Awwww yeah we Loomposting out here

RESPECT LOOM
ALL MY HOMIES ROLL WITH LOOM
RETURN TO THE PRIMORDIAL SWAN

Chapter One
A child ran off from their village, filled with rage. A petty kind of anger; one that the child would have all but forgotten about the next time you saw them. This next time would never come, though. The child disappeared and in their place stood a Destroyer.

Chapter Two
The village seemed different. Strange new people kept showing up, with pig shaped masks covering their eyes. On the surface, they went about their business and chatted like any other villager but the more mind you paid them, the more their words rang hollow. Their thoughts and jokes seemed inorganic; mass produced even. As these Pigmasks gathered in the village, the original people there felt alienated. An old man, once known for his insights and his sharp wit would get angrier and angrier, lashing out at those around him and eventually leaving. More villagers would follow suit, some of them against their will, as this community they saw as a safe haven to share things they couldn’t share anywhere else slowly but surely became part of that “anywhere else.”
Were these Pigmasks to blame for everything? Or was it merely a case of things that always infested the community finally bubbling up to the surface? And what of the Destroyer, a one-time villager, now hailed as the champion of the Pigmasks?

Chapter Three
A monkey walked through a forest with boxes on their back; head and torso fighting a fierce battle to not fall and hit the ground. This grueling process eventually became routine and the monkey’s body eventually went on autopilot. They had all this time to think about if they’ll ever move past this task and if they’ll ever have a purpose.
Did the Destroyer have the same thoughts in this same forest?

Chapter Four
Another village child was not unlike the one who would become the Destroyer. In fact, you could say that these two village children were a single entity; two sides of the same coin. The Destroyer was the head of this coin, facing up and always the topic of conversation from those who saw this “face.” The tail, stuck to the ground, reveled in the attention the head received. They took glee in seeing friends talk about the Destroyer without any clue of its relation to the one standing near them. They searched for other villagers’ words on this mysterious Destroyer and snuck into houses to see them: the praise, the insults, the natural discussions surrounding this new “symbol” of the village.
This was not healthy for the village child. But still, could you blame them? This sensation of feeling important, even if that importance was just a niche micro-celeb in a small village, was much more comforting than the cold reality of meaning nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Chapter Five
A Pigmask working in a tower was a big fan of a rock band. They were utterly awestruck at the sight of that band’s merchandise on the man that entered the tower earlier that day and could not talk about anything other than that band: expressing their love of the band’s work, idolizing the ones behind it as supposedly great people, and elevating the band to some moral paragon because of milquetoast political opinions in its songs.
The Destroyer was in the tower too, watching this Pigmask’s conversation with mere apathy if not active contempt.

Chapter Six
Sometimes, ghosts of the past appear as reminders of what will never come back.

Chapter Seven
The Destroyer pulled a needle out of the ground and felt nothing. They pulled quite a bit of these needles before but something was different this time. The act was now done only out of some perceived obligation; to the Pigmasks and villagers cheering on or to the fake images of hearts that result from the act. It was time for the last needle to be pulled.

Chapter Eight
The Destroyer laid on the ground motionless as its tail pulled the final needle on its behalf. Its supposed stardom was crushed into not even half a star.
It’s over.

Player agency is a term that encompasses all the ways players can interact with the game world, from micro-decisions in combat to the narrative paths chosen through dialog options. When games are described as deep, this is what’s being referred to, and the deepest games are the ones with an abundance of viable decisions to make. Action games are usually where depth is a major concern, since the entertainment value rests on how long players can experiment with the possibilities of their moveset. This puts Bloodborne in a weird place though, as it's an action-focused game that doesn't have the same sensibility. Just like a normal action game, the players’ primary source of agency is in the weapon they’re using, but the combat has a notable lack of depth that makes it weak as a core element. It’s tempting to rattle off all the attack animations that are possible after rolls and backsteps, but depth isn’t just a measure of a player’s possibilities, it’s of the viable possibilities not overshadowed by a dominant strategy. Bloodborne’s combat is governed by how quickly enemies attack, how you can’t dodge during a windup, and how you can recover health by immediately returning an enemy’s attack with attacks of your own. These mechanics reward players who charge in and stunlock enemies, especially when you can't block, ensuring that a barrage of light attacks is your best offense and defense at the same time. So, while the trick weapons are beautiful and incredibly cool, ninety percent of the time they’ll be used for identical light attacks and dodging. To be fair, this is a complaint that could be directed at the game’s predecessors as well, but their slower enemies, lack of a rally system, and robust magic provided a strategic breadth that ameliorated the lack of depth. The Souls games also embedded more decision making in the world itself than Bloodborne does, through environmental traps or questionable characters. What makes this overall downgrade in player agency so disappointing is that Bloodborne isn’t just the most imaginative and wonderfully crafted fantasy world within its series, but among the best of games in general. It’s a setting I want to spend time in and learn about, but without interesting decisions to make or complexity to master, summoning the energy to revisit it after the first playthrough was difficult. It’s awe-inspiring to look at and it gives you a lot to think about, but it’s hard to be enthusiastic about an action rpg that isn’t interesting to play.

Mother 3 changed my life. Before playing it, I always thought it had to have been an exaggeration when people said that. Without being fully open, yet slightly candid, I completed my first playthrough of Mother 3 during one of the most difficult and emotionally vulnerable parts of my life.

If I were to make a list of "video games that everyone should play", something akin to how everyone reads certain books during their education, this game would firmly plant itself onto the list. Mother 3 is emotional, inspiring, funny, and sad. I don't even want to blow the lid open too much further on this game, it's safe to say I love nearly every last thing about it.

