Immaculate vibes, man!

I will always have New Leaf as my preferred Animal Crossing game, but after playing this for a bit I really respect the origins of the series. Sure, its more simple, more rough around the edges. But that makes it interesting! It may not have the endless content of New Leaf, but its got a unique feel, I respect that.

I will definitely be playing this more. I may write more detailed thoughts once I play a lot more.

played a round with my gf and here's my notes:
-too many non-disney related questions
-I unlocked a "lilo and stich themed costume" for donald and it was just him with sunglasses
+has clarabelle cow

conclusion: goes crazy if you're 5 years old

There is absolutely nothing like Illbleed.

Illbleed is an absolute achievement. Bonkers. Wild as hell. Absolutely unpredictable in everything its doing. Designed to entertain and fuck with you to a degree I haven't seen a horror comedy joint ever really quite do and only really in the way that a video game can.

Illbleed is a reminder of the kinds of things only video games as a medium can do in the ways in which they interact and interface with the player and the way the player interacts and interfaces with the game. You could adapt The Last of Us, Dead Space, God of War and Final Fantasy XV into a series or film or something. You could NOT adapt Illbleed into anything else.

You could not remake Illbleed and get the same result. You could not make a sequel to Illbleed and have it work the same at all. This is a culmination of absolutely deranged ideas all culminating into a beautiful package at one specific time by one specific team at one specific moment. This shit is special.

Illbleed frankly is fuckin peak. The more I played the more I fell in absolute love with it. It trolled me, it baffled me, it knocked me on my ass and every twist and turn had me waiting for where the fuck this thing was gonna go next.

Sorry to be vague but you should really just play it for yourself and see what this has to offer. I want people who experience it to have the raw experience I had with it. I really wish there was some Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind type procedure so I could wipe my memory and play this shit fresh cause it is such a transcendent and wild experience. I will absolutely never forget it. Don't be afraid to use a guide if ya need to, it's absolutely worth experiencing.

Make sure ya invest in them worm stocks alright?

“It’s is very funny to me that your castlevania journey stalled hard on Symphony of the Night, one of the most beloved and influential games of all time.” These words by a close friend of mine have haunted me for months bro.

Classic Ina Followers may recall that last year I spent the month of November playing every Castlevania game in release order, a project that started when I bought that collection of most of the classic games on a whim and sort of just went to town once I realized how entirely my shit every single thing about the series is. Castlevania’s been something of a blindspot for me – as a kid I played AND QUITE LOVED Castlevania 64 and later Order of Ecclesia, and then specifically Lords of Shadow 2, and maybe a couple years ago I had a really great time with Aria of Sorrow but other than futzing around with the first couple of NES games in a false start at this project that was the full extent of my scattered Castlevania experience.

How much I love Aria really set me up for a surprise then because the reason I haven’t posted about Castlevania in a year is that I actually got through like 60 or 70% of this game right after I finished Bloodlines and I was so entirely turned off that I put it down and just didn’t come back for eleven months. I think if I wasn’t so committed to making this a “play every game in the series” kind of thing I may never have.

BUT I DID THIS WEEK and I ZOOMED THROUGH THIS MOTHER FUCKER and I’m SO TORN BRO. Well, not really, I think actually I mostly just don’t like it, but I hope I can adequately explain why.

Because obviously there is so much to love in Symphony, and so much stuff that’s specific to my personal taste too. Aesthetically, the game is a dream, holy SHIT. Everybody knows how good looking it is, experienced sprite artists taking advantage of the fancy new hardware to push what they’re capable of. You see it everywhere, from obvious stuff like Alucard’s butter-smooth animations to the absolutely METICULOUS details in nearly every background in the game, used to dial up a sense of place and atmosphere in as maximal a way as possible but with a slightly different flavor than we got even from powerhouse games like Bloodlines and Super IV. But I don’t just like how GOOD the game looks, I also like how a lot of the time the game looks kind of messy and bad? There are a TON of reused sprites from Bloodlines in this game and listen man I LOVE Bloodlines but it is a stiffer and more early 90s arcadey looking game. It’s that in a way that suits it but compared to the way original sprites look and move in Symphony things just kind of stand out when they’re contrasted. It’s not just that either – the most realistic visual fidelity the series has seen yet along with a much less strong sense of theming than any of its three mainline predecessors (necessitated, I’m sure, by how much exponentially bigger and more open Symphony is) means they really mash ALLLLL the inspirational shit for this series together in a big soup in a way that feels a lot more overt than ever before. You have grotesque horror imagery, fairy tale mystique, hollywood horror guys, and overt cartoon monsters all chilling in this same castle, and often on the same screens as each other, with no sense of visual cohesion tying them together in a way that just didn't come through as hard on, say the NES.

