Snake: Weapons and equipment OSP (on-site procurement)?
Campbell: Yes. This a top-secret black op. Don't expect any official support.

MGSV’s musings on the ceaseless war economy, linguistic colonialism, and imposter syndrome come across as scattershot and for the grander duration of the title left me feeling completely hollow. promised as the world’s foremost tactical espionage title, the game’s tightly choreographed mechanics felt as though they had been slotted into a vacuum devoid of meaning because the series’ layered gameplay replete with a diverse selection of choices dissipated in the face of subpar and artificial level design, suggesting once and for all that a game should perhaps aim to be more than the mechanics that prop it up. the usual directorial gratuitousness of the franchise all but vanished, replacing its slick and controlled craftsmanship with boiler-plate camerawork and storytelling that lacked emotional drive even at its most off-kilter. rote base management mechanics returned from peace walker, only now larger in scope, more pervasive, and entirely less enjoyable. when everything in the world became a harvestable resource, fuel for your well-oiled war machine, the conscription of personnel became necessity and thus the game’s sense of freedom became shackled to optimal and highly exploitable gameplay loops designed not with stealth in mind per se but rather with efficient accumulation taking the helm, for which only a few tools became necessary. it’s this ambition to do more, have more, and create more that led to one of the most complicated releases of the decade, a game in which the vastness of it all dwarfed the hitherto established intimacy of the franchise to such an extent that communities became completely and totally fragmented over just how much of this mess was authorial intent or not – whether or not their ‘phantom pain’ was intended.

whatever the case, there is as much of MGSV that points to this reading being an intended success on the part of its author as there is evidence to suggest it really wasn’t; further fuel to the fire was added by the revelation of deplorable behind-the-scenes working conditions alongside missing content alluding to an entire chapter torn out of the game which seemed to suggest one of the medium’s most celebrated auteurs was ruthlessly disrespected and his work was severely compromised. if i had to do away with the hackish pseudo-academic veneer of this essay for a second, i would say that you really had to be there witnessing this unfolding narrative to understand its essence. MGSV was one of the most hyped games of its generation, kojima appeared to be on a tear with the revival of silent hill as an ip, and in one fell swoop silent hill returned to dormancy and kojimas professional career (and perhaps even, for a time, reputation) was shattered at konamis behest shortly following the release of MGSV. it seemed unjustifiably cruel, maybe even nonsensical considering the extensive relationship between auteur and company in addition to the guaranteed success he was capable of generating. understandably, people once again began investigating to see the subtext behind the material – they reinterpreted PT as a title that predicted KJP’s oblivion, they came to see optional ground zeroes missions as suggestive of konami erasing kojimas legacy. whatever it was that could be pored over was. i would put forward, however, that even amidst the deluge of scathing reports regarding konami’s corporate culture, the hazy details of kojima’s termination, and the constructing metanarrative that found foothold in forums and messaging boards, the moment that cemented konami’s legacy as the industry’s number one heel was barring kojima himself from attending the game awards in 2015, which geoff keighley seemed visibly perturbed about. no one likes to see a diamond dog kicked while he’s down.

a cultural context can be a powerful thing. by and large, this is what made metal gear survive destined for failure on the day of its announcement. making matters worse was just how derivative the experience seemed to be, not just in its reuse of MGSV’s assets but also in how it seemed to desperately ride the coattails of the uninspired and in-vogue survival movement, using the pristine fox engine to deliver on…zombie action that you’ve almost certainly seen elsewhere. kojimas lack of involvement, the genre from which it takes its inspiration, the strong emphasis on its multiplayer, inclusion of microtransactions, always-online DRM, and the pervading industry context prior to release were all signals that portended doom, the kind of game that releases straight into the ninth circle of hell – speaking personally, i was so disillusioned by MGSV that i hardly paid attention to it even as the engines of the youtube pseudo-critic mill roared to life to bludgeon a dead horse into unrecognizable paste. this games life and MGSVs failure were inexorably linked, so divine punishment needed to be meted out by the community and evidently, the calls for this game’s crucifixion exist to this day – i mean you’re right here on backloggd, which is only an infinitesimal slice of the internets demographic, and you can see how many 0.5’s this thing’s racking up, the grand majority of which i’ll infer haven’t even played it. this title’s only real contender as far as ‘worst average on backloggd’ goes is alien colonial marines, leaving aside vaporware like yandere simulator and titles like superman 64.

it’s been five years since MGSV and i knew there was a problem when i thought for even a second of returning to the world that it presented. ive put enough distance between the titles release and now that returning to reassess it seemed like it could be a prudent venture just as much as it seemed a waste of time for a product that bordered on dreck, one that i was grateful to have torrented. i was scanning online to see how cheap physical copies of the game were, i found metal gear survive for six dollars, then i blacked out and now i’m here, thirty minutes away from the aforementioned game’s finish line, writing about one of the internet’s most detested games on this platform. what transpired here was an experience that surpassed my frankly non-existent expectations and provided for some of my favourite thought exercises i’ve experienced in my time casually writing about the medium.

first and foremost: i believe auteurs are intrinsically intertwined with the art they create. they're important to the fabric of the text, particularly in jpn game development where it seems they tend to have a lot of input (though my discussion here does not intend to suggest games are not inherently intensely collaborative projects). for the sake of argument: remove yoko taro from the apocalyptic, nightmarish drakengard and you get the uncouth high fantasy of drakengard 2. diminish suda51s importance to the subversive hyperreality of no more heroes and you might wind up with the perverse, juvenile, borderline unrecognizable sequel, desperate struggle. that said, there are those rare few titles for which handing the keys over to a new party has worked out rather nicely – the evil within 2 saw shinji mikami pass the director’s seat to john johanas, resulting in an unexpectedly good work. it is my firm, resolute, and perhaps alarming belief that metal gear survive is one such game that belongs to the latter camp, making better usage of all of MGSV’s design tenets to create a more watertight title.

previously in this review i briefly touched upon my belief that MGSV is a game better understood through the lens of accumulation and resource extraction rather than through the traditional lens of espionage so that it may serve a metanarrative agenda; by contrast, what metal gear survive does is it literalizes this gameplay loop, grounding it in terms of a constant struggle against the game’s alternate dimension of dite to create a system that is far more personally affecting. MGSV’s itemization of the natural world sees even greater manifestation when you realize every time cost mechanic of the phantom pain has been rebalanced to work against you, which means time is your most tangible resource and the design throughline which promotes efficacy and planning in a manner exceeding MGSV. every second wasted means your hunger and thirst ticks down, every second spent crouchwalking or crawling expends stamina because your glutes aren’t deemed foxhound worthy (especially noteworthy because this is one small part of what makes the action/stealth dichotomy far more balanced than the game’s spiritual predecessor), almost every action in the game incurs some form of risk or otherwise depletes some kind of asset, and the flow of the game never once ceases to force your hand into action. this, i find, often throws new players for a loop – yes, the narrative of the early hours and the preceding tutorialization is rather weak because the game tries not to overwhelm its players, but it still remains surprisingly difficult once those hurdles have been overcome. one of the strongest assets of the game is its merciless nature which prevents players from having access to unearned conveniences or getting stuck in one optimal gameplay loop for too long, a problem with the vast majority of survival games (here is where i must point out that every single armchair critic who told you the game is poking zombies through a fence with a spear for thirty something hours is straight up lying to you. any dissent to the statement i just made is also a straight-up lie.) in the early game it is expected that you must adapt to your new surroundings or face immediate death – players, for instance, don’t have an easy way to obtain clean water until at least seven chapters in, forcing them to partake in dirty water and risk infectious peril numerous times. zombies might be dumb, and to a certain degree exploitable, but they are freakishly strong and unending in numbers. every chapter forces the player on further and further expeditions into uncharted territory even as they may struggle to balance effective base management and even effective self-regulation. defence units built can’t simply be recycled back into their base materials once constructed – there’s an expectation of commitment here present in every ordeal the game imposes upon its players.

