MatthewSmolnski
5 reviews liked by MatthewSmolnski
Max Payne
2001
"After Y2K, the End of the World had become a cliché. But who was I to talk? A brooding underdog avenger alone against an empire of evil, out to right a grave injustice? Everything was subjective. There were no personal apocalypses. Nothing is a cliché when it's happening to you."
In Max Payne, New York City comes first. We have a few moments just with the city, and the chatter of police scanners cutting through the howling snowstorm, before Max hits us with one of his characteristic delightfully purple parodic noir metaphor.
This might not seem worth noting, given what a tiny slice of the game it is, but I think it's important in the context of how the rest of the game's narrative is portrayed (mostly from Max's narration) and from the rest of Remedy's games that followed in Max Payne's lineage. Control, Quantum Break, and Alan Wake all open with their protagonists and their narration before the world, giving the player no time to form an impression of it outside the lens of our central character. Alan Wake offers the greatest window of time for this at a whopping two seconds before he starts banging on about Stephen King. So Max Payne giving us about a minute of time in snow-covered New York feels almost luxurious in comparison. And then Max Payne barges in, bringing Helheim with him.
I spend so much time pointing this out because any attempt to talk about what Max Payne is doing on any level below the surface makes one sound like a particularly unhinged conspiracy theorist, something that Remedy are explicitly aware of and has playfully prodded at in their future game Control in particular. Part of this is the conscious silliness of the surface-level: comic-sans narration boxes filled with prose so purple it can make fine wine, and, of course, the way the entire story is told through delightful school-play images made from the developers and their friends and family putting on ill-fitting outfits and making silly faces. There is a pervasive charm to all of this that invites luxuriating in it, but I think a common mistake one can make when reading any work is to simply assume that something is thoughtless because it's a bit silly. Remedy was not somehow unaware of the fact that they were a bunch of nerds and their relations playing dress-up, and indeed, lean into it.
The archness, the artifice, and the absolute over-the-top-ness of it all, evokes the tropes and styles it is pulling from so bluntly that it becomes solid in the mind, manifesting into a brick thrown at your face that then falls into your lap, remaining there and weighing on you, never letting you forget what it's doing. From the comic panels, to the tvs throughout the levels playing broad parodies of soap operas, Twin Peaks, and, uh, The News, to Max Payne himself, as he intrudes upon the serenity of New York at the beginning, a noir cliche diving in through the door from one of the better issues of Frank Miller's Sin City (the comic panels and narration and image of a city in white bearing greater similarity to those comics than anything starring Philip Marlowe) and leaving reality covered with bullet holes in his wake.
But here's the thing. He doesn't close the door behind him. And slowly, other things start to creep in.
A superhero with a baseball bat climbs out of a comic strip and into the head of a mob torturer who is a fan of the comic. The apocalyptic snowstorm that blankets the city of New York, and the pervasive Norse Mythology references that litter the game, crawl out of a book about Ragnarok being read by someone in the club Ragna Rock. Max's actions are fed into a news cycle that makes entertainment out of it. The game's genre references become recursive and circular, wrapping in on themselves over and over. Max becomes aware of his own status as a loose cannon cop out for revenge. Mobsters make themselves into occult monstrosities in order to survive. People write fiction. Fiction crawls into peoples' heads, influences them, and through them, the world. And then people carry those ideas back into fiction. People imposing on fiction, fiction imposing on the world. On and on it goes.
It is an imposition the player performs as well. I can't bring too much to the table in terms of the mechanical construction of Max Payne's fantastic moment-to-moment gunplay, as in many ways, the sheer joy of diving in slow-motion through a doorway and riddling an entire room of goons yelling "PAYNE!" full of holes simply speaks for itself with more wit than I could ever manage. However, one thing I do want to mention is something has, to a certain extent, been obscured by successive ports to consoles and phones and back to the PC. Max Payne was a PC game first and, I think, foremost, and understanding this is key to understanding how the game handles checkpoints, or, to be more accurate, how the game doesn't. Autosave points are extremely few and far between, and most deaths will take you back to the start of the level, and these deaths come quickly and mercilessly, with only a single mistake standing between Max and the grave eagerly awaiting him.
