As you might expect from the way I constantly play and analyze important games, I try to do the same for albums, and this week I’ve been listening to Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). This was the first time I sat down to listen to Wu-Tang, and while the name of the group should have been a big hint, what surprised me was how the album was almost… dorky? It’s packed with references and samples from kung fu movies which were getting old even at the time of the album’s release, and you would think they would make the whole thing sound dated, but the reality is just the opposite. These movies were such a huge inspiration for producer/singer/songwriter The RZA that every track shines with the love. If you want to see just how much, check out this amazing interview where he talks about the movies he’s sampled, it’s plain that the enthusiasm hasn’t waned even 1% all these years later. That earnest appreciation has a certain magnetism to it, and it characterizes Max Payne in the same way it does Wu-Tang. You have references to oldschool noir, comic books, John Woo action, a whole slew of disparate influences, but they blend in a way that only fans who deeply understand the material could accomplish. James McCaffrey’s performance of the titular character is a big part of what brings it all to life, giving Max an edge while also establishing him as someone with a genuine sense of humor, but the extreme situation has dulled his ability to tell fantasy from reality. This blur turns the bullet-time mechanic from a simple cinematic homage into something that’s iconically Max Payne; it’s hard to tell whether the slow mo is something he’s imagining, or if his adrenaline is actually giving him the edge. The game’s ability to reuse proven narrative language while injecting it with new personality in this way is what makes the game such a timeless classic, it shines with the love of its influences while also being entirely original. I can only hope the upcoming remake knows how to do the same.

March 4th, 2020: I start a new job as software developer at a bank. 


March 6th, 2020: Boris Johnson, leader of the Conservative Party of Great Britain, reassures the British public that the rise in SARS-CoV-2 cases is "nothing to be concerned about".


March 9th, 2020:  Due to the rapid rise in SARS-CoV-2 ("coronavirus") cases in Asia and the European continent, financial markets go into free-fall. Billions of pounds of value are wiped away from companies around the world, in an event later dubbed as "The First Black Friday of 2020". My second-ever meeting at my new bank job is interrupted by financial traders screaming at each other and their phones in the corridor outside the conference room. Boris Johnson once again reassures the people of Britain that coronavirus will not be a problem in the UK.


March 10th, 2020: In the interests of personal and public safety, a number of software teams at my workplace decide to implement a joint 2-week work from home policy. An immediate evacuation of personnel, laptops and coffee mugs begins. 


March 16th, 2020: A ban on non-essential travel comes into effect in the United Kingdom and citizens are advised to stay at home to curb the spread of coronavirus. The UK government claims that coronavirus "will be beaten in 12 weeks".


March 20th, 2020: Highly-anticipated video games Animal Crossing and DOOM: Eternal release around the world. Gamers who pre-ordered DOOM Eternal also receive a remastered port of DOOM 64, a 1997 first-person shooter game developed and published by Midway Games for the Nintendo 64. This port of DOOM 64 also goes on general sale at the same time. 


March 23rd, 2020: My grandfather dies from complications related to the contraction of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2).


March 26th, 2020: Due to UK government health policy that strongly encourages hospitals to release elderly patients who test positive for coronavirus into the care of residential care homes, my 60 year old mother is forced to give up her role as an events co-ordinator and take up full-time nursing duties.


April 1st, 2020: Six people are allowed to attend my grandfather's burial, which is carried out by the local council's hazardous waste department. There is no funeral ceremony. 


April 3rd, 2020: Looking for something cheap to distract me, I purchase DOOM 64 for £1.50 on the Nintendo Switch, mistakenly believing it to be a Nintendo 64 port of the original DOOM (1993). 


April 6th, 2020: While playing map 16 of DOOM 64 - "Burnt Offerings" - I begin to realise that DOOM 64 (and DOOM in general) is something quite special.

April 30th, 2020: Boris Johnson assures the public that the UK is now "past the peak" of the coronavirus pandemic.


May 2nd, 2020: Gradually beginning to enjoy the newfound freedoms of home-working, I download GZDoom and begin playing through "DOOM", "DOOM II" and their expansions whenever my code is compiling or I'm stuck waiting for a reply to an email.


May 9th, 2020: I celebrate my 30th birthday. Between other housebound festivities, I play a wee bit of DOOM II’s MAP04: The Focus to celebrate. It’s my favourite DOOM map.

June 15th, 2020: My flatmate and I host a Streets of Rage 4 charity stream on Twitch, and attempt to clear the game's Arcade Mode on Mania difficulty in one sitting. After five attempts, we manage to make it two thirds of the way through the game before throwing in the towel. The stream raises £600 for Glasgow asylum seeker funds and social housing charities.

July 23rd, 2020: Noticing my increasingly-obsessional interest in the DOOM series, my flatmate buys me a copy of Masters of DOOM, a book that tells an oral history of John Carmack and John Romero's creation of the original 1993 game and its sequel. 


July 31st, 2020: A BAFTA award for investigative journalism is awarded to the BBC for a 2019 television interview with Prince Andrew, son of Queen Elizabeth II, regarding his association with Jeffrey Epstein and alleged involvement in child sex trafficking.


August 2nd, 2020: I order a replica of John Romero's infamous "COOL GUYS AT THE BEACH" vest in anticipation of my upcoming summer holiday.


August 11th, 2020: John Romero favs a picture of me wearing my "COOL GUYS AT THE BEACH" vest.


August 21st, 2020: Twitter user @spewlieandrews makes a tweet about how he'd spend his eternity in Hell searching for Margaret Thatcher so that he could kill her again. I laugh at it and retweet it.


September 13th, 2020: Tim Rogers releases ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS DOOM, an exhaustive 3-and-a-half hour review of DOOM (1993). During his review, Tim suggests that no one can honestly claim to be a true fan of DOOM until they have tried designing their own map for the game. 


September 22nd, 2020: Some "minor" lockdown restrictions are re-introduced across the United Kingdom in response to a rapid rise in coronavirus infections and ICU admisssions. The government stops offering restaurant patrons its financial incentive programme for eating out.


September 24th, 2020: My girlfriend, a few weeks into her first year as a trainee doctor, is re-assigned to a new infectious diseases unit created in response to a severe rise in coronavirus cases across the city of Glasgow.


September 26th, 2020: I receive a stern warning from my employer's infosec administrator for attempting to install WINE and Ultimate Doom Builder on my workplace laptop. I promise not to do it again and remain grateful that he didn't see the GZDoom launcher on my desktop while inspecting the laptop.


September 27th, 2020: After successfully reformatting my old 2007 Lenovo laptop and installing Windows 10 on it, I begin the process of making a DOOM map. 


September 29th, 2020: After a few evenings spent learning how to make working doors and windows, I create a file called MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad and decide to make a standard DOOM (1993) techbase to test if I understand what the DOOM experts on YouTube have taught me so far.


September 30th, 2020: To make the learning process funny (which is very important to me), I decide to use @spewlieandrews’s August 21st, 2020 tweet about fighting through Hell to find Thatcher as a model for MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad. Making a techbase map about Margaret Thatcher naturally leads to MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad becoming THATCHERS-TECHBASE.wad later that day. 


October 8th, 2020: While in a pub on Islay, my girlfriend and I find out that the Scottish Government is restricting hospitality opening times to 6am-6pm indoors. The sale of alcohol will not be permitted at any time. News of this announcement causes the entire pub to descend into Tennent's-fuelled chaos. After securing my final pint, I go back to drawing DOOM map layouts on my phone.  


October 21st, 2020: Construction begins on THATCHER’S BATTLE COLISEUM, one of the game’s main boss arenas. At this point in development, I still don’t know what a Margaret Thatcher-based boss battle in the idTech1 engine would look like.


October 27th, 2020: Struggling with mapper’s block, I decide to recreate the main lobby of Peach’s Castle from Super Mario 64 in DOOM. With a bit of texture-bashing, this later becomes one of the game’s main lobbies. The iconic castle corridor where Peach’s portrait morphs into Bowser’s - one of my most precious gaming memories ever - is easily repurposed into a Thatcher joke.

October 31st, 2020: Submitting to widespread pressure from the media, general public and his own government officials, Boris Johnson finally announces a second coronavirus lockdown in order to prevent "a medical and moral disaster".


November 1st, 2020: I finish playing through Going Down - perhaps the greatest DOOM wad of all time - and am reassured to discover that DOOM is a fantastic vehicle for comedy.


November 4th, 2020: My flatmate buys me a copy of Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus,  a 1995 book about DOOM mapping. The book comes with a CD-ROM that has a few hundred wads on it, but after 26 years on a bookshelf, the glue has fused the CD’s envelope shut and  I can’t get it open. 


November 5th, 2020: While reading Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus, I come across a chapter that describes “The Best DOOM WADs Ever”. Among mods dedicated to The Simpsons and Beavis & Butthead, I find an entry for a wad called Return to Phobos. The author of Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus describes the wad’s E1M4 replacement as “one of the all-time great DOOM maps”. I’ve never heard of it.


November 6th, 2020: Still curious about Return to Phobos and unable to get the glue off my CD-ROM, I spend some time searching the internet for the wad file. After downloading and playing two other DOOM wads called Return to Phobos that aren’t the particular 1995 Return to Phobos wad that I was looking for, I eventually locate the all-time great E1M4 replacement. It’s a giant factory with a balcony at the rear that lets you look out at a stunning 128x128 industrial skybox. I like it. Some of the doors don’t work and the textures are out of alignment, but I like it. 


November 7th, 2020: E1M4 of Return to Phobos is resurrected and thoroughly repurposed as a mining facility for THATCHER’S TECHBASE. While retexturing a big slime pit, I find out Joe Biden has been elected president of the United States. I return to retexturing my slime pit.


December 14th, 2020: I submit a fake article to my friend’s zine in the style of a 90s video games magazine article. To fill the page out, I stick some wigs on cyberdemon, imp and pinkie sprites to make them look like infamous politicians. The image of a cyberdemon rocking Thatcher’s iconic blow-dry job really makes me laugh.

December 19th, 2020: Due to a rapid rise in coronavirus infections and critical demand on healthcare services, the British and Scottish governments announce a ban on household mixing over the Christmas period. "Tier four" lockdown restrictions now apply indefinitely.

December 25th, 2020: I have an instant curry with my brother and girlfriend before they head off to work on emergency infectious diseases wards at the local hospital because people are being ventilated in corridors and are having to sleep on beds placed in storage rooms. I watch Home Alone 2 then do a bit of work on THATCHER'S TECHBASE.

January 1st, 2021: Waking up to an empty house again, I decide to spend my first hours of the first day of 2021 fucking about with THATCHER'S TECHBASE again. I am severely hung over and vomit into the bin next to my computer within minutes of trying to play the big lobby fight. Maybe tomorrow.

January 22nd, 2021: With the majority of the map's layout, scripting and enemy placement done, I decide to take a short sabbatical from map-making to do some research on the Margaret Thatcher premiership period, which lasted from 1979 - 1990. I watch a number of documentaries, fiction films andYouTube videos that are related, directly or indirectly, to the Thatcher government and its influence on British society in the 1980s. Examples include Pride, The Fully Monty, Brassed Off, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and Pink Floyd's The Wall.

February 17th, 2021: After spending a lot of time reading very snobby, snooty and sanctimonious guides on how to do pixel art for DOOM, I begin adding my points of reference to the game as in-game textures and sprites. I find the pipeline of identifying images, tailoring them to the specifications of the DOOM engine and adding my own artistic flourishes to be one of the most satisfying parts of the THATCHER'S TECHBASE design process so far.


March 16th, 2021: Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, is photographed leaving hospital following a heart transplant at age 99. His incredibly sullen features and sickly demeanour prompt a number of internet memes and satirical artworks that I enjoy very much.


March 19th, 2021: While watching a decino video about the inner workings of the DOOM engine, I learn that Commander Keen objects (as seen in DOOM II’s MAP32) have a special property that causes them to open doors tagged “666” on a map when they are shot at. 


March 21st, 2021: While doing a biweekly watch of my favourite One Piece scenes, I realise that the Commander Keen object in DOOM could be repurposed to resemble a shootable flag. I animate a burning Union Jack sprite and replace the Keen frames with it.


March 24th, 2021: New guidance mandates that all government buildings in the United Kingdom will fly the Union flag at all times. 


April 4th, 2021: Buckingham Palace announces that Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, has died at the age of 99. 


April 6th, 2021: After a number of unsuccessful attempts to convincingly put a Thatcher wig on a Cyberdemon, I decide to ask someone with actual talent to do it for me and commission a pixel artist from Brazil. When he asks me to do a sketch explaining what the hell I’m talking about, I realise it would also be pretty funny to give her a ripped jacket and handbag. https://ibb.co/HpLpkFP


April 7th, 2021: After a nervous 24 hour wait spent wondering if I am certifiably insane, I receive an enthusiastic reply from the artist, who agrees to create the necessary sprites for a Cyberdemon sprite replacement. The enemy has now been creatively dubbed “CyberThatcher”.


April 10th, 2021: CyberThatcher’s handbag is dropped due to logistical issues.

April 12th, 2021: Non-essential retail reopens in England and Wales.


April 17th, 2021: The CyberThatcher sprite sheet is completed and inserted into the game.

April 20th, 2021: I get a haircut for the first time in over a year.

April 26th, 2021: A leaked recording from inside 10 Downing Street reveals that in the autumn of 2020, Boris Johnson said that he would rather "let bodies pile high in their thousands" than take the country into another coronavirus lockdown. Once again, I feel regret that I don't have the time or resources available to put a Boris Johnson wig on that pinkie sprite.


May 12th, 2021: After four months spent playing my wad while listening to a MIDI version of LMAO’s Party Rock Anthem on repeat, I decide that the main map of THATCHER’S TECHBASE probably deserves a more fitting soundtrack. I contact my friend Barry Topping with a tongue-in-cheek job offer, suggesting he compose a “man on a mission”-styled metal track in the vein of the original DOOM games. As an avowed metalhead, he graciously accepts the offer of a lifetime. 