the overarching context by which all these intertwined systems are facilitated is the dust, an overworld expanse covering the vast majority of the games maps. the dust is characterized by a few traits. firstly, expeditions into the dust require oxygen, which runs out rather quickly and can only be replenished by investing successively greater amounts of in-game currency (which you need for everything else from crafting, to base building, to upgrades) in order to facilitate productive expeditions – the designers smartly refused to allow players to upgrade this oxygen capacity by any truly convenient measure, meaning each expedition is wrought with monetary friction. secondly, the dust obfuscates the player’s surveillance by every means imaginable. the waypoint and GPS functionality of your map fizzles out within a few seconds, aside from scant few designated areas and paths where the signal is strong enough to restore functionality. the world is shrouded in a kind of quintessentially konami miasma, through which visibility is low and landmarking, route-planning, and testing player’s memory becomes a necessity. thirdly, one cannot save once they are in the dust – meaning that every expedition is naturally tense. these are the primary factors which ensure that no expedition is ever undertaken without planning beforehand or without at least some fear of the unknown, which encourages a shrewd and careful playstyle, but they also mean that the next mistake could be your last, and they also mean it is possible to become hopelessly lost which will tax players’ ability to stay steely and retain their resolve. speaking as someone who did become hopelessly lost and came close to wasting almost 25 minutes of progress while constantly, fruitlessly expending my cash to have some meager oxygen aiding my desperate search for beacons that would light the way back to home camp, the moment i stumbled on one of the game’s few oases – clean zones where your maps work again, where water and food can be cultivated, and where oxygen is no longer depleted – it felt like a small miracle that could hardly be replicated in any other survival game. here i must give particular commendation to the map design as well, which provides the illusion of an open world but is instead a smidge more linear than it lets on, allowing for divergent treks that capitalize on player exploration while always advancing the games sense of flow and progression and structuring its challenges and worldbuilding in a manner that exceeds the artifice of MGSV’s far cry-esque outposts and hubs. if we accept that both of these games are at their core actually about resource extraction, it is metal gear survive that is the more convincing of the environs in its level design and depiction of a hostile and unforgiving world which is nonetheless your oyster.

it is the inclusion of the dust which characterizes the games absolute strongest hooks in atmosphere and metanarrative, as well. metal gear survive is not hesitant or subtle in delivery – it is aware of its nature as an asset-flip project. suffice to say that there are several returning areas from MGSV that have been remixed or recontextualized and are ripe for exploring and collecting valuable materials to strengthen ones base, provide for base personnel and oneself through food, drink, and medication, add to ones collection of defence units and offensive weaponry. nonetheless, the implication could not be clearer – here you are, in a forgotten world entrenched in a deep fog, pilfering its remains for anything which might prove valuable to yourself. these are the surprising and quiet moments that had me solemnly reflecting on my time with MGSV and on my time with metal gear survive. many playing the game might see a barren overworld, but to me this is a game world that feels completely haunted in a way im not sure ill ever be able to articulate. perhaps it’s the lonesome nature of each trek, perhaps it’s the slightly removed familiarity of each environment (from which i choose to steal for my own benefit), perhaps it’s the faint creaks and drones one hears in the dust as well as the occasional barely heard whispers, perhaps it’s the promise of a world once teeming with potential for life and espionage now reduced to nothingness and including the medium’s most beaten-down enemy type in droves. to me, there’s a mutual understanding between myself and the developers that some of this feels like blasphemy, and certainly those shrewd investigators i mentioned at the beginning of the review were clever enough to pick up on such cheeky inclusions as ‘MG KIA; KJP FOREVER’ at the start of the game, but i was surprised to see none commented on how any of these self-critical and distraught narrative elements continued to resurface as a vicious undercurrent throughout the entire experience. it’s all but stated right in the opening cutscenes – the captain stands in the wreckage of his home, mother base, and finds himself transported to an alternate dimension at the behest of a shadowy organization, the machinations and politics of which he cannot fully understand. and since you’re not likely to ever play this game if you’re reading this review (if you made it this far) i can say that it ends with the captain and the survivors unable to return home, but still always looking for a way in which they might be able to and still making the best of their situation the only way they know how to. everything that happens in between those two focal points doesn’t matter – the pain of severance is irrefutably part and parcel of metal gear survive’s premise. it’s easy to make a sardonic and biting comment about the irony of this game’s title, but i left the experience assured that this was a team of developers who genuinely wanted metal gear’s legacy to survive in spite of the conditions they were forced into.

this isn’t necessarily to say that the game is a hidden gem – it is an incredibly solid game that met with an insane amount of derision, but careful scrutiny still shows a product that could, in many ways, afford to be a better title, many of which revolve around the hesitance of the designers to truly push this title into MGO levels of madcap insanity. the strengths of metal gear survive become apparent when those abrasive and frictional qualities are at the forefront. the flaws of the experience readily show themselves when their lack of confidence, or more specifically, konamis lack of confidence, manifests. inarguably the greatest stains on the experience are the always-online DRM component of the title, which is frustrating on every level and betrays konamis minimal expectations with the game, and the inclusion of games-as-a-service elements, but particularly the supply box which, every day, supplies the player with a randomized selection of three items each to assist them in some way. these are usually defence units and traps, but they also include water and rations which, if utilized, can deter from the intended experience to an extent, so they’re best ignored if one can refuse to give into temptation because i wouldn’t say they trivialize the early game but they certainly ease player stress and one thing this games design is oriented towards, and what it does excellently at times, is fostering player stress – such an inclusion is nothing more than publisher-induced anathema.

further, while the atmosphere it cultivates is strong, i wish slightly more was done with enemy management. the map design, and the way in which the dichotomy of stealth and action is better managed, is impressive, but it takes a little too long for enemy waves to be diverse, which is a shame because when they are the game becomes delightfully chaotic. these are the moments in which metal gear survive almost becomes transcendent in its design, which become more apparent around the time the second map is introduced. there are some delicious scenarios here that test player mettle in ways that completely blindsided me and which seemed purposefully designed to bait unsuspecting players, and these are excellent, but there are just as many moments where some of this chaotic streak could have stood to benefit the games systems at an earlier point in the game purely for the purpose of spurring its players into determinative action. it’s such a strange thing because the game’s progression is quite good at what it purports to achieve but just as the challenge starts reaching an even more interesting fever pitch, the game enters its denouement. i find myself at odds, simultaneously wishing it was either more compact, or that it was a longer campaign.