Of course, the game does not actually expect you to restart from the beginning of each level every single time. The game expects - an assumption that was reasonable given that this behavior was ubiquitous across Max Payne's contemporaries on the platform - for you to manually save the game and create your own checkpoints from which Max can resume his story after his next future full stop. This seemingly innocuous feature might be the game's cleverest ludic move, as together with fast deaths and often-scarce painkillers demanding a certain degree of trial-and-error perfectionism, the player is put into the role of director, cutting the action when they are satisfied with the scene as it played out. It is a system that imposes storytelling structure onto every aspect of play, including even the act of entering the pause screen to save and reload into its all-consuming storyboard.
On every level of it's construction, Max Payne is a game about stories insinuating themselves, loudly and quietly, into the real, and it's surprising to find the DNA that runs through Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control already fully-formed in (Death Rally aside) the studio's debut title, arguably more deftly and charismatically than any of those later works would manage. The strength of Max Payne is that unlike, say, Alan Wake, all of this is left to crawl around the periphery, only bubbling up very occasionally, allowing the player to put together the disparate images in their head, like a detective attempting to solve a mystery by staring at connected pins on a bulletin board. Indeed, I don't know if I would have the confidence to make this read if not for Remedy's future work pulling on all this stuff much more explicitly. Max comments on some stuff, but not all, and one of the most compelling images the game has to offer eludes his notice completely.
Late in the game, Max is recruited by a shadowy illuminati-like organization known as the Inner Circle, and learns that pretty much everything in the plot stems from their influence, and in particular, from one of their number who manufactured the US Military super-soldier drug that drives the game's plot: Valkyr. In his own piece on the game, critic Noah Gervais explains Valkyr, the hilariously cartoonish green goop drug that has it's origins in a military super-soldier project, as a kind of uniquely video-game pulp that bleeds in from what was typical for video games in that moment, and I would say that is fairly accurate. Where I deviate from Gervais is that he finds Valkyr to be a kind of ancillary element, something that emerges out of the video game milieu of the time rather than an intentional element, and that is where I disagree. Valkyr is a consciously artificial video game trope that begins this video game, in the same way that Max's dead family is a consciously Noir trope that begins this Noir story, created by a US military project run by a member of a secret organization who's headquarters is draped in conspicuous US historical ephemera, from the room looking like the briefing room of the White House, to the Washington Monument replica at the center of it all.
There was something disturbingly familiar about the letter before me, the handwriting was all pretty curves.
"You are in an American world, Max."
The truth was a burning green crack through my brain. The film noir aesthetic, the American comic influence, even the bullet-time mechanics derived from a filmmaker who, contemporaneously, was being consumed by the Hollywood machine making strange twists on the Hong Kong action films he so excelled at.
I was in a cultural world shaped by the hegemonic influence of American fiction. Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of.
Everything after this point, after this moment, is perfunctory. The point is made, the statement is said. As Max would put it, the final gunshot is merely the exclamation mark to everything that led to this point. He fulfills his duties to the game and the genre strangely quietly, defeats the villain, and is taken away in the back of the car, knowing exactly what has, what is, and what will happen.
He releases his finger from the trigger, and then it is over.
Until you start again.
Try Hard Boiled mode or New York Minute mode for the next challenge!
In Max Payne, New York City comes first. We have a few moments just with the city, and the chatter of police scanners cutting through the howling snowstorm, before Max hits us with one of his characteristic delightfully purple parodic noir metaphor.
This might not seem worth noting, given what a tiny slice of the game it is, but I think it's important in the context of how the rest of the game's narrative is portrayed (mostly from Max's narration) and from the rest of Remedy's games that followed in Max Payne's lineage. Control, Quantum Break, and Alan Wake all open with their protagonists and their narration before the world, giving the player no time to form an impression of it outside the lens of our central character. Alan Wake offers the greatest window of time for this at a whopping two seconds before he starts banging on about Stephen King. So Max Payne giving us about a minute of time in snow-covered New York feels almost luxurious in comparison. And then Max Payne barges in, bringing Helheim with him.