May 13th, 2021: Barry sends me “thatcher1.mp3”, an awesome minute-long sample of the song he’s written. Much to Barry’s dismay, I inform him that the map takes between 40 minutes and an hour to beat in its present state. I have inadvertently tasked him with the horrendous job of coming up with a tune that someone would be happy to listen to upwards of 60 times in a row.


May 16th, 2021: Barry sends me “thatcher2.mp3”, an incredible six-minute long sample of the song he’s written. Much to my delight, the song is now 6 minutes long and could comfortably be listened to on repeat upwards of 120 times in a row. In honour of our new-found creative partnership and a long-standing ironic catchphrase related to the failures of the 2014 Scottish Referendum on Independence, the track is dubbed "L2VN" - "Love 2 Vote No".

June 16th, 2021: After seeing more of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, Barry very kindly offers to compose more music for the game.

June 18th, 2021: Barry produces the opening theme of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, to be used with the main menu.

June 21st, 2021: All coronavirus restrictions are lifted across the United Kingdom.

June 25th, 2021: I build a quick test area in THATCHER'S TECHBASE in order to work on some new Doomcute objects. While bashing together a few chairs, cigarettes and cans of Tennent's Lager, I realise that the test area is actually pretty fun to hang out in and decide to keep it in.


June 26th, 2021: After a few hours spent quickly map-bashing some assets from iconic 90s DOOM wad STAR WARS DOOM 2, I turn my quick test area into a UAC headquarters building and move everything out into a new MAP01 slot in the wad. This map becomes The Beginning of THATCHER'S TECHBASE.

June 28th, 2021: THATCHER’S TECHBASE is awarded an E3 best of THIS 2021 Award by MechaGamezilla.

July 8th, 2021: I share a pre-release build of THATCHER'S TECHBASE with some DOOM wad enthusiasts.

July 9th, 2021: A DOOM player and wadding/modding enthusiast with 25 years of experience laments that I didn't share THATCHER'S TECHBASE sooner - not because it's amazing, but because it's gotten wildly out of hand and he thinks it needs to get under control. He shares some very harsh but fair advice with me.

July 10th, 2021: I cut a number of sections from THATCHER'S TECHBASE in the interests of not making players go mad with confusion/stress/boredom. Approximately 2,500 sectors are deleted in one hour. With far less map to maintain, I feel much better about the project.

July 11th, 2021: An amateur DOOM player struggles to realise that a wall in front of them at the start of MAP02 is a door. I start to feel much worse about the project and wonder if anyone will be able to understand me. I begin to fear that if THATCHER'S TECHBASE was a £60 game you could buy in a shop, people would be looking for their receipts in the first ten minutes.

July 22nd, 2021: While watching footage of The Beginning, Barry notices similarities between the wad's Express Elevator to Hell and the opening of Paradise Killer. WHITEHELL, MAP01's track, is extended to include one of his signature funky interludes.

August 4th, 2021: In the middle of a rare Scottish heatwave, I play through some of Flower, Sun and Rain's most infamously obtuse and player-adversarial chapters and begin to understand the value in placing priority on my own game world over the game world that a player might expect.

August 20th, 2021: I play through the infamous toilet maze puzzle in Grasshopper Manufacture’s The 25th Ward: The Silver Case. After months of feeling guilty about forcing potential THATCHER’S TECHBASE players through harshly indistinct mazes, I suddenly feel much better about myself and the game and begin to see the humour in making gamers suffer.

August 23rd, 2021: Realising that I could probably spend months (if not years) refining the map to no end, I decide to do the one thing I never wanted to do since the moment the project began - I set myself an arbitrary deadline of September 24th, 2021 for the release of THATCHER'S TECHBASE and decide to get the wad into a playable state by that date.

August 25th, 2021: Realising that the content of THATCHER'S TECHBASE makes it an unlikely candidate for inclusion in the idgames wad archive, I make a website to host the wad instead. Inspired by my prior success raising money for charity with Streets of Rage 4, I include a donations link for organisations suggested by Hope Not Hate, a group set up in the wake of Margaret Thatcher's death to encourage people to support communities affected by the decisions of her government.

August 28th, 2021: Hoping I can find a way for the game to played by more people than just by immediate friends and appreciator's of Barry "Epoch" Topping's music, I enlist my friend Richie Morgan to make a tongue-in-cheek trailer for the game to help get the word out.

September 1st, 2021: The trailer for THATCHER'S TECHBASE is completed, but I feel like it's missing something - namely, the voice of Margaret Thatcher herself. I approach a guy on Twitter who is really good at imitating Duke Nukem and Dr. Kleiner from Half-Life and ask him if he knows anyone who could do a good Thatcher impersonation.

September 2nd, 2021: Gianni, the Duke in question, responds quickly and recommends Laila Berzins - the voice of Demeter in Hades and a bunch of anime boys in Sword Art Online. Despite my reservations about how much a professional voice actor would cost, Gianni strongly recommends that I ask her anyway. In the space of an hour, Laila sends me six voice lines and waives the majority of her fee upon learning that it's a free game about killing Margaret Thatcher that intends to raise money for charity.

September 13th, 2021: I get a cat.

September 14th, 2021: After being condemned by the UK's chief medical officer for spreading coronavirus misinformation, Nicki Minaj releases a Twitter voice note that claims she was an Oxford classmate of the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

September 15th, 2021: The THATCHER’S TECHBASE trailer launches. In its first day on Twitter, it somehow gets 3000 retweets and 8000 favourites. A lot of gaming websites turn the tweet thread about the trailer into low-effort content for their blogs. People with small brains send me a fair few messages with insinuations of sacrilege, treason and other acts of digital terrorism. I am generally shitting myself.


September 16th, 2021: Articles about THATCHER’S TECHBASE are published in The Independent and NME. A pal from 15 years ago phones me up to tell me how excited he is to play the game. John Romero retweets a Rock Paper Shotgun article about the game and declares that he's going to play the wad. I am now really shitting myself.

September 19th, 2021: Gillian Anderson wins an Emmy Award for her portrayal of the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. After the awards show, Anderson is asked if she consulted the Iron Lady about the role. She claims she has not spoken to Margaret Thatcher recently.

September 20th, 2021: UK bottling plants and farm suppliers report that there is only enough C02 supply to last the nation "one or two more weeks" - this prompts mass panic buying of Coca-Cola, Irn Bru and other carbonated drinks. The price of Irn Bru immediately rises by £1.50, and multipacks are auctioned on eBay.

September 23rd, 2021: Shortages of diesel and petrol are reported across the United Kingdom, prompting a wave of panic buying nation-wide. Ambulances at the hospital my girlfriend works at are forced to suspend service, as local petrol stations have been selling their emergency reserve supplies to desperate bidders.

September 24th, 2021: About an hour before I am due to publish THATCHER'S TECHBASE on the web, my daily post arrives. A firm of lawyers representing Tennent's Lager order me to remove any copyrighted branding and images related to Tennent's Lager from THATCHER'S TECHBASE - in exchange, Tennent's Lager will make charitable donations to the organisations suggested by 3D: Doom Daddy Digital's website. I comply, replacing the T cans with legally-distinct F cans with only 30 minutes to spare.

At 12pm BST, THATCHER'S TECHBASE is released to the public.


------------------------------------

Still with me? Great. Thank you.

So - that's how I got here. As you can see above, THATCHER'S TECHBASE is a piss-take the just kept gaining more and more piss-taking momentum until it reached a critical mass of taken piss. A silly distraction in a hopeless situation that was ultimately powered by the twin engines of my love of a good joke and my hatred for the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom, birthed to a Global Britain that is imploding ever-inward.

When I first opened Ultimate Doom Builder on September 27th, 2020, I never intended for my finished product to become something that would have me taking interviews from magazines and newspapers. I never imagined that folk from Brazil and Argentina would message me about how much they loved the design of The Icon of Thatcher. I couldn't possibly conceive of Scotland's most beloved lager company giving their money to social justice causes so that they didn't have to be associated with my work. I just wanted to have a good time making a game and let others have a good time playing a game. Fortunately, I think I still managed to achieve that too.

A week out from release, it does feel like THATCHER'S TECHBASE was yet another victim of the classic video game hype pathology that we've all known about since the first time Nintendo Official Magazine promised us Dinosaur Planet was going to revolutionise the games industry as we knew it forever. When the trailer dropped, people were proclaiming it Game of the Year, Game of the Decade, Game of the Century - and in a way, it kinda hurt to see people pin their Thatcher-bashing hopes on something that only I seemed to know was an amateur production. I knew people were probably joking, but I also knew people were probably going to be let down by THATCHER'S TECHBASE - and there was no realistic means of telling them that without sounding like a moron or a fraud.

After a chaotic launch day filled with technical hitches and streamers angrily messaging me with disapproval over the game's more "extreme" content, I've shied away from reading too much opinion on the wad. Some people get it; some people really don't. While Barry, Richie and my other friends did their best to elevate THATCHER'S TECHBASE into something spectacular, it is still ultimately a quick and dirty little amateur DOOM wad with some Margaret Thatcher paint coating its non-orthogonal walls. Is that sort of thing really worth writing about in a newspaper? Is that sort of thing really worth streaming to your audience of thousands? Is that sort of thing really worth five stars on Backloggd? Or even four stars? Debatable! But it's my work, and I'm proud of it. If I don't give it five stars, how could I expect anyone else to? THATCHER'S TECHBASE is what it is, and aside from a few more minor tweaks and improvements I plan to make in the near future, I guess people will just have to deal with that. (Lemme tell ya - I never imagined someone would DM me to complain that the Thatcher's Grave section wasn't "optimised for co-op play" lmao)

In many ways, I'm relieved that my criticisms of THATCHER'S TECHBASE are other people's criticisms of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, too. I haven't yet been blindsided by any huge oversights in design or presentation, which was a perpetual worry while creating the wad. Aside from occasional DOOM-building tutorials and design guides, I tried to make as much of THATCHER'S TECHBASE as I could by myself - pretentious or not, I wanted it to be my work, my ideas, my thoughts, my feelings, untainted by outsiders as much as possible - something inside me just told me that this had to be my vision of Hell. Arguably a very naive decision, but I was worried that opening the game up to too much of the internet's collective-constructive consciousness early on in the process would derail me from the goals that were formed in my mind from day one. I wanted THATCHER'S TECHBASE to be fun to play and nice to look at, but ultimately the project was a therapeutic outlet for me in an era where everything outside of DOOM's space brought so much pain and anger... Something about Margaret Thatcher and DOOM just felt like such a natural fit in every single way. The overlap in time period, the rage, the pain, the suffering, the helplessness, the despair, the manic, desperate energy of it all - at no point in the process did I doubt that Thatcher deserved to be the subject of her own DOOM wad. It's more that the technical process of creating said wad was a huge hurdle for a first-time wadder to clear.

Obviously, my introverted development process backfired in many ways - as we read in the July 9th, 2021 entry of the THATCHER'S TECHBASE: OFFICIAL TIMELINE, I found out way too late in the development process that I'd made something over-complex and under-designed, a map drawn on a pub napkin that was crushing itself under technical and practical weights that I didn't even know existed for a long time because I was only talking to myself about it. I let my mind run wild while my body was stuck in the same physical space for months on end, and it didn't always lead to great things. Would people enjoy THATCHER'S TECHBASE more if it was shorter, more direct? If the puzzles weren't so fucking esoteric? If I'd leaned the dial of difficulty closer to the original DOOM than The Plutonia Experiment? Probably! The wad's Hurt Me Plenty difficulty was designed to be enjoyed by people who've played their fair share of classic DOOM, but I don't think I ever considered that a) the wad would find a fanbase beyond hardcore gamers or b) that most DOOM source ports automatically drop their cursor on that pseudo-Hard difficulty at load time. I've seen more than one streamer ram their head against the first two sections of THATCHER'S TECHBASE and then throw in the towel when they really didn't need to - I'm Too Young To Die and Not Too Rough difficulty are probably the right difficulty levels for most people - but given the technical limitations of the original DOOM, it's nigh-on impossible to communicate that to people that not all hope is lost; that they can still make it to the juicy CyberThatcher MK1/MK2 content if they just dial back difficulty a little. But by the same token - shouldn't a game about otherthrowing Margaret Thatcher and the systems of decaying power she represents be difficult? Like, really fucking difficult? Did you really think you could waltz into a British Hell and sort things out in an afternoon? C'mon now. The longer THATCHER'S TECHBASE exists in the ether, the less of an issue the challenges of the game should become, hopefully. I've yet to hear about anyone beating it on AUSTERITY difficulty, though, and in a weird, perverse way, that kinda makes me happy. It's not remotely fair!

One thing that has been validating about the game, in a weird way, is that the two "puzzles" I put the most time into - the "Three Thatchers" lobby and the desecration of Union Jack flag - are the two things that have provoked the most remarks, questions and frustrations. While I'm not going to wash my hands of any criticisms those parts of the game have provoked, they really were meant to tease and terrorise you until you arrived at the same conclusions I did while making the wad - that images of Margaret Thatcher and the United Kingdom have to be destroyed with a double-barrelled shotgun if you want to break free and move forward.

When you make a point of intentionally creating something in a vacuum, there can be an overbearing sense of dread regarding everyone else who's standing inside the airlock - will this silly little puzzle make sense to them? Is this fight too hard if you don't know where the health packs are? Is this bit of artwork going too far into a realm that should stay inside me? Will people be annoyed by this? All of this? That was probably the scariest thing about making something like THATCHER'S TECHBASE. Every time I approached an outsider about a sprite, a sound effect or a voice line, I expected nothing but disgust, despair or abject laughter. Maybe even a referral to a psychiatric unit. But not once did I receive anything but the greatest of care from others. Every request was met with kindness - much more kind than it deserved. People seemed more than willing to help me. And that felt fucking great.

