can destroy almost every form of terrain that there is, and what he can’t destroy is mostly found in optional challenge rooms, underneath dozens of feet of sediment, and some cool stuff that I’ll just table. He can punch a section of a wall out of existence or rip it out to use as a bludgeon (or a surfboard). This is only possible due to one of Nintendo’s favorite words of 2025: “voxels.” In layman’s terms, they’re kinda akin to pixels for 3D environments instead of 2D. DK’s not pulling up a 4x4x3′ block of earth; he’s holding a combination of, I dunno, five million or so voxels. When I threw dozens and dozens of dirt clumps onto each other to make today’s art installation of a header image, every clump is near-countless voxels, all of which have been coded to be that material. It’s how the game can play with so many types of terrain, from the rocket engine rock to the slippery ice to the rubber you normally can’t touch to stuff I probably shouldn’t spoil since the game’s, like, only just out. Voxel graphics and rendering have been around for many years, and they’re not purely used so that players can destroy things. But this is an incredible example of their use.

Thus we lead to today’s prompt: what is, if any, your history with voxels in video games? Are you interested in them from a design perspective? How would you like them to be used? Is Minecraft a voxel game? The latter answer is “yes,” though it doesn’t have voxel graphics – Wikipedia gives a decent explanation about that and a surprisingly diverse list of examples.

And, of course, what did you play this weekend?