The story is front and center, it's paced so well, the dialogue is so well written, and its grander themes and messages are poignant, to say the least. This game has a very strong political messaging that resonated with me deeply, and taught me a lot about compassion and the human condition during a difficult time in my life.

Mother 3 is also incredibly fun to play! With its linear, guided world design, every moment is perfectly tailored to the experience (with only a rare blip in quality during that one boss fight in Chapter 4). The run button is a godsend, the inventory management is so much better in this entry, and the timed hit combat system is very engaging.

The synthy soundtrack is such a nice listen, emboldening the silly nature of the game and the emotional impacts harder. I really love the cast and villain group here. There's room for such a wealth of analysis around the big bads that I'd love to discuss, but it just needs to be played to be seen.

Mother 3 is a shining example of the power of video games as a medium. It is without a shadow of a doubt something that everyone who enjoys video games needs to experience, and a crying shame that there isn't a way for mainstream not-Japanese audiences to do so. I implore you to find a way to do so, Mother 3 is one of the greatest video games ever created.
"Strange, funny... heartrending." - Mother 3 advert

silentchad2004:
using data mining, conventional mining, divination, and star charts I've uncovered shocking lore implications involving the 1999 teen choice awards, eddie's skull circumference, and the last herakleopolitan pharaohs that challenge everything you thought you knew about james. it all starts with the hex code for his jacket, which I'm sure many of you already noticed is #303828, a clear reference to the roland TB-303 commonly used in chicago acid house. to understand this better we'll first need to return to the topic of jean baptiste point du sable's whereabouts in 1780 and how they tie in directly with merikare of the 10th dynasty[...]

the fans:
obviously. it's soo obvious

masahiro ito:
😭😭😭

Dark Souls gets a lot of (deserved) credit for being a great and influential game, but it was Demon's Souls that restored my faith in modern gaming, what, almost 15 years ago? What a wonderful, grand, adventure, with a unique take on what the medium of video games can do.

One of the most underrated features of From's Souls-likes games in my book is that, instead of relying on a world map, the levels are navigated by having memorable designs, lighting, and shiny sparkling treasure points which catch your eye and make you look at certain points of interest on the way. The levels are designed in such a way that you don't really NEED a world map (Tower of Latria and Miyazaki's mandatory poison lake aside).

It's also probably the easiest Souls game, especially if you start as the Royalty class (just like real life) since that lets you start with a mana regen item.

The attract video is also a masterpiece. Mostly it's just a dude in the game's trademark boxart fluted armor fending off hordes of soulless zombie humans and then a giant golden skeleton with a big sword to some blaring trumpets and ends with the sudden appearance of a multi-jawed nightmare dragon. It's like a mission statement for the game. What you get in the game is on the box, only the essence of that attract video is going to be captured in such a brilliant way that it will always stay with you.

Dark Souls is great but Demon's Souls has so many memorable moments, scenes, and characters the whole way through. And a lot of the revolutionary systems and Souls tropes all started in Demon's Souls--Summonings, Invasions, ghostly messages to leave for and read from other players, the NPC hub where many of the characters slowly succumb to the effects of madness in the world but also help you on your journey, bonfire waifus, well-designed heavily interconnected levels with smart enemy placement, the sickle-wielding murderer, Patches, sneaky dragons, crystal lizards that drop powerful raw materials but have a chance of running away from you and disappearing forever, and of course, poison swamps. And it also has unique systems like World and Player Tendencies systems which were not carried over in the same way as the other elements, and keep this PS3 title feeling fresh and deadly dangerous since you haven't these systems copypasted all over the place

Such a tremendous game. The old-school style of level-crafting and mastery-through-challenge but taken to new heights in 3D, coupled with a daring yet casual adoption of revolutionary, new-school ways to interact with other players. The Old Monk fight is one of the most important and incredible bossfights in the history of video games.

Really hankering for a trip back to Boletaria right about now. What a game, one of my top 5 for sure, in the running for number 1 no doubt.

“Use bombs wisely!” - Sun Tzu, probably

I think I first played Star Fox 64 when I was five or six, during a family visit to my aunt’s place in Seattle. My cousin had a Nintendo 64 of his own decked out with a ton of games I’d never seen before, including the aforementioned rail shooter. I think I must have taken a particular shine to it, because when it was time for us to leave, my cousin sent it home with me. I should probably take the time to properly thank him for that, because I can’t imagine life without it.

The concept behind Star Fox 64 is as pure as they come. You play the leader of a group of space animal mercenaries who blast through an evil scientist’s army in an effort to thwart his takeover of the Lylat System. Mash the shoot button, barrel aileron roll through a hail of enemy laser fire, collect powerups and save the galaxy. Sound familiar? It probably should, since this is basically the original Star Fox with a fresh coat of paint. Given 64 was released only about four years later, it may very well be the shortest timeline from “original” to “soft reboot” in gaming history. But it isn’t hard to understand why they did it – the SNES Star Fox, while impressive for its hardware, was very obviously struggling beneath its own weight. So let’s just take that and do it over again on our fancy new 64-bit system. We’ll give it some flash, some extra production value, a bunch of delicious polygons. Gone is the electronic jabbering of the main cast, and replaced with some ham-fisted, cheese-laden, compressed-to-crunchy-perfection voice acting. It may very well be the very first fully voiced game Nintendo ever made, and that’s still uncommon for them even today. It gives the whole cast loads of personality, whether it be Fox’s consummate heroism, Falco’s admittedly charming brusqueness, Peppy’s paternal drawl (rest in peace, Rick May) or Slippy’s iconic cries for help. Even your enemies are performed well, shouting to the high heavens how they’re going to destroy you before letting out a primal screech as their supermassive war machines get blown to smithereens. It’s endlessly quotable and nigh unforgettable. And it probably helps that the game is really good, too.