And I think that fucking rips ass dude. I’m sure I’ve spoken about this in these Castlevania writeups before but I think the fact that Symphony of the Night exists so permanently in the cultural memory as this titanic Important Game that people are still playing, especially with its legendary status in the ever-more-popular speedrun world, that it’s easy to forget that it was at one point a game that like, came out, in 1997, in a moment in history. One where 2D games were spoken of by pretty much everyone as if they were relics on their way out the door. That was surely on the minds of the Symphony of the Night team too, who had this game’s obnoxious 3D cutscenes foisted on them by their corporate managers, who were making a game for the Playstation, a console that’s so powerful but also famously kind of bad at running 2D games, who were surely working on this with the understanding that they may not get many more chances to make a game like this, if they got to make any more Castlevanias like this at all.

You can FEEL this energy vibrating through all of Symphony of the Night; it feels like a swan song, a chance to pay homage to everything everyone loved about every single previous iteration of the series and ALSO to cram in every idea they thought might have been cool in this format before the boss came in and started making people learn how to model skeletons riding motorcycles in 3D. SO there’s just all kinds of weird bullshit in here – yeah sure there’s an input based spell system, uhh puzzles will be tied to the game clock, hide a third of the game behind some really oblique bullshit I promise it will be worth it when they figure it out, oh hey what if the game was an RPG and it had the worst menus of all time. Feels like my man Hagihara simply did not say no to anything anyone asked him if they could put in the game and honestly god bless him.

The addition of Ayami Kojima as the key character artist coupled with a returning Michiru Yamane using the strengths of the Playstation's sound doohickeys (idk shit about that stuff man) to deliver something altogether moodier and synthier than we got from previous Castlevanias create the outrageously intense arch-goth style that people identify with this series for the first REAL time I think. There have always been shades of this, it’s a bit hard to avoid when you’re dealing with the subject matter Castlevania does, and the soundtracks have dipped into this vibe from time to time when they’re not fully rocking out but this is a very distinct artistic shift away from both the original 80s hollywood vibes and the more modern anime stylings the series had leaned on up til this point, and I think these aesthetics suit it really well. It looks and sounds like you made a Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream get drunk at the kind of nightclub where people still do ecstasy.

It’s so fucking boring though. This is the hardest part for me because ON PAPER Symphony is still theoretically doing the kinds of things that I like to see in exploration based games. The castle is huge but the game leads you directly through very little of it, and there are massive chunks of it that have nothing to do or see in them. So often you’ll work your way through some challenging puzzle room or gauntlet of enemies, maybe even fight a boss, and be rewarded with a swords that’s like fifty times shittier than the knife you’ve been rocking for two hours. That’s fine by me, I do like to get a little treat if it’s gonna be something cool or interesting, but I hate feeling like the only reason to explore in a game is to get to the treasure chest or Lore Nugget or whatever at the end of whatever I’m doing. I rarely feel like Symphony of the Night is doing that though, both because the rewards are genuinely terrible almost every single time (including the important ones! There are SO many upgrades and abilities in this game that are just like complete garbage lmao we are truly filling a list we made the castle so big oh piss oh fuck) but also because almost all of the areas in the game are so distinctly designed and full of personality; I WANT to poke around in them, even if I’m always only doing it to soak up the atmosphere and maybe see what kind of big freak I get to stab at the end.