I spend so much time pointing this out because any attempt to talk about what Max Payne is doing on any level below the surface makes one sound like a particularly unhinged conspiracy theorist, something that Remedy are explicitly aware of and has playfully prodded at in their future game Control in particular. Part of this is the conscious silliness of the surface-level: comic-sans narration boxes filled with prose so purple it can make fine wine, and, of course, the way the entire story is told through delightful school-play images made from the developers and their friends and family putting on ill-fitting outfits and making silly faces. There is a pervasive charm to all of this that invites luxuriating in it, but I think a common mistake one can make when reading any work is to simply assume that something is thoughtless because it's a bit silly. Remedy was not somehow unaware of the fact that they were a bunch of nerds and their relations playing dress-up, and indeed, lean into it.
The archness, the artifice, and the absolute over-the-top-ness of it all, evokes the tropes and styles it is pulling from so bluntly that it becomes solid in the mind, manifesting into a brick thrown at your face that then falls into your lap, remaining there and weighing on you, never letting you forget what it's doing. From the comic panels, to the tvs throughout the levels playing broad parodies of soap operas, Twin Peaks, and, uh, The News, to Max Payne himself, as he intrudes upon the serenity of New York at the beginning, a noir cliche diving in through the door from one of the better issues of Frank Miller's Sin City (the comic panels and narration and image of a city in white bearing greater similarity to those comics than anything starring Philip Marlowe) and leaving reality covered with bullet holes in his wake.
But here's the thing. He doesn't close the door behind him. And slowly, other things start to creep in.
A superhero with a baseball bat climbs out of a comic strip and into the head of a mob torturer who is a fan of the comic. The apocalyptic snowstorm that blankets the city of New York, and the pervasive Norse Mythology references that litter the game, crawl out of a book about Ragnarok being read by someone in the club Ragna Rock. Max's actions are fed into a news cycle that makes entertainment out of it. The game's genre references become recursive and circular, wrapping in on themselves over and over. Max becomes aware of his own status as a loose cannon cop out for revenge. Mobsters make themselves into occult monstrosities in order to survive. People write fiction. Fiction crawls into peoples' heads, influences them, and through them, the world. And then people carry those ideas back into fiction. People imposing on fiction, fiction imposing on the world. On and on it goes.
It is an imposition the player performs as well. I can't bring too much to the table in terms of the mechanical construction of Max Payne's fantastic moment-to-moment gunplay, as in many ways, the sheer joy of diving in slow-motion through a doorway and riddling an entire room of goons yelling "PAYNE!" full of holes simply speaks for itself with more wit than I could ever manage. However, one thing I do want to mention is something has, to a certain extent, been obscured by successive ports to consoles and phones and back to the PC. Max Payne was a PC game first and, I think, foremost, and understanding this is key to understanding how the game handles checkpoints, or, to be more accurate, how the game doesn't. Autosave points are extremely few and far between, and most deaths will take you back to the start of the level, and these deaths come quickly and mercilessly, with only a single mistake standing between Max and the grave eagerly awaiting him.
Of course, the game does not actually expect you to restart from the beginning of each level every single time. The game expects - an assumption that was reasonable given that this behavior was ubiquitous across Max Payne's contemporaries on the platform - for you to manually save the game and create your own checkpoints from which Max can resume his story after his next future full stop. This seemingly innocuous feature might be the game's cleverest ludic move, as together with fast deaths and often-scarce painkillers demanding a certain degree of trial-and-error perfectionism, the player is put into the role of director, cutting the action when they are satisfied with the scene as it played out. It is a system that imposes storytelling structure onto every aspect of play, including even the act of entering the pause screen to save and reload into its all-consuming storyboard.
On every level of it's construction, Max Payne is a game about stories insinuating themselves, loudly and quietly, into the real, and it's surprising to find the DNA that runs through Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control already fully-formed in (Death Rally aside) the studio's debut title, arguably more deftly and charismatically than any of those later works would manage. The strength of Max Payne is that unlike, say, Alan Wake, all of this is left to crawl around the periphery, only bubbling up very occasionally, allowing the player to put together the disparate images in their head, like a detective attempting to solve a mystery by staring at connected pins on a bulletin board. Indeed, I don't know if I would have the confidence to make this read if not for Remedy's future work pulling on all this stuff much more explicitly. Max comments on some stuff, but not all, and one of the most compelling images the game has to offer eludes his notice completely.