To me, one of the most beautiful things about it is that it’s got layers to it. If you’re a fresh-faced, innocent youth such as I was when I first played Star Fox 64, barely capable of keeping your hands on that chunky Nintendo 64 controller, you can probably still make it to the end credits. However, you might just barely scrape by on some of the more difficult sections and may eventually see yourself funneled towards the easy route by the time you reach Venom. You’ll get your triumphant little victory scene… But Andross will have the last laugh. No, you have to do better. Play through it again and tighten up your shooting. Practice those tougher levels until you can clear Area 6 with your eyes closed. Embarrass Star Wolf, then fly down into the depths of the planet and take out Andross himself – for real this time. Head home and cash in your exorbitant paycheck in space dollars. Boom, you’ve just mastered Star Fox 64! Except not really, because you haven’t earned any medals yet.

The first time I started vying for those awards, I thought it was fucking impossible. Even just getting 150 hits on Corneria felt like a struggle. The problem was that I wasn’t privy to the secret technique passed down through generations of Lylatians. Hold down Z and R and your charge shots won’t lock. Now, with the ability to manually set their trajectory, you can send hot plasma-death straight into the center of a cluster of enemies. You’ll get bonus points for every target taken out by the splash, and that’s how you push your way towards those medals. Memorize the patterns, conserve your bombs, and squeeze out every last extra point you can. Smoke bosses as quickly as possible to maximize your score – oh, and don’t forget that your wingmates need to be kept alive or you’ll lose out. Extra lives were there to make up for your mistakes when you were a novice; now, they represent the number of attempts you have at retrying when you miss that last lousy point. Finally getting a medal stamped on every planet is a badge of honor, and you can rest easy knowing you’re a true space ace.

… Oh, wait, I forgot about Expert Mode –

By the by, getting all of the medals in Expert Mode lets you play the tacked-on versus mode on foot. I mean, if that doesn’t sell you on the idea, then what will?

Honestly, the more the years go by, the more I appreciate Star Fox 64. There’s very little fat on it, and as a result it’s a great game to pick up and play any time the fancy strikes me. The Arwing is fun to pilot, but there’s also the Landmaster and Blue-Marine sections, both of which are also a lot of fun – the latter being especially noteworthy considering how easy it would have been to make another crappy water level. The levels themselves are largely well-designed and there are very few stages that I will ever pass up on a chance to play (in fact, sometimes I’ll take an easier route just to hit a favorite that I haven’t seen recently). And yeah, it’s always a joy to come back and hang out with The Boys, even if only to remind myself there was a time when Fox and Falco were more than just those two bastards I can’t seem to avoid on Slippi netplay. I love the dynamic difficulty dependent on the path you take. I love Andross’ menacing presence. I love Star Wolf. I love secret warps. I love flipping those switches and watching the smug monkey guy crash his train into the fuel bunker. I can recite the entire script of this game from top to bottom. I love Star Fox 64.

Nintendo can't one-up this one because they basically already made a perfect game the first time around. They’ve outsourced the franchise like three times by now, and in retrospect, it's very telling that titles helmed by Rare, Namco and motherfucking PlatinumGames largely didn't hit the mark. But it's easy to see why: Star Fox 64 is beautiful in its simplicity. The gameplay is solid, the structure is solid, the style is solid. It's rock-solid, baby. And despite having such a sturdy foundation, Nintendo has yet to iterate on it in a way that makes sense. We don’t need a Zelda clone, we don’t need on-foot sections, we don’t need pseudo-RTS mechanics or the ability to turn our Arwing into a chicken or Gamepad gimmicks. We don’t need to overcomplicate things. What we do need is a high-energy cheesefest of a rail shooter with quirky characters, fun level design, entertaining bosses, a challenging scoring system, a dynamic branching path through the game, an occasional all-range mode section, a bombastic Koji Kondo score (or at least something like it), and plenty of little tricks and secrets. We don't need Star Fox 64 but New™, what we really need is Star Fox 64-2. It would be so easy to do. “Your father helped me like that, too!”

Sorry to jet, but I’m in a hurry.

P.S. The best thing to come out of Star Fox since 1997 is A Fox in Space. Nintendo may as well just sell Gafford the rights.

Shootemups were a genre that earned a parody as scornful as bullet hell games. As the genre wore on, they became less games about shooting things and more games about collecting things, be they lives, powerups, medals, or whatever else. There was ambiguity about how to push the genre forward which left everything primed for Cave to come in and do what they did, making the shooting part of shootemups ancillary to tracing lines with a pen through prismatic fields of dots. And now, sitting at the opposite end of 20 years of that shit, we've come to a fork in the road. One side of the fork is Vampire Survivors and it's ilk: the full lobotomic removal of the agency of play, replaced by the stockpiling of slot machine assets to take you to deeper Nevada brigs. Devil Blade Reboot shines gloriously on the road less travelled.

I'm not going to claim Devil Blade is the best example of what directions are left to push shootemups. That is ZeroRanger. What Devil Blade is, is a punk rock volume reminder of The Point. It asks, "Do you know what's fun about flying a ship full of bullets and bombs on a progressive metal suicide mission?" And it answers before anyone can think of a joke or a denial: "EVERYTHING."