I made THATCHER'S TECHBASE more or less by myself in a physical and mental isolation, but THATCHER'S TECHBASE wouldn't exist without everyone else. Everyone who suffered directly as a consequence of Margret Thatcher's decisions as a politician, everyone who stood up and was counted by her, everyone who tried to take count of her in kind; everyone who worked on the original DOOM games, everyone who contributed to DOOM's legacy in some way, everyone who played DOOM at some point in their life; everyone who said that the wad was a good idea, everyone who gave me a stupid idea to throw into the game, everyone who wrote a song for it, everyone who recorded a voice line for it, everyone who drew a picture of a Cyberdemon in a pearl necklace; every single person helped create this stupid little DOOM wad in their own way - and I'm really glad that they did. Because it wouldn't be anything without them.

This game is dedicated to everyone Margaret Thatcher and everyone who hated Margaret Thatcher.

I’m a little bit self-conscious about my writing style. I think a lot of my write-ups particularly end but also often begin the same way. Part of my worries about this because the idea behind “write at least a little bit about every single game you finish, no exceptions” is like 50% motivated by a desire to be better at this. I don’t fret about it TOO much because, hey, I’m not like, IN SCHOOL or nothin’, nobody’s gonna come after me with a pitchfork like “bitch you say you’re excited to see where a series goes next at the end of like 70% percent of your reviews get some new material.” But I fret about it ENOUGH that I do rack my brain trying to think of ways to open and close these things more substantially. So with that in mind here’s what I have for Devil May Cry 4:

Devil May Cry Four? More like, “Devil May Cry MORE PLEASE” amirite?????

Now you may think this is JUST a hilarious gut-buster and you’d be right that it’s that and you’re welcome, but it’s a statement that also describes this game in two important ways. Firstly, there is just MORE Devil May Cry here, easily the MOST Devil May Cry the series has seen to this point. A whole new guy with a whole new set of moves, not as WIDE as Dante’s and not as deep as a Professional Gamer could make Dante deep, but Nero’s single set of weapons and its accompanying combos certainly has more to it than any one combination of Dante’s powers, and requires more technical skill to fully master (something I will never achieve, I’m just not this good). Dante, too, sees his toolkit essentially unaltered from DMC3 bar a couple of weapon swaps, but now you can access all of it all at once all the time which makes him the most absurdly varied, options-heavy character in maybe any video game ever??? It’s frankly an embarrassment of riches. If DMC1 codified the genre, and DMC3 brought a second revolution for the speed, skill, and depth action games could demand without compromising things like fairness, balance, and fun, then DMC4 is a more genteel statement – there’s nothing revolutionary here, but everything is so perfectly balanced, so immaculately tuned that it’s hard to imagine going back to 3 after this, even though a lot of the stuff you can do in 4 is ostensibly exactly the same as in 3 and even though that game, undeniably, whips ass. It feels like a magic trick, it’s incredible. Every character in DMC4 is truly a pleasure to pilot, even Lady, the most underbaked character on the impressive Special Edition roster.

The second thing then, is that DMC4 is famously and OBVIOUSLY unfinished. When I was growing up I didn’t have an Xbox 360 or a PS3 until WELL after this game’s time and I still knew about this debacle, but playing it is something else entirely. It’s not JUST that the back half of the game reuses all the maps in reverse order, which honestly I don’t mind at all. You see the cracks in these really unexpected ways, like how every time the game wants to punish you for falling into a pit you fall into the same one cave room, but then also late in the game they introduce an enemy that eats you and if it gets you you get teleported to that same cave room inexplicably instead of a bespoke location or maybe just that not happening. Enemy types that are just previous enemy types but bigger. Dante’s weapons being entirely unrelated to the bosses he defeats rather than derived from them. It’s the little things like that peppered throughout that are like “oh….oOOOoooOOoHHHHHHHH.” Dante’s half of the game being crammed inelegantly into a set of levels and enemies clearly not designed for him is the most glaring thing here but it’s far from the only sign that shit was not well in this production, however it shook out.

It's a shame too because OSTENSIBLY these things would not bother me so much, right? Like I’ve mentioned, I don’t mind running through the game backwards, I think it’s kind of fun to race back to the city from the depths of the map to stop the bad guy you keep catching glimpses of on the horizon, the sky ever darkening under his wrath as you approach, seeing these places you’ve visited as another character ravaged not only by the wraths of the current occupants but also by your own travails in them. It's more that Dante’s half of the game suffers from a really high concentration of Gimmicky Bullshit that seems tailor made to stop you from just having a good time with his incredibly deep and often inventive skillset. There are staples like “level you’re constantly losing health in,” but that one is a diamond in the rough of shit like “repeated miniboss that you can’t properly hurt until you shoot it a LOT” or “terrible setpiece boss fight with unclear progression telegraphing that has very little combat and is mostly running in a horizontal line that took ina twenty minutes to do despite the fact that she took zero damage during it” or “those plants that eat you and teleport you to the cave room which is kind of funny until you get out of the cave room and realize that any time this happens you have to start literally the entire level over.”

This game is kind of littered with weird distractions from its core conceits of action combat with occasional platforming challenges, like the infamous dice game (which I think is not really bad at all once you figure the rhythm out) or a sequence where you have to fight a couple difficult flying enemies without getting knocked off of increasingly small disappearing platforms or you have to face the Punishment Cave lol, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this stuff is REALLY concentrated in the back half of the game where you can really see the seams in the development showing, nor do I think it’s a coincidence that the punishments for failing any of these challenges are almost always really minor for your character but REALLY time consuming for you the player. It’s rough, and it sucks, because I cannot emphasize enough that this is one of the best playing games I’ve ever had the pleasure to fuck around in.

I played the Special Edition which I think is the version that basically everyone plays at this point and the one you would have access to if you just went to buy it, but it didn’t really get the chance to ameliorate any of these issues. Instead they added MORE GUYS TO FUCK AROUND WITH in these same half baked levels and that’s fair that’s a choice. Capcom was never gonna spend buhmillions of dollars to make half of a game, this makes sense to me. Lady and Trish and Virgil are all very fun to play with. Lady is my favorite even as she has the fewest tools to work with because she’s weird for the series, and she really shines in the hardest difficulty setting where her extreme power and extreme fragility couples with her relative lack of maneuverability and huge vulnerability windows make for the most risk-reward play you can get basically in the game. Trish is kind of an explicit DMC1 Dante throwback ported into DMC4’s extremely slick vibe and she’s a joy to play as. Virgil is not so different from his DMC3 incarnation, same as Dante, but like Dante he feels better in the hands and he also has a unique character model so I’m happy for him. These characters I think maybe don’t make up for how skimpy on alternate modes and stuff the game is; it feels to me like a lot more could have been done to flesh out the experience of the game around the margins via side content even if the core experience is locked in forever, but three more guys in The Best Action Game You Could Play Circa 2008 is not a bad deal so I can’t complain too much.

Something I refuse to complain even slightly at all about is something I feel the series gets better at every time (ehhhh bar DMC2, as is often the case lol) are the STORY AND PRESENTATION which are excellent all around imo. I love Nero very much, he’s a great little guy. I want to ruffle his hair. I want to pack his lunch for him. Wanna make a bunk bed for him and make him sleep on the bottom bunk. What a good little dude. He’s refreshing because for as much as it seems like someone made him Look Like That because we wanted to kind of have our cake and eat it too re: phasing out Dante, Nero is so immediately such a distinct voice in this series. Although he is telegraphed with everything but out loud direct words throughout the game to be Virgil’s kid somehow lol, and he has a Special Arm, and he Looks Like That and he does all the goofy quips and flips and homoerotic, overly performative battle choreography with a guy who I’m pretty sure is his uncle, the character he actually has the most in common with from earlier in the series is Lady. Both normal kids in over their heads, the only two people reacting to the events of their respective games with anything resembling appropriate emotions. Nero is not a gothic tragedian or a romantic figure or an erotic pulp icon, all roles Dante has and does occupy at various point throughout this series – he’s just a guy, and a kind of sad, angry one at that. He’s been taken advantage of in a very real way, he’s hurt emotionally throughout the game, and when he fails it’s not in an epic way, it’s just, like, a bummer. It’s sad. Even when I started to connect with these characters to some degree on an emotional level in 3, it was in an extremely Saturday Morning Shonen Anime sense, very heightened and melodramatic. 4 isn’t NOT that, and Nero isn’t ABOVE that stuff, but I think we’ve entered a zone with DMC4 where these games might be able to tap a well of genuine pathos? There are only hints at it here but I am very curious to see if these threads of Real Drama get tugged at further in DMC5. I know Bingo Morihashi, the writer of 3 and 4, comes back for that one and he seems interested in pushing this stuff. I would like to see it.

But for as much as I like Nero, Dante is here too, and he rules, he fucks so hard, literally and figuratively. I guess not LITERALLY LITERALLY. Nobody in these games knows about sex, and Dante has always been a somewhat eroticized figure, in like, a darker, classically gothic sense (he is constantly being penetrated by swords, he has a weird borderline-incestuous relationship with a clone of his mom and also his brother, he is a stoic object of lust for other often sinister forces throughout the series), and that’s still true to some extent here but because this game truly is not about him and only kind of involves him via tangential connections to his family’s past, here we see Dante at his most carefree and flamboyant, retaining everything fun and cool and good about himself while maximalizing all of the pulpy, sexy eccentricities that make him a singular persona in the video game landscape. There is no one more akin to a $3.95 harlequin romance hero cover illustration than Dante Devilmaycry whether he’s doing an assassination or locking legs with his probably-nephew or doing a flamenco dance to fuck/destroy a hell-penis-obelisk or confronting his thematic opposite (a man who twisted himself into a demon hoping to discard his humanity altogether vs a half man half demon who embraces his natures and values his personhood) over their ideological differences through the explicit façade of theater for an audience of You The Player. He’s a delight, I love this guy.

This is as good as these games have ever looked too. They’ve always paid really close attention to the design sensibilities of their worlds and that shit is back in full force here. The way all of the angel guys at the church are clearly demonic if you get a good look at them, pulsing with black and red underneath their immaculate armor even before Dante dramatically unmasks one for Nero to see, or that the supposed savior’s most prominent features are the massive demonic horns sprouting all over his body and the deep, cruel holes in his eyeballs instead of carved pupils. The way the public church is a traditionally ornate cathedral but the actual Order’s base of operations, hidden from civilization, is a giant, brutalist slab because nobody who doesn’t actually know what’s up has reason to go there so there’s no reason to keep up a pretension. The only guy who might be suspicious is too stupid to ask that question. It’s great attention to detail, all over the game. Small stuff but it’s important to me. It’s clear how much care went into the development here, even when things didn’t go according to plan.

I’m sure that’s always the story with games like this, and DMC4 just made it out better than most. It did, really – even with all its warts, the underlying core of DMC4 is so so strong that it would be hard to discount even if things were actually as bad as this game’s doomsayers (who admittedly do seem to be fewer now than in 2008, especially in the wake of that reviled Ninja Theory reboot) would have had you believe. As it is, while the game is certainly not what I think anybody imagined or wanted, even all these years and a “hey we fixed it sort of” rerelease later, the fact that it’s just like, a good-ass game shines through all the little annoyances. I’m thinking about it right now. If DMC5 didn’t exist and I wasn’t SO curious about it and I hadn’t bought it this afternoon and it wasn’t downloading right now, I wouldn’t be surprised if I could easily put hundreds of hours into 4 between its five characters and two game modes. The engine powering this car is that good, even without considering what a blast I had with the story this time around. DMC has quickly become one of my favorite series over the last year, and if this is the worst they can do (y’know, bar 2, and uh, I guess also that reboot, like, you know what I mean) then I really just couldn’t ask for things to be in a better place.

When I was younger, I loved Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland. It's a rather random entry point into the series - not to mention the farming genre as a whole - but it's what we had at the time. I remember booting up my PS2, brushing the cows and horses, fishing, trying to make the lake fairy appear... a wave of nostalgia hits me every time I think of it.
So, this year, I decided to go back to where it all began.
There are many ways in which Harvest Moon for the SNES is near-identical to Save the Homeland. Despite the obvious difference in graphical capabilities, it scratched many of those same itches. You can still brush cows and horses. You can still fish. There's still a mysterious lake fairy.
Yet, there were also many glaring issues that really hindered my enjoyment. I doubt StH was a perfect experience, but time has aged HM96 in ways that later entries just won't suffer from, even the most forgettable ones. Distractingly bad English translations, repetitive gameplay, and unintuitive systems are the worst of the problems.
Don't get me wrong, it's a charming experience in its own right. But HM96 definitely won't be for everyone. The people who will feel most fulfilled by it are those that enjoy that repetitive gameplay, who like having a to-do list, and who don't mind a lack of set pieces.


SHORT REVIEW

Visuals: 4/5
Sound: 3/5
Story: 2.5/5
Gameplay: 3/5
Worldbuilding: 3/5
Overall score: 3/5 [3.1/5]

Visuals:
It's hard to go wrong with the art direction of Nintendo-published SNES games. While HM96 is not the best the console has to offer, it still boasts beautiful, professional graphics. The farm animals are adorable, and the changes between seasons (such as winter snow or brown fall leaves) keep the game from stagnating visually. There are a surprising amount of little details, too, like the crops perking up a bit when watered, or the cows blowing snot bubbles while they nap.
I particularly liked how nearly all of the townspeople had unique looks. This is best seen in the romanceable girls, whose personalities are expressed in their clothing and haircuts. Ann, the inventive tomboy, wears pants and keeps her red hair tied back in a ponytail. Eve, the most promiscuous and adventurous of the girls, wears a (comparably) revealing red dress and has long, blonde hair tied loosely with a bow.
All of these little aspects added up make the visuals the best part of HM96, easily. While I have qualms with every other aspect of the game, it's nothing short of delightful in the art department.
Overall, 4/5.