Late in the game, Max is recruited by a shadowy illuminati-like organization known as the Inner Circle, and learns that pretty much everything in the plot stems from their influence, and in particular, from one of their number who manufactured the US Military super-soldier drug that drives the game's plot: Valkyr. In his own piece on the game, critic Noah Gervais explains Valkyr, the hilariously cartoonish green goop drug that has it's origins in a military super-soldier project, as a kind of uniquely video-game pulp that bleeds in from what was typical for video games in that moment, and I would say that is fairly accurate. Where I deviate from Gervais is that he finds Valkyr to be a kind of ancillary element, something that emerges out of the video game milieu of the time rather than an intentional element, and that is where I disagree. Valkyr is a consciously artificial video game trope that begins this video game, in the same way that Max's dead family is a consciously Noir trope that begins this Noir story, created by a US military project run by a member of a secret organization who's headquarters is draped in conspicuous US historical ephemera, from the room looking like the briefing room of the White House, to the Washington Monument replica at the center of it all.
There was something disturbingly familiar about the letter before me, the handwriting was all pretty curves.
"You are in an American world, Max."
The truth was a burning green crack through my brain. The film noir aesthetic, the American comic influence, even the bullet-time mechanics derived from a filmmaker who, contemporaneously, was being consumed by the Hollywood machine making strange twists on the Hong Kong action films he so excelled at.
I was in a cultural world shaped by the hegemonic influence of American fiction. Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of.
Everything after this point, after this moment, is perfunctory. The point is made, the statement is said. As Max would put it, the final gunshot is merely the exclamation mark to everything that led to this point. He fulfills his duties to the game and the genre strangely quietly, defeats the villain, and is taken away in the back of the car, knowing exactly what has, what is, and what will happen.
He releases his finger from the trigger, and then it is over.
Until you start again.
Try Hard Boiled mode or New York Minute mode for the next challenge!
im stunned this version of outrun doesn't get more recognition. it's really pretty excellent, existing as an unabridged remake of outrun in the sega ages budget line for the PS2...but it's more akin to a sequel. the original arcade mode, whether you prefer to play a jpn cabinet or 'overseas', can still be accessed, of course, and there have been a few minor tweaks so as to maximize outrun's tranquil and contemplative atmosphere - checkpoints grant just a few more seconds of bonus time, crashes send you hurtling forward with increased momentum, switching gears is a bit more trouble-free. time and difficulty can also be tweaked as well, so this is really outrun as the ultimate carefree experience. but this iteration also throws in a time attack mode and an 'arrange' mode with three newly implemented remixes of outruns triumvirate of songs that sees you take on a diamond shaped route as opposed to a pyramid. while it always ends in the same way, there are more sights to see and routes to take that make full use of the PS2's capabilities, and sega made the smart decision of re-implementing rivals from turbo outrun. they won't steal your girlfriend this time but they're legitimately challenging foes that offer a bit more nuance to route selection and scoring, especially if one's aim is to take down all seven rivals. in the scenario that you've let the rivals slip, if you want to surpass them you'll have no choice but to follow them through branching paths which often means you wont find yourself taking the same few paths time and time again...it becomes outrun configured as close to pure instinct.
it's probably actually deserving of a 5/5, but ill sit on it for a while; it's obviously not quite as visually appealing and how you feel about your vehicle's size and distance from the camera in relation to the original might vary from one playthrough to the next. still, this is a complete and total iteration of an arcade classic, retaining that 80's spark of adventure and mastery over play-induced zen.
it's probably actually deserving of a 5/5, but ill sit on it for a while; it's obviously not quite as visually appealing and how you feel about your vehicle's size and distance from the camera in relation to the original might vary from one playthrough to the next. still, this is a complete and total iteration of an arcade classic, retaining that 80's spark of adventure and mastery over play-induced zen.