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the internet’s full of obstinate folks. i don’t think i can change anyone’s minds on this title, nor do i think i can blame them if they choose to give the game a miss. but i find it extremely interesting as an example of targeted hostility, disingenuous criticism, and cultural narratives informing our perceptions of a work. what i found in metal gear survive was a survival game that acted as an emotional and mechanical post mortem for the design of mgsv, as well as a good game that combines the tight responsiveness and polish of the fox engine with a genre that seemed trite and overdone even in its time of release. what other people appear to see is a work that was intentionally crafted to spite them, which seems to me droll, predictable, and totally self-centered. granted, im still of the belief that konami is an abysmal publisher, so i can’t change people’s perceptions of the game, but i can scream to the heavens what i think through my writing: that these assertions are fundamentally untrue, and that it does a disservice to kojima’s former team, who have inadvertently crafted a more engaging title than MGSV ever was. i think that we, as a culture that writes about these experiences, could afford to be a bit more clever and nuanced in our analysis – more raw honesty, more passion, more standing our ground. it’s either that, or the cultural endgame we’ve been building towards for years here – the dominance of insincerity and contrarianism, the labelling of any meaningful dissent as a hot take but also the proclivity to cynically monetize these hot takes, the inability of individuals to be truly honest about what it is that appeals to them

came dressed in black ready to mourn immense creative stifling by the casual, profit-driven tyranny of western publishers, stayed for akira yamaoka's godlike score and for the comic and raunchy but often unrealized attempts to jab at the medium's hypermasculine paragons

if you haven't read kurayami dance and have any interest in suda or in this game's behind-the-scenes progression from kafkaesque horror to b-movie grindhouse romp, id highly suggest you do because it's insane how much of the language and iconography of that manga (itself a conceptual iteration on kurayami, a separate project that never saw realization, and the initial vision suda had for SOTD prior to ea's chokehold on creative direction) is reflected here; the manga presents a lovely middle ground between the two diametrically opposed visions at the core of SOTD's inception. shared in common are the ideas of an easy ride-influenced road trip, a talkative otherworldly companion, a journey through supernatural planes of existence, a mysterious castle separate from the general populace, and a few other smaller commonalities. still, SOTD opts for a much less thematically complete endeavour (with its sardonic and satirical throughlines of male insecurity as it relates to female sexuality feeling largely uninterrogated), and considering the pedigree behind the project it's shocking the gameplay really isn't up to snuff at all either, so it's harder to enjoy as just a thrilling and cheesy adventure. mikami somehow turned in a dull third person shooter with finicky controls and mechanics that trivialize the vast majority of the combat scenarios

it's difficult to fault any of this - reading kurayami dance, one gets the sense that suda wanted to make something more in line with flower, sun, and rain again and simply couldn't because EA didnt see those ideas as trendy or appealing to western markets - but it's a shame the end result is a poor experience that appealed to no one if sales data is anything to go by, that hasn't aged especially gracefully, and that games criticism of its era struggled to sum up, reconcile with, or effectively assess. the most common criticism was so of its time it almost hurts - the lack of a new game+ feature. no discussion of narrative, stilted mechanics, corporate meddling, what have you. just a run of the mill release to throw into the 7/10 pile and forget.

of the titles suda had a hand in in the early 2010s, produced in his absence from the director's seat, this is probably my second favourite, but it's really not saying much. there's interesting insight from the development of killer is dead that showcases yet more publisher strangulation - the implementation of gigolo mode, mandated by kadokawa. what's interesting here is that, commenting on gigolo modes inclusion, suda explicitly acknowledged that these features would probably harm grasshoppers reputation, especially when taken in conjunction with both this game and no more heroes 2, but there wasn't much he could do about it. that lack of control speaks volumes about the experiences on offer, and SOTD is the poster boy for that fraught process. playing through the game, i can say that as interesting as it could be at times? thank god that eras over and that grasshopper is moving on to self-publishing. at this rate, you'd be better off reading kurayami dance and playing travis strikes again than trying your hand at SOTD, both of which are more interesting to experience, are far more emotionally affecting, and reflect on this title in interesting ways. dissociative identity might be a trademark of sudas works, but it's always bleak when the game itself is undergoing an overt identity crisis

bear with me on this one

it’s an admirable feat for pixel pusher union to supplant the domineering individualist (and disturbingly often, bordering on authoritarian) power fantasies common to the medium with a collectivist power fantasy, and certainly it’s worth noting that the fledgling studio has put their money where their mouth is by operating as a worker-owned cooperative. still, one look at tonight we riot’s tongue-in-cheek steam page and you can easily see how they’ve mobilized to target their chosen niche. the only two prominent reviews chosen to represent their title shine a spotlight on the game’s overt politics. one, offered by variety, is a rather bog standard but affable description of the title’s unapologetically political nature, and the other undercuts variety’s blank cheque review vis-à-vis this political quality because it is written by a middle-aged economist chud who claims the game is socially ‘repulsive’ with all the intellectual grace and cutting rhetoric of that one infamous matt bors comic (‘yet you participate in society. curious!’) this kind of clearly ironic spotlight on bad-faith condemnation doesn’t necessarily call the sincerity of PPU’s endeavour into question, but it does function as a kind of signal to the intended audience. ‘come on, look at this petty bourgeois rube…don’t you want to stick it to this guy who so clearly represents the structures of power you’re starving to utterly demolish, to gloriously overthrow?’

while i am loathe to admit it, and while he obviously didn’t intend it in this way, the chud may have a point in the grace note of his dismissive conjecture when he suggests that as an alternative to tonight we riot, you can ‘download streets of rage 2 for a dollar’. that title is, of course, a dystopian beat ‘em up in which four turned-vigilantes from varying socioeconomic classes unite to thwart the machinations of white collar criminal mr. x, a man whose accrued wealth, power, and despotic nature gives him carte blanche to inflict systemic pain on wood oak city and to treat disenfranchised individuals as nothing more than cogs in his exploitative machine, which disempowers the entire city on a macro-level and on a micro-level, whittles down the beauty of everyday life – the desolation of wood oak city contrasted with the opulence of his headquarters, the devolution of martial arts’ inherent philosophical honor seen in shiva’s character or in the eagle mini-bosses (that martial arts is often a path out of poverty remains a despairingly easy connection to make), the mechanization of society running as an undercurrent throughout the streets of rage 2 campaign. ive always argued that a hallmark of streets of rage is its humanist bent when contrasted against other beat ‘em ups, corny though it is. you’re fighting for the future, the only way you know how, which maybe in itself turns out to be a problem. this is prominently, albeit inadvertently, demonstrated through the franchise’s successive entries, which implicitly question just how sustainable those hard-fought victories are. the fight goes on, the rage never dies down, the future must always be defended by egalitarian vanguards – the existence of a world untainted by corruption and power is never denied.

