Kratos' tragedy is that of dehumanizing discipline to achieve the vain glory of ultimate conquest, of fruitless strength.

I wouldn't consider God of War's drama to be particularly lucid, as it largely exists to rationalize the player's advancement in the scenarios (as is the case of so many other triple A games, to dichotomize "story" and "gameplay" in the relationship between cinematics and "the actual game", as if gameplay wasn't inherently narrative in the actions we partake in when interpreting a character) and gets too stuck for much of it in the voyage for the McGuffin that is Pandora's Box. However, I can't deny that there's something intriguing in its contradiction.

A game about the pleasure of ultra-violence and the dominance over all beings that questions our involvement in how all the expulsion of id results trivial. Merits without satisfaction, as the demonic phantasms of the past persevere. A mortal accepting the throne of a God, yet he is still condemned to be haunted by his actions; what has been done can't be borrowed, no matter how hard one fights against the divine. Kratos "wins", yet what is his worth? A solitary palace to rejoice on his emptiness? A revenge bringing no more than dissatisfaction in ostentatious dresses?

Its immediate sequels (II & III) would miss this appeal, either from the ridicule reaching an excess that it no longer can have any human grounding (this entry is absurd though, let that be clear), or from the epic centering even more scarcely in the psychological complex, making its delving to such unearned. Yet this one still holds weight in the progression of the flashbacks, each taking us closer to the painful truth, and its understanding of the Greek tragedy being personalized to the protagonist's vices; the tale functioning in pedagogical terms due to how the punishments of the Gods feature a cautionary lesson; the inevitability of the conclusion as all has been precedingly rigged (and how the flashbacks here play a role in realizing this dynamic).

Some gets lost in translation due to how troubling is to pull off its contradiction, of being satisfying while enjoying a sense of banality and transmitting it in terms of interaction with systems. Nonetheless, it remains interesting and surprisingly well designed to evade monotony in our player disposition. It takes some time to get truly engaging with the challenges, yet everything involving, for example, the three stages of the finale I found immensely gratifying in how it forces genuine attention for the enemy patterns and a pragmatic usage of our special abilities. Definitely better than the sordidness of God of War III.

Es a Vascolet: La Máquina del Tiempo lo que Mega-Man X es al Mega-Man original.

¿Esa frase significa algo?

No. Pero a este le pusieron mucho más onda al nivel final.

El primero era rarísimo que, después de su primer nivel, los dos siguientes tuvieran un cierto concepto de exploración y una cierta complejidad en lo laberintico de los escenarios para que, sin ningún aviso, tiren a la basura dicho paradigma de diseño, hasta el punto que los vascolet que te dan poder en ambos niveles finales te los otorguen en la misma zona del nivel, sin más. Acá al menos el nivel final sigue una de las reglas de vídeojuegos pa' boludos 101 de que la conclusión tiene que poner en práctica todo lo que el jugador ha aplicado durante la aventura. Incluso, para que lo que dije de Mega-Man no sea tan sacado del orto, cierran el nivel con una batalla contra todos los jefes anteriores. Salvo el dragón por ser una cagada, supongo.

Igual le quita onda que, de cinco niveles, uno sea un mundo de agua horrible y otro uno de vuelo con dragón. Medio te introducen la novedad del poder correr y no te la dejan exprimir del todo hasta los últimos dos niveles.

El diseño de niveles está mejor pero los controles se hacen muy torpes, y lo del boomerang es una pelotudez cuándo siempre el juego te incentiva a saltar sobre tus enemigos. Más que nada sirve para cuando te sumerges.

¿Tan mal estoy para rejugar estas cosas y escribir algo posta a las dos de la mañana?

Probablemente. Pero la verdad acompañé la jugada escuchando Dawn FM, que está increíble.

No fue una pérdida de tiempo tan grande. Énfasis en tan.

You couldn't be asking a worst person about anything regarding this series' lore. However, despite my general disconnect with its specifics in its venture to provide a fulfilling narrative from questions left by the originals' history-making, I like how its preexisting conditions damn it into a FPS rendition of operatic tragedy; A Star Wars Prequel for the Halo Universe, even if less potently felt. Rogue One, but maintaining a better sense of pulse in its representation of the happening.

Fighting for a lost cause, death from the first frame and only directing oneself to disaster in the insignificance of our role in the battle of Reach. And Bungie does find a way of transmitting this impotence through our interaction with the system. We taste the pleasure of small victories in our advancement in the plot, yet are always reminded, either enviromentally or through exposition, of the futility of any achievements in the face of a menace this unstoppable.

The final mission, in which our goal is as vague yet concrete as "surviving", is a particularly lucid piece of design as it encapsulates the struggle one endures navigating through this scenarios. The best we can do is fight to last another minute. Not succeed, but remain; to build a path for the next generations to persist. That hope, as constructed in its precedents as its despair, what grants its tone of a nuance generating a stronger engagement with the incidents on-screen, as much as individual characters are defined in broad strokes.

More rewarding than what I'd prefer from a proposal of its qualities, while still not meaning it fully accomplishes the heights of its ambitious drama.

