Resident Evil has always had this problem where, after a few games with the same protagonists and antagonists, the conspiratorial lore and glut of proper nouns overwhelm any sense of good narrative. This DLC makes a good argument for closing the door on the Winter saga. It all has the feeling of watching deleted scenes on DVD with a new, worse actor spliced into the lead role. This maudlin family drama cannot continue! We need a return to the camp and hard resets of RE:4 and RE:7, stat.

That being said, I've never loved to hate a RE level more than the House Beneviento basement. Smart idea to do an encore setpiece down there.

I walked into this expecting to really find it annoying, but it was more annoying in a gay way than a diaspora kid way so I felt able to be more lenient towards it. Still, I still find it lacking in having the conversations it needs to have. It’s moulded in the American liberal tradition of diaspora narratives, always ultimately optimistic about the ties that bind us and the motherlands, always finding the right angles where all our identities can be overlaid on top of each other perfectly. Even when this game is critical of the conservatism embedded in much of south asian social relations, it is reductively simplistic - the homophobic parents of one of the side characters are Brahmins who have brought all of their casteism to the new world that they have different plates for non-Brahmin guests! Jala’s, the protagonist’s, parents have historically progressed a generation ahead having eloped in a caste-exogamous marriage which informs how they raised their children. Their homophobia was dealt with in their generation too, with Jala’s aunt’s lesbianism leaving decades of room to have it addressed and sorted out. But this is a cowardly artifice rooted in contemporary anxieties of representation - our families are not violently homophobic satans clinging on to feudal hierarchies or futuristically progressive angels. Our anxieties are a lot more complex. My communist mother and liberal father (don’t say this is a good sitcom setup, I know, I’ve lived it for 22 years, Kerala has a great tradition of comedy of this vein) have always allowed me to do and be whatever and whoever I want, but they are still a pair of 52 year old Indian Gen X-ers. I don’t talk to them about queer issues. I don’t know where to start. I don’t know if their allowance of “what and who I want” extents to being a woman. I wish the game was interested in navigating this complexity instead of black and white depictions of south asian conservatism and progressivism. It reads very much like a “we don’t want to scare off a white liberal audience with a more nuanced engagement with the baggage of history”, and every time the game dips into “haha Asian parents am I right” humour I wanted to destroy the state of california.

On the flipside, and maybe this is what they were going for, Jala is a perfect fantasy. She is absolutely what people like me wish to be. Aside from the whole being a life-ruining mess for everyone part. She’s empowered, confident, supported by everyone, effortlessly cool. It is absolutely good that we have a game with a protagonist like her, as much as I can be critical of what that game is.

There’s a part of this game where Jala is criticised for choosing “the pleasures of the imperial core” over family and tradition. While the character suggesting this serves an antagonistic function, they are still suggested to be making a correct assessment. But Jala is a Tamil Brahmin whose family lives in Bangalore. The imperial core is where she is minoritised and racialised. The “pleasure of the imperial core” she has access to is queer struggle, not burgers and milkshakes. It’s a much easier struggle than what she’d face in the motherland, but it’s not easy, especially with this game’s weird anachronistic 90s setting. It just appeared so strange to me that such an idea would pop up in this game at all, and so evidently shows the game’s frustrating crisis in managing an original, personal story and the monomyth of asian diasporic narratives.

looking back at the 2018 hype for this shit i think marvel 3 might be the most misunderstood fighting game of all time. in comparison to the literal screen tearing positional tug of war of marvel 3, where dashing to take your assist out of the screen is a fundamental offense strategy, movement in this game feels like a weird mix of kof hyper-hopping, melty blood's importance of constricting your opponent's aerial movement, and maybe like any given 2D fighter franchise weird entry where they added assists (i.e. kof 99/2000 or now MK1 I guess). i've been playing this game on and off for closer to 5 years now and been exercising mid 30s salarymen dedication to watching stray replays during lunch hours/work down time and the neutral
movement here has never looked slick tbh. the reliance on super jumping and holding 2/8 to control momentum and fall speed means that say, hopping over a beam to punish the recovery feels genuinely awkward on a pad. in a way that saying magneto holding up hitting a dash micro and pressing S doesn't. absconding to pockets of the safety on the screen feels way harder than it should for a game based off flying aliens. dead horse but i wish they took more from arcana heart than blazblue.