i bring all this up not only because the existence of a better world is a thread that both of these titles share in common, but also because by contrast, tonight we riot has no easily identifiable hooks to sink into; there’s no imagination here. if i described the game to you as ‘insular leftist agitprop brawling power fantasy’, everything that could reasonably come to mind for you is on offer here, like it’s some kind of derivative checklist borne from endless amounts of doomscrolling. the trumpian caricature, a narcissistic billionaire – he’s the antagonist, and when you whittle away his means of production and armed forces throughout the game he turns out to be the most pitiful opponent you’ve ever faced. check. okay, we got the literal invisible hands of the market as a mecha boss battle. check. we threw in leftist myths with a degree of universality and cuteness behind ‘em in the form of shoutouts to loukanikos and possibly even el negro matapocos, check. corrupt media denouncing your efforts only to then demonstrate fear as your success continues, check. it is what it is – unambitious, serving as an attempt at an antidote to a perceived conservative culture in games. you could make the argument that conservatism in gaming isn’t borne out of anything other than malaise – apoliticism taken to its furthest extent, with developers treating their audiences as pigs lining up for escapism slop. but then that ignores the culture that breeds this sentiment, and it ignores the role the state plays in the creation of all kinds of media. just as the pentagon finances film if they can be depicted benevolently, so too does the military fund games like call of duty and use these titles as recruitment tools. so maybe there is in fact a need for titles that do the opposite.

but, see, here’s where i get kind of hung up on this. depicting collective action in a mechanics-driven arcade format is difficult. that’s the primary reason the individual is venerated in action games – it’s borne not out of conservatism necessarily, but out of constraint and out of an understanding that any of these concepts could easily be abstracted and then transposed onto the actions of the individual. the only title that springs to mind that may serve as an exception to the difficulty in portraying collective mechanics is the fantastical and tokusatsu-influenced the wonderful 101, which many in action-game circles purport is one of the greatest games ever made, so while it’s not a politically driven game per se already there’s a particularly high bar to clear for this kind of thing. not beholden to any tokusatsu schmaltz, the way in which tonight we riot depicts this collective action – by still conforming to standards of dozens of arcade action titles – feels hollow to me. the fact that it’s not well-designed by any metric or even cathartic to play is ancillary to me. (and no, it’s not cathartic to play when it wears the aches of the world as pastiche and when its core gameplay loop still revolves around managing faceless comrades, who can and will get brutalized, played out against the backdrop of a brazenly idealistic take on a revolution…the game tries to sidestep concerns that you’ll see everyone as gamified Units To Sacrifice and Expend by having no narrative hooks/leader role protagonists but it’s not a great solution either. also good god those controls are horrid) the problem for me is that what should be ample opportunity to subvert expectations or preconceived notions is done away with in favour of a terribly bland arcade experience that seems to only exist to affirm people’s political beliefs, like some kind of reward for Good Online Leftism, and it’s made worse by how insular the whole thing is. it uses the language of an aging aesthetic and of a particular kind of power fantasy and just wears its skin without doing much more with the concept. im left wondering who is left for this to appeal to, and i kind of have an answer, but it’s not a particularly nice one so i see no reason to write about it.

‘why get hung up about a game that still unabashedly shares your politics, it’s fine that it exists! six days in fallujah just got greenlit again out of nowhere in the most unhinged move the medium has seen in years, talk about how that’s fucked up instead!’ im only writing this because i do care! because i think games of this kind should do more than be escapism or reiterate what we already know ala cynically celebrated films like parasite, itself revered in a similar vein to tonight we riot. i think there’s genuine room for emotionally mature experiences that respect audience intelligence, that reveal deep and moving truths, and that achieve more than just being the same kind of escapism under a different ideology or that exist only to plainly acknowledge blanket issues (i don’t expect remedy but i do love insight). and i think it’s part of a weird overall trend in discourse that largely revolves around the sanitation of art and the rejection of anything that doesn’t 100% conform to our stringent politics.

ultimately, tonight we riot has no charred or abrasive edges, in spite of what it sells to you – it’s every bit as inoffensive and unremarkable as it claims to not want to be.

in the heavens and in the cosmos, a ball plods onwards

artisan and curated tapas design stylings replete with esoteric peculiarities and idle fluff that could only indicate the fingerprints of its author. entirely mechanics-driven, thus offering no pressing justification for the increasingly maniacal rube goldberg-esque obstacle courses on offer but often stumbling on its own design convention from time to time, evoking a feeling comparable to rote busywork accompanied by an unsatisfactory scoring system. nevertheless, always tense, attempts to make the most of the mechanics on offer, gets better as it goes along, and likeable enough to warrant a single playthrough. by far the best quality is its minimalist sound design, engineered by mona mur of kane & lynch 2 fame (!). cold, eerie, mystical, and always on the verge of wonder. it would have been so easy to design a game with a fast and loose body of sound to match its kinaesthetic pleasures but instead ballance is thoughtful, reflective, and composed, perplexingly absorbing its audience into the spiritual solace of the balls adventure through use of effective grace notes. surprisingly funny ending and overall a good time!

jaws still clenched, brains still wired, the tetrominos are still dancing in my vision, i need a glass of water

less about the mechanical expression of tetris and far more about the transcendental flow state that can be achieved from playing such systems driven titles, hence its appropriate title. as such it's content to settle for the basic template with little in the way of formal experimentation beyond its visuals and aesthetics but good god are they pulling their weight here, imbuing the experience with elegance and ephemerality. it's this unique concoction that immerses subtly, the endless tides of puzzle pieces washing over me and rejuvenating my soul with each minute spent in the playing field, narrating the story of life itself through descending blocks. impressively, each stage in journey mode seamlessly cycles the player through varying tempos of play before they even realize what's happening; the seasoned players mind quickly grows accustomed to the affair and instantly switches gears in their head, like it's all some locked away second nature. half the game is reconciling with the part of you that is made to operate solely on instinct and thats an experience you cant really get in other mediums and always makes me happy to sit down for a while

the most brazen tagline of all time: "what if dark souls had six more months in the oven?" daughters of ash styles itself as a scholar of the first sin-esque remix of the first games proceedings. for all ye vagabonds who have come to know lordran like the back of your hand and have pilfered the lands of its mystery, this mod offers an inviting glimpse into a world where the script is flipped. it is a total overhaul that incorporates new mechanics, restructures player progression, implements new bosses, and expands on the lore of the first game. normally, i'd roll my jaded eyes at that last statement, but as memory serves from my playthrough two years ago there's nothing outright offensive or transgressive about DoA's new narrative heft - the mod is rather content to humbly experiment with the author's interpretation and views of the setting, offering new themes based on parenthood and sin to complement the originals often lofty tone. at most there is an unfortunate tendency for the grandiose; some fights are reimagined and redefined by their spectacle in a manner that would not feel out of place in either bloodborne or dark souls 3, which for me detracted from the often quiet grace of the original. a more critical eye could perhaps reveal more of this games wayward tendencies, where it stumbles and fails to capture the magic of the original, where it is utterly inert, but on a personal level (as a person who has become boringly efficient at playing these games), this was a worthwhile return to lordran that scratched a forgotten itch. saves me from having to do yet another randomizer run at the very least.