The fixation on The Point informs the whole task. The ship is called The Shining. No model number. No time for revisions. All that counts is that it kills, and there are kills to be done. The enemy talks back to you in terms of a God's punishment. You are to play the role of Resilience, the role you should've been playing this whole time. The ship is loaded with two guns, and describes them only by function: Narrow and Wide. You have bombs. You can also get shields. Bombs do what it sounds like: kill everything on screen. Shields do what they sound like: Protect you, once. Bombs also have the benefit of giving you a shield when you use them. All that matters is that everything dies, and Resilience demands they die first. If you kill absolutely everything in a stage, you get a bonus, because That Is The Point.

In wisdom, the developer understands that rewards stacked on top of rewards are amplified, and in desire of removing the baubles of old, the player increases the score simply by playing like a fucking lunatic. The closer The Shining is to its prey, the higher the multiplier, from 2x to 4x. And every #x adds up to a meter, shown as a raw digit. Once that digit crosses 100, a beast snarls and the word "BERSERK" lights up. Those 2x kills become 10x, the 3x become 15x, the 4x become 20x. A small white bar begins emptying, but once the bar empties, it doesnt end berserk mode: it simply takes 100 off the value. So, if you can push the value above 200, when the timer ticks over, surprise! It's still Berserk time. And the way you do that is to Kill, Recklessly, Constantly. That Is The Point.

Or, you can convert one of those bombs, rare and precious as they are, into a Boost by holding it. I like to believe I'm shoving the bomb into my fucking mouth and eating force. It shoves the meter to 500%, increases your damage, and puts a giant countdown clock around your ship that you couldn't ignore if you tried. You want to gamble? Here you go. Don't waste it. Waste THEM. THAT'S THE POINT.

A lot of interactive entertainment and digital toys are going to come out this year. Devil Blade Reboot is a Fucking Video Game. Maybe as those markets start crashlanding, love-fueled little ships like this will start launching their own suicide missions into hearts obsessed with the grotesque parodies of unloved gods. There is a point to being alive, and it's to Be Alive.

Sega had a rough transition to 3D.

It all started with the 32X. This is unlike most stories, which usually start at the beginning. The 32X was, to put it politely, a fucking disgrace. A lot of historical accounts regarding what a nightmare it was to work for Sega start around this time — Scott Bayless claims that former CEO Hayao Nakayama sent the order down from on-high for a project that was ill-defined and mismanaged from the start, comparing the company to the Hindenburg; Tom Kalinske says that he desperately tried to get Sega to kill the console, to use a Silicon Graphics chip that would later be poached by Nintendo, to partner up with Sony to make the PlayStation long before Sony did it by themselves and made a boatload of money — and was rebuked at every turn. A bit later, Peter Moore told Yuji Naka to fuck off and left for Microsoft after the latter accused the former of faking a video of a focus group who said that Sega was old and boring. Of course, these accounts are all clouded by a combination of bias, the Pacific Ocean, and a language barrier; I admit that I find it a bit difficult to believe Kalinske was such a good businessman that Nakayama was “literally slapping subordinates” (in his words) because of how bad Sega of Japan looked compared to the American branch. Still, though, it paints a picture. Sega is broadly described as being a nightmare company to work for starting right around the time the 32X started being developed, and its reputation never once improves in anyone’s retrospective accounts. The games on the 32X could run in primitive 3D, which was neat, but that was about it. The 32X launched, bombed, and was unceremoniously killed within three years.

The Sega Saturn surprise-launched in the west, to the complete and utter dismay of retailers. So incensed were they by what they perceived to be a fuck-you on two fronts — the miserable launch of the 32X leading into the Saturn just six months later combined with the fact that only some of them were selected to stock it — that many of these retailers outright cut ties with Sega. Hell, the Sega CD wasn’t exactly moving units at the time either, so Sega was cannibalizing itself on three different fronts. As much love as I have for the Sega Saturn and its utterly strange architecture, the console really wasn’t setting the west on fire. Japan liked it, largely because it ran arcade games pretty well. But there was one major, horrifying problem.

The Sega Saturn didn’t have a Sonic game.

It was going to. Sonic Xtreme was planned to be the very first mainline 3D Sonic game, which is probably a sentence that was a lot more exciting to hear in 1994 than it is thirty years later. But there were too many fires that needed to be put out behind the scenes at Sega to continue development on Sonic Xtreme, and the console went without the killer app that most people really wanted a Sega console for. Imagine Nintendo going an entire console generation without a mainline Mario platformer, or Sony bankrolling a new game that isn’t a cinematic, third-person, over-the-shoulder shooter. That’s just not what these companies do. It’s all wrong. You can’t drop Sonic the Fighters or Sonic Jam’s “Sonic World” and pretend like those are good enough replacements for what was supposed to be the 3D Sonic game. The Saturn launched, bombed outside of Japan, and was unceremoniously killed in western markets within three years.

With every last ounce of power and goodwill they had within them, Sega released the Dreamcast. This time, it would be different. This time, they would have their mainline 3D Sonic game. This time, they were going to beat their competitors to the newest console generation. This time, people would be ready for it. This time, it would be Sega’s turn to reign.

The Dreamcast launched, bombed, and was unceremoniously killed within four years.

Well, it was a good run. It wasn’t, really, but at least they managed to eventually get that 3D Sonic game out. They were late to the party by about two years — missed deadlines and the cancellation of Sonic Xtreme meant that Super Mario 64 had been out for three whole years before Americans could even buy a Dreamcast — but they at least managed to finish it. After all that time, the world finally had Sonic Adventure. It was worth it, right? After everything, it had to be.

It wasn’t. The game is bad.