The big problem for me then is that I think the actual act of moving around the castle feels like complete shit almost all of the time. Not the act of moving Alucard – that feels incredible – but the act of moving inside of the space of the castle. I think something was fumbled pretty badly in the transition from tightly designed levels to a big open world that’s intended to be crossed back and forth over many times. There are certainly a lot of cool rooms that offer neat layouts and challenges to overcome, but SO much of this castle is just big hallways with a few guys copy-pasted in them. It’s not like this didn’t ever happen in Castlevania before, but it was way less common, generally speaking, to see enemies just plopped somewhere without a feeling of intent to where and how they were placed, and I think that almost feels like the MAJORITY of enemies in Symphony of the Night. Space fillers. Overwhelming the player with numbers and leaving it up to me to figure out how to deal with it using his robust arsenal and moveset rather than filling the game with more considered encounters. And I understand how that sounds, for sure; by the sounds of things the game had a rushed development as it is, and I think the piece that we got is pretty astounding considering that, but it doesn’t change tedious it is to just get around. And when there IS a challenge that’s satisfying and tough or even just like difficult and a relief to clear, damn I am usually a lot less enamored with them the third or fourth time I have to truck through that area. The Clock Tower is my arch enemy in this game (I was bad at the switch puzzle).

My other big sticking point is that Castlevania is an RPG now but I think this sucks? I think this sucks dude. I so rarely feel like a proper balance is struck in how this plays out. There’s equipment everywhere and it’s all useless. I like finding the secret abilities, that’s cool, but I am not as crazy about filling my inventory up with fifty shirts that all suck ass. The main issue for me though is the way this affects interacting with enemies, where encounters often boil down to getting turbo stomped and dealing scratch damage based on my level or being able to kill guys by stepping on them – rarely does it feel like I’m properly tuned to stretch my resources from one save point to another.

All of this coalesced on my first playthrough when I got to the upside down castle and found that every enemy suddenly killed me in just a few hits and the nature of the designs of every room meant that while things were somewhat cleverly crafted insofar as the upside down layout accounts for all of your abilities, what that actually means is you have to spend a LOT of time as that awful bat or doing your super jump thing and I really just don’t like how any of the extra traversal stuff in this game feels at all! And that was enough for me to take a break that became a couple weeks that became a couple months that became me restarting the game almost exactly one year later. I did finish it this time, but I find that my feelings haven’t changed very much. I just don’t get along with the part of the game where you’re playing it. Which is, unfortunately, basically all of it.

And yet.

And yet there’s that room with the confessional where you can get the good nice guy who gives you the grape juice or the shitty twisted guy who stabs you, but also you can sit in his chair and a lady will show up and SHE might try to stab you and that is also really cool. You can sit in basically every chair in the game except the one you kill at the end and none of them even do anything, except make you look fucking cool. You can look in that telescope and see the guy in his little boat! If you get some peanuts you throw them into the air and you have to catch them in your mouth to get the health boost because I guess Alucard will only interact with peanuts via fun party tricks. If you have your bat buddy equipped and you turn into your bat form he gets really psyched and then when you turn back into a vampire he’s like damn that sucks. There are seemingly infinite little hidden details and skills and secrets tied to equipment and combinations of equipment and certain inputs and shit. Is that the fucking guy from Kid Dracula? I think it is the fucking guy from Kid Dracula. There are so many greebly little details stuffed into this game for seemingly no reason at all other than that it would be cool to have them in there, and it’s truly impossible not to be charmed by them.

I’m similarly charmed by the story, as scant as it is. I think the character sketches here are strong, and while Maria is pretty swagless here these are the coolest takes on Death and Dracula so far easily. I even think the localization is good, like sincerely I think this is a very fun script with a strong sense of character that matches the tone of the rest of the game. Some of the voice actors are certainly weak links but you’re not gonna catch me saying SHIT about the guy doing Dracula here he is fucking EATING. I think the only time I actually laughed because the game caught me on something silly was when Alucard hit us with that fake Edmund Burke quote in the ending; I guess whatever else he was up to in his exile, Alucard was making sure to keep up with 1700s British politics.

I hope that when I get some more distance from Symphony of the Night that’s the stuff that stands out to me. The verve and playfulness on display here; the expansive lineup of Guys, the beautiful background art. I worry that it will be the bad vibes, which I tried my best to resist. I wanted to like this game more than I did but at some point I had to give up the goat and admit to myself that this was the first time I had ever just really wished I wasn’t playing the game while I was in the middle of it. I know a lot of the big players on this team will go on the be involved in like fifty more games iterating on the foundation laid here, and I know for a fact that I really love at least one of them, so I do hope this one’s a fluke. But even if Symphony is a personal low point for me, that’s like, that’s pretty good right? I guess if this is how I’m feeling about one of the most beloved and influential games of all time then we’re in a pretty good spot, right? Only up from here I’m sure.