speaking of, as a fighting game designed for beginners i actually think this might be the most frustrating game to play for beginners/intermediates, on par if not worse than tekken 7 (tekken 7 having a higher playerbase and somewhat more reliable netcode offsets the knowledge gap i think. also a far worse matchmaking/lobby system. look i get it playing an arcsys game past 2004 and going "ooooo the lobbies suck not the lobbies 🤓🤓" is low hanging fruit, but like, its still true). i think the autocombos suck because the grounded versions do not lead to a knockdown like most other fighting games autocombos, i would not show this game to someone to demonstrate the get a hit -> knockdown -> run some oki flowchart of anime 2D fighters. superdash as a whole mechanic is more tilting for new players to counter than any superarmor/invincible reversal super/comeback system possible. granted inputs and learning any given character is easier, but if im at a function and somebody was like "matt bring one of dem fighters around" i'm still reaching for soulcalibur, tekken, or kyanta first u kno.

but having said all that, this game can be rlly cool on occasion. the attention to detail is rlly outstanding, and seeing any of the lvl 3 closeups or intros looks rlly good when u haven't seen it in a while. there's also some characters who diverge from the boring fundamentals here: zamasu, ginyu, krillin, nappa, gotenks, & baby are beacons of light, possessing the creativity and uniqueness of something more in line with p4a than p much what every other character is doing. they can actually like, run oki, besides guessing a tech direction and going for a meaty. crazy. in spite of how simple the building blocks are it's wonderful the type of synergy in blockstring/combos you can explore. i just wish this game had a more even experience & design, the xenoverse 2 level dedication to updating this shit without planned DLC down the line is rare, it's doing justice to a property that hasn't seen a W in like 7 years, it's in conversation with a pretty vaulted subgenre of 3v3 fighters, it's just too frustrating and awkward to deal with long periods of time...this was always gonna be true and technically has been true for a while but budokai tenkaichi 4 will truly be better

In Alfie Bown's excellent The PlayStation Dreamworld (2017) the author considers whether a videogame can truly be unheimlich. On one hand there is something unsettling about the malfunctioning technology of yesteryear. But then on the other, Bown notes, we have a way of smoothing over the gnarled edges of the past by designating things 'retro'. Maybe we can see this with the trend toward a self-consciously broken 'retro' style in videogames. For something to be unheimlich it has to reveal something about ourselves — perhaps if we call these things uncanny it's because they reveal hauntology's undesirable proximity to cheap nostalgia. 0_abyssalSomewhere doesn't have any answers, but it benefits by making a dual address to both the style and materiality of the past. What I mean is it pairs the ghostly trace with corroded industrial debris because in practical terms the two are the same thing. It comes from a future where we are dead but our technologies have survived, or, rather, have been programmed to await a human 'input' that will never arrive.

Alan Wake writing the most twisted fucked up horror story he can conceive: The dark darkness encroached darkly upon me, I noticed my shoes were stained red with blood, red blood, on the ground pooled the crimson ichor of a bloody ritual murder enacted in the name of the Dark Lord of Darkness himself; Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, The Father of Lies, the Lord of Flies; Satanas, Diabolus- The Devil.
Remedy writing the most twisted fucked up horror story they can think of: Imagine being trapped in this guy's writing

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You sit before the computer again; a bone-numbing chill blankets the air between you and the screen, as if the monitor itself bordered on some other, colder space. This is the portal to your Fortress of Regrets... now all you need do is inscribe your feelings upon the website.

> 𝐓𝐚𝐩 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐭𝐲𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐛𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐞 𝐚 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐉𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐄𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐲 𝐛𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮.
- 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐉𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐄𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐲 𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐞... 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐧𝐨𝐰.


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This thought of yours has been peeled from the back of your mind. Its rough gray surface reminds you of a zombie's hide; it looks more like another piece of worn-out novelty writing than a legitimate video game review.
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> 𝐄𝐱𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭.
- 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐞.


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You clench your teeth and dig your mind into your soul; with a dry, tearing sound, you peel off a strip of yourself. The chill between yourself and the monitor becomes stronger, almost hungering, as if the screen has opened a crack in your mind...
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> 𝐊𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐭𝐲𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠; 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐝.
- 𝐏𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲...