Sonic Adventure is ambitious, like Macbeth. It has a lot of ideas for what it wants to be, but it doesn’t quite have the ability nor the aptitude to make it all come together. Sonic Adventure is a platformer, and a pinball game, and a snowboarding game, and Panzer Dragoon, and a kart racer, and Pro Bass Fishing, and a pet simulator. It’s a clear and obvious case of “fuck it, throw it in”. Rather than one good game, Sonic Adventure is about ten different bad games, summed together in the hopes that having enough content will make people look past the fact that none of it is actually on par with games that were coming out years prior. Quantity over quality is the name of the game here, which means that it’s about four hours too long and it made me wish that I was doing something else, instead.

Sonic himself is most emblematic of this lack of focus, both because he gets the most screen time and because his stages tend to be the most widely varied. Set aside the bad pinball minigame, the fiddly snowboarding, the boring rail shooter sections (you get two, because one wouldn't have been enough!); how does the platforming in this platformer feel? The answer, as it turns out, is also bad. Sonic moves fast, and that's good! It takes him a while to get going, and he benefits a lot from going downhill rather than up. It's nice for a 3D Sonic game to at least gesture towards concepts like momentum rather than relying on the instant capital-B Boost mechanics in later entries that let you go from zero to six thousand in the press of a button. This speed comes at a cost, however, and that's the fact that the game itself can't really keep up with him.

I managed to clip directly through the world several times over the course of about the two hours I spent playing as Sonic, and I was never certain exactly what caused it. An area in the snow level sent me directly through a loop-de-loop after I hit a boost pad, so that one was easy enough to figure out; Sonic went too fast for the collision detection to keep up with. More confusing was when I floated on a wind current that was meant to transition me from Mystic Ruins to a different stage, at which point the camera jerked into the wall and Sonic voided out. I still don't know what happened there. Regardless, Sonic is too cool to follow rules, and that includes the fundamental laws of nature about solids not being able to pass through one another. I've looked it up and people say that this is primarily a problem in the DX GameCube port, but this is the version on the original Dreamcast. This is the third revision of the game. How fundamentally broken must the game logic be for two rounds of bug fixes to not catch this? I wasn't even trying to glitch it out. Clipping out of bounds for going too fast in a Sonic game was a known shippable?

Tails is largely considered to be Sonic's junior, which is funny considering the fact that he completely fucking blows Sonic out of the water at his own game. Sonic's whole thing is supposed to be that he's the fastest thing alive, which is a bald-faced lie in a world where Tails exists. Tails gets not only the benefit of being able to fly over most of the levels that Sonic has to platform through, but he also has unique-to-him boost rings that give him a fast, automatic, optimal path towards the goal. Tails can complete a level with a three-minute par in sixty seconds. He completely trivializes a game where the most difficult challenge is not clipping out of bounds when the collision gets confused. Playing as Tails is fun in the way that spawning a jet pack in San Andreas is: the joy is in cheating.

Big was up next, because I wanted to get him out of the way after everything I'd heard about his section in the intervening years since this released. Funny enough, I had a friend growing up who had the GameCube port of this game, and he used to play the fishing minigame all the time for fun. I watched him do it. It looked like a great time. I never really got a chance to try it out, because he was a controller hog, but I never really believed all of the naysayers. My friend liked it well enough, after all. What's the worst-case scenario for something like that? It's a fishing minigame. How hard could they fuck it up?

Well.

It's bad. It's real bad. It's about as bad as people say it is, but not for the reasons that they usually say it is. Apparently there was some big Game Grumps drama blow-up over the fact that Arin Hanson railed on this section and then got flown out as a mock apology by Sega so that they could all make fun of Big the Cat as part of a marketing campaign. If you don't understand that last sentence, that's okay. It's better that you don't. If you're up on your Game Grumps drama, however, people who go on the attack against Hanson claim that his gripes are only because he didn't know to hold down on the control stick to latch Froggy on the hook; had he known it, it wouldn't have been such a problem for him, and he wouldn't have been so harsh. I agree insofar in that he probably would have had an easier time with it, but I seriously doubt that time spent would be better. Shorter, certainly. I suppose that's a form of better, because it means you get to stop playing the fucking fishing minigame earlier than you would otherwise.

The problem is multi-fold. Froggy doesn't get tired the longer he stays on the hook, but Big gets tired from reeling him in. You can get a series of bad rolls (it seems random, from what I can tell) where Big's stamina drains absurdly quickly and Froggy manages to haul ass three meters in the opposite direction before you have a chance to recover even a quarter of your stamina bar. Froggy can just go and go and go, and you can be put in a position where there's no choice but to let him go without any chance of getting him back. If Froggy stays on the line too long, it automatically breaks without warning, which can be especially frustrating when you've almost got him after a lengthy struggle. The reel likes to fucking jam more often than not, which gives Froggy a free couple seconds to make distance. Froggy will refuse to take the hook if there's three meters or less of line remaining, which is really annoying during the ice stage where the hole is tiny and Froggy clings to the walls. It's probably the worst fishing minigame I've ever played, which is impressive, because I wasn't sure that it was possible to make a fishing minigame that was both this rudimentary and this bad. The nicest thing you could say about it is that this is either the first or among the first 3D fishing games to be brought to home consoles, so it's a bit more understandable for it to be complete shit. It carries a deep and terrible burden, like the sin eaters of old, or our Lord Jesus Christ before them. Big the Cat absolves us of original sin by taking it all upon himself. He ought to be canonized.