Hong Kong 97
1995
you could play this or you could watch knock off (1998) dir. tsui hark...the choice is yours
Ridge Racer V
2000
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04. kohta / "euphoria"
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last year, I played Astro's Playroom, the PS5 pack-in game. it was ok. i was immensely endeared to the way it posited itself as taking place "inside" your PS5, which i thought was a great conceit for kids to enjoy a prohibitively scarce piece of tech that is being taken out of their reach by assholes like me who aren't so much interested in the games available on it now but in the promise of games to come out in the future (Final Fantasy XVI) while they complain about how bad the Demon's Souls Remake looks.
the most interesting part of it, though, was it's reverential references towards the past of playstation, in ways that sit increasingly strangely with me. Certainly, sony acknowledging that they have a past was a breath of fresh air against their landmark launch title, the aforementioned Demon's Souls remake, speaking to a greater desire to obliterate the past with the gleeful cooperation of myriad voices in the industry. but as a launch title, as something that is designed to get you excited about playstation 5, it feels like a strange foot to put forward, spending so much time in the past rather than on the exciting future playstation 5 has to offer. maybe that's because there is no vision for what the future looks like, certainly not a vision that we'd like to live in. what's coming out for the PS5? what does it have to offer? i can't tell, and astro's playroom couldn't either.
Ridge Racer V is not a pack-in game, but it has the essential soul of one. released in 2000 alongside the playstation 2, the year that Ridge Racer Type-4 rang in ahead of schedule, RRV's jaw-droppingly sick UI, smooth rounded Y2K futurism feels molded around the PS2 and it's dashboard, an atmospheric place that feels most at home in the dead of night when everyone else has gone to bed. the use of the PS2's system configuration aesthetic in the save menu clinches it: this is a game intrinsically linked with the PS2, set inside it just like Astro is set inside the PS5, to such an extent that playing it on emulator felt wrong to me, and compelled me to seek out a physical copy and find a way to hook up my PS2 to a TV that has outmoded it to the point of needing a technological prothesis to facilitate communication between the two. the game's use of a a singular, compact space only enhances this sensation: these are the streets of the PS2, a city of pristine tarmac and glass monoliths that reflect the rays of the sun onto the streets, empty save for the machines that ride through them and give them life.
it is a game not only about the PS2 and why you should feel great about having spent money on one, but also about the promise the PS2 represents, about the future it represents, and what it means to be here. in many ways, this makes it the philosophical antithesis to Astro: a game that never once looks in the rear-view mirror for more than a second.
to underline this point, we must look at the front-cover star: ai fukami. reiko nagase was only in ridge racer for a couple installments, but already her presence was ingrained enough in the minds of ridgeheads that her replacement immediately produced frustration and rejection. but her replacement was purposeful. this is a new ridge racer for the new millennium. we're not going to keep anything, even the fake cgi girl you like.
the racing itself is similar kinesthetically to R4 but in practice feels almost completely different. if R4 was about pushing your machine through ultimately forgiving tracks to hit the front of the pack, then RRV is a game of perfection, of mastery of it's language of curves and bends and aggressive opponents, who no longer exist as obstacles to be passed like the wind but as snarling competitors who can and will leave you in the dust if you make even a single mistake. a single graze against a single wall is all it can take to leave you out of the race: nothing less than fluency can be accepted.
this is the future. this is what it is like. it will not wait for you, and will not carry you forward into it. sink or swim. adapt or die.
and i love it. i'm shit at it, don't get me wrong. this is second only to F-Zero GX in terms of sheer difficulty i've experienced in a racing game, it took me hours to complete the first grand prix on the normal difficulty level, but that's why i like RRV, for reasons quite apart from why I like R4. it's a game that demands something totally different, and something that I relish to give it, a sense of mastery buoyed by the genius decision to repeat curves and straights and corners across multiple tracks, simulating the sense of growing mastery in a series that would otherwise risk bringing you back down to zero with a single new track that doesn't gel with you. even when you're on a new grand prix, you know that corner coming up. you know what to do. you're ready.
it's still really, really hard. but no one said that forging a future, staying alive in it, would be easy. lord knows we all struggle enough in the future we've found ourselves in.