I think that if there is any art-form that successfully reflects the condition of living under late-capitalism, that would be videogames (what a start, I know lol, but hear me out). There is always this idea of control that a player has when going through the experience. The feeling that you are the one that has the freedom to do whatever you want. That you have a choice over your actions and that whatever you are lead to, is because of your own interests. Since you are the one controlling this figure and making everything that seems relevant in this world.

However, you are never truly in control of your actions because everything you do in the virtual space has been predetermined and calculated by people above you who designed this system. You’re directed to perform certain tasks that they want you to, while others you’re limited to because they either didn’t plan for you to use the system in that way or because they went out of their way for you to not do that which you’re trying. Agency is nothing more than an illusion that any game sets on you because you are not doing more than what they ask you or what they allow you. The system was designed by them, and you are not doing more so than acting under its restrictions.

Some videogames, like for example those in the sandbox genre, capitalize on the power fantasy of being free. They sell you the idea that you are going to be allowed to do whatever you want. That you’re going to indulge in your wildest wishes and accomplish them. Living in this space as if it was reality and ascending in a hierarchy until you, as the exceptional you are, end on the top.

However, that cannot be seen as nothing more than dishonest because in the end video game are always limited. There are many tasks you cannot perform in GTA V, for example. No matter how much they thought it out, the system can only account for what the creators set up, along some outsiders that are produced out of its failures more than anything else. They might make it seem as freedom, but it is nothing more than the fantasy of freedom. (Not something that makes the games bad necessarily as there is still value in the illusion, but there is no denying in what it is).

And even without that, those very same sandbox games, ironically enough, end up having very linear and hermetic story modes in which you’re strictly told what to do. The instructions are clear and there is not space for the player to take a different path for that target. The contrast in the process reveals the farce of the surrenders and that you never had any freedom in the first place. The control is taken away from you from the start and the only things you can do are things you are asked to do.

The existence of this aesthetic hegemony of games that favor false freedom and saturation of options to hide your lack of agency only makes it more interesting when a game comes out and sets itself to be conscious about the conditions you are put in as player. Hotline Miami being one I recently talked about, but on the other hand there is also, among many others, Portal.

Interestingly enough, a game that was created few years after Half Life 2 by the same company. That one founding itself in empowering oneself against the system through revolution, just for your efforts to become meaningless. Despite how much other characters in the game try to enhance you as myth, you are nothing more than a puppet for a supernatural entity that decides to put you in this scenario just to take you as soon as you finished your task. Portal is not too distant, but I would argue its use of symbols to evoke similar territory is more sophisticated.

You wake up in a room with no information about yourself, and right away, a machine guides you through tests that you have to pass (while not being given an explanation). From that point on everything you perform in this space, every gesture and every action is instructed directly by the machine, who gives you information about how to solve the scenarios. You might be the one resolving the set pieces, but it is not too different from a laboratory rat that is promised a cheese at the end of the maze (in your case, a cake). The scenarios were designed by them for you to resolve in only one way, and there is nothing you can do in response other than obey. A brilliant touch to demonstrate this is how at the start the portals are put by the machine for you to solve the puzzles instead of giving you the gun and the two kind of portals right away.

Something that, on one hand is functional from a design standpoint. Since it allows the player to get used to the systems. Leaving a space between every element you are given so you can assimilate the information, giving a sense of there being a difficulty and complexity curve increasing at your pace. However, symbolically, it already presents the element about lack of agency revealing the fakery of it all. That the scenarios are artificially constructed for you with a single path to cross.

The dynamic of control that the machine GLaDOS has on you, however, changes halfway through. When you stop being useful to her and her tasks, she attempts to murder you. You served her interests and since you were nothing more than a tool now you have to be thrown away like many others before you. That is the point in which you rebel against your position. You stop being submissive, and you start using the gun to create portals where GLaDOS did not plan. You move behind the red curtain where you see everything going on to make the puzzles possible. In dark industrial places characterized by its violent cylinders that smash the walls and give little room for motion and comfort. Contrasting with the clean and polished places you are presented for the tests.

You do what it was not planned for you to do. You take what you are learned (with help of efforts by someone that preceded you and suffered in the same environment) and apply it without being told by a superior what to do and how to do it. In fact, you assert dominance by repeatedly doing the opposite of what you are told. The oppression reached such point of violence that now the only solution is to fight back. Which is very interesting in how the game applies it in multiple ways, including especially that you kill GLaDOS by using the missiles of her gun turret against her with the portals.

Like by the end of Half Life 2, there is a sense of empowerment in this comeback. You do not only fight back, you are even better with you tools that you were before. Now that you are at your peak, nothing can stop you from achieving the emancipation of the powers that repress you. However, through a melancholy finale, that empowerment is recontextualized as futility. And for Portal specifically, that gives sense to its individualist focus throughout the journey.

You might have successfully defeated the one machine that was gaslighting you, manipulating you and controlling you, but such effort was meaningless. So concentrated into a single being that it practically produces zero material effects outside of the little story you lived.

You see the woods; you see nature after having seen exclusively the mechanical. But an unknown robot takes your body to pull you back into the structure. Because the structure is still there, and you cannot change it by destroying one individual. You are back in your submission, probably to repeat the cycle of tests and control.