I regret not saving Big's section for last, because the following three ended up being something of a blur. As the Joker once said in Christopher Nolan's seminal 2008 film The Dark Knight, you should never start with the Big the Cat levels; the victim gets all fuzzy. What's left probably isn't very good even if you play them first, though: Amy's levels are as forgettable as they are slow; Knuckles flies better than Tails and uses this power solely to float around re-re-re-reused stages collecting emeralds; Gamma just holds forward and the shoot button and all of his levels complete themselves. This Rashomon-ass story also starts getting very old around this point, where you're watching what are broadly the same, unskippable cutscenes over and over again with only minor dialog changes between them. It's cute the first time you play as Tails and Dr. Eggman suddenly sounds like an absolute evil menace, and it's fucking annoying the third time Amy convinces someone not to kill Gamma on the deck of the Egg Carrier.

Super Sonic is a broadly boring fourth or fifth traipse through the jungle maze that culminates in the best sequence of the entire game. You finally get an opportunity to go incredibly fast down some straightaways with no immediate danger of clipping through the world. Crush 40's Open Your Heart is playing. Sonic flies along the surface of the water and bashes Chaos on the underside of his brain. It rules. It fucking rules. The second phase kicks off and is the exact same thing with worse music. Rinse, repeat, roll credits. It's a limp end to a bad game. Big the Cat is there, but he mostly just stands off to the side and doesn't have a single line of dialog, which makes me wonder why he's even here. He doesn't do anything. For the whole game, he doesn't do anything. He exists solely so Sega could shoehorn a bad fishing minigame into an already bloated, half-baked title. Fuck Big the Cat. I hope he dies. Sorry. I know it's not his fault.

What I'm ultimately left with is a small handful of decent Sonic stages, vaguely entertaining Tails stages, and a miserable experience everywhere else. Aside from nostalgia reasons — and nostalgia is a factor whose power I cannot and will not attempt to diminish — I cannot possibly understand what people see now or saw then in Sonic Adventure. It's hardly a wonder why the Dreamcast failed when its biggest flagship titles were games like this and Shenmue. Personally speaking, I wouldn't want to give the console any time of day if I was a contemporary buyer and this is what was being marketed to me. The PS2 plays DVDs. What's this have? Bleem? There are some phenomenal Dreamcast games in the back catalog that make it look like a tragedy that the system was killed the way that it was; there are games like Sonic Adventure that make me wonder how Sega even got as far as they did.

Killer soundtrack, though.

Where were you when cyberpunk became escapism?

Look around discussions of Cyberpunk 2077 and keep track of how long it takes before someone says that they wish they could live in Night City. Watch these conversations as they turn to screenshots of scenic views and vistas, with all involved waxing poetic about getting lost in the world. See the rising glut of "comfy" cyberpunk games — DYSTOPIKA, Skid Cities, Nivalis — and remember the genre's origins, written in blood and broken teeth from beneath the heel of a corporate boot. Cyberpunk has not been a genre where hope exists. It has not been a place for people to want to be. Cyberpunk media is a warning more than anything else. Despite this, more people than ever don't just see places like Night City as an acceptable alternative, but as something to yearn for. What they have now pales to what the genre's founders threatened would come to be. It isn't difficult to understand; I spent four years in Toronto, and that city has been a fucking shithole longer than I've been alive. This is a common opinion for extant cities and towns all around the globe. But what once existed as the worst-case scenario of a dark future has since emerged as more favorable to the world we occupy today.

There's an honesty to cyberpunk media that isn't there for much else. To pull an idea from Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, our world doesn't make sense. It's all abstraction. There are no roots, no sensible causes, just an ideological superstructure over everything that never seems to be shaped by its base despite all theory suggesting that it must. The bank owns a home owned by a landlord whose mortgage you pay. Your work is dictated by a boss who is dictated by a stock market which is dictated by investors, all so far removed from what you do that they couldn't ever comprehend it, yet they remain in charge of shaping it. Your country sends locals to other countries to kill other locals and nothing ever seems to come of it besides more people being dead sooner than they would have been otherwise. Cyberpunk media offers an escape from the absurd; it puts a gun in your hand and tells you to go and blow someone's fucking head off. The cops won't stop you, you'll get paid to do it, people will celebrate you. It's brutal, and barbaric, and it'll eventually leave you with more lead in your body than blood, but it's honest. It makes sense. There's no abstraction. There's you, there's a gun, there's a computer, there's a target, there's a legend. If it doesn't change much, it'll feel good to do it. Adventurism can't even promise you that in real life.

The greatest triumph of Cyberpunk 2077 is almost inarguably in its world design, doubtless thanks to the many decades of effort put in by creator Mike Pondsmith. Whether or not CDPR did a great job in translating all of that background lore into gameplay — in empty, clean streets, packed with inaccessible buildings and linear pathways — the design of everything borders on flawless. Night City is an urban planning nightmare, all twisted highways and too-dense housing. Drive a few miles out of town, though, and it starts looking like LA suburbs; drive a bit further than that, and you hit desert. While this alone is nothing new — Grand Theft Auto 5’s Los Santos is effectively the same thing — I feel that this is pretty rare for a lot of cyberpunk media, especially in the ones that break into the mainstream. People online will talk about that “eating noodles while wearing a trenchcoat in the rain” joke a lot when it comes to their ideal cyberpunk setting, but really take a second to think about how painfully generic cyberpunk media tends to be. Everyone wears stupid clothes, lives in permanently-raining cities with neon lights running 24/7, they all listen to nothing but darksynth, they’re all either corporate goosesteppers or chromed-out hackermen. People in cyberpunk settings are almost universally treated as set dressing, as indistinct and universal as the fucking wind. There’s some real diversity to both Night City and to the people that make it up, and it goes a long, long way in making it feel like a possible outcome for the real world rather than yet another piece of computer-anarchist wish fulfillment.