Sound:
With 20 tracks to accompany you from the title screen to the credits, HM96's music is - for the most part - pleasant and calm. It's a classic 90s SNES soundtrack through-and-through, with the 16 bit style we all know and love. Each season even has its own theme, though I will say that I wish there was more diversity in the tunes during these rather long periods of time. They can get repetitive after a while.
But that's not even my main issue, really. I'm no music expert, and I sometimes find it difficult to distinguish what, exactly, makes any particular soundtrack 'good' or 'bad' to me, except if I enjoy it or not. But it's not difficult to put my finger on the problem here.
Some of HM96's tracks are downright grating at best. Certain notes sound like something being scraped against my ears, the high-pitched tone and limited capabilities of the system making a few moments almost unbearable.
I wish I could say that I enjoyed the music here more than I do. I think these kinds of laidback simulation games benefit a lot from good sound direction. While HM96's soundtrack certainly isn't the worst, and it does have a few particularly good tracks, it could've been a lot better.
Overall, 3/5.

Story:
As I’ve already mentioned, the English translations for this Japan-made game are not the best. Almost all of the dialogue is broken English, with quite a few mistranslations that make little-to-no sense. Although it’s kind of charming in a way, it is rather funny to see Nintendo allow this kind of presentation for the North American version of one of their published titles.
As for the rest of HM96’s story, it’s very loose. You are a young man who has inherited a farm from his grandfather; your job is to rebuild the farm, while also (ideally) finding love and starting a family. Getting married is one of the few ways to push the little plot forward, with only a few other moments sprinkled throughout your playtime to give it any sense of narrative. There are ones to show mechanical progress (such as people upgrading tools for you), and random events to provide some sparse new interactions.
The only other notable events are the annual festivals you can attend. There are seven different holidays sprinkled throughout the year, each with their own premise - a Thanksgiving, an Easter, a Star Night festival. I found myself really looking forward to these. They’re a great way to break up the monotony, and are spread out enough that they don’t get old or annoying.
Aside from that, you won’t see much of a story until your parents visit during the endgame. You are subsequently given stats about how you’ve run your farm and grown your relationships. It’s a pretty satisfying and cute closing sequence.
But besides those little gems, there’s really not much going on here. I don’t expect to be taken on an epic adventure in a farming simulator, of course, but I do wish there was a bit more of a focus on events and character interactions.
Overall, 2.5/5.

Gameplay:
The supposed bread-and-butter of HM96. This game entirely focuses on your running of the farm - raising crops, keeping chickens and cows, taking care of your land. Like I’ve said, it’s very repetitive.
Now, repetitiveness in gameplay is not a bad thing. In fact, I quite enjoy games where I can get into a little regimen and roll with it. My problem is more with the many small mechanics that add up to a lot of frustration.
Take the crops, for example. You can only keep so many at a time, because you’ll run out of energy watering all of them. While you can increase your overall stamina, I still found it difficult to keep more than a few dozen at once. Eating food or swimming in the lake to regain stamina is time-consuming, and I found myself leaning towards working with the animals because of the lower energy costs.
You also can’t keep an entire 9x9 path growing evenly. As the plants get bigger, you can no longer walk over them to reach the middle, meaning you can’t water all of them. So you either sow the ground in a way where you don’t plant that one at all, or you have one crop growing behind all the others in the patch.
The fact that you can only plant crops in Summer and Spring gets annoying, too. That takes away a huge chunk of the gameplay, leaving you with little to do during Fall and Winter. I would be completely done taking care of my tasks before noon, and I’d just have to aimlessly pass time until evening.
Another big gripe I had was with the inventory system. You can only hold two tools at once, and if you want to switch them out, you have to go to your shed to retrieve the new ones. It’s another little thing that gets really annoying when each and every day rotates around using these tools around your farm. Watering crops, fixing fences, and taking care of the animals mean you’ll deal with this a lot.
The stagnation in story really affects the gameplay, too. There’s just never anything new to do. Visiting town feels completely unnecessary after a certain point. Everyone keeps the same lines of dialogue, and nothing ever advances.
Then, of course, there’s the time changes. Maybe it’s just a ‘me’ thing, but this is why it’s hard for me to click with farming sims such as Stardew Valley. I feel pressured by the limits of each day and the changing of the seasons, even though the genre is supposed to be relaxing.
To be fair, I did get into a rhythm in this one, but only because of that stagnation. It’s hard to feel like you’re missing anything when nothing new ever goes on. A blessing and a curse.
Despite all my problems with it, I still found some joy in HM96’s gameplay. You do eventually get into a pleasant routine, watering your crops and feeding your cattle, making tasks for yourself. Playing it in short bursts is ideal, getting a few days out of the way, then coming back later to farm some more.
Overall, 3/5.

Worldbuilding:
The world of HM96 is a simple one. While the towns and farm are aesthetically beautiful, it’s hard to appreciate them fully when you’re so limited in interaction. That lack of change, not ever seeing anything new, really hurts things. No lore, very little character activity, and a limited number of events make everything around you feel empty, in a way.
I wish I had more to say here, but I really don’t. I’m the kind of person who loves to explore every nook and cranny of a game, but there was literally no reason for me to in this case. There were parts of buildings I simply never visited again after I realized they’ll never matter. It’s disappointing.
Overall, 2/5.

Overall game score: 3/5. I think Harvest Moon deserves recognition for its place in the history of the farming sim genre, but I don’t recommend going back to visit it unless you have patience for its obvious flaws. The visuals are its strongest talking point, but everything else falls flat - the gameplay has numerous issues which hold it back, and there’s almost nothing to appreciate about it beyond that.

It's been a long while since I've played something casually. Most often, I go into gaming with a very serious mindset, setting aside dedicated time to focus on it. As such, The Room was a really nice change of pace; I never pushed myself to finish it, and I only played it when I had the brain power to. I broke it up over a few days and just used it to relax.
Additionally, this is my only experience within the purely puzzle genre in years. While it's great to try something new, it's also difficult for me to feel like I can give a proper rating. Still, I'll do my best to provide insight into what I think was quite a lovely little experience.


SHORT REVIEW

Visuals: 4.5/5
Sound: 4/5
Story: 2/5
Gameplay: 4.5/5
Worldbuilding: 2.5/5
Overall game score: 3.5/5 [3.4/5]


IN-DEPTH

Visuals:
Each individual chapter of The Room centers around an intricately-made box with dozens of moving pieces; every side, every crevice and surface, holds a secret for you to discover.
Not only are these boxes very creative in design, but they are beautifully rendered and presented. The graphics, the textures, the lighting - and, yes, the creativity - turn a seemingly everyday object into the center of attention here. There is massive attention to detail, leaving you constantly surprised at what these inconspicuous little containers have to reveal.
While you could argue that the lack of environmental detail is a downside, I'd actually argue the opposite; I think this works in favor of the gameplay. Although there's still some very pretty backgrounds, they're never too distracting or busy; instead, your focus is almost always on the puzzles.
Overall, 4.5/5.

Sound:
While there is a distinct lack of music, The Room makes up for this with its otherwise quality sound design. Wind or strange humming set an eerie mood while you investigate. The house around you creaks. Every little noise you make echoes around you, reinforcing a feeling of loneliness. I'm always a sucker for a good soundtrack - even if it's understated - but I think that The Room succeeds just fine without one.
Overall, 4/5.

Story:
While The Room makes a solid attempt at providing an interesting little story to go along with its mechanics, I'm not really a fan of 'mad scientist' schticks. Thankfully, any sort of plot is secondary in these sorts of puzzle games, so it never affected my enjoyment too much. The investigation of the boxes is less about pushing the narrative along, and more about the mechanical satisfaction.
It turns out that these boxes were created by the previously-mentioned 'mad scientist' - a man who'd discovered a secret fifth element. As his research into harnessing the element pushed forward, he was slowly driven mad by its visions; he then vanished into thin air. You are now solving the puzzles he has left behind to protect his life's work. But will you succeed, or will you simply follow in his ghostly footsteps?
The overall idea is pretty neat. Even if there's not much to it beyond the surface, I still think it's worth talking about. I could see it becoming an intriguing base for something with more depth. Maybe future games will ramp it up.
Overall, 2/5.

Gameplay:
Because this was my first puzzle game in years, I do feel a bit out of my depth talking about its mechanics. But I suppose I'll never learn if I don't start somewhere. Thankfully, I feel like The Room was a great starting point.
I'll begin by saying that the visuals do a lot for the gameplay. The sleek box designs are easy to parse, while still being complex to explore. Certain parts of them are blocked off until you finish others, and others are gotten rid of when they are no longer needed. This makes everything much less confusing and overwhelming, since nothing is viewable or accessible at any given time.
The puzzles themselves contain a myriad of ideas and solutions. There are definitely some difficult ones that'll make you scratch your head, but I ended up only needing a guide for one. As long as you take a break when needed and don't push yourself, it'll never get overwhelming. They're also all satisfying, which is - again - in large part due to the art design, and watching the box contort as you solve it.
But probably the best thing this game has going for it is its creativity. Nearly each and every puzzle - the dozen or so in each individual chapter - are different and unique. Everything from aligning miniature planets, to starting a projector. The Room will keep surprising you.
Overall, 4.5/5.

Worldbuilding:
The Room's lore is vague, but stylized. The antiquated, Victorian-age world is only used as a backdrop, yet the atmosphere built on it is both eerie and beautiful. But even though the visual and audio design make for an appealing environment in terms of aesthetics, The Room once again lacks any depth in its writing.
There is very little known about the characters, the setting, or much of anything beyond the fifth element itself. Your protagonist doesn't even have a motive for their actions. It's a pretty glaring issue, and something else I hope is improved upon in future entries of the series.
Overall, 2.5/5.

Overall game score: 3.5/5 [3.4/5]. The Room is a charming and thoughtful little puzzle game. Its beautiful art direction and engaging puzzles will keep your attention until the end, even if the story can't. I recommend it to anyone looking for a nice little dip into the genre.

I think Judgement is amazing, and I don't think Judgment needs Yakuza to be amazing. I believe it is at its best when it strays away from the storytelling style of that series, or uses that style to contrast itself. Compared to the bombastic ever-present, crime world shaking melodrama of the titular decade spanning franchise, Judgement decides to zoom in a bit more, tell a simpler story, and make the people the story is about its #1 priority. This games biggest “moments” see fully realized characters reaching the end of their respective arcs and watching as their shifting alignments shape the world inside and outside Kamurocho, where every single thread of fate will intertwine in the climactic finale.

Actually, lets rewind a bit, because like I said, Judgement really is just a simple story, a story about one man, Takayuki Yagami, and how his perceived failures turned him into a detective, seeking forgiveness for his actions. I could not think of a more perfect protagonist for this sort of story than Yagami. Supremely likeable, but incredibly selfish, he has just the right level of bullheaded determination and craving for justice that gives you hope that he can crack any case wide open. That isn't to say Yagami is just some kind of truth cyborg, he's portrayed as a very logically flexible and legitimately intelligent protagonist, which plays perfectly against his endearing oaf of a partner, Masaharu Kaito.
Kaito, and the rest of the Matsugane family, feel plucked straight from the Yakuza series in a way that seems directly opposed to the murder mystery vibe running throughout the game. He's brash, impulsive, and never beyond a joke, even in the most dire of scenarios, but it's loyalty that makes Kaito such a definitively loveable ally. He brings a simple approach to any scenario that helps Yagami out more than any like-minded genius could.

We'd be here all day (and things would start entering spoiler territory) if I really wanted to start diving into the delightful layers of the entire main cast, and even most of the secondary cast, but the main point I'm getting at here is just how uniquely personality driven Judgement's story ends up being.

One big example of this is the games priority on friend events over side quests. Friend events are unique interactions with permanent fixtures of the overworld, barfly's, restaurant manager's, weird cat bloggers, and after these interactions are over and these people's questlines are "done", they never go away. It gives this tangible, lived in quality to the world, as you turn a corner and see your landlady, or the in-universe inventor of Kickstarter. Judgement ends up creating a unique tapestry of associates, friends, and allies that goes to show Yagami's networking ability in real time.

When it comes to the side-quests however, I can't say I was as much of a fan of their general presentation. Despite having some good laughs, and fun writing for the most part, the side quests all ended up having a similar structure that disincentivized me from even seeking them out after a certain point, especially when the main story reaches about the midway point i was so enthralled that accidentally hitting a side-quest event trigger felt way more like a nuisance than it should have.

Which i think is where an interesting line begins to form between Judgement and the Yakuza series. The DNA of Ryu Ga Gotoku's beloved series can be seen all over Judgement, from its setting, to its combat, but that's why I think the distinctions in tone matter so much. Judgement's existence as a mystery story following a singular protagonist leads to a much more streamlined approach to the storytelling, as the player is encouraged to piece together the mystery right alongside Yagami, rather than simply be presented a story, moment to moment. I personally loved this, and found myself itching to play the game every single day after work into the small hours of the morning. I grew up on a steady diet of Ace Attorney and Danganronpa and those series' taught me that even if the mystery is a bit obvious in places, being in the middle of a spiderweb of deceit and intrigue is just fun in and of itself.

I honestly could go on. I could talk about the incredibly fun, if not slightly unbalanced combat system, how warm and comforting the girlfriend mechanics were (as lonely as that makes me sound), Ayabe being the perfect foil to Makoto Date, and plenty of other things, but I think I'll just leave it there. Judgement is a wonderful experience filled with endlessly charming characters, brilliantly written dialogue, and a brisk pace that sunk its hooks into me and never let go. It's so much more than "that yakuza spinoff". I hope everyone reading this finds the opportunity to play it so I have more people to talk about it with.

Also, if I wrote a one sentence meme review for this game it would be:
Kaito is just Kiryu if Kiryu had sex"

(Slight content warning: Some of the work discussed here isn’t exact safe for work, for a variety of reasons. I chose not to link to anything, but if you dig on your own… y’know. Look Out.)

