still difficult to talk about...essentially the inverse of the original, a game about failure and the need to move forward regardless (you can already see the shape of what would become Death Stranding in how much of this is running fruitless errands for their own sake)

anti-power fantasy in that it begins with a low-key dissection of Snake, the transcendence of his original character having already been achieved and thus all that's left is his death and rebirth...and then Raiden becomes protagonist, a blank slate stand-in for the player that remains constantly in conflict with the player's goals...a literal movement in circles followed by a break, first steps toward agency, a backstory that reveals itself as the player/Raiden go through purgatory...dreaming and then becoming the dream

20th century ghosts haunt the new millennium, the once-vibrant hope of the digital age tears apart, gives way to something terrifying and monolithic, a new fascism that seems inevitable...and yet through what amounts to ego death via stripping (ha) the player and character down to their bare (ha) elements, we find a new hope in the rubble, persistence in the face of a reality that always works against us...Sisyphus unleashed!!

something of an identity crisis, captures Y2K and even post-9/11 and its fallout with such clarity and spot-on chaotic energy that i can help but feel its a rare, magical piece of work...the resonance it takes on in the current day could not possibly be felt in its time, at least not without the benefit of hindsight...its breaks into live action, specifically at the climax, create a hard contrast against the original's focus on a melting iceberg against that game's comparative optimism in a more straightforward self-actualization...here we have a surreal descent into despair and futility followed by a call to keep going anyway, to find meaning in our realities even if we can't quite understand them, and the live action sequences work on multiple levels...as ghosts captured outside their time, abstracted into pixels and inserted into a narrative they have no bearing on, and yet they're evidence of something solid, something that exists and will always exist in a four dimensional sense...image and ambience call without language for us to have blind faith, to throw ourselves into our connections and be present rather than bound to endless loops of the past, whether in literal terms (the repeating of Shadow Moses) or a trap of memory space tinged with crushing trauma...the enemy is Capital and Empire, unsolvable with a boss battle, intangible and invisible to the eye....and yet here we have material and spiritual steps forward

the rare art that has faith in the player to keep moving forward despite everything, to find their own peace without any assurance that their decisions mattered in any immediate sense...to live for living's sake

started this write-up unsure but after dwelling on this for weeks and finally jotting down my thoughts, this is up there with a handful of experiences with art (in any medium) that broaden my idea of what's possible and give me infinitely more hope in humanity's future...astounding this exists, astounding that i get to contend with it!!

inching that much closer to Death Stranding in its melding form to function...that through embracing a borderline passive, often frustratingly counterintuitive role, the player is taught patience, ingenuity, and strength of will...the game's design working its way backwards from the madness of gameified endless warfare set in the ambiguously coded middle eastern terrain to linear trench campaigning to idealized cold war stealth and back to the beginning in an interrogation of iconography and nostalgia cycles...the overarching theme is essentially a necessary repetition of what the first game did to a lesser extent: proposing a radical abandonment of prior systems of thought as the only means to truly better the world, that without dismantling to zero we are doomed to repeat the same patterns until they finally kill us...that melting iceberg replaced with an equally potent double-image of sun/yolk, that with every rebirth, every new attempt to get things right there is potential to break from set outcomes, that we have within us the will to withstand anything and everything, it's only a question of direction

everything about this gets better with every minute i sit thinking on it!! i.e. as much as this mirrors MGS1 it's much more like MGS2 in its sheer thematic complexity and MGS3 fluidity of purpose, that despite a similarly self-defeating linear drive to MGS2 (bolstered by both the game's actual incentive structures and generic gamer impulses instilled within me by years of FPS internalization) there is an immediacy to the game's aesthetic joys that feels more in line with MGS3...the combination of these modes gives me such a unique, deeply melancholic feeling throughout...the futility of action meets the joy of the present-tense, i can imagine my positive-nihilist phase self enjoying this even more, a philosophy culminating perfectly in the Old Man Fist Fight anti-climax, geniusly placed after all the in-universe tension has been resolved....it's that strength in its commitment to immediacy despite more futility than ever that places this as perhaps my favorite of the series, feels like Kojima et al have finally let themselves off the hook and it hurts so good!!