The characters themselves play a large part in why players seem so desperate to live here. Night City, as presented here, is kind of just filled with decent people. Now, we can’t talk about 2077 without talking about the Edgerunners anime, so I’ll be brief. What people liked about Edgerunners, I hope, is that it did a good job of establishing how someone can slip into a street gang. Not just a cyberpunk-themed one, but in general. David’s life fucking sucks from minute one, and it doesn’t stop sucking until the day he dies. His life is dog-eared by the deaths or betrayals or both of just about every person he’s ever cared about. He starts out with no money, no opportunities, and no future. Finding his crew is a release from that, but it’s short, and it’s painful. V, by contrast, has been born with a silver spoon in their mouth. The most stark difference you’ll notice happens right at the beginning, when Viktor Vektor gives you a free 21,000 eddies worth of cyberware that you never have to pay back. This is a strong line to draw between the two works. 2077’s Night City is nice, and forgiving. Edgerunners’s Night City will swallow you whole. It makes it really kind of difficult to believe that this is such a terrible world to occupy when V never really struggles for much, due in no small part to how strong of a support structure they both start out with and discover as the game goes on.

While nowhere near as cutthroat as they perhaps ought to be, considering that the way they act runs counter to how bad you’re told the setting is, 2077 has a strong supporting cast. What helps is that most of them are flawed in fairly believable ways: Judy is an idealist in a situation where it won’t work; Panam is so emotionally stunted that nearly every conversation she has ends with her blowing up on the other party; Jackie doesn’t know when to quit; River is here. Everyone’s favorite wholesome chungus Keanu Reeves is here as Johnny Silverhand, too, and he does a good enough job playing his character that you might forget that Silverhand is supposed to look like Bowie. Something I really do love about Silverhand is that it would have been so easy to make him fall on one extreme or the other — always right or always wrong — but he straddles that line exceptionally well. Johnny spends most of the game as an insufferable asshole, but when he’s right about something, he’s very right about it. By contrast, there’s a lot of time spent on him being wrong, and there’s really nothing to ought to say to him beyond telling him to go fuck himself. It’s a nice balance, and one that CDPR couldn’t keep up through Phantom Liberty, but that’s a review for another time.

The writing, broadly speaking, is good. I think a lot of the best stuff gets tucked away in the side jobs where you can actually dig into who these characters are and what they’re about, rather than just using them as a point of contact to get more “go here and kill a guy” missions from. I’m not completely sold on this being a masterpiece once you start poking away at specific details; I remain very surprised by people who both got attached to Jackie and then were surprised to see him die. The guy is throwing death flags from the very first mission. “Mama Welles is worried about me because all of her other sons died doing exactly what I’m doing, but it’s okay, because I’m never going to die. I love being alive. Hey, bartender who works at the place where they name drinks after dead people, here’s what my drink would be.” It doesn’t help that CDPR apparently ran out of time and money and stuffed the majority of Jackie’s character development and V’s start in Night City into a montage. I don’t know for certain how much it would have helped, but I have to imagine that Jackie’s death might have hit a bit harder if the guy wasn’t gone after a grand total of two gigs.

V lives a remarkably untragic life when you really zoom out. Aside from Jackie’s death, basically everyone that V knows or cares about either continues living their lives just fine or straight up moves out of Night City to go someplace else. Evelyn’s suicide is barely felt because she’s barely known, a couple of Aldecados can bite it, some dolls die in a Tyger Claws raid, and that’s about it. When you see how easy it is for Judy to leave Night City, for Panam to leave Night City, for V to leave Night City, for River to go on the run, for Kerry to go on tour — it makes you wonder why the fuck anyone actually stays in Night City. It doesn’t really seem that hard to just bounce. Of course, this is where something like the core books or Edgerunners come in to demonstrate why people can’t leave, so I’d say CDPR just did kind of a bad job in conveying this.

2077 does manage to be a decent immersive sim released in the year 2020, and that’s something of a feat. While some missions are incredible railroads that essentially force you down a set of tight hallways, there are significantly more of them that allow for quite a bit of player expression. Far from your usual dichotomy of “guns blazing” or “rear-naked choke fanatic” — though that certainly still exists here — 2077 likes to play around with the idea of your skills allowing you to break a mission in half. These are usually relegated to your mobility options, as most characters can walk out of the first couple hours of the game with a double jump and an airdash that’ll allow them to soar like a majestic, sequence-breaking eagle. It’s like a more limited Cruelty Squad, as the closest comparison; there’s no gunk booster jetpacks or intestine grappling hooks, but you can instead kill people with your brain or get Gorilla Arms to punch them in half as a trade-off. These are what you should be prioritizing when it comes to killing people, because firing guns feels pretty bad. The best thing you can do with regards to firearms is get the biggest shotgun you can find and stuff it in someone’s chest, or get smart guns that don’t require you to aim. Peering down your sights and taking potshots at approaching enemies from anything more than ten meters may as well just subtract the ammo from your gun without all of the sound effects and visual flair that would suggest it would ever do anything. Of course, this is all moot when you consider that the most optimal and most fun way to play this is to activate your berserk implant and just smash everyone’s face in with a baseball bat like you’re the Babe Ruth of the dark future.

It’s still kind of a buggy piece of shit. I do like 2077, but this is not the absolute slam-dunk comeback that it’s been hailed as. Granted, it’s certainly a lot better now than it was — back when it was so bad that Sony pulled it from digital storefronts and issued no-questions-asked refunds — but you don’t get points for getting your game to day-one launch stability three years after you released it. The opening nomad lifepath at one point flung me a kilometer in the opposite direction from my car for seemingly no reason, and I had to walk all the way back to it. This is in the introduction mission, before you’ve done anything. This is not the point where things should be breaking yet.