There’s always a difficulty in viewing works like Lollipop Chainsaw through an analytical lens. On a surface level, the game spews out vicious bloodshed and references-disguised-as-jokes by way of a barely-legal blonde bombshell voiced by Tara Strong, hot off the presses from the seven other games she acted in that year. Cutting deeper, breaking the skin of easy T&A and lukewarm comedy, the blood of the B-movie flows freely, an exhumed exploitation expression bearing the scars of grindhouse cinema. With inspirations ranging from splatter horror and the impressively-direct sexploitation subgenre, and spearheaded by self-proclaimed punk Suda51 and Troma alumni James Gunn, Lollipop Chainsaw is, for better or worse, the same sort of gore-soaked titillation that swept through drive-in theaters and low-budget dive cinemas in the 1960s and 70s.

But, pray-tell, what makes it fit among the prestige derived from that lineage, you may ask? What aligns Lollipop Chainsaw with hallmarks of the genre, with Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! or Cannibal Holocaust? In what way is this game different from the legions of flavor-of-the-month titty games that drop from the garbage shoot that is steam, or the waves of ultraviolent mass murder simulators washing ashore from untold origins? How is it better? How is it worse?

That’s the problem; there is no real distinction. No marks of quality, no big-time writers or esteemed directors could change the fact that the “trash games” of today are, simply, an extension of the “trash cinema” of yesterday. When removed from the context of “children’s plaything” or “unique audiovisual medium”, video games take on the language and identity we ascribe to thousands of films, plays, and books. Looking at work churned out by multi-million entertainment conglomerates, you see the hallmarks of mainstream film being used as the benchmark for excellence. As an interactive mode of expression, it’s inevitable that games go beyond the realm of what is acceptable to a mainstream audience, venturing into the grimey, the messy, the extreme. After all, what is Senran Kagura if not an extrapolation of The Switchblade Sisters? What is Splatterhouse if not the logical conclusion of Hausu?

Now, I understand that this may all come off as statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged, that this could be the result of introspection and pretension too far gone to consider. Before I am soundly laughed out of the Backloggd community, consider: In the Wider Gaming Community’s push for video games to be viewed as art, isn't it also important to appreciate that which goes beyond the traditional accepted view of art? The existence of sleazy slashers and lowbrow smut doesn’t revoke the existence of time-honored masterpieces in film, in written pieces, even in the work of playwrights dating back to ancient times. As the acceptance of gaming as artwork, whatever that truly entails, dawns near, is it fair to deride the messier side of the medium as unapproachable, of being unworthy of contemplative thought? Does Lollipop Chainsaw and its ilk deserve its branding as something holding back serious discussion of gaming, or is that simply an indication of the immaturity of not only the medium, but of criticism around it?

when you first encounter dr. naomi in NMH3, she's eking out a kind of solitary existence in travis's basement, resigned to her fate being entwined with a 'creepy-ass otaku' and promptly aiding him through all his savagery and debauchery. there's obviously still a lingering a mild undercurrent of disdain in their interactions, but dr. naomi is otherwise shown to be genial enough to continue to upgrade travis's gear. although it's not like she had much of a choice in the matter - her unexpected transformation into a cherry blossom firmly anchors her in the game's primary base of commerce, allowing her to fulfill her pre-established role as a fixed vendor from the convenience of travis's motel.

the question of how exactly dr. naomi became a disfigured and hardy tree given artificial life isn't necessarily central to NMH3's narrative, but i find it worth thinking about because it continues NMH3's perpetual tendency to allude to works of all kinds unceremoniously. in this case, the easiest analogue would be twin peaks: the return; in the 25 years between season 2 and the return, a character slowly and inexplicably evolves into a fleshy and gnarled tree pulsating with electric currents. this is nothing more than an incidental tribute - and not unexpected after something like 2018's the 25th ward references to twin peak's third outing - but an homage to the return will always make me reflect a bit because it is such an extraordinarily well-structured, thematically cogent, and thoroughly excising metatextual work that it still is every bit as arresting and affecting as the moments i first watched it some four years ago.

NMH3 poses as a ‘return’ of sorts as well; in reality, however, TSA, with its title literally referring to travis’s absence from the throne, is more likely to fit that bill. TSA was also a metatextual work – about travis and GHMs absence from the limelight, about what had changed over the course of close to a decade, about GHMs works, fears, and their future. in several respects, TSA may as well be NMH3, bringing a close to travis’s character arc and positioning itself as a vector for GHM’s next project.

these elements effectively make NMH3 a lot more like a big-budget reunion than a fully-formed closer to a trilogy, something comparable to a no more heroes: gaiden or no more heroes: the after years. i say this in large part because, in contrast to TSA and especially NMH1, NMH3 is markedly straightforward and almost juvenile in its affectations. i don’t envy anyone attempting to continue a series which defied continuity and explanation the way NMH1 so deftly did, but this is our third time returning to this nexus, so the hope would be that there’s an actual reason to be with these characters again, to inhabit this world. so to briefly sum up: to an extent, i think even NMH2 toyed around with the idea of franchise iconography and the role travis had foisted upon him in that world. TSA was, as was previously said, a game about absence, reflection on and mild interrogation of the indie space, about games themselves and the feuding ideals animating their development, about artistic love and loss.

what’s NMH3 about? we’ll get to it, kind of, but for our purposes it’s worth establishing a few things first, namely that this is a pretty significant departure from NMH1’s jodorowsky and seijun suzuki-influenced blend of inviting contradictions and abrasive lampooning (although it’s worth noting suda apparently has never seen branded to kill lol). if anything it’s kind of the opposite which makes it kind of wild that it released after TSA, NMH1 is very pointed about the intersection between stifling economics, dead end americana, and fan obsession with foreign work, whereas 3 is kind of like, ‘im travis and im 40 and kamen rider is still so fucking cool’ (not that hes wrong, just that that kind of adoration and those adolescent proclivities go totally unchecked here). still, it shares less in common with the kind of vulgarity-without-sincerity romp that NMH2 produced and honestly a lot more in common with suda’s short fiction, especially post 2010? im thinking very specifically about ranko tsukigime and kurayami dance, both works that are ‘closed-off’ or ‘shuttered-off’; they have a very definite beginning and end but everything that happens in between is a dense mix of dream logic, parodic undertones, perverse ironies, ‘i say it like it is’ genre statements – very much storytelling as irresolvable and inconclusive. shared between all three, there’s a strong narrative centering on non-sequiturs, an emphasis on artistic collaboration, and torrential floods of absurdity and surrealism fueling the game. hell, so many artists, such as animation teams like AC+bu, are common to both ranko and NMH3, even.

and i think for sure a lot of these constituent elements are present in other GHM/suda titles (that inability of narrative to resolve itself is a staple of NMH1), it’s just the explosiveness and the frequency with which you get barraged by these specific traits are at a fever pitch in those works. kamui shows up here in NMH3 and he basically does as kamui is wont to do, offering a bit of a skeleton key for understanding some of these works:
“[Things] had become quite the confusing mess. But somewhere inside that confusing mess hid the truth. What is real, what is not? … There is only one thing that is real. I am here in front of your very eyes.”

i think this is where my problems with NMH3 come into focus. i think NMH3’s invocation of that dizzying mess kamui alludes to is half-baked and barebones. unlike ranko tsukigime, NMH3 isn’t an absurd sidescroller that can be finished in 40 minutes. unlike kurayami dance, NMH3 isn’t a sub 30 chapter manga. NMH3 is a 12-20 hour adventure game. so while it shares much in common with these narratives, just the protracted nature of it results in maybe the last thing i expected a NMH title to be – just kind of boring? it’s a profound skeleton of a game in so many different ways, there’s not really a full-bodied texture so you’re left with a lot of entirely separate and only somewhat interrelated elements. how you feel about the game is left up to how you feel about any one of those constituent elements. for my purposes, i think a lot of this game has the seeds of something really special, but comes up pretty short.

when we catch up with travis touchdown again, he’s in the middle of doing something i think a fair amount of us do and are unwilling to admit – he’s looking up footage of a game he’s already finished, looking to vicariously (and perhaps voyeuristically) re-experience some of those same emotions, to temporally connect himself with a younger, more idealistic version of himself. i recommend watching it here, if only because in the same way NMH1’s intro frames the game, i think this is meant to be NMH3’s primary invocation of all its themes, running parallel to the game, and i like the remake angle the opener plays with because it feels like an implicit acknowledgement that so many sequels are really just remakes if you unpack them a bit.

in the proceeding cutscene we learn quickly about antagonists FU and damon’s origins, lovingly animating an ET-esque tale of nostalgic childhood tenderness gone somehow wrong. FU promising to return no matter what is a bit of cheeky writing, and the transition seamlessly shifting between aspect ratios as the scene shifts to the modern day is a great touch as well. damon (based on known shit-for-brains john riccitiello, a can of worms im not really interested in opening in this review), has apparently used FU’s powers to position himself in a place of executive power since the days of his mirthful childhood, and signals FU back to earth, where he pretty much immediately sets out on planetary conquest. in the original reveal trailer this is revealed as its own fakeout IP in the form of goddamn superhero, right before travis crashes the party. the kind of IP conflict this opener promises – between a resuscitated old franchise built on subjugation of nostalgia and clearly alluding to the MCU, in conflict with the brazen punk nature of NMH – is the kind of fertile ground NMH3 is built on, but fails to really capitalize on.

after that, the two plotlines intersect. travis is interrupted and called to action before he can figure out who deathman is, sylvia immediately begins fulfilling her designated intermediary NMH role, some dire shit happens, and the game kicks off proper with revenge serving as the impetus for taking down FU. it’s here where we’re introduced to the systems of the game, harkening back to NMH1. we can explore an overworld on foot or on bike again, participate in side activities like gig work, and hunt for small collectables and trinkets. structurally, however, it’s difficult for me to say this was worth it. performance is taxed to a degree in the open world and it’s barren in a way that feels unacceptable, fragmented across different islands, some of which are inaccessible from beginning to end. but even on spicy difficulty where i played, you only need to check out some of the barebones gig work a couple of times just to see what’s there, and you’re more than comfortable to just engage with the designated matches to advance in the narrative. they’re there because they worked in NMH1 and people like it, but they don’t recognize how interwoven those elements are into NMH1’s thesis. perhaps there’s a read in which you can argue it’s fun work for work’s sake – it’s nice to see travis turn the act of lawnmowing into stylistic expression – but it just feels noncommittal and compartmentalized.

which is another problem imo…NMH3 doesn’t have levels, you travel to points in the map to engage in little designated battles that take 2-5 minutes to complete on average to deflect from the fact that there’s no substantive content and to give the combat system some meat and heft. and i do think the combat is kinaesthetically really appealing, in a way kind of the artistic statement of the year, it’s so garish, the way the voxel art and weird low fidelity environments and excessive blood and splatter effects all coalesce into conveying an off-kilter unreality, but it sucks that the combat is what’s on center stage and nothing more. even if the enemy designs are generally serviceable and the gamefeel is solid, i found myself wanting more than contextless skirmishes. midoris one of the better fights in the game purely because there’s actually a level here with good ideas and imagery relating to her character and background fueling the stage before travis’s competing subconscious infects the scene and they fight in a tokusatsu rock quarry.

NMH3 in that respect represents NMH at its most gratifying. it just feels good, despite it all. part of this is that your slot machine upgrades don’t grind gameplay to a halt to do some other weird mode of gameplay for a bit but they all naturally come together to form random bursts of unrelenting power expression. gold joe is probably my favourite fight in the game – soundtracks fuego, mechanics are simple, gimmicks unique, and the fight is very readable without compromising too much on difficulty, it fits the style of game NMH3 is trying to be the most. and that’s where that slot machine integration comes in because it’s entirely possible to stunlock these guys into oblivion when all is said and done, combining a smidge of luck with some of the very minor okizeme nuance present in the game – i basically one hit killed FUs first phase because i got luckily enough to trigger mustang twice through errant slashes and he got stuck in my cage of fishermans suplex torment. i still don’t really know what his moveset looks like in the later stages of the fight. that’s a gratifying thing in my books, perfectly in line with NMH’s ideals.

still, it’s a bit uninspired and tame otherwise in how it achieves that expression, and i wish there was a bit more meat on its bones. it’s technically the best NMH combat system, but it achieves this through:
- configuring dark step as witch time
- having enemy types
- boring death glove DPS mechanics
which is really kind of a shame because it’d be nice to have more in the way of formal experimentation, particularly after some of the crazier death glove abilities in TSA. this is basically killer is dead 2 for all that that’s worth, and it’s not particularly interested in tying any of these combat mechanics into a greater core. it’s just a Component in an, again, extremely compartmentalized game, unlike NMH1’s brand of, to this day, really unique bushido/lucha combat. it feels homogenous with action titles i’ve already played, yknow?

that retreading, homogenous feeling, is what’s most disappointing about NMH3s conveyance of narrative. everything in the opening establishes some ideas and themes that lose a lot of their momentum as you engage with the game, throwing in NMH1’s subversions of boss battle identity and coyly alluding to it at times as an unsatisfactory way to shake things up. i think where NMH1 and TSA are pretty unpredictable, NMH3 is firmly predictable and monotonous - there aren’t as many hooks to engage with, not as many quiet moments to reflect on…i imagine there will be some sects of the internet who think NMH2 deserves a reassessment after this and my answer to that is a hearty no, that game’s just absolutely miserable to play, but even that title has something like the captain vlad fight which i really liked! and a fair amount of my positive feelings on NMH3s battles mostly stem from whether or not they were fun to engage with on a more tactile level rather than leaving me with some narrative or aesthetic thread to deliberate on. the multimedia, ‘binge streaming’ format the narrative is conveyed by feels holistically appropriate in this sense, because it really is No More Heroes as unchallenging content, No More Heroes as brand ip, No More Heroes as obligation…in a world where games more than ever unironically resemble NMH1’s implicit criticism of the open world city format, what could or should NMH3 be bringing to the table? because it’s just more of the same here.