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You finish the review. Before your thoughts can escape, you press 'Create Log' and let forth several paragraphs of bullshit. As you prepare to save your work, a series of images float across your mind...
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> 𝐑𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭: "𝐈 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐦𝐲 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬..."
- 𝐑𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭: "𝐈 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐦𝐲 𝐩𝐚𝐬𝐭..."
- 𝐑𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭: "𝐈 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐮𝐩 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐭..."
- 𝐋𝐞𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐲.


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You whisper the words to yourself, but the regret echoes through your mind:
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> 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐮𝐞

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'I regret...'
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> 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐮𝐞

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"I regret that I played this game."
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With great shame, I've always been apathetic to Mario's plight. His journey is a noble one, but I do not see myself in his bings, nor his bings. His wahoos do not reach me. I feel like a cunt rat bastard for giving this Three Succulent Backloggd Stars ⭐⭐⭐ and absconding with the ultimate sayaway that this is "still one of the better Marios" but that's-a my burden, not yours - my paesano in cristo. I pirated and completed the game days ago and earnestly found myself worrying I'd forget I even played it before it released and I could officially log the game on BL.

It's good!!! Honest and true!!! Nice to see what felt like notes of 3D World in here with the little rosary bead structure and rhythm of each level having their own little wonder flower acting as an F5 button, refreshing the level's objective into a unique blink-and-you'll-miss-it sleight of hand trick. It keeps u guessing but only so much. It's still Mario, it's still the charisma of a cereal box free toy, but credit where it's due - the soundtrack is nice and they did a great job in shuffling the artstyle up into representing illustrative 3D. Not losing my nut over this but it's nice to see some sparks of personality rattling around behind mario's shark eyes.

The friends of Ringo Ishikawa was a game that took me back to my teenage years, viewed through the sobering & cynical lens of hindsight. The titular Ringo & his friends are a bunch of classic Japanese delinquents, with seemingly no initial higher ambitions beyond their schoolyard gang warfare, entering their final year as students with graduation on the horizon. Despite being a gaggle of petty thugs who smoke cigarettes & have seemingly little interest in their own futures, it's shown as the plot goes on that there's more to each of these delinquents than let's on. Your violent, dumb-as-rocks lackey Goro is a surprisingly talented thespian. Your number one brawler Ken has the talent necessary for a shot at a boxing career in college. Even Ringo himself is a shockingly erudite scholar with an interest in literature, a once-promising career in karate, and is a surprisingly idealistic, loyal, man of virtue. The one thing holding them back is their gang lifestyle & ideas, something that resonated with me as someone who saw this same situation play out dozens of times in my youth.

My own high school wasn't great looking back on it. Violence & abuse were common occurrences, drug use & sex in the hallways was an unspoken fact of life, and basically everyone was a minority of some kind from a low-income background. Lots of people I knew came from broken homes, or were working part-time to put food on the table, or were otherwise struggling with something no kid should've been dealing with at that age, the kind of things that can make studying for your history exam seem like small potatoes. It's a structural issue decades in the making that leads to people getting trapped in places like these, and unfortunately not everyone is able to escape it. Schoolyard fights that escalated into shootings. Football players who graduate with bright prospects only to then get arrested for murder. Kids akin to Ringo's gang members like Masaru or Goro, who have zero sights beyond the now & fully believe they'll be set for a life of petty crime after graduation. The short-sighted violent mindsets people box themselves into that end up spelling their own ends because they can't escape the circumstances that put them there.

I vividly remember hanging out in the parking lot after school one day, and I saw a kid reading a book on the hood of his car. His friends came up to him and immediately dogged on him for this and the supposed weakness such a hobby would project on your image, and he sheepishly put it away in his bag before he left with his friends. It's a small event in hindsight, but it was called back to my mind crystal clear during a scene where Ringo's friends rip into their fellow member Goro for his new vested interest in acting.

Ringo, for all his virtues, for all the books you can make him read, for all the training he can undergo, for all the studying & knowledge you can try to impart on him, still fully believes that his gang of schoolyard bullies is going to last forever, despite it being made rapidly apparent that everyone is starting to move on and find their own callings. Ringo still gets into casual street fights & latches onto his childish notions of schoolyard ethics, of "official challenges" and "rules," even as things spiral out of anyone's control & everyone starts to get in too deep. Much like some of my peers that I saw in my youth, he's a bright soul with potential and promise that is being squandered by his own adherence to violence and unhealthy group mentalities & expectations, and the simple fact is that as the days go by, everyone around him is starting to realize that they need to grow up and move past it all.

Everyone except him.