NEXT TIME: CASTLEVANIA LEGENDS

LAST TIME: BLOODLINES

"As for military or state violence, I feel like that’s the purest crystallization of a type of legalized murderlust. It’s so completely farcical in the way the stated purposes (defense, security, etc.) differ from the actual outcomes. It’s a libidinal death cult with a serious bureaucratic veneer. The scene that it sets for our everyday life interests me. It’s like an ever-present background radiation of evil." - Ville Kallio in an interview you can read Here

I wrote a sort of strange poem about this game Here you can read. This was during that period of time when a lot of people were doing reviews as poems and I thought they were mostly lyrical and quite bad because it was all based on rhyming or strict meters, which is totally fine. I've created a controversy around myself of being judgemental of other peoples writing, but if you're going to practice and even do it poorly, you might as well do it here. Especially with comments off so people don't bug you. The reason I was only ever annoyed with it to begin with was anger management issues as a result of binge drinking and also overusing the site too much at the time, both things I've gotten a lot better about. Recently about a week ago I finally came to terms to myself as somebody who has in a very real sense been battling alcohol addiction for a long time, admitted to myself and to my real life community I actually struggle with alcoholism, and slowly taking steps towards self betterment and eventual sobriety there. So I want to somberly apologize for the hostile and standoffish precedent I created around me in relationship to that here, even though we are a while out from the last time I stepped on anybodies toes here.

This may be a strange note to start a review of Cruelty Squad (2021) on, but its a necessary one for a few reasons. The first is that to give off the impression I'm a detached observer merely 'peering into' the text from above, as some figure of authority goes against one of the main things the text is actually 'about'. Several times the established person running an organization of authority in cruelty squad blurb at you, in funny memetic ways that illustrate to you that they do not actually have their shit together, and are using their social authority to disguise that fact.

"I've been getting really into "hell". Both as a mindset and as something to strive for in an organisational sense."

"I'm the most powerful person in this room. I control this situation. Everyone's dancing to my tune..."

"I have thousands of followers. They say im blacksuppositoried and debased."

Some of us that are in charge of something think exactly like this. Anybody who has run their own discord or had a 'social media presence' definitely has this 'toying' psychology baked in deep. Occasionally this 'decisionality' is thrust onto you, for instance by making a semi successful game, the creator of Cruelty Squad, Ville Kallio, has opened a portal for themselves they cant close. They are now the 'center' of something, and probably had some of these same issues in the physical art community of being a 'worship statue'. They even admitted to this in the interview I quoted at the beginning.

"Sacrificing your friends to develop your CEO mindset so you can finally ascend to primordial-financial godhood. I feel like these things have sort of leaked into my own life, as I had to start a business due to the success of the game. I was reading Goethe’s Faust and it made me feel like I’ve accidentally made some sort of infernal pact at some point during development, which resulted in all of this. "

Problem is, if you identify with this feeling too much, you start thinking of yourself as a 'moderator of thought' and begin to think in ways the prior quotes from the game show. We have to ask ourselves, how is this way of thinking any different from the weird misogynist Pick Up Artistry thinking that these people don't 'deserve' your glory and should actually bow down to you? How easily can we divorce the world of middle management from larger systems of violence? Rather than using this power as a pure commercial toolset, Ville in the discord server for the game made it incredibly clear that transphobia will not be tolerated. You have to frontload yourself like that or you do completely self isolate and go CEO mindset. I could theoretically ditch all my friends tomorrow into a toxic sludge pit, alienate myself and start working on my Grindset and get a bunch of people to worship my every word. Make one of those stupid fucking paid to use discords. Pimp my patreon out constantly. Treat my connections with people in terms of a career path and not just people I like. Sometimes people say I'm one of the best writers on here and it freaks me the fuck out. It freaks me out that I self gloating something to that effect a few times to. The internet normalized all of these more primal urges to Control the world of violence around you. It's fucked. I mean for instance if you use the internet long enough you stop referring to other people as people, you start calling them 'randoms'. It's ok to be mad at commenters and guess their IQ levels when they even slightly annoy you or get on your nerves. It's ok to get so angry with people for doing something you don't like and letting your friends hang them out to dry for it publicly. It's ok to antagonize people with kindness just because they were mean to you once. Look I got the damn comments off in here. That's not because I'm afraid of you, its because I'm afraid of myself dude. I've done all of this stuff before and seen others do it on here. It's embarrassing.