the best fucking game-play ever...i cannot get enough of the way things move in this game: the pace of combat, weight of every action, force of the weapons and cost of evasion...the game is consistently teaching the player first how to play and then how to be themselves...like, obviously there are certain obstacles that require different loadouts but only to a degree; i was surprised how many bosses i could beat with the same playstyle once i'd established that about mid-game, ignoring more effective weaponry for sheer force of will and confidence in my approach

while i experienced one sustained Gamer Rage moment at a certain elongated mission, i find in retrospect that this mission forced me to commit to my own style and i am eternally grateful for that, as the rest of the game would be far harder otherwise...and before that is The Best Boss Ever in BALTEUS, a fight that took me like 9 hours and a million approaches (and deaths) but that remained consistently enthralling throughout...when i won i laid on the floor in exhaustion but resumed more excited than ever to progress, and this was roughly 1/5 into the game!

stepping back for a second it's easy to see the FromSoft trademarks (at least as i understand them via reputation and playing half of one game) all over Armored Core VI...the mechas, vast spaces and spiraling structures, bits of lore we barely understand that imply vast histories and forces that possess incalculable power with no clear purpose or visible leadership

it's all in service of such an immediately pleasing series of missions that it took until near the very last minute for my own priorities to point in a clear direction, and even then i remain uncertain what drove my choices outside of intuition and momentum...it's all about choice and the will that drives our actions, refusing passivity to consciously fill your role, earning your name through force of identity

i find that synergy between my own experience and that of the character unparalleled in any other medium...a huge emotional and intellectual punch that came completely by surprise and honestly pushes this from one of my favorite games into like, my actual favorite to this point...which is especially pleasing given my uncertainty about the medium outside of Kojima/MGS, it feels like a second Power of Gaming Moment has hit the twin towers (my brain)

knotty, novelistic, sprawling and more than a little exhausting in its sometimes repetitive and always bordering on non-linear structure...if i could give a score to the first like 30ish missions i would probably give this another 5/5, but i have to admit the extremely long time it took me to finish is to the game's detriment, and that's 50% life events but 50% a near-constant gamer fatigue!!

it's all actually encapsulated nicely in the first and final mission; almost exact mirrors with minor differences and of course a new perspective the second go round...the issue is that this novelty applies to the cutscenes and not so much to going up against all the same obstacles...it felt tedious in a way that's surely intended but comes off flat-out unenjoyable rather than reflective or even meditative, as Death Stranding would achieve across my entire playtime

i think a lot of that comes down to the incongruity between incentives and aesthetics; we feel compelled to keep the story moving in the same sense as the prior games, complete the missions and move forward, and yet the open world formatting invites us to linger, challenge ourselves, breath in the environment...but when one does that you start to notice how quickly the novelty of these environments, these copy/paste setups...it lacks that Death Stranding mirage, the way it feels like you're lingering as you're still pushing things forward, that clear distinction between what's optional and what's core to the experience

as much as i want to engage with this directly as is, i can't help but see in its feverish ambition yet numerous failures to reconcile incentive and aesthetic nothing more than a really pretty dry-run for Death Stranding...it makes me appreciate that even more for what it manages to do without ever showing its hand, the tightrope it manages to walk between linearity and open-world sandbox

i don't think MGSV pulls that off anywhere near as well, in fact, i think it could have been better served by a less is more approach, sharing the same density of storytelling as an MGS4 but with its evolved, silky smooth gameplay...it's not that the decision to scatter narrative to the wind bothers me so much as the incongruity between form and function

still, i have been and will be chewing on it for a long time to come...and i do not regret even a second of the year+ i've spent finishing out the Metal Gear series///i feel like it was a great way to clearly understand the strengths and weaknesses of this medium i'm still only sorta familiar with, and i look forward to comparing every single subsequent game i play to its exemplary invention, it certainly casts a wide fucking shadow...the series already takes up more room in my daily thoughts than maybe any body of work period!!