Is a more than functional exploration of corporative control against human interests, neoliberalism advancing towards structures that are more detached and cold, resulting in the further alienation of the people. Moreover, it is even more successful as a metaphor for games and the dynamics between creator, player and the game itself due to the precision of the symbols and aesthetics employed to evoke this significance. I would even prefer it to Half Life 2 in this reading of the political and the Meta as both interconnected because of the synthesis.

The way this plays out so simply, with no more than what is needed to tell its story, instead of extending itself to a duration that would conform to what is expected, feels almost “anti-commercial” (as much as an accessible, mainstream game can be) in its attempt. Two hours of content, a main story and that’s it. This was something that, when I first played it, underwhelmed me about the work because it felt like it was offering too little in comparison to the standards of what a game offers. However, is exactly that what compels me so much about this and makes me prefer it to its sequel.

Portal 2 might expand on the concepts and might give more to the player to extend the life of the title, but in my opinion it feel like a sequel that tries to replace the original by giving the same but More. More story, more characters, more puzzles, more tools, more Lore, more duration, more play modes, more everything. It’s a way of creating sequels that feels uncomfortable to me because it presumes video-games as a commodity to constantly improve on rather than as pieces of art to revisit, which is something that Valve’s sequels (except for Half Life 2) suffer from.

On the other hand, Portal is comfortable being concise. Making every element memorable rather than trying to saturate the experience. And it makes it feel like more artistic and sincere in its exploration of thematic ideas and ludic concepts (using the first person format for a genre like puzzles, using the mechanics of Half Life to explore and figure out rather than to make your way killing). And is the kind of simplicity that makes its speech more convincing, more so when comparing it to Half Life 2 that runs into some contradiction due to how it is designed.
Honestly, games should learn from this that not all stories need to be extensive, and sometimes brevity can be your virtue.

A story of love and revenge told through ellipsis. A tale of violence reduced to its visceral fundamentals. Abstracted until the literal no longer matters and the work can indulge in the essential symbols and aesthetics.

In my opinion, it outdoes other games released at the time that tried to be self-critical of the mechanics being designed for violence and the implications of such. That because of Hotline Miami’s emphasis less on the shaming of the player, and more on the ways we distance ourselves from our actions in virtual spaces with context and the particular abstraction inherent to the videogame look.

Pushing us out of the comfort that virtuality gives us by constantly involving us, asking us question and calling attention to what we exert. Every time we kill dozens of enemies, having the need to contemplate the destructed bodies of every one of them on our way back to the place that we started in.

Video-game avatars as masks (like those Jacket wears before committing atrocities). Figures we control that serve to express ourselves in a space. Even when the only way that we can see of achieving that expression in the digital being through violent acts. All a performativity that the creators allow themselves to break down. Pointing at its farce and putting it apart so they can directly involve us in a conversation about what makes us wish for enacting these stories.

We might want to moralize our habits of playing through intellectualizing. The actions as means for encountering meaning of any kind, especially if it is irony. That it is okay that I exert violence in a virtual space because the game is making a critique of violence (the military FPS being the quintessential example of this falsity).

However, any of that would be nothing more than dishonest. We are not given a reason by the game of what we did. Nothing that rationalizes our journey, because we were not looking for anything in the first place. We just wanted to indulge ourselves. It is as intellectually unrewarding as that.

In so, the game not only explores exerted virtual violence and our relation to it as perpetuators, but also the futility of our agency in any form of system. We are taking from place to place by the designers to execute a very strict set of actions without possibility for more. We might like to indulge in the power fantasy, but in the end, we are being used by the game. We don’t have a choice over where we will go because it is all designed a priori. Anything we do having been not only considered but also planned. And any illusion of choice is all within the restrictions that the game puts us in. So we can do what they want us to do.

An anxiety that gains a political dimension with how it parallels how Jacket and Biker are used by a group with its own agenda, as if they were nothing more than tools. An agenda that they are not told about. Just doing it because it is what they have been ordered to. If anything, this game shows an understanding of its particular source (Drive, which itself was inspired by Le Samourai) that goes beyond the mere appropriation. That these symbols all served for stories about lonely men defined purely by their labor that are finally confronted with the consequences of their involvement, being left with nothing in the end. Although to this, Hotline Miami adds a viscerality in the trauma of normalizing violence that fits with its conceptual interests.

The only real shame is how this effect is kind of undermined by how there is, in the end, a rational explanation that gives meaning to all of us actions. A revelation that enhances the political side of the story in its usage of cold war confrontations and PTSD. However, in the process also takes away from the abstraction that is part of why this works so well on an aesthetic level. And so it kind of falls in what it tries to critique by giving us the comfort of the reason to justify what we did. Still, the experience of playing the game and getting these conflicted emotions by the situation that we are put in is something that cannot be taken away even by the worst twist (it does make it easier to forgive that when it's a secret ending that you need to find collectibles for, rather than being what you get when you only complete the story). More so with design this polish and an understanding of video-game language this intense.

I am very much sorry for bringing my big pretensiousness to video games too. It's what being bored and not being able to sleep does lmao.