There's this frustrating issue in videogame discourse in which, in order to try and self justify our time to ourselves, we talk about games as 'cultural objects' rather than effective experiences that change our way of viewing things. Most of this is the result of the 'video essay' style catching off like commercial wildfire, and thus imparting some sense of commercial value to the idea that you can 'speak around' videogames as literary texts. I believe the other big result of that is that we all sort of learned from having to undo the 'videogames as vehicles to violence' argument for a long time (and sometimes still do) that, crucially the connection between play and real life behaviors is thin. Gamers went through this moment where they had to learn about cultivation theory as much as they could to ward this stuff off but the problem is that by doing that we sort of nullified ourselves from getting into any sort of public political wanting. This desire to absolutely affirm that a game cant cause real life violence caused us to neuter our own discourse before it could really grow. We are just passive soyjacks playing with blocks in the cornor. We fucking infantalized ourselves through self domestication.

So that's part of the problem. The other part then is to try and get away from this we dont talk about this art form as 'things we learned' partially because learning from art is cringe, learn from academic Journals you room temp IQ having freak. When we do interpret a game text, we will interpret both the front and the back to the point it spoils the magic for others. For instance every video I've seen on Cruelty Squad that takes the work seriously can't help themselves but 'compare' the endings and try to analyze a discreet meaning from them. The game is set up like an ARG where the further you slip in the weirder you learn the world is (for instance a creation myth people believe in that own homes is literally about owning a home). It makes sense, because we were all taught to do this as a book report in school and shit, but it doesn't always translate cleanly to games. Videogames are a continuous act function you experience and push through. It's not like a movie where you merely just 'watch'. There's a reason why one of the most enjoyed novels in game enthusiast (watch out with that term buddy, Gamergate will start knocking on your door) peoples favourite book is House of Leaves, its because its a book you physically travel through, have you fight with to keep reading. You have to hold it sideways, sometimes you have to warp a few pages backwards for a bit. Videogames as narratives, even continuous ones and simple, are more like Choose Your Own Adventure novels, and you so don't see people asking you to analyze those right.

So it ends up putting Cruelty Squad in this awkward and frusterating temporal space, where on the one hand you really want to dig into the niche leftism that Cruelty Squad is existing. Where it pokes fun at stuff like veganism being connected to purity culture issues for instance. But you can't do that without everyone being on the 'same page' about it first and so now you have to back up and address that problem first. The lore of Cruelty Squad being so dense that you want to see somebody break into the mechanics of the story and figure out who the 'real villian' of the mystery is. But since we cant really get into all that without looking psychotic and freaky we just gleefully poke at each other to make the first move. Yet, art isn't about a 'really good conversation' or solving the damn mystery for everyone though. Art is an experience that usually wants to tell you stuff and make you reshape your world a little. I didn't get the other endings of cruelty squad because I'm not that obsessed with the game in that way. The internet can slowly teach you that people like me are normies and shouldn't open their mouths until they 'really beat it'. I know about the fucking Nick Land and Bataille references ok, I read a bit of these people but we dont need to pose as philosophers or completionists to talk about art and the world.

Cruelty Squads level Androgen Assault made me rethink the way I consider the police and the fascism associated with it. None of the police talk to you, they instantly fight you, but you learn throughout that level that the place is a horrifying cult with people testing on each other and the prisoners to Absurd limits. This is blunt and flagrant, your briefing even says that Magnus, head of the narcotics department, is testing on people and making shit difficult for everyone. It's a hard and uncomfortable level. The hallways are way too long. Everyone is running in slow motion. It made me rethink about the police as basically a grooming organization for people lost in their early life. They slowly teach people to repress everything, be violent, and fuck peoples lives up. That doesn't happen overnight, and its only upheld by baking people in the culture of fear and adult bullying. I hate these macho pricks, but they aren't some 'visceral' decision, they are a chemical nightmare scenario. The building for a precinct in the town I live has a few different things.