if travis feels at odds with it, subsumed by it – i think that’s the fairest way i can read this game, even if it doesn’t feel like something the game is perhaps entirely committed to. sylvia is travis’s partner but you wouldn’t guess it in this game, she’s resigned to her designated role as matchmaker and manager, pitting travis against battle after battle to keep his bloodlust sharp and flowing (which maybe in some perverse sense means someone like her is inadvertently the ideal partner for travis), but that elides that she absconds every time travis attempts to talk to her more meaningfully. and i think maybe what the game attempts to stab at is that complete and total death of meaning in the macro sense as we prefer to engage with things in the micro sense. im pretty sure this is why it ends in the dizzying manner that it does, even if its post-credits scene is something a great many of sudas works already do (ranko, SOTD, etc). travis’s life is now battle for battle’s sake; the game doesn’t think to ask how he feels about that because it’s clearly still duty to him at this point in time, but one of the only other meaningful connections he’s fostered is someone like bishop who he can just sit back and crack open a cold one with, sitting through miike film after miike film having these podcast-esque discussions as this weird place of respite. sylvia even thanks bishop for taking care of travis, so it's clear she's aware to some extent of what he's being put through. still, his inability to connect with sylvia does frustrate him but there’s not a lot he can do about that given she’s been shuttered off into the role his life demands of her. hell, so cyclical is the absurdity in travs's life that characters from separate narrative continuities like kamui and midori (with kamuis malleable and impermanent physical appearance fittingly shaped to appear as a younger otaku in this title) explicitly allude to glamour camping in this universe, because, well, it seems like there’s a vaguely interesting show going on here – why not change the channel for a bit? in that sense i do think some of the spirit of KTP is in this title, but not in a particularly substantive way. i should also probably point out that i didn’t expect any of those narrative threads to be in this game, because that’s insane, and i specifically wanted for NMH3 to be another expression of NMH, however that might manifest. but if these are ideas NMH3 wanted to chase, i don’t think it needed to explicate them necessarily so much as it needed clarity and focus; after all, much of NMH1’s thematic strength is expressed in the margins. i kind of liked ranko, and i greatly enjoyed kurayami, both of which are similarly works defiant of continuity that still feel complete and total, whereas this is just distended for much of its runtime.

maybe the other fair thing to point out is that my favourite narrative content in the game is usually in the smaller moments, particularly the optional bad girl arc players can choose to engage with wherein travis attempts to console her by making anime recommendations. classic stuff there. but otherwise things just kind of happen with hardly any sense of importance or dramatic rhythm, and while it’s unrelated, you can sense that the most in the game’s pared back soundtrack – a surprising wealth of these tracks are lacking in pulse or energy, particularly the battle tracks which are composed by nobuaki kaneko. he later went on to form the band red orca – their debut album features so many of the tracks listed in this game that have all been given extensive and lavish production, whereas in NMH3 they’re all significantly pared back cascades of white noise. not as relevant to the discussion here, but feels like an apt metaphor.

i really think it’s admirable that a game like this can swing for the stars, but not every chance at bat will be a home run. i expect that this will become something of an MGSV-type debacle in a few months time, since it’s clear that covid production, budget issues, and technical problems took a butcher’s knife to this game, with it being confirmed that there’s over an hour of cutscenes missing from the game and probably even more content missing as well judging from suda’s own description of what’s absent, such as boss fights and fully developed areas. but, all the same, im really not sure it’s a game that can find life in its wounds like MGSV can be said to accomplish…but it’s all the more frustrating that it’s impossible to say, as well. maybe there’ll be a director’s cut, but it seems highly unlikely given that this is travis’s last hurrah and marvelous has the rights to the IP. it ends up offering an interest contrast to killer7, a game salvaged in a similar edit that brought everything into comparable focus. with NMH3, the dominant sense is that everything is disparate and disconnected. i can say that trying to make any semblance of cohesive statement on this game is hell, which explains my overwrought nature this time i suppose, but then, NMH3 is like that too. meditation on weaponized nostalgia? ouroboric game about audience’s inability to let the past die? a work about the futility of mechanics-oriented design? impossible to say, but i could have appreciated its resistance to any easily read interpretation (in part because i think treating works purely in terms of the message they purport can be a reductive lens) if its parcels of content were more meaningfully engaging, but they unfortunately arent. by the end of all these competing conceptions of media, it's only fitting that they all meet at their 'final destination'. it is what it is. see ya in the next one

The video game medium has been one of my biggest passions since I was ten. I longed to be a developer growing up, and to this day I spend much of my free time dedicated to an ever-growing library. The Hotline Miami duology was undoubtedly one of the driving forces behind my love; it was inexpressibly important to my teenage years, almost as much as Fallout and LISA. Even now, whenever I think of video games, Hotline Miami 1 and 2 are some of the first that come to mind. To me, they are some of the best ever made.
HLM1 has style, flare, tight mechanics, infinite replayability, and a story unlike any other. Its aesthetics both capture and unsettle you, its violent imagery and over-the-top gore the beautifully ironic antithesis to its themes. There is nothing like it out there, nothing to top what it does - except for its very own successor.


SHORT REVIEW

Visuals: 5/5
Audio: 5/5
Story: 5/5
Gameplay: 5.5/5
Worldbuilding: 5/5
Overall game score: 5/5 [5.1/5]


IN-DEPTH REVIEW

Visuals:
The pixelated, neon-soaked world of Hotline Miami - with colorful blank backgrounds for the buildings to rest upon - add to its surreal 80s aesthetics; the camera slowly tilts back and forth as you navigate levels, giving a dreamlike quality. In this illusive city, you will make your way through base after base of criminal activity, exterminating hundreds of men in a gory cavalcade of death.
The levels are each distinctive in terms of design, and many in art direction as well. No two feel like a copy of another. You visit a hotel, a police station, a club - all with the purpose of killing everything in sight. The top-down view is extremely important in making these levels work so well; being able to look rooms ahead before you go in allows you to strategize much more easily.
The floating dialogue heads are definitely jarring at first, as they're not exactly the most pleasant to look at. But, after all these years, I couldn't imagine them any differently. The ugliness and exaggerated features are infinitely more memorable than another cookie-cutter pixel style. More importantly, they make each character's face stand out, even when you very rarely see faces at all.
Clarity is of massive importance in a game like this, given that you'll die and restart in just one hit. Thankfully, HLM mastered it right out of the gate. Enemies are always in the foreground, with their white suits and thick outlines. Bullets are bright and easy to spot. An abundance of blood signifies which enemies are dead and which you need to finish off.
Everything adds up to the best possible visual experience. You might not expect the style to work so well, but HLM pulls it off without a problem. It fits with the game's story and gameplay perfectly, while also being unforgettable and unique.
Overall, 5/5.

Audio:
I don't think it's controversial to assert that HLM1 has one of the best soundtracks ever put together. Even if you're not a fan of the game itself, it's impossible not to groove to its music (provided by M|O|O|N, El Huervo, Perturbator, and more.) The upbeat tunes that play during most levels sound straight out a flashy 80s movie - while the bizarre lo-fi that accompanies many cutscenes evokes unsettling psychological mindfucks. From the unforgettable Horse Steppin title screen, with its creepy vocalisations and distorted guitar strums, to the purely fun dance tunes such as Miami Disco. Each one is a genius piece of music, and they add up to an absolutely flawless soundtrack, made especially for an already-great game.
The club beats are a huge source of levity during gameplay, too. These energetic and catchy refrains are a big reason why restarting never feels like a chore; because no matter how many times you die, they play on in the background. It keeps your energy up, pushes you to press forward, encourages you to hit that R key no matter how many times it takes.
Meanwhile, the disturbing, slow-paced cutscene pieces set a totally different atmosphere. They give each of the level breaks an uncanny feel, reminding you that what you're seeing is a warped reality presented by a mass murderer.
The contrast of these two audio presentations adds so much dimension to the game, whether you consciously realize it or not. For this reason - and for its amazing quality - it is one of the absolute best soundtracks in the medium, or maybe even of all time. Not many can top it for me.
Overall, 5/5.

Story:
Hotline Miami is the picture-perfect blend of action and surreal dreamscape; Lynch inspires the thematic presentation, while Miami Vice (and other 80s media) shape the aesthetics. Everything about it - its subtext, its gory violence, its eccentric storytelling - reads as an ideal movie script.
Yet, it's not a movie. It's a game. And that's something that's very interesting to me.
There are a lot of people who denounce games as a 'lesser' form of media. They aren't allowed to be art; they're not on that 'level'.
But then, there are instances like Hotline Miami. Examples that plays to all strengths.
HLM1 is a video game through-and-through. A large chunk of your playtime is devoted to the addicting mechanics and moment-to-moment gameplay, which have been honed to perfection. It's already a masterpiece in that aspect. But when you throw in its narrative, it's hard to argue against HLM1 being art. Art that would captivate movie buffs if it were a movie, I'm sure. But, it's not. It's a game. It's ABOUT games.
The setting is Miami. 1989. It's a turbulant time for America. Hot off the heels of war with the Soviet Union, the USA and USSR have formed an uneasy alliance; the two are attempting to prevent an absolute nuclear apocalypse. This is only lightly touched on in-universe, if at all (some information is only mentioned in HLM2), but it is helpful in understanding the framework of HLM1.
A fairly average man - nicknamed Jacket by fans, for his signature varsity jacket - begins receiving strange phonecalls. These calls order him to complete 'jobs' at provided addresses. Suspiciously discrete things, such as babysitting or maintenance.
But, in reality, these tagged buildings are bases for Russian Mobsters. Armed with nothing but a chicken mask, Jacket's sole job is to eliminate every foreigner in sight.
Occasionally, in-between these genocidal excursions, Jacket is confronted by three other masked figures. The first is a woman, clad in a horse head, sympathetic to his plight. The second is Russian mafioso with an owl head, hostile and threatening. The third is himself, wearing the chicken mask that started it all, questioning and stoic.
He slowly uncovers the truth behind not only the phonecalls, but the very reality around him.
Despite having minimal dialogue, there are a dozen different themes to pick apart in HLM1. Nationalism, xenophobia, personal loss, grief, violence in video games. Most importantly, it manages to speak on all of this without ever slowing the pace.
And even though HLM1 has a large focus on fun gameplay, this is not just a game about beating levels. Instead, it pointedly asks you if you enjoy the violent acts you're committing.
"Do you like hurting other people?"
This iconic line is directed towards Jacket, and by extension, you. It is an introspective questioning of how brutal video games have become. Not only do you take part in Jacket murdering hundreds, but you watch as he cruelly bashes their heads in, breaks their limbs, sets them on fire, strangles them, beats them to death.
Still, HLM1 does not fault you for enjoying this. It simply raises the question of its mindlessness; it alerts you to the savage fictional acts we commit without ever thinking twice. It pleads that you to take a step back, and that you think about the kind of person you're filling the shoes of.
"You're not a very nice person, are you?"
Jacket is, in fact, not a nice person. While the fact that he is being forced to do these things is sympathetic in a way, he's still committing some downright heinous acts - and, what's much worse, is that he DOES enjoy them. THAT is who you are playing. Not an anti-hero. Not a valiant warrior. You are not saving the world, or leaving it any better than how you found it. You are a broken man, slaughtering human beings like animals, and your actions to fight against those controlling you might not ever matter.
Overall, 5/5.

Gameplay:
Hotline Miami is one of the rare examples where not only are the story and mechanics perfectly balanced, but they tie into each other in a crucial way. Those questions would not be nearly as evocative if not for the barbaric acts that predate them, after all. As the bodies pile up in Jacket's wake, the tone is set for the themes to thrive.
HLM1's levels are fast-paced, intense, and violent. You - as well as nearly every enemy - die in just one hit. One slash of a knife, one bullet from a gun. There are no drawn-out firefights, no unbearably long bosses.
There is also no brute-forcing your way through; you are obligated to strategize at every turn. The irony is that you're carefully planning out actions which will only take a few seconds to carry out. You go in, and you either kill, or you eat shit.
Thankfully, not even death is a chore in HLM1. When you DO get your head bashed in - and you will, many times - you simply press the R key to restart. No loading screens, no waiting. You are always thrown right back into the action. This allows for the sort of trial-and-error that HLM demands. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that dying is an integral part of the experience.
The trial-and-error is also aided by both forgiving checkpoints and sensible chapters lengths. Each chapter (or level) is broken up into 'floors', each of which provide a new spawn at their beginning. This way, restarting never feels too frustrating. An area will only take a minute or two once properly executed; it's LEARNING how to properly execute it that's the real challenge.
That strategy demanded of you is made much more fun by an abundance of ways to kill. Even aside from the melee/ranged arsenal, there's a dozen smaller mechanics to consider. Punch enemies down to finish them off. Open doors or throw weapons to knock enemies prone. Use enemies as human shields. Shoot through glass windows. Decide whether to sneak around, or use noise as bait.
And although the chapters are linear in goal, many have multiple paths to reach it. The open-ended level design allows you to act out different avenues and ideas; it's really up to you to decide what works best. You are constantly encouraged to change things up and use your brain.
None of this is even mentioning the extra layer that masks add to the gameplay. There is such a wide variety of them, with dozens of different upgrades (and some wacky, fun stuff too!) to change things up. They open the door for all kinds of playstyles, leaving you free to find masks that suit you as a player, or that suit specific levels. They're also very rewarding to collect!
So, even though I do think that the story of Hotline Miami is an underappreciated factor in its greatness, I cannot deny that the gameplay is just as good. HLM1 is a never-ending source of entertainment. Whether it's your first time around or your hundredth time replaying, it's a safe bet that you'll enjoy yourself.
Overall, 5.5/5.