capcom would be real rock stars at the forefront of a renaissance in my eyes if they once again harnessed the visual mutability and intimate choreography of the venerable survival horror titans: gorgeous fixed camera angles, a sense of foreboding lurking in every obfuscated space, prerendered environments littered with mesmerizing detail...anything would beat this newly formulated vein of survival horror, a 'new' taxonomy, the strengths of which are reflected better in other titles and the bountiful weaknesses of which are unique to itself - it should be the opposite! theres so much untapped potential in this concept: a return to the old style with modern tech...

anyways, id be lying if i didn't say that at times, the enjoyment i had with this eclipsed any other game i played this year - but only at times. capcom brings a strong sense of polish to the games proceedings and takes care to imbue it with an immersive quality, but it all feels hollow. the main plot outside of the bakers and the raimi/hooper aesthetic they bring to the table is completely charmless; the molded are awful enemies that don't make players plan ahead appropriately, nor do they compliment the games virtues; as everyone claims, the last third of the game is indeed action-laden busywork; the balancing of traditional survival horror tenets like resource management and the ability to skillfully avoid damage is askew; that medley of locked-away dlc campaigns and scenarios continues to taunt me, and this coming from a franchise that used to be the king of optional post-game content. there's something to be said for taking the traditional resident evil structure and transporting it to first-person, it makes for a game that feels like nothing else out there at the moment (claims that it is a safe product made to cynically cater to the disenfranchised PT audience be damned) but it's just a shame that this is so safe and palatable as a resident evil title, and that village looks similarly bankrupt of ideas...almost makes me miss when resident evil was this garish action gourmet completely lacking in self awareness

in an episode of gamespot’s audio logs, disco elysium’s lead designer and writer robert kurvitz was asked to discuss ZA/UM’s approach to CRPG design, in which he makes clear the title’s great tabletop roleplaying game influence, contrasts disco elysium against modern CRPGS, and elucidates the rationale behind certain UI decisions the game had made. one of the very first things kurvitz highlights, and what was apparently one of the decisions given primacy in pre-production, was the concept of placing the text box in the righthand side of the screen in contrast to the game’s contemporaries, even outside the CRPG genre, which typically slot the text boxes in the lower middle of the screen. the benefits to this alternative organization seem immediately obvious as kurvitz spells them out: increased screen real estate, far more interesting visual composition, and a modality which seemed to emulate the engrained habits of run-of-the-mill technology. peer at disco elysium’s textbox and your mind may not immediately pick up on the contours of its design, but your subconscious will instinctively understand it relates to the modern desktop experience. it innately resembles the windows toolbar, where the clock and calendar is – the screen is visually ‘weighted’ to the right, where the center of gravity is, and it reflects the placement of the players right hand on the keyboard.

the deceptive genius of this UI design is that it wasn’t enough to simply reflect a desktop, which disco elysium’s target demographic was instinctually bound to – ZA/UM wanted to snuff out any and all competitors. that means taking inspiration from unlikely sources, one of which was social media. this helps explain why the prose of disco elysium is so confrontational, sharp, abrasive, sensational; it explains why the text-box was designed to reflect an addictive scrolling experience ala twitter; and it builds upon centuries of entrenched human behaviour in its column design, which may inadvertently reflect a phone but also reflects the structure of a newspaper article. in an era where developers have now fully committed themselves towards eradicating loading screens in a veiled effort to curb the impoverished, stimulation-craving instincts of their player bases (a major hardware decision which is replete with as many pros as cons), ZA/UM subtly adapted the topography of phones that so many players were already used to for their own purposes.

kurvitz’s final salvo is illuminating. every element of this design is an amendment which reflects a critical problem in the games marketability, that disco elysium, judging by its phenomenal success, ameliorated fully: how do you sell a modern CRPG that is simultaneously defined by its lack of combat and by its verbosity? well, it’s simple. everyone says they don’t like reading and claims they don’t want to read – but reading is all we do on social media, in private messages, in news articles. we take it for granted. player retention was a big problem for ZA/UM, so the designers intelligently made what seems like a very easy observation, but then engineered everything about the game’s flow in order to manufacture a state that hopefully will allow players to immerse themselves and to truly salivate over every last written word the game has to offer.

so, reading is something we do every day. no-brainer. but the same exists for writing. both exist in a connected equilibrium. just as we read every day, we write just about every day – whether we realize it or not. some research even suggests that where the mind is allowed to wander while reading, neurons will roar to life and the brain will mimic and simulate the act of pen flowing on paper, gliding betwixt margins with grace and individualized efficacy.

it would be more accurate, however, to make the claim that we’re typing every day.

are typing and writing of the same scholarship? could one make the claim that writing is therefore impoverished by the usurpation of typing – the same way kurvitz attributed to his audience a kind of destitution of readership? reflecting on this opens the floodgates of a perennial chirographic concern. the digital epoch has not responded with kindness to the eloquence of handwriting. surveys often suggest swathes of people go more than half a year without handwriting, and countries that are at the forefront of educational theory like finland suggest that it may no longer bear the same relevance on day-to-day activities as it once used to. the practice is fading, its dominance curtailed by the dissemination of keyboarding. this is in spite of a marked increase in literature suggesting the many benefits of handwriting. among the myriad cognitive benefits there are particularly noteworthy virtues such as attention sustenance, increased capacity for memory, improved self-regulation, and the ability to plan ahead. children who learn to write by hand are known to activate adult-like pathways in their minds which aid in facilitation of improved memory.

and for many, handwriting is an exercise in aesthetic pleasures, a distinct mark of individuality, and a reiteration of a practice undertaken by even their ancestry that innately links mind and soul, body and space, the sensate and the insensate, an unwitting cooperation between all the ontological elements of lived experience that inform existence and being, a unification of self and language. there is the concern that the abstractions of writing, that once in the past were nothing more than pictographs painstakingly carved into slabs and yet was still a decidedly intellectual, tactile, expressive, and intimate practice, are lost in the mechanical era and the complex beauty of it has vanished. many continue to remind and advocate for the pursuance of ‘bilingual writing’ – education that fosters children who can handwrite as well as they type and thus don’t fail to attend to their expanding minds. on a more anecdotal level, all of this rings as true – too often does the pursuit of typing education boil it all down to a callous, impersonal drudgery that serves only to prepare children for the rampant dehumanization inherent to the workforce.

if any of this discourse seems like a relatively modern concern, don’t worry – it isn’t. let me take a quick step back. walter j. ong indicated that our history in knowledge storage can be divided into two phases: the oral-to-literate stage and the chirographic-to-print stage. in the former stage, culture began to transition into a society that relied more and more on the written word and began to leave oral tradition behind – as far back as 3500 BC, sumerians sought to preserve their history by capturing and transcribing oration. in the latter stage, the individual handwritten texts began to be mechanically produced and widely disseminated by means of the printing press. this evolution of writing technology invariably altered the way humanity came to grips with their own awareness and how this changed the epistemology of the time. in ong’s view, it was this shift from the oral tradition to a society of literacy that broke apart the old ways of tribal unity, as fostering literacy operated in tandem with greater levels of individuality. the chirographic-to-print stage of the 1500’s only further reinforced this.