if the pre-Solid game saw Kojima's preoccupations already taking shape, Solid is fully formed...i've always been told the story is incomprehensible and maybe that's true of later installments but this was quite straightforward, keeping with the prior game it's a series of double and triple crossings but notably every single villain gets empathy...in fact many of the game's best moments are exchanges of love after battle, broken people reaching for connection in their final moments

the military industrial complex and the "terrorists" are one in the same, no one in power can be trusted...and despite this you have to find meaning in other people, love on the battlefield...to live because you never know when your time, when our time, will be up

my only complaints are with the gameplay, which while fantastic still lacks a bit of what i found thrilling in even the first game, with the difficulty and complexity reeled back a bit in favor of a surprisingly linear and intuitive experience...i still had a blast but i feel it could have been better, which makes me that much more excited for what comes after!!

Kojima's all-out power fantasy extravaganza, a supercharged version of the original game's appeals to the id...ultra atmospheric, ever engaging, endlessly cool!!

what it lacks in world-altering subtext it makes up for in blunt force, rendering the MGS universe as hyperreal Cold War fantasy, all its bite coming from its intertexual relation to the prior games...much like the Star Wars prequels, we know how this ends and its vibe of pure fun only makes the eventual tragedy that much heavier...an intersection of systemic forces beyond our control with apolitical hippieisms utterly insufficient to prevent the gradual decline to follow...the liberation Snake and Raiden attain is unobtainable to Big Boss, who always remains a hapless puppet, losing control of his own narrative as he goes

the gameplay's relative linearity reinforces this fatalism at every turn; we are not breaking cycles so much as following the game's lead to the bitter end, all the usual antagonists as mirrors to the protagonist turn darker than ever before...i find more layers the more i dwell on it!

a bastion to the 20th century's failures in all its glory, an invaluable artifact and fantastic experience

played only up to the opening minutes of Anor Londo, will hopefully come back to this in the summer when i have more time and energy to commit to finishing!

instrumental to my newbie mind, primarily in its intricate gameplay detail and plethora of options to proceeding...oftentimes subtly defies intuition / invites contemplation in how best to approach its challenges...i greatly enjoy the ritualistic feel of trying/dying/trying in a vicious cycle, each circle getting just a little bit smarter in approach...my initial struggle with the first few levels gave way to a gradual ease of movement, teaches you how to play so slowly it's almost imperceptible...absolutely wonderful how much a fiction the supposed impenetrable difficulty turned out, that playing the game is more about making measured decisions and studying varied, deliberately chosen responses

funny to me in retrospect how damn difficult the Taurus Demon was; easily the longest i stayed at any level of the game, not because it was actually that hard but because i refused to change tactics, did not think of easier methods to winning beyond grinding harder and gaining more skill...the "cheapness" of certain approaches crumbles under the weight of the game's intentional design, that it's MEANT to be beaten, MEANT to challenge you before giving you an out every single time...the satisfaction comes from that process of push/pull against the world, that there's a spiritually driven disposition toward winning, i feel like Neo going into these seemingly hostile areas without faith, dying easily, before arming myself with a confidence in the game's design as a game, an unbelief that is truly just seeing the work for what it is, engaging with it on its own terms rather than projecting myself onto it

i look forward to completing the game!! while i don't think i'm particularly predisposed toward SoulsBorne style games, i'm happy to have put in the work to "get" them, and will likely play something like Elden Ring at some point :) s/o to the GOAT suzie asriel miniike for providing insight and advice throughout this initial experience, extremely Strand Type of her

relaxing, tedious, frustrating...always rewarding...such an utterly singular experience that it's hard to put into words...essentially had me from the minute i realized that delivering packages with little to no palpable reward or sense of progress was what the whole thing just...is

that sense of satisfaction when i accomplished a particularly tough delivery, often taking hours and suffering countless restarts due to little mistakes, even slight miscalculations...it's a high i haven't experienced anywhere else

i kinda fell in love with the medium due to this unique disposition...the way the form of the game itself reinforces every other aspect, the story, themes, etc...ideas that i've seen explored elsewhere are given such a tangible potency, resonate with me so directly; it's a sensation that couldn't have manifested in any other way