1. A viewable office from the street: So I saw what the inside of one of these guys offices looks like and its very drab and depressing

2. A plaque on the side dedicated to a confederate doctor

3. A giant fucking face construction on the side of the building, very similar to The headquarters of Mussolini's Italian Fascist Party (1934)

I thought about that stuff as I was working with a fucking horrible hangover today. I saw a bald pig on my way home from work near the bus starting some scene. I know now that this is a lifestyle the mother fucker was tricked into, and I learned it from a game, non verbally. I still hate the dude and would resist him but he was 'constructed', he doesn't have some sort of primal genetic code that made him join the Cop Cult. He's not some sort of low T brainlet normie NPC like the internet tries to convince me of. Just as much as women aren't fucking 'femoids' or any of this greasy internet dungeon speak. A lot of the internet sort of teaches you to dehumanize people like this, and not see where the violence is coming from. It's something you have to sort of unlearn one day at a time. Cruelty Squad is willing to meet you there. Today I this all hit me and I realized I don't want to moderate my fucking friends and stepped down from running a discord as a big attention seeking thing. I can't run around with a chip on my shoulder like that. There's a lot of great levels in Cruelty Squad that reillustrate facts like this, home ownership, office culture, reconstructing a scene of violence and blithe anxiety in a new way. That's art. Thats life. That's why I reccomend this fucking game.

Everyday is actually a battle, but until I die I will actually wake up and fight that battle till I'm snuffed out for good.

Control Valve Companion

CW: Transphobic Discourse, Bad Relationships, Alcoholism, Brief Mention of Suicidal Ideation

Venus Meets Venus (2014) is interesting in the fact that it feels like such a specific cultural object from 10 years ago. It's interfacing with a greasy and failed relationship of a cis lesbian dating a transwoman, 10 years ago. Basically in a time period where talking about that stuff was still out of bounds. Shockingly its hard to believe this, but for transwomen being spoken of in a large cultural group as these 'objects to have strong opinions on' didn't really catalyze until about 3 years ago with J.K. Rowling posting her (J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues) [https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/] (2020) essay.

So this whole discussion is a major sidebar but hear me out before you skip this paragraph. The important thing you have to know here is that even me interfacing with this post now would be dumb if we are just talking about Rowling and what shes doing. Sadly¹ the best reference point to make that point is that of a youtube video by detailed independent journalist Shaun over in the video "JK Rowling's New Friends" (2023) in which among lots of other things he points out that Rowling has some fairly extreme ties to the gender critical movement and the ways in which shes shaking hands with ultra conservative figures and supporting their desires to see shelters for trans people actively closed down. In most ways this concern trolling about Rowling being 'maybe not the worst for saying what she said' is completely out of date by design, and Shauns coverage in general points that out. Most news coverage is not like 'hey its no longer about what these people are saying, but what they are doing' because transphobia gets more clicks. This is not just Rowling specific by the way, there was a similar issue going on with the treatment of Dave Chappelle actually. Chappelle has been getting that similar concern trolling treatment all throughout the bookending of his own transphobic specials, which as you know pulled the Netflix development team into striking for a while, all the up to his most recent special. I don't even think its worth either of our time for me to go and find the name of those specials and talk that stuff out, because Chappelle being bad about trans people is literally not that important (and I'm saying this as a transfemme). You know what is important? When the dude threatened to block a housing proposal at a local commitee by pulling out a lot of money. That's actual horrifying news but that doesn't get clicks! It's the biggest deal about Chappelle to me, and a blip on most peoples radar. This is the problem, for most people everything exists on the level of a few words said wrong and not on the level of actually bad stuff happening.

This is what I mean, most of this stuff I just mentioned is literally out of date in the sense that a metric fuckton of cultural movement and politics has been happening even since then. It's only been Three Years since that particular event, and if your trans like me this probably comes as a shock, for us with all the stuff going on it feels like 10. So I can't sit here and show you all the awful shit going on in the world with that. That has to be something you learn about somewhere else, not from a random post on a wimpering social media website like this. But importantly, it puts into context why Venus Meets Venus is as culturally important as it is, its from 2014. The dynamics were more innocent, and most people thought that the only 2 things trans people were worried about was the trans panic defense and online TERFs. Even here Venus Meets Venus functions as a fracturing point actually and a rather important one, it illustrates through being so well written that relationship issues are a huge problem to. Even then we had a lot of terrible stuff we were dealing with, but we didn't really know about it like, statistically or whatever.