it is here where i must remind that typing is the apotheosis of these differing stages of written tradition, and one that has remained in the public consciousness since the late 1800s – far from a modern invention. the first commercial typewriters were made available in 1874, and the first stenograph was invented in 1879. the history of typing predates the personal computer. but nevertheless it is the fixed rigidity of typing – when taken from its latent form and iterated upon, recontextualized in the digital epoch as an apparatus to be used with the computer – that ong sees as a synthesis of the oral and the literate. it’s a kind of folding together of space and time, one of the arguments of this viewpoint being the idea that the premise of instantaneity central to typing on a computer transforms printed word into something more akin to oration and therefore reunites our own epoch with the era of oral tradition as a result of totally reconfigured relationships between all the constituent elements of the past two stages: the writer, the text, the audience, the interfacing, the medium.

others are not so kind – any technological evolution brings trade-off, and some philosophers note that history is simply an unfolding narrative of intangible gains and omitted losses. of the many philosophers to grapple with the heady question of how the modalities of writing inform existence, heidegger is an authoritative voice and spoke often of the cultural loss typing imprinted on society. it is his view, and that of his supporters, that typing represents something perverse and impersonal, something amputational in logic. the body is diminished and conveyance is thus diminished too; the essential realm of word and hand is shattered, depriving the person of dignity and irreversibly altering our relationship with language and distances ourselves from it, changing something from beautifully abstract transmission to simple transposition. certainly, this view seems almost supported by modern empirical studies that uncannily echo some of these concerns!

and yet, type dreams seems to believe otherwise, and treats all text within as something to be given primacy, something that is profound and bold and transcendent. richard hofmeier’s second developmental outing is an anachronism-laden victorian-set game about typing. so committed to typing it is that everything about interfacing with the game involves the use of keys rather than the mouse, removing yet again any semblance of a bodily gesture that might conflate modern typing with traditional handwriting. you enter a username and password to begin the typist’s journey, and from there depressions of the spacebar cycle through menus, tapping the enter key confirms, hitting the escape key…escapes, and the very act of typing itself provides shortcuts with which to access menus.

as you play type dreams, you get a greater sense of where its priorities lie, and it’s something coincidentally shared with tetris effect, another game i recently played and appreciated: the answer is transcendence. actually, it would be far more accurate to say that what type dreams pursues is something close to ong’s vision of modern typing: complete synchronicity across boundaries of space and time. and it does so by providing an utterly unique audiovisual experience that goes far beyond the simple educational value of a typing game. in type dreams you find a wealth of categories of typing exercises: rote exercises, poetry, classical literature, even smut and songs/lyrics. and in each ‘stage’, reconfigured as a kind of desperate arcade scenario, the player, alongside their chosen imitation avatar, competes with only themselves for faster and faster words-per-minutes, for fewer errors, for unapproachable streaks of correctly placed letters. at the onset of the game you must choose between digital keyboard and typewriter and i must wholly recommend the typewriter – passages are smartly fragmented by the continual rhythm of the player sliding their fingers across function keys f1-f12 to emulate the carriage of a typewriter, a sensory experience unlike anything else that inadvertently calls to mind musicality and instrumentation, suggesting that rather than representing a kind of blasphemous automatism typing may well be a new kind of instrument. a tidbit that is particularly noteworthy and relevant to my argument: typing activates an area in your brain that is equivalent to what drumming activates in your brain.

and it is this kind of ‘music’ and kinaesthetic experience that forms the basis of what type dreams achieves so excellently, as so few games do, interrogating ideas that similarly, so few games do. in type dreams the keyboard is an instrument, a weapon, a guide, an anachronism, a representation of shared consciousness, reflecting an understanding of the infinite forms of text as well. type out these chords of text via an angry letter to a newspaper and listen to the game channeling these frustrations in the forms of aggressive grunts with each letter misspelled or each error in keystroke; explore the textual melodies of some poetry and watch as the visuals accompanying your office change, freeing the mind and allowing poet and player and avatar to be intimately linked like nothing else; type out an account of keyboard rebellion and understand that the drudgery linked between workforce and the word processor can be subverted by the daring, that there is more to text than copying or correspondence; be transported across space and time to verbose scrawlings on prison walls, to the history of stenography, to socrates on trial. it’s a thrillingly evocative experience that lessens the temporal and spatial boundaries of history and literature and that is characterized by efficiency and dexterity in a way that recalls music, so it helps that the music accompanying each stage is really solid – the bimanual and repetitive nature of typing necessitates an audiovisual layer to allow the mind to coalesce with text and wander freely.

all of this serves to strongly re-evaluate typing in the modern era and to rebut most of the concerns of heidegger with new presumptions on what it even means to type, and it allows the self to feel the keyboard as something other than a symbol of workplace productivity. it filters in expression and individuality back into typist methodology, which may explain why there is no mechanical difference between the two typewriters on offer – only an aesthetic one. you begin to pick up on the subtleties of typing’s topography, on how hands moving across keys can influence emotion and thought, on how it serves as an appropriate contrast to the unimanual nature of handwriting. handwriting allows for reflection, for contemplation, but what type dreams suggests is that typing can become a tool for embodiment. this makes sense given the increased tempo that contrasts the two modes of writing, but it’s yet another point in the game’s favour- can you still feel the significance of the game’s text in spite of that breakneck pace, or has it slipped through the permeating fog of synchronicity? type dreams works its ass off to have your answer be a resounding yes. yes, in spite of the kaleidoscopic nature of digital text, in spite of its immaterial and infinite nature, in spite of the concern for the lessened significance of text and how it may erode at our senses and reduce our attention into fragments, transcendence can still occur. meaning can still be felt. text hasn’t necessarily been impoverished – not when it’s so lived-in.

that isn’t to say the game is perfect. in fact, the game is laughably imperfect, probably the most laughably imperfect game i've given such a high rating. it’s buggy, there are some UI issues and several technical dilemmas, and the greatest kicker of all: it’s unfinished. as i tried to unlock more of the game’s levels in proto-drakengardian fashion i came to realize there was only so much available, that the game was in an adolescent state and might never see completion. yet so much of the game contains the seeds of what is such an unexpectedly ideal game for me that i cannot help but give it such high accolades – the immensity of the experience is deserving of far more attention and far more interrogation from far smarter figures than i.

richard hofmeier is a complex figure for the games media to reckon with. after the smash hit success of cart life in indie games circles, he vanished from the public eye and released cart life in open source format, citing its imperfection as a barrier to its permissibility as a for-profit release. type dreams was his second major outing, released on itch.io in an incomplete state, originally at a price so that hofmeier could make ends meet. by his own admission, he disliked the fact that he had to do so, but he had been working away at this and several other projects over the course of several years, so he had to release at least something to get past his perfectionist tendency. since then the game has received several inconsistent updates before the pipeline of developer communication shut off entirely without warning in november of last year. currently, the game is listed as cancelled on itch.io. the version of the game you can download, uploaded 81 days ago, is listed as td_final.zip. when you try to click on the game’s “story” mode (one might assume the game’s main campaign would have been papers, please-esque; reliance on electricity was a drawback for the digital keyboard made apparent to the player when they are prompted to choose their instrument of choice), you are greeted with the following message:

“These stories were boring. Consider making up new ones; new stories about [PLAYER NAME] might be worth writing.”

as it stands, i have no way of knowing if the sentiment of this message and the title’s abrupt and unquestioned ‘cancellation’ are related. but in my heart of hearts, i hope hofmeier returns to this project. there’s nothing else like it.

https://hofmeier.itch.io/type-dreams

ALRIGHT, blanket announcement: on top of the game being available on the internet archive, as was wisely pointed out by DJSCheddar, MrPixelton was kind enough to get a mega link up and running for type dreams using their copy of the game since my laptop was indisposed. so shouts out to you guys, you both rock, and all of it helps to keep this game preserved and alive. i think the internet archive solution will be the public one and ill keep the mega link open for private channels/as a backup. thanks everyone for your efforts! whenever hofmeier returns to the public eye please try to financially support him, we need this kind of creativity in the medium

be sure to reach out if you'd like the mega link!

thought a lot about downhill domination (bakuso maunten baikazu, ie 'Roaring Mountain Bikers' for the real ones out there) while playing this. both games borrow from the same conceptual base, being an extreme downhill cycling game with tricks to perform and varying paths for the worldly cyclist to take, but only one is an aesthetic experience with any communicable soul or attitude, and it's the one with the cooler name. by contrast, descenders is a cobbled together unity engine project that consolidates all the dull trademarks of the minimalist game movement. everything has been given a sleek, mawkish corporatized veneer - you don't pedal to the metal in this game so much as you trailblaze to soft, inoffensive synths and thumping techno. you race to accrue sponsors and randomized crew members who dote on you and make your career marginally more convenient, tweaking the shape and form of procedurally generated races through too-pristine nature that all feels excessively anodyne and humdrum. progression structure youve seen just about everywhere else constantly emphasizes the same question youve heard thousands of times elsewhere: can YOU, intrepid player, become the next LEGEND? load screens continually fragment the action and detract from an experience that already starts off too slow in the career mode. the fact that its actually still pretty fun when the game does finally decide to go hogwild is a consequence of the designers emphasizing cyclist fragility, ensuring a modicum of tension in each career session that styles itself as a 1CC attempt at a couple dozen, maybe more, downhill environs. i suppose bombing hills at 80mph is always gonna be a joy regardless of how you bungle anything else.

pure vibes. in this walking sim, a JRPG protagonist realizes that he's too much of a loose cannon to mess around within the emaciating confines of 'menus' and 'random encounters', and makes it his business to barrel his way through a plethora of demons with unrelenting ferocity. this 'bump' system, as it came to be known, is the ultimate manifestation of violence. the madmen at falcom made the final dungeon like half of the games length twice in a row because they knew such a superficially impervious roadblock would deter your average JRPG protagonist, but to adol, the King of Drift, the man who challenges those hairpins, these are only paltry speed bumps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fNhyo0VOgc

degenerate fighting game hiding behind illusory veil of 'honor' and 'fundamentals'; in other words, it's essentially perfect. love literally everything about this. haohmaru's heavy slash is the greatest fighting game button of all time. if samurai shodown 2019 had rollback netcode it'd probably be more of a 'forever' fighting game for me but it cant possibly match the lunacy of v special. go ahead, tell me what the D button does. you cant because its a fickle mistress that exists beyond the realm of logic

https://twitter.com/w_guppy/status/1382287033838792707?s=19

i can't rightly say if it's simply a case of my absence from games due to academic obligation or what over the course of the past month, but lonely mountains is just superbly refreshing and taut, something like petrichor for my self-imposed exodus. sure, you'll still be made to do challenges and deal with progression for epic customization but at least the title is never abrasive about it. instead with precision cycling you make your way down several serene mountains, at first as a wayward explorer and later as an adrenaline junkie carving the most efficient routes down the mountain possible. the soundscape is ambient and sparse in the best possible way, with these rendered environments coming across as painterly; little splashes of colour and brushstrokes serve to implicitly guide the eye towards where the next shortcut might be. the camera rides in tow, giving players a perspective of how vast and beautiful these biomes are while also contributing greatly to both thrill and discovery. and there's even joy in failure, as dashing your intrepid cyclist against the rocks often leads to some good ol' ragdolling goofs. just the perfect game to wake up to with a cup of coffee

of the games ive played this year, the most similar analogues are a short hike and descenders; it goes without saying that im currently enjoying my time with this little beaut so much more than those. bliss

perfectly imperfect. it's not my intention to unleash Gamer Mode but this game's profile, for me, was really heightened due to three separate yet interrelated factors: the addition of a crisp 60FPS included in the ported edition, opting for the mostly well-tuned hard difficulty, and playing on a controller that isn't the dualshock 3. these components were tangible right from the start and coalesced to create the kind of flow state vanquish so often strives for very early-on in the experience.

it's kind of a misunderstood game sometimes, even by its supporters. rabble rousers who didn't engage with the mechanics will tell you it's a generic third person shooter, but they wouldn't exactly be wrong; what makes the cogs in vanquish roar to life has far more to do with the speed of the title as you boost slide from cover to cover and intelligently utilize your suit's reactive time-slowdown to dispatch droves of robots. getting to that level of play can be difficult for first-timers who either approach it as they would any other unseasoned third-person shooter or attempt to play it with the community-ascribed mechanical gravitas burdening their playstyle, when in reality, the optimal way to play is a mix of both approaches. and when these efforts work, they really do shine brilliantly. there's a certain level of madness here not seen in other third person shooters that i'm sure i'd somehow enjoy even more if i had the chance to play on pc and could use the suits timing to kill more than 3 or 4 bots at a time, something closely resembling a high-octane max payne. fluency promotes fluidity which leads to battleground dominance, and there's enough light weapons experimentation and tactical play stringing the replayable experience along to make the game worth the first run and then some. it's at its best in these sterile futuristic halls as you vault over cover, wipe the floor with three enemies, then in one gambit slide around a romanov to fire a shotgun shell into his achilles heel before delivering a coup de grace with your melee. sam gideon's the most unassuming middle-aged looking guy but you trap him in that gear and he'll have the combat expertise and battle readiness of any other platinum protagonist. you ever seen those first videos of tom brady at the NFL scouting combine where he just looks utterly pathetic running drills? same deal. that's football quarterbacks for ya

it's the melee system here that is one of the most questionable mechanics on offer, so i want to pivot a bit more here to where vanquish fails to deliver, because in so many ways this titles in dire need of a sequel it will never receive. many have pointed out that the melees in this title detract from experimentation because completely depleting your resources seems too harsh a penalty, and i would agree despite what i think the intention might be (i.e. your melee as a desperation move - completely rote). what's more interesting to me is that this highlights a meaningful failure to synergize melee and gunplay together into a cohesive whole from the person who directed resident evil 4. there are shades of what this game could and should have been when you come to learn that sliding melees, when utilized on terrain like cover or walls, will give you enough airtime to fire a few slugs into mechanical skulls at no cost, but these are negligible in the grand scheme of things. considering how many CQC techniques sam uses in the cutscenes this is a bit of a missed opportunity to create some really fun opportunities for combat experimentation. it didn't need to be about space control ala RE4, but it should have been incorporated into the movement as well and i think melee techniques designed to keep momentum going operating in tandem with melee techniques that are about halting momentum to safely deal massive damage could have been a step in the preferable direction