racing through ridge city at night on solitary time attack roads made me strangely sad. not because i wasn't enjoying myself, but because i realized that i miss this. i miss this feeling, the feeling that the future is here and god we are so excited that it's here, i miss the boundless optimism we had about how the internet would change the way we talk and think and connect us like never before, before we started talking about hellsites and posting and post-post-post-post-post-ironic self loathing. i miss the sheer unbridled enthusiasm for mobile phones, of cloud strife in advent children whipping one out being given the same triumphant framing as arthur pulling the sword from the stone. i miss when launch titles were so brazenly about the future instead of desperate attempts to relive the past. despite never playing it till this year, i miss Ridge Racer V. i miss PlayOnline. i miss dot hack. i miss The 25th Ward. i miss The Bouncer.
god, do i miss The Bouncer.
i recognise that this is oxymoronic, contradictory, to pine nostalgically for a sense of anti-nostalgia futurist optimism that burned out two decades prior, but i can't help but feel this. i've become more and more invested and interested in this kind of early 2000s futurism over the past year, and more and more eager to find the way it makes me feel in my daily life. because I think we might have done this to ourselves. i see it in how the people i know who are most jaded about Online are the people who actively seek out people to be miserable and angry at, consciously or otherwise. i see it in how we characterize our phones as evil bricks that siphon away our life even when they offer us the world in our hands. i see it in myself, and the way i engage with this website, hyper-focusing on interactions that make me feel miserable and worthless instead of the majority of warm, lovely people i interact with on here.
i'm not advocating for a removal of critical thought, here. there are critiques to be made of all of these things and reasons for why these resentments and frustrations spring. there are a great many things wrong with the internet - and the world at large - right now. but what i do want is to be more optimistic. i want to find that hope that there is a brighter future, that technology can connect us in ways that are positively transformative, and that we can transcend the now and race into a brighter tomorrow, together.
i've been trying to write a book for...too many years now. it's always in mind - not a single day goes by where i don't pore over it in depth in my head. it's about the world, and how i feel about living in it, about two people who are aware that they are living in the last days of the world and how they come to terms with that. because that's how i feel, all the time. my cringe bio on backloggd i've had for a year now is how i feel: stuck at the end of everything, playing video games. and that isn't necessarily a statement of hopelessness: i do think that the world we live in now is corrupt and evil. but it's only ever the end that i think about, there is never a thought about what comes after. that's why the book has remained mostly unwritten: i don't know how it ends. i don't know what comes after this world. but i think i would like to start trying to imagine it, if i can. to change my perspective so that i do not look on the future with an eagerness for the end, but with an excitement for what comes after that.
i want to find that world. i want to find that tomorrow to believe in, the one that Astro's Playroom couldn't discover, but one far away from the world Ridge Racer V arrived in. i don't think i can find it here, and i don't think i can find it now. but, still. i want to believe in it. because sony computer entertainment sure as hell doesn't.
04. kohta / "euphoria"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
last year, I played Astro's Playroom, the PS5 pack-in game. it was ok. i was immensely endeared to the way it posited itself as taking place "inside" your PS5, which i thought was a great conceit for kids to enjoy a prohibitively scarce piece of tech that is being taken out of their reach by assholes like me who aren't so much interested in the games available on it now but in the promise of games to come out in the future (Final Fantasy XVI) while they complain about how bad the Demon's Souls Remake looks.
the most interesting part of it, though, was it's reverential references towards the past of playstation, in ways that sit increasingly strangely with me. Certainly, sony acknowledging that they have a past was a breath of fresh air against their landmark launch title, the aforementioned Demon's Souls remake, speaking to a greater desire to obliterate the past with the gleeful cooperation of myriad voices in the industry. but as a launch title, as something that is designed to get you excited about playstation 5, it feels like a strange foot to put forward, spending so much time in the past rather than on the exciting future playstation 5 has to offer. maybe that's because there is no vision for what the future looks like, certainly not a vision that we'd like to live in. what's coming out for the PS5? what does it have to offer? i can't tell, and astro's playroom couldn't either.