Worldbuilding:
Our viewing of this near-dystopic Miami is constricted, limited to only that which is absolutely necessary. A world on the verge of nuclear war, an uneasy alliance between opposing governments. HLM1 may not spell out very much to its players, but if you take the time to dig just a little bit, some very heavy politics come to light. This society, dressed in neon 80s trappings, is slowly failing.
The themes of war serve as a backdrop for the sadism that HLM1 boasts. You're not just mindlessly killing hundreds of people; you're doing so in the name of nationalist vigilante justice. Your hand is being forced by powerful people dedicated to a cause that is beyond you. Even if you wanted to stop, you couldn't - even if you don't agree with what you're doing, you have little choice. All you can do is play their game and hope for the best.
But Jacket, though a perfect selection for jobs of violence, proves to be too much even for the nationalists to handle. He comes to serve as their singlehanded dismantler (at least, to the extent that we can see.)
Our protagonist's path of murder and revenge is palpably movie-esque, undoubtedly inspired by the likes of The Driver in Drive. But, in spite of his convictions, Jacket's inner monologues reflect guilt and trauma. Don Juan, Richard, and Rasmus accentuate his self-hatred. As time passes, the previously peaceful scenes with Beard begin to host horrifying, undead mafia members. Beard is murdered and replaced by a strange man, aggressive and intimidating.
Most of what we see is Jacket's own perception of events. We're unsure if any of it is accurate - if it's exaggerated, or if it's flat-out false. But, either way, they remind both the player and Jacket himself of the atrocities that have been committed.
It's in this way that Hotline Miami surprises. Despite seeming to be gameplay-focused on the surface, HLM1 sets the scene with a thoughtful and symbolic narrative. The worldbuilding is largely to thank for this; environmental storytelling shines through, leaving excess dialogue unneeded, and allowing the game to ebb and flow at a perfect pace.
Overall, 5/5.

Overall game score: 5/5. Hotline Miami ushered in a new era for the indies, proving that they can be just as good - if not better! - than anything published by AAA studios. Everything about this game is beautifully executed - the visuals, the music, the mechanics, the story, the characters. Maybe 10 years is a bit too early to call something a timeless classic, but I have no doubt that I'll be saying it about Hotline Miami another 10 down the line.

YA GOTTA GO BALLS OUT

Yakuza 4 is the only entry in the series I had virtually no expectations of. Its reception wasn’t overwhelmingly positive like some of the other entries I’m going to come across, and it wasn’t overwhelmingly “meh” like Yakuza 3. I didn’t really know what to expect outside of just having fun with Yakuza. I’m glad that I had that mindset since this game ended up blowing me away constantly.

The biggest change Yakuza 4 makes structurally is shifting perspectives between four different protagonists, Shun Akiyama, Taiga Saejima, Masayoshi Tanimura, and Kazuma Kiryu. Each one of them has their own backgrounds, fighting styles and walks of life. I think this was a fantastic decision for a multitude of reasons. First, the pacing greatly benefits from this. Experiencing each of the protags is varied enough to make each chapter of the story feel fresh, while still having a good amount of unified elements to them so your own skill can transfer over to everyone relatively well. The pacing of each part is also pretty brisk, so it never felt exhausting to go through, even during sessions where I binged the game. It also made it really cool to see the stories of the protags intersect, which is most prominent in the main plotlines of Tanimura and Kiryu’s parts. I’m excited to see how 5 expands on it.

The fighting styles of all the protags are really fun to use. Ranking them from my least favorite to favorite, I’d go Tanimura, then Saejima, then Kiryu, then Akiyama. I’ll go over them briefly here. Tanimura is pretty good, I like the use of combo enders and parries, though I think he’s the weakest for how his strengths aren’t really explored until the literal final boss. Saejima is kind of like a heavyweight character in a fighting game, focusing on charging up really strong attacks and powering through enemy strikes, which have a huge amount of impact to them. He also probably has my favorite boss lineup in the game, especially the ones in his 4th chapter. Kiryu is as satisfying to play as ever, especially with how his red heat mechanic sets him apart. Akiyama ended up being my favorite one to play as due to his focus on rapid movement and blitzing enemies. He’s like playing Yakuza in turbo mode, and I think the bosses also do a good job of taking advantage of that. Even if I enjoyed some of them more than others, I think all of them really come together super well in their final bosses.

Something else that made it really enjoyable is how the leveling system works. First, I prefer the spirit orb system in general to the exp bar system of the first three games. It feels much less cumbersome and lets you make an effort to unlock more advanced moves as soon as you can. It’s a shame that the ones post-5 seem to use different systems since this is probably the best leveling has been. It’s also helped by the fact that you level up really fast. It’s a choice that I feel was made to accommodate the multiple protagonists, and it works really well for it and lets combat open up pretty quickly.

Quick note, the soundtrack is incredible, strong contender for my favorite in the series. The songs here are some of the most stylish they've ever been, some favorites being Akiyama and Tanimura's battle themes. The main theme in particular is probably the best in the franchise that I've heard.

I generally really liked the narrative. Each of the main protagonists have compelling arcs, their values are put to the test quite a bit. The standout of the newcomers is definitely Saejima. The suffering he went through and how it informs his ideologies are incredibly gripping. That one scene in Purgatory REALLY got to me. The recurring theme of police corruption made the villain plot pretty compelling, even if I thought the villains themselves were a bit on the weaker side. The only thing that holds it back from being at the top of its class is that some of the plot twists are REALLY dumb, even for this series. (A specific archetype of the “Kiryu doesn’t kill” jokes hit different after Tanimura’s part ends) I have more to say about each of the individual characters and their chapters in the journal entries I wrote as I played through the game.

Overall I’m really happy with my experience with this game. I’ll probably wait a little bit before jumping into Yakuza 5, since I’m aware of how MASSIVE that game is. As of now, there’s just two games left in my journey through the main series. To see the rest of this through, I gotta go balls out.

The other day I was playing The Adventures of Bayou Billy, a beat-em-up for the NES developed by Konami. It was incredibly ambitious for its time, packing brawling, lightgun shooting, and 3D driving all on one cartridge, but what stood out to me wasn’t the technical mastery, but the fact that it was hard as balls. Even as someone with Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden, and Gradius under my belt, this game was absolutely ridiculous. I looked up some info to see if I was doing something wrong, but as it turns out, when localizing the game for the west, Konami more than quadrupled the difficulty. You deal half the damage and last half as long in the brawler sections, and when driving you don’t get a health bar at all, instantly dying from any mistake. After my desperate struggle to finish the game, I booted up the Japanese version and beat it in one shot without dying. So, not only was I upset at Konami for putting westerners through that, I was also annoyed that there isn’t a, for lack of a better term, correct version of the game. One is way too hard, but the other is so easy that you can just stand in one place mashing the punch button and get through just fine.

The reason I bring this up is because Contra: Hard Corps was also tweaked for the West, but that might not be obvious when you first boot it up. It plays just like any other Contra game; you jump around trying to upgrade your gun as fast as you can so you can fill the screen with bullets before enemies kill you in one shot. So, what did they change? As it turns out, in the Japanese version you have a life bar, which seems like an alien concept to the Contra series. Dying in one hit is one of the little things that gives the series its identity, so this time when I tried the Japanese version after the American one, I had a much more puzzled reaction. The game was still hard, and I enjoyed how the repetition was much lower, but there was a feeling that it wasn’t quite right. Before jumping into Hard Corps, I had beaten Contra, Super C, 3, and 4 back-to-back, so the aforementioned departure in gameplay, combined with its shift in aesthetic, made it feel more like an imitator than a true member of the series. It didn’t make the different characters and weapons any less cool, and the set-pieces were still the best in the franchise, but it didn’t quite feel like Contra.

So, the question now is how much that feeling is truly worth. If analyzed by retro-gaming fans, I’m sure they would say the western version is definitive, while reviews done in a contextual vacuum would likely prefer the smoother Japanese version. What makes this extra complicated is how it’s influenced by a factor outside the game’s control, and even outside the control of the games it’s compared with. Contra used to be a huge name in gaming, but now it’s been more than ten years since any well-received titles have come out, and the cultural knowledge of what Contra means is fading from memory. So, what’s considered the better version of Contra: Hard Corps may slowly change over time, purely through a slow evaporation of the cultural context which set it apart from its contemporaries. Even that might be optimistic thinking though, considering how this game has never seen a rerelease, and is likely to disappear as soon as the brand consciousness which anchors it to gaming history starts fading away. That would be a shame since I really love this game, BOTH versions of it, so to help keep Contra alive, play this one. Remember what Contra was all about.

Full disclosure of video-game-journalistic integrity: I have been in love with Mario Kart 8 for close to ten years. I think it is one of the best video games ever made, sheer perfection that would be impossible to surpass with a Mario Kart 9 - hence why I have been banging the drums of DLC for this masterpiece for a long time. My review of these eight courses is extremely prejudiced by the fact I am just happy to be booting up Mario Kart 8 and seeing something that I haven’t already seen 10,000 times. But is it possible to add to something perfect without making it not perfect?? Without further ado, let’s review each of these courses in unnecessarily exhaustive detail:

Paris Promenade: If you browsed the video game internet in the mid-2000s, you’re likely familiar with this advert. I think it is one of the greatest video game adverts of all time, and most people who posted on video game message boards in the mid-2000s thought so too. If you posted on the Nintendo Official Magazine UK Official Forums, as I did, at least four dudes in every thread would have an avatar or at least a signature that referenced this advert in some way. It was the shit. Just funny as hell, and it also perfectly captured the excitement of finally being able to play Nintendo games online. Don Draper wishes he could've made it. I’m not one of those Ricky Gervais Jordan Petersen Richard Dawkins “cant say that these day” whatever-the-fucks but it does feel like an advert you could not do today and I am sad about that because I am currently envisaging a 2020s version of the advert for Mario Kart 8 that includes more good-naturedly outrageous cultural stereotypes and it’s super funny, dude, just trust me, honestly, please, it’s not offensive at all. Bro. Please. Anyway, as I was about to say - this course really reminds me of that advert and I get a real kick out of that, a sort of personal-liminal cyberspace, a private joke between me and my own Nintendo history, riding my little Donkey Kong motorbike around the Champs-Élysées (which is in itself pretty fucking funny imagery) and laughing to myself, having a good time.

As far as technical analysis goes - there are, in my opinion, two types of Mario Kart course: player-competitive courses and course-competitive courses. Course-competitive courses are primarily battles between the players and the environment - taking tight bends round steep cliffs, avoiding stage hazards, anticipating the movements of Goombas and Monty Moles. Other players are still an ongoing concern, of course, but they’ll also likely be too preoccupied by giant lava Bowsers and rain-slicked roads to give you their full attention. These kinds of courses usually serve as the finale of a cup, such is their intense make-or-break nature; a Survival Mode of sorts that rewards players who commit the fewest unforced errors (A Smash Bros-style stock battle for Mario Kart where you try and Death Race 99 other racers round a tough track would be so fucking sick dude, like honestly, just think about it for a minute) Player-competitive courses are, naturally, an inversion of this paradigm. With simple wide raceways and few hazards, if any, players are focused a lot more on each other and how they’re doing - expect green shell snipery, a focus on clean driving lines and a lot more counting of passing seconds. The bread-and-butter of Mario Kart, the sort of courses your gaming-illiterate little brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers probably prefer; the type of course your average anime-avatared Twitter luddite will probably call “mid and basic” because their TikTok-addled synapses require constant multicoloured stimuli in order to feel anything resembling satisfaction.

As you might have already worked out, Paris Promenade is a player-competitive course. Don’t get it twisted, though - “player-competitive” isn’t just some dogmatic mind palace I’ve created to justify the paucity of a simplistic Mario Kart course. There are bad player-competitive courses out there - take the mindless Grand Old Duke “marched them up, marched them down” tedium of 8’s GBA Mario Circuit, for instance - but Paris Promenade isn’t like that at all. It has branching turns, cute little roundabouts and a brand-new hyper-literal interpretation of “player-competitive” - the ability to drive head-first into the oncoming traffic that was bringing up your rear only a few seconds ago: a tense series of who-dares-wins moments where the leaders can fuck up the losers and the losers can get a far more visceral shot at the top than the game usually affords.

One of Mario Kart 8’s few flaws is that it’s quite easy for the podium-position racers to distinctly disparate themselves from the pack - strong defensive play leaves 4th-thru-12th to fight amongst themselves for scraps of coin and redshell, but folding the racing line back in on itself and forcing the tops/bottoms to go brave-or-grave is an ingenious little noteless balance patch that’s contained to a single lap of a single track, a very Nintendo solution to a very Nintendo problem that I’d like to see spill out entirely across the next instalment of the franchise. Paris Promenade is a track of deceiving simplicity that we’d all do well not to dismiss as “an asset flip” (curse the YouTuber who taught 11 year olds this phrase), it could well be the blueprint for more Karts to come.

Toad Circuit: Mario Kart 7, the hardworking Josephian father who helped give birth to the Christ-child Mario Kart 8, will always have a special place in my heart. In 2011, it helped form the bedrock of at least twelve friendships I still maintain to this day, its surprisingly robust online multiplayer providing a great opportunity for one of life’s most underrated means of forming a human connection - being absolutely fucking awful to other people via the medium of video games, strangers hurling “FUCK YOU BLUE SHELL PRICK” messages at each other via group DM until the ironic venom hardens in the veins of their hearts and forms the bonds of friendship.

Toad Circuit was one of my favourite courses in Mario Kart 7 because it played a sort of upbeat funky version of the game’s main theme and my brain naturally built neural links between that music and being online with my online friends playing Mario Kart online and having fun online. Sometimes it’s enough just to drive three laps to some music you enjoy and think about your friends. Who cares that the grass texture isn’t well-defined enough for you? You don’t have any friends because you’re comparing screenshots of Mario Kart grass on Twitter.