instead we have a repertoire of weapons meant to facilitate said experimentation, which is fine save for two things: the situational tendencies of your armory and the abysmal weapon ranking system. i see no reason to delve too deeply into the first other than to say the assault rifle and the shotgun are consistently two of your best weapons and that you'll probably want the rocket launcher for a bit whenever it comes up. the real problem here is the knowledge that in order to upgrade a weapon, you'll need to either hope an enemy drops an upgrade chip or you'll need to conserve that weapon's ammo entirely and hope you can find an equivalent pickup. for instance, to upgrade an assault rifle, i'd want to not use the assault rifle so i can hopefully, by the grace of god, find three more ammo pickups to slot in an upgrade necessary to make the weapon perform. just utterly baffling, made slightly worse by a strange checkpoint system which punishes these rankings upon death, which conceptually makes sense but given that these aren't meaningfully tied to the (also not good) scoring system they're hardly a galvanizing incentive for players to achieve mastery, either. ironically this whole bit is made worse in the remaster where i quickly learned that, thanks to better load times, instead of using a checkpoint that would reset my ranking, i could simply go to the title screen on a game over and reload my save for a few extra seconds without suffering any debilitations, which further hampers an already dull and arbitrary scoring system

the last point to be made here is just that this game's full of conceptual detritus. i've warmed up a bit more to the premise and tone of the title but it occupies a strange nexus between platinums over the top sensibility and sledgehammer satire (ala madworld) and a westernized gears of war-esque romp. you could liken this narrative approach to something not too dissimilar from metal gear but given the high concept behind the playable supersoldier in question it would have been nice to have something that made a bit more of an aesthetic splash. it's a surprisingly drab game without a lot of memorable hooks beyond the mechanics. making something that was a bit more like neo-human casshern in its flavoring would probably have made this game stood out a bit more, for me, but i think the direction the game went for makes sense considering the context of its development. this game's already as westernized as it can be and you had braingeniuses like arthur gies say, and i quote, "it's repetitive, clunky, and irritatingly punitive. very japanese." how do you get past consumers like that

anyways yet another feather in the hat for the general rule of thumb: the best third-person shooters have 'shinji mikami' somewhere in the credits. sasuga platinum

(edit for posteritys sake: im gonna be chipping away at learning god hard difficulty on my lonesome and i expect some of this review may be untrue by the end, at least with regards to ranking and armory)

another year has come and gone and we're finally on the precipice of E3 again, after the whole affair seemed dead in fetid waters last year! that daunting triple threat of the pandemic, the organization leaking the private details of over two thousand journalists working in the gaming industry, and big-name publishers realizing they can create their own presentations and sizzler reels without a centralized expo to unveil everything at...it should have spelled the end of it all if you ask me, but obviously the trade event's a stubborn bastard. if you're anything like me, you completely forgot E3 was happening this year, so naturally you're a little bewildered and extremely wary.

i've seen most of these shows with friends since around 2012 and they're always horrid wastes of my time but i just keep on attending anyways. the whole things a sisyphean cry for help if you ask me. if you've been around the block, you might have heard of the occasional scandal when it comes time to present a game, and how this presentation often doesn't reflect the final product. just off the top of my head i can name countless instances of this kind of thing - killzone 2, the last of us, cyberpunk 2077, no man's sky, bioshock infinite, destiny, the bureau: xcom declassified, aliens: colonial marines, and so on and so forth. accusations get hurled around using the same tired old jargon - graphical downgrades, scripted events, tech demos, what have you. there's always a glossy veneer of 'too good to be true' in the eyes of many viewers. a lot of these demos and presentations appear conceptually similar and rote (you'll notice this in several of sony's E3 demonstrations) because, as neil druckmann pointed out in 2018, they're nothing more than glorified advertisements - demonstrations of 'real' systems working in tandem to convey authenticity while performing optimally, so as to show the game at its most radiant and alluring. this is the definition of an E3 demonstration that seems the most reasonable, even if it remains an optimistic endeavour as to whether or not everything will make it to the final cut, so to speak.

“So at an E3 demo you take complicated systems that are random and we’re making them deterministic and we play it a lot and rehearse it and choreograph it, so we’re showing off very specific things. But those are all real systems that players will experience when they play the game.”

what makes ryse unique in this regard is simple: all those pejoratives you've heard since time immemorial are apt descriptors for this title. this game offers the rare and unheard of opportunity of being the director and choreographer for a sleek, gleaming, counterfeit E3 presentation. from the moment that you're exposed to the menu's stark and brutalist UI, commonly aped in eighth gen games that had a GAAS element, ryse reveals one of the most sickeningly child-proof games i've ever played. i winced a little bit when i manned a scorpio and felt control wrested from my grasp as the title's obscene auto-aim jerked to life, spasming wildly the instance it detects an enemy hitbox to annihilate. combat borrows heavily from assassin's creed and batman, so every encounter is a bit of a snoozefest as you'll tap the same sequences of buttons rhythmically and efficiently. it actually also reminds me a bit of the lord of the rings games developed by EA redwood shores; your blocks are incredibly lenient, some sequences are overly padded to inflate the runtime of the game, and there's a sense of scale afforded to the experience's delusions of grandeur because it doesn't really stop, it just funnels you from action setpiece to action setpiece. as a crucial contrast, ryse is missing charm. there's none to be found here. the dynamic yet fixed camera angles of the LOTR titles led to some genuinely effective moments, combat allowed for ease of failure yet was easy to pick up and play, and obviously the IP itself brought life to the sometimes dry flavourings of the mechanics. not so in ryse. you'll marvel at the same five or six canned executions against the same five or six enemies across a campaign that feels much longer than it is despite a 6 hour runtime. there's no confidence here beyond a meager multiplayer experience and its admittedly crisp visuals, although they're hardly used to memorable effect. you'll play a mission that, as with dozens of other games, appears to crib from saving private ryan's visual palette, only superimposed on an ancient roman invasion of britannia, and you'll ask yourself if the comparison even registers before an achievement hazily manifesting on your monitor tells you that your brain was correct to subconsciously pick up on the reference. derivative doesn't even begin to describe it. add a limpdick narrative into the broth and the title becomes borderline insulting, it's not worth picking apart but i did laugh a lot at a character saying "son of rome...rise." there are five bosses here, three of them work the exact same, one of them has four phases despite each phase being functionally identical, and the final boss is a three minute long quick time event sequence that, just like the rest of the game's execution inputs, you don't even have to press the right button for in order to succeed. it's the kind of launch title everyone implicitly knows isn't worth it, but websites like ign have a gun to their head, so they can only award a 6/10 or 7/10 when they really mean 3 or 4.

awarded it 1 star instead of 0.5 because i enjoyed some of it the same sick and demented way i enjoyed drakengard. i like to flog myself from time to time what can i say