Ridge Racer V is not a pack-in game, but it has the essential soul of one. released in 2000 alongside the playstation 2, the year that Ridge Racer Type-4 rang in ahead of schedule, RRV's jaw-droppingly sick UI, smooth rounded Y2K futurism feels molded around the PS2 and it's dashboard, an atmospheric place that feels most at home in the dead of night when everyone else has gone to bed. the use of the PS2's system configuration aesthetic in the save menu clinches it: this is a game intrinsically linked with the PS2, set inside it just like Astro is set inside the PS5, to such an extent that playing it on emulator felt wrong to me, and compelled me to seek out a physical copy and find a way to hook up my PS2 to a TV that has outmoded it to the point of needing a technological prothesis to facilitate communication between the two. the game's use of a a singular, compact space only enhances this sensation: these are the streets of the PS2, a city of pristine tarmac and glass monoliths that reflect the rays of the sun onto the streets, empty save for the machines that ride through them and give them life.
it is a game not only about the PS2 and why you should feel great about having spent money on one, but also about the promise the PS2 represents, about the future it represents, and what it means to be here. in many ways, this makes it the philosophical antithesis to Astro: a game that never once looks in the rear-view mirror for more than a second.
to underline this point, we must look at the front-cover star: ai fukami. reiko nagase was only in ridge racer for a couple installments, but already her presence was ingrained enough in the minds of ridgeheads that her replacement immediately produced frustration and rejection. but her replacement was purposeful. this is a new ridge racer for the new millennium. we're not going to keep anything, even the fake cgi girl you like.
the racing itself is similar kinesthetically to R4 but in practice feels almost completely different. if R4 was about pushing your machine through ultimately forgiving tracks to hit the front of the pack, then RRV is a game of perfection, of mastery of it's language of curves and bends and aggressive opponents, who no longer exist as obstacles to be passed like the wind but as snarling competitors who can and will leave you in the dust if you make even a single mistake. a single graze against a single wall is all it can take to leave you out of the race: nothing less than fluency can be accepted.
this is the future. this is what it is like. it will not wait for you, and will not carry you forward into it. sink or swim. adapt or die.
and i love it. i'm shit at it, don't get me wrong. this is second only to F-Zero GX in terms of sheer difficulty i've experienced in a racing game, it took me hours to complete the first grand prix on the normal difficulty level, but that's why i like RRV, for reasons quite apart from why I like R4. it's a game that demands something totally different, and something that I relish to give it, a sense of mastery buoyed by the genius decision to repeat curves and straights and corners across multiple tracks, simulating the sense of growing mastery in a series that would otherwise risk bringing you back down to zero with a single new track that doesn't gel with you. even when you're on a new grand prix, you know that corner coming up. you know what to do. you're ready.
it's still really, really hard. but no one said that forging a future, staying alive in it, would be easy. lord knows we all struggle enough in the future we've found ourselves in.
racing through ridge city at night on solitary time attack roads made me strangely sad. not because i wasn't enjoying myself, but because i realized that i miss this. i miss this feeling, the feeling that the future is here and god we are so excited that it's here, i miss the boundless optimism we had about how the internet would change the way we talk and think and connect us like never before, before we started talking about hellsites and posting and post-post-post-post-post-ironic self loathing. i miss the sheer unbridled enthusiasm for mobile phones, of cloud strife in advent children whipping one out being given the same triumphant framing as arthur pulling the sword from the stone. i miss when launch titles were so brazenly about the future instead of desperate attempts to relive the past. despite never playing it till this year, i miss Ridge Racer V. i miss PlayOnline. i miss dot hack. i miss The 25th Ward. i miss The Bouncer.
god, do i miss The Bouncer.
i recognise that this is oxymoronic, contradictory, to pine nostalgically for a sense of anti-nostalgia futurist optimism that burned out two decades prior, but i can't help but feel this. i've become more and more invested and interested in this kind of early 2000s futurism over the past year, and more and more eager to find the way it makes me feel in my daily life. because I think we might have done this to ourselves. i see it in how the people i know who are most jaded about Online are the people who actively seek out people to be miserable and angry at, consciously or otherwise. i see it in how we characterize our phones as evil bricks that siphon away our life even when they offer us the world in our hands. i see it in myself, and the way i engage with this website, hyper-focusing on interactions that make me feel miserable and worthless instead of the majority of warm, lovely people i interact with on here.