Choco Mountain: Super Mario Kart defined almost every element of the Mario Kart iconography/featurology that we know and love today, but I think it’s fair to say that Mario Kart 64 was the progenitor of the “fucked up little weird place that doesn’t really have anything to do with Super Mario” trend that has followed Mario and his friends all the way to Twisted Mansion and Sweet Sweet Canyon. The original Choco Mountain leveraged the Nintendo 64’s smudged-signature fog effects to create a terrifying Silent Chocolate Hill, and it’s unfortunate that Nintendo have chosen to prioritise things like “visuals” and “performance” over “looking like shit in an endearingly eery way”, perhaps traumatised by anime-avatared Twitter luddites who called the Switch port of Ocarina of Time “mid and basic” because their favourite YouTuber told them that the fog effects were wrong, totally trust me bro, I know you hadn’t been born yet and your dad was still in middle school but it’s all wrong man, go reply to @NintendoAmerica RIGHT NOW when you’re done talking about Mother 3 and Geno in Smash, man. Anyway, removing the creepy lag fog from the peaks of Choco Mountain is a besmirchment of Mario Kart’s legacy as a horror game; they added a cave, but forgot to make it scary. It’s still fun, though!

Coconut Mall: The Wii era of Mario Kart more or less passed me by because Mario Kart Wii came out at a time when I thought getting called “a feckless little irish cunt” (I’m not Irish) in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2’s Xbox Live lobbies was a preferable multiplayer experience to this. I do remember the majesty of Coconut Mall course quite well, though, because I was old enough to do Serious Babysitting when Mario Kart Wii was huge, and I spent a lot of time observing my little cousins and their horrible little friends play it all the time, maintaining a safe distance that afforded me plausible deniability if ever seen in the vicinity of Baby Daisy instead of a virtual M4A1. Undoubtedly a missing link in Mario Kart 8’s chain that has now finally been restored, albeit as a weaker polygon-carbonfibre replica of the Wii’s solid steel original. (Though shouldn’t we have cause to return to the old games now and again?) This broken circle now only awaits Waluigi Pinball.

Tokyo Blur: An unfortunate salvo of ammunition for the people who rightly or wrongly accuse Nintendo of hiring Miyamoto’s work-shy grand-nephew to drag and drop mktour3.track into the Mario Kart 8 codebase and call it a £30 product. There isn’t all that much to remark on here, I think - the course transforming on each lap isn’t all that impressive when it’s done off-screen, and we already know the game’s track designers can do cool revolving-set shit that evokes Prey’s opening level. I’m sick of driving under thwomps! What do thwomps have to do with Tokyo, anyway?! I know Nintendo love to represent their home nation in their work, but wouldn’t it be cool if, idk, they reproduced Barcelona or Budapest or Bangkok or something other than the usual New York/Tokyo/London/Paris real-life fare?? I just wanna do a bike flip over the Dublin Dracula Museum or the Potsdam Hanging Rhino…

Shroom Ridge: Course-competitive courses that seek to emulate the feeling of player-competitive courses are nothing new (Toad’s Turnpike, Mushroom Bridge, Moonview Highway), but I feel like this one is special because it also uniquely emphasises some course-competitive elements, like sheer cliffs, and puts you and some cars next to them like you’re a henchman driving in the second-act chase scene of a James Bond movie where he’s trying to overthrow the Mushroom Kingdom’s leadership on behalf of MI:6. The traffic is enjoyably dense, forcing players to sometimes choose between weaving and bending knife-edges and cartoon fenders (try it in 200cc time trial!) and you can even try for a mushroom-jump off the back of a moving car and over a crevice, which is surprisingly daredevil for a game that is usually one step away from putting giant flashing neon signs labelled SHORTCUT over their shortcuts. I’m now hoping for a course with cars and trucks that can actively fight back instead of passively crushing you by merely existing.

Sky Garden: lol u just gotta love it. Has three of my favourite Mario Kart 8 tropes in one neat package: the random copy-pasted Koopa Troopas floating in unison at the starting line like busted Disneyland animatronics begging for mercy; Nintendo blatantly going “ehhhh the o.g. track sucked” and just ‘remaking’ it by doing a whole new tangential optioning of another course (in this case, Cloudtop Cruise); and of course, everyone’s favourite -  busted-ass giant-ass leaves and fruits that serve as quintessential Mariokartian devil’s shortcuts that give you like a 33% of getting thoroughly fucked in the abyss if even one tire isn’t aligned right, only a step removed from just watching Bowser Jr. spin a Russian Roulette revolver and press it to his scaly little temple before pulling the trigger. Apparently this one was in Mario Kart Tour too, but who played that game after launch week? Nintendo, there’s no need to tell on yourself by acknowledging that game in any way - we’ll forgive you, like we always do.

Ninja Hideaway: This fucking Wanokuni-ass shit right here!!! I have no idea why Nintendo thought it was a good idea to package this directly in a cup with the relatively-unremarkable Tokyo Blur - while Hideaway perhaps leans a little too heavily into every single “omg cool japan” design trope ever committed to cartridge, it is undoubtedly a far better advert for Edo-Nihon-Nin-Nin-Nintendo culture than anything else I can remember them making - and Nintendo fuckin love doing Edo-Nihon-Nin-Nin stuff. How good was Bowser’s Castle in Super Mario Odyssey, folks? Yeah!! How much time do I have left to talk about the music that brings this all to life? Funny to think that most people who originally played this course were looking at it on their iPhones with their sound off while riding the subway. Is it any wonder Nintendo wanted to free these little masterworks from their skinner-boxes and let normal people play them?

Let’s take a deep breath now and turn the other blind eye for a moment, pretending once again that Mario Kart Tour didn’t happen, and this course is brand-spanking new (which it will be to 99% of players). Operating on the exciting assumption that this is the logical next gameplay step for Mario Kart 9 (it won’t be called that, I hope!!) will take in 2025 or 2026 or whatever unfathomably far-off date that Nintendo decide to make a new Mario Kart game, is this an example of the “u can go anywhere!” design principles that Nintendo have been toying with in Breath of the Odyssey: Arceus’s Fury, now applied to a driving game?? Could the next Mario Kart be an off-road jam, finding new, personal routes through sprawling open Horizons or maze-like spaces? C’mon man, that would be kind of cool, man!! Mario Kart 8 is the apex of the traditional kart game - so how do you improve on that? Maybe, just maybe(!!!), the next Mario Kart isn’t going to be on a traditional track…?! Are we going somewhere where we don't need roads?

Some might argue that Ninja Hideaway’s exceptionally tight turns and freeform movements are more a consequence of this trying a straight transplant of Tour’s invisi-barriered track design tenets to the high-octane world of Mario Kart 8,  but I see it more as a prototype, accidental or otherwise, that addresses another of Mario Kart’s few flaws: that even in 150cc, the game often doesn’t require you to think all that hard about how you’re driving. See bend, take bend. See ramp, do trick. You might, at most, have to apply a slight brakepadding on a wet Neo Bowser City hairpin, but even then, that’s usually just a wrist-slapping punishment for favouring the kinda-broken top-speed big-boy builds. 

200cc is an admirable quick-win solution to this problem, but you can’t play 200cc with your grandma. And if your grandma can’t play Mario Kart, you’re not playing a Mario Kart game, right? It’s almost impossible to broach the skill canyon that exists between your grandma and proverbial snakers who pick the optimal weight class, but what if this is what the Booster Pass is intended to explore? Are there ways to make Mario Kart equal for all again after creating an essentially perfect game? With the last pack not coming until the end of 2023, this is a two-year experiment in the future of a game that has sold 35 million copies. I’m excited to see where it goes.

Gran Turismo 7 is a lie. For all the words spouted about how this is a return to form of the massive singleplayer campaigns and content of Gran Turismos past, it's really not. It tries, goddamit, and definetly scratches the itch that we all have of Gran Turismo 4 and such... but it never goes more than skin deep.

Because Gran Turismo 7 is just an expansion of GT Sport, and with it, the promise of new stuff to come at an indeterminate date. At time of writing it's just a buy in to a live service.

The kicker here is content. Versus GT sport there's a grand total of... 4 new tracks and two new layouts of existing ones. I'm not joking thats it, and whilst the selection is mostly good - High speed ring, deep forest, and Trial Mountain are classics - there being no completely new additions outright is really sad.

The car selection is also quite small by mainline gt standards. 400 cars which are mostly unique (compared to GT6's deluge of 20 different types of Miata) and all beautifully modelled - but lots of these are ludicrously expensive, the vast majority are imported from GT sport, and there's very few additions in the racing car categories. The overall car selection is also, by now, quite old. Most of the cars here you can track back to about 2015-ish, and there's very few non concept cars from post 2020.

And it kinda all makes sense. The reduced scope of GT7 compared to - particularly GT4, is almost unavoidable. The level of fidelity demanded these days makes something the scope of GT4 or even GT6 basically impossible, and Polyphony arent the crazed madmen sleeping at the office and making Naughty dog's crunch practices look pedestrian anymore.

And thus, the campaign doesn't really work. There's the delightful level of gran turismo charm and cheese which is lovely to have back and is probably my outright biggest criticism of Sport, but the whole thing is too linear, short, and really lacks the freedom of previous GTs.

Particularly dissapointing is the lack of the super high level events from bygone days - Like the wind, Formula grand turismo championships, etc. It's outright bizzare, the game carries the license system from previous games, but there arent even any license requirements over A in the game at time of writing. And it's so weird, because the game dangles these awesome legendary cars in front of you for stonking credit values but there's like fuck all to do with them except online!

But despite it all, there's sparks here. S-10, the final license test, has you wrangling a classic Porsche 917 around a slightly damp Spa Francorchamps. It's probably the most fun i've ever had in a driving game. The handling model in GT7 is top tier, it's implementation of weather and changeable conditions amazing, it's level of fidelity so damn high, the Car such a fun beast to drive - that it all comes together and it's downright magical. It's the apotheosis of the driving fantasy GT has always been trying to fullfill, and it's the best it has ever done it. Some of the other missions and driving tests are also great, but this moment is what makes it, and proves GT7s potential.

But we'll have to wait, i guess. More than even GT sport, this is a game where buying it is buying into a live service and years of updates which will eventually make it the game we all wanted. GT sport eventually got there. And if there's more moments like S-10 coming... I guess i'll be there to see it in GT7.

As someone who hadn't played a Monster Hunter game in almost ten years, Monster Hunter Rise came as a bit of a surprise when I started playing it. There is a far reduced sense of friction here; gone are the days of making sure you're prepared for the environment you're entering and its extreme heat or cold, wandering around trying to find your prey, having to be careful to paintball them so you can keep tracking them down when they flee mid-battle.

I can't really think of this direction for the series as better or worse, it's more just different? The biggest things lost with this change in direction are that you form less of a connection with the game's environments (which are wonderful, and a delight to exist in) when you can just zip right to the monster the moment you start the mission, and you're also just far less encouraged to think through your preparation for battle when the game's actual focus is on getting you into the action as fast as possible. This latter point is something that isn't helped by Rise being not-particularly-challenging generally and so not punishing this lack of preparation; I played the vast majority of the game using the exact same item loadout, eating the exact same dango meal, and never feeling like I needed to change these habits in any way.

Whilst there's clearly something lost here, there's also a lot gained as Rise is able to lean harder into the action and excitement. Once you've entered the monster's locale you're never more than a minute or two from battle as you swing through the air, run up walls and drift on your dog around corners to get to where your target is as soon as possible. You can ride the monsters, smashing them against each other for different item drops, and when monsters run away it's so easy to catch up with them that it mainly just acts as a momentary reprieve to sharpen your weapon. I do think Rise can at times blur together a little bit - being able to charge towards a monster right away, the fight never really letting up, every mission starting the same way with you catching a monster or two early on with your wirebug attacks to slam them into one another - but the more action-focused approach makes for an exciting time, and I had a lot of fun moving up the ranks fighting alongside my girlfriend.

Outside of these changes, it's still very much Monster Hunter. There are still many, many systems, starting the game is a horrorshow of tutorial pop-up messages you'll immediately forget, and it's hard for me to figure out how much training my pets or sending out meowcenaries to go add to the ever growing pile of random-monster-pieces really ended up mattering in the end, but the moments in the village still mostly make for chill vibes once you wrap your head around this portion of the gameplay loop.

Other random thoughts;
- I love riding the dogs and wish they didn't feel just much worse than the cats outside of the convenience they offer
- Spiribirds suck as a mechanic and seem like the way the game is encouraging you to actually do some exploration ever but the reality is they actually force you to choose between running around a loop for a few minutes before battle to pick them up and actually be fully powered or entering battle without them knowing that you could be stronger
- Despite the fact I only played as a hammer-wielder all game long the sheer variety of weapons here continues to rule and be one of Monster Hunter's greatest strengths and really adds to the multiplayer experience when all the different playstyles start interacting in cool ways
- I think the multiplayer experience in Rise is just generally better than playing alone, but this is particularly emphasised with the handful of rampage quests which are quite unfun on your own but become very chaotic but really exciting and tense when you're coordinating them with a friend
- For the most part the monsters here are fantastic, a lot of them feel unique and compelling, turf wars are spectacular, and a special shoutout to Magnamalo who is anime as hell and easily my favourite monster to fight
- The story and dialogue are Quite Bad. I'm someone who will read almost every line of dialogue in games and even I found myself not bothering to read almost anything here after a certain point
- I love everything about the wirebug mechanic; the range of movement they offer, how fun wirebug attacks are, managing your wirebugs to make sure you can escape quickly if you're knocked down, it's all great
- The final fight of HR7, also the final fight of the main story content, was very exciting and a clear high-point of my time with the game

All said and done I played for about 50 hours, got to HR11, beat the main bulk of the story stuff, and whilst I think it's likely I play a bit more Monster Hunter Rise I'm definitely not invested in pouring in tens of hours of grind against the same monsters over and over to see a couple extra pieces of content or to get some slightly better armour so I am mostly done I think outside of the occasional multiplayer session with friends. Had a blast.