More and more of these bugs will continue to rear their ugly heads the further into the game you get and the more things 2077 needs to keep track of, and it’s clear that it’s a juggler with too many balls. Cops stopped spawning entirely at one point, allowing me to massacre civilians with no penalty; calls for new missions stopped coming in, so I couldn’t progress the side stories; the game engine would forget a fundamental law of reality and drop me through the map, or launch me hundreds of feet into the air, or make it so my guns just wouldn’t fire when I pulled the trigger. These come infrequently, but popped up enough throughout my 25-hour playthrough to bother me. I’m playing this on a brand-new computer off of an M.2 drive and V’s dick is still out whenever he gets on a motorcycle for a few seconds before his clothes load in. Something’s fucked up behind the curtain.

2077 is good, but given how much of a moment it was intended to be, it falls more than a little flat. CDPR still made a fucking gajillion dollars before it even released, so it isn’t as if they’re going to learn anything from this. As The Witcher 3, as Cyberpunk 2077, so The Witcher 4. Expect their next title to also be a barely-working mess that takes years to patch to an acceptable state. This is good, but it’s only good. It's a lot of missed opportunities rolled into a single work.

In Night City, you can be cum.

Perhaps I was too harsh on you.

I’ve long stood by the opinion that Half-Life 2 is a bad game. Upon revisiting it, it’s become clear to me that Half-Life 2 is not actually a bad game. Half-Life 2 isn’t a good game, and that’s an important distinction to make.

Half-Life 2 is a game defined by moments, by set pieces; the City 17 escape, piloting the airboat, driving down Highway 17, attacking the prison, rushing through the Citadel. What’s unfortunate, then, is largely how uninteresting most of these moments are. While it’s borderline impossible to downplay genuinely fun moments like sprinting along the rooftops while fleeing from the Combine or fighting off waves of zombies in Ravenholm, these moments don’t make up the bulk of the game. If you took a playthrough of Half-Life 2, exported every single frame, and averaged it out into a single screenshot, you’d wind up a photo of a dune buggy steering around runoff canals.

An inordinate amount of time is spent driving on empty roads, steering through identical-looking pipes and basins, walking along the world’s worst beach with nothing but miles of sand and an ocean you can’t swim in. It’s clear with the frequent stop-and-pop sections that interrupt these driving segments that Valve was trying — crunching, after the beta build leaked — to keep players engaged, but I don’t think they succeeded. To their credit, I suppose that this all feels more like the product of poor decision-making rather than them being forced to throw out their old work and start over from scratch, but that’s some faint fucking praise.

A few conversations with some friends of mine have revealed that, universally, we agree that the strongest thing Half-Life 2 has going for it is its aesthetic. Consider how you personally feel about Half-Life 2’s look and feel to determine whether this is a point of celebration or condemnation. Further, we all agreed that something about this particular aesthetic has been lost over the years since release; Garry’s Mod has diluted it heavily into something more funny than oppressive, whether that be through a variety of wacky game modes where Dr. Kleiner goes sledding and Barney sets up an illegal money printer, or through comedic, face-warping machinima like The Gmod Idiot Box and Half-Life: Full-Life Consequences. All of these are, in a way, Half-Life 2. And it’s no fault of Half-Life 2 that it’s difficult to take seriously in the year 2024 simply because of how its legacy has been warped by fans, but it’s borderline undeniable that these have all had an impact on lessening Half-Life 2’s, uh, impact.

Maybe that’s not entirely fair to Half-Life 2, but I’d counter that, apart from City 17 and the interior of the Citadel, the game is pretty generic. The incredibly long canal, highway, antlion cave, and prison assault sections are all as boring to look at as they are to play through, and they really don’t do a good job of delivering on the Combine-occupied hellscape that was promised when you got off of the tram.

As harsh as I’m being, though, I really don’t think all that poorly of Half-Life 2. It’s definitely a game that keeps souring on me the more time I spend away from it, giving me a chance to actually step back and reflect on the parts I didn’t mind in the moment but don’t care for at all in retrospect. I like the narrative they’ve got going on here. Dropping Gordon into the middle of City 17 without a fucking clue in the world why he’s there or what’s going on is an inspired choice, and it plays nicely into G-Man’s little tease about his employers looking for a soldier they can dump into the middle of an active warzone who’ll start blasting away without asking any questions. Similarly, the Combine that you square off against are stupid fodder who exist purely to get merked en masse, but they’re also a token occupation force comprised primarily of conscripted or traitorous humans wearing alien armor. Spinning blades and cars on winches in Ravenholm can be activated at will either to kill zombies or use the moving parts as platforms to reach other areas. There are quite a few moments where the gameplay exists in complete harmony with the world as it is established, and there are quite a few moments where Gordon Freeman has to stop what he's doing to jump up and down on a seesaw. Truly it is a land of contrasts.

What's here is neither particularly good nor particularly bad, and is in a way remarkable for having such a strong legacy despite standing on such weak legs. People say that you needed to be there when this came out to truly appreciate it, but I think that if something is actually good, then it remains good. There are a lot of games out there that are both far older and far better than Half-Life 2, so I don't adhere to the "poorly aged" argument when it seems significantly more likely that people were just so awed by the tech that they didn't notice the emaciated muscles hanging off of the Source Engine skeleton.

The greatest sin Half-Life 2 commits is making a sequel to Half-Life that's boring.