i'm not advocating for a removal of critical thought, here. there are critiques to be made of all of these things and reasons for why these resentments and frustrations spring. there are a great many things wrong with the internet - and the world at large - right now. but what i do want is to be more optimistic. i want to find that hope that there is a brighter future, that technology can connect us in ways that are positively transformative, and that we can transcend the now and race into a brighter tomorrow, together.
i've been trying to write a book for...too many years now. it's always in mind - not a single day goes by where i don't pore over it in depth in my head. it's about the world, and how i feel about living in it, about two people who are aware that they are living in the last days of the world and how they come to terms with that. because that's how i feel, all the time. my cringe bio on backloggd i've had for a year now is how i feel: stuck at the end of everything, playing video games. and that isn't necessarily a statement of hopelessness: i do think that the world we live in now is corrupt and evil. but it's only ever the end that i think about, there is never a thought about what comes after. that's why the book has remained mostly unwritten: i don't know how it ends. i don't know what comes after this world. but i think i would like to start trying to imagine it, if i can. to change my perspective so that i do not look on the future with an eagerness for the end, but with an excitement for what comes after that.
i want to find that world. i want to find that tomorrow to believe in, the one that Astro's Playroom couldn't discover, but one far away from the world Ridge Racer V arrived in. i don't think i can find it here, and i don't think i can find it now. but, still. i want to believe in it. because sony computer entertainment sure as hell doesn't.
If the original Sin & Punishment is Evangelion, then this is Gurren Lagann: sort of a similar thing, but in a more fan-appeasing/pleasing form; a little louder, brasher and self-aware, a little less thoughtful, meaningful and aware of its surroundings - though still leaps and bounds ahead of its contemporaries.
The price paid for this bigger/badder/better package is a bunch of time spent flailing the dodge button to try and get through ambiguous hitboxes of pure particle that obscure your entire view. At times it feels like you’re the victim of a practical joke by Treasure, playing a part in a parody of their shmup excess and the “faster, more intense” aesthetic choices that ruled anime of this era. The decision to give the player unlimited continues and generous moments of invincibility feels like an outright admission that a lot of this is pure bullshit, but it’s hard to feel bad about slotting in another quarter from your boundless pocket when you’re going up against a pod of cybernetic dolphins who’ve decided they’re sick of jumping through hoops and bouncing balls on their noses. While there’s a few too many bosses here who exist to pad this to a longer length than the original, there are still some really memorable baddies and associated cutscenes - big fan of the one where Isa just starts idly blasting a baddie during his big “rule the world” speech.
I approached this via the Dolphin emulator with some trepidation, expecting that using my mouse as an emulated Wiimote pointer would kinda suck, but I was pleased to discover that Dolphin’s a much sturdier creature now than when I last tried to do this sort of thing in the early 2010s. Playing through Star Successor with half an Xbox pad in one hand and my mouse in another was super pleasing, and I actually felt like some crazed cyberpunk badass... I can now empathise with those sickos who play PC FPS games using the same setup…
The price paid for this bigger/badder/better package is a bunch of time spent flailing the dodge button to try and get through ambiguous hitboxes of pure particle that obscure your entire view. At times it feels like you’re the victim of a practical joke by Treasure, playing a part in a parody of their shmup excess and the “faster, more intense” aesthetic choices that ruled anime of this era. The decision to give the player unlimited continues and generous moments of invincibility feels like an outright admission that a lot of this is pure bullshit, but it’s hard to feel bad about slotting in another quarter from your boundless pocket when you’re going up against a pod of cybernetic dolphins who’ve decided they’re sick of jumping through hoops and bouncing balls on their noses. While there’s a few too many bosses here who exist to pad this to a longer length than the original, there are still some really memorable baddies and associated cutscenes - big fan of the one where Isa just starts idly blasting a baddie during his big “rule the world” speech.
I approached this via the Dolphin emulator with some trepidation, expecting that using my mouse as an emulated Wiimote pointer would kinda suck, but I was pleased to discover that Dolphin’s a much sturdier creature now than when I last tried to do this sort of thing in the early 2010s. Playing through Star Successor with half an Xbox pad in one hand and my mouse in another was super pleasing, and I actually felt like some crazed cyberpunk badass... I can now empathise with those sickos who play PC FPS games using the same setup…