Power of Gaming moment fr

rating based on my experience up to chapter 8...which is where i'm putting it down because i feel like i've gotten everything i wanted from the game (and borrowed it anyway)...up to this point, and with no context of any other games in the series, i feel that as a pure survival combat experience this is well-designed and fluid...nothing revelatory but certainly fun and even without playing the original game the mid 00s vibe is palpable and charming

but the primary takeaway, and most valuable to my overall gaming and art journey, is that i'm stopping because i don't really enjoy killing hordes of weird creatures over and over again, however engaging it may be...feels a bit soul-draining and i prefer killing to be a bit more abstracted or light-hearted (or otherwise discouraged i guess)...not that i'm a pacifist (especially in the context of fiction because it aint real) but it's just a taste i've come to accept...i can do this shit but maybe this genre is outside of what i want out of immersive art

that being said, i'm still gonna try other things in what i assume are a similar mode (Bloodborne etc)...but overall i'll be prioritizing other stuff for a while to see where that directs my taste :)

i feel like i owe an apology to MGSV and have retroactively raised it to a 4/5...as for all my complaints about the repetitiveness of its missions and general disdain for its loose open world, there was still an easily understandable core story that worked on an emotional level...and more importantly the form and function of its gameplay and thematics weaved together...whereas i think of Control as a very solid game with "characters", plot, and themes that never really come together as one...there's never a sense of cohesion to create that sense of player satisfaction i'm so used to when playing a game by Kojima, which are similarly knotty and aesthetically assured but much better at directing those strengths toward a bigger picture

and like i hate to compare this to those games but they have been my way into the medium and i cannot help but hold them up as the gold standard of high concept video games that give me something to think about while also delivering in the immediate moment most of the time...like obviously there are some segments that can drag but they earn a sense of investment that makes the greatest moments hit that much harder...whereas when i played Control i felt like there was a very strong draw, with great player direction and a smooth and enticing learning curve, followed by very little in the way of challenge diversity past a certain point...with a few exceptions of course...but the game could sometimes feel more like a series of errands than an immediate experience...it hit the wall that Phantom Pain did in like 1/3 the time and without the same Big Moments to offset that dissatisfaction

all that being said, i really loved a few parts...the worldbuilding through imagery, the generally Beyond the Black Rainbow ass aesthetic, many of the boss fights, the fight mechanics, and of course a few notable set pieces such as the infamous Maze...although i do wish at times it had been a bit more consistently challenging as even by my standards this was fairly easy a majority of the time...anyways, helluva way to say goodbye (for now) to my PS4 and give myself permission to upgrade to the PS5, where i will hopefully finally play some new titles and broaden my experience with the medium across 2024!! extremely excited for Alan Wake II :)

while it sacrifices a bit of the depth of meaning i've come to expect from the Kojima entries, i find this surprisingly fitting as a spiritual sequel to MGS2...plunging full force into an unapologetic service to the Id, somewhat formally serving as a deconstruction/celebration of the reasons we enjoy violence, that duality between ignorance of effect and the purity of Play...that violence has no inherent negative/positive connotation, just significance in its direction...follows the usual Metal Gear signature of Big Players using our protagonist for their own means until self-determination breaks the mold, that trademark slow progression into transcendence that defies Raiden's previous subsumption into a post-modern reality, a metamodern banger!!

my official first foray into little bitty games was a great experience! despite being kinda messy and strung out (even at like 20 mins of material) i got quite an emotional response from it...the central conceit of an arbitrary and unknowable choice lends every little quirk of design a thudding weight, and in the end i felt...victorious in my unwavering conviction

i also played the expansion, which felt less inspired but certainly on the cusp of something profound with its more violently consumptive nature...i find myself dwelling on the inherent themes that come with the mechanics of a game, which i'm certain is something a lot of these smaller works will focus on...an informative and promising start to this journey!