See the more 'economic' side of this was uncovered in "He Fucked the Girl Out of Me" (2022, Talyor McCue) which needed a bunch of statistics about how transfemmes have the harshest wage gap of any gender group we have census data on, and the trans panic defense needed to wear off a bit. Back in 2014 we just had 'feelings', really sapphic and confusing feelings about 'others'. If Venus Meets Venus shows anything then, its that through the thoroughness of its prose and broken bar relationship that being a 'good ally' is not being a good person in a relationship. There's a very profound passage where the main character asks her partner if she wants to go to the trans march, and she politely declines. It immediately becomes this prodding 'why' moment, you went to the dyke march after all and frusteratingly as a reader you're never given a 'good' reason as to why not. What would it have been? She passes, does she not want other trans people to see her as clocky? Does she not want to be 'seen'? Is she worried that she might be murdered by police or something? You're not really given an answer, nowadays she might have had one, but in that time period, in 2014, no was just all there was unless you were especially educated about the windows being broken and I mean come on, I was out in 2014 and the main thing I was thinking about with my crush on a homeless transfemme. Coercing your girlfriend into doing stuff they doing want to do, and pecking them into activism for their minority group more is not ok, and through the main narrator you learn that. It hits like a truck.

Thus in a beautifully put way you learn one of the most important struggles that LGBT people face: we are made the victim fairly often of other peoples maladaptive enthusiasm and have to watch ourselves about falling into it with each other. Maladaptive enthusiasm is the main theme of the work, and it hits like a truck. For me if I had to describe it, its basically the concept of loving somebody through your desire to 'help them out' and get them out of a rough spot. You other them as an object of political desire rather than romantic thoroughness. A desire for active and continuous solidarity that can rather franticly overwrite your other emotions and desires. For instance I had an extreme crush on my now transmother who was going through a housing crises at one point. I get her some basic nessecities from CVS once and shipped it to her, and obviously it put me in an emotional spot where my crush on her was getting toxic and out of hand. I was messaging her constantly to make sure she was ok, would actively tell her my worst intrusive thoughts, etc. which catalyzed into an event where I upset her by saying I was thinking about offing myself (this is years ago, I'm fine now). Demanding an intense emotional care from somebody who was in no place to give that. Soon after that happened, I realized I was trans myself and thats how I came out. This is actually the most chill version of this I can publicly talk about, in part because we have such a powerful and loving relationship now without the need for active check ups. This didn't happen immediately. I had to go take a year smoke break with myself and take a really long look in the mirror.

This acts then as the ultimate criticism of the piece. You can hurt people and have a point of healing happen with them later on, but the way this work frames that is as something that happens over a single night with a wine bottle and some tears. But especially once you do something outrageously hurtful (as is revealed in this text) you can't just cry it away. You need to take inventory of yourself and walk it off for a year or two. It's on this same note that I want to say that I'm not that far from becoming other peoples political projects rather than just as a person with some demons I'm fighting. For instance I tell most when I first meet them that I'm a transwoman, but I keep the fact that I'm plural and an alcoholic behind the teeth. Especially that second one. Because the moment people hear stuff like that they feel catalyzed to make a decision 'about me'.

Do I make this person my 'project' or do I discard this person as a result of these factors being 'too demanding' to put up with. Yet, I do everything in my power when these facts come up not to make it other peoples issues. This work operates as a tragic example of how barrelling into this way of thinking about us does us a disservice and dehumanizes us and allows you to act more vile. I would say this is a very necessary warning story, with an albeit awkward reunion note I don't agree with, and since it depicts a time in which trans people weren't a constant fox news paranoia, its actually worth playing through at some point despite this blunder.

Recently I've been opening up to people in the city I live about these other facts, and they still proceed with love in their hearts towards me with adjacency and not active doting. This powerful form of love, a love via adjacency, is likely necessary in order to build healthy relationships with people. I think we should help each other, but the political projects should happen on the street level, and not through courting. Highly recommended work of fiction, and extremely empowering to the concept that relationships for LGBT people can start out normal, but if you can overcome the occasional edginess of this text (for instance the 'counting chapter narration openers' for each section) there's a powerful few things to gauge from underneath. In a way, I think this text is a lot less about queer mistreatment, and a lot more about how bar romance seem to be the mecca for maladaptive enthusiasm, and even if you don't find time to play it (its only about a half hour read), it's best to try and actively keep suspicion of that pronged understanding of others in your life. Communicate your barriers and take inventory of your emotions when you can. Don't toss people away just because they have 'problems' c:

A timepiece to a sense of nostalgia I have no relation or memory of having, but I can still feel through the work itself. A delightful story with twists and revolutions that constantly shifts the player's interpretation of the story as it goes on. It is rather short and simple, but the story is worth it for home much impact it made in such as short time. Puzzles can be a bit questionable, some being fun, others being tedious, as well as having a bit of a "guide dangit" when it comes to specific triggers and collection points. As well, the game could be a bit slow to work through, as you somewhat move pretty slow. All in all, the story and characters are a real hit and make the experience all worth it.

Written September 17, 2011

For the past 9 months I have been playing Borderlands. After acquainting myself with its niches and quirks, playing through all of the Downloadable content, searching for the best guns, grenade mods, shields, abilities, fighting through every boss, and doing the best I can to defeat the single most difficult enemy in the entire game (it's impossible to do it on your own), I can now comfortably review Borderlands in its entirety. Though it can be played as a single-player game, Borderlands is best enjoyed with at least one other person. Playing by yourself is the least interesting way to play Borderlands and is not recommended at all. Part of the fun of the game comes with dicking around with teammates and making wise cracks at your friends about how much they suck at the game. I'm serious.

Gameplay
I have been known to describe Borderlands as the inverse of Fallout. While Fallout is mostly an RPG with Shooter elements, Borderlands and mostly a Shooter with RPG elements. And that's where the comparisons to Fallout end. Borderlands is quite unique in its execution of gameplay. It's a fast paced Shooter with a fair share of explosions, vehicles, alien creature things, Challenges for killing X alien creature things or killing X enemies with X type of guns, class-specific skills, leveling, and Critical Hits. The game controls much like a Call of Duty title, in terms of button layout on the XBOX 360 controller (and yes, I only reviewed the XBOX 360 version. Owning multiple copies of the same exact game on different systems is for people who hate having fun), and needless to say it works. The only thing that would be new to a CoD player would be the Action Skill, which is Class-specific and bound to the Left Bumper, and the D-Pad used for weapon swapping between (up to) 4 equipped weapons.

Each class has his or her own Action Skill. The Soldier deploys a turret that, with upgrades can shoot a barrage of bullets, shoot rockets, heal players, regenerate ammo, and help up a downed ally. The Siren's Action Skill turns her invisible, allowing her to move at an incredible speed through enemies. She can also use the skill to attack an enemy with a Force Push-like melee attack. The Hunter summons a Bloodwing (which is a very deadly bird) that attacks an enemy by basically mauling their face off. The Berserker's Action Skill will not only heal him, but cause him to -- you know, go berserk. In Berserk mode, you can run up to people and punch them in the face repeatedly until they go plop. Each action skill can also be upgraded to have elemental effects from Artifacts.

Guns can also have elemental damage. Every gun you find in the game is randomly generated on the spot (except for a few key weapons, but even then those have variations). In addition to the random chance for certain guns to have scopes, or large magazines, or low recoil, they also have a chance of doing elemental damage. Every gun has their own manufacturer and each manufacturer has their own special rules to their guns. For example, Maliwan only manufactures elemental guns, while Jakobs never manufactures elemental weapons. Certain manufacturers will have certain styles, like white guns from Atlas, or red guns from Hyperion. Often times I simply can't find the a gun with the specs I'm looking for, but once I do, I never let go... Until of course I find a better one.

Grenades and shields also have their own traits based on the manufacturer. There are various grenade types, though Transfusions are very helpful in stealing enemy health to replenish your own. Additionally, healing shields are good, but often times have low amounts of actual shielding. There are also class mods that can add to your Class' skills depending on the type of Class Mod.

Story
The story is nothing special and isn't really necessary to enjoy the game, but I could never feel like I was actually part of the Borderlands universe. Missions are given and you can accept them, but any backstory is written in text, and this being a fast paced shooter and all, I simply couldn't be bothered to do that. All I ever really did was go to where the checkpoint told me to go, finish the checklist, return to the quest giver, and collect my rewards. I never even knew why I was doing the missions or for what reason they needed to be done, I just did them. No, I will not go so far as to say that it's a social commentary on how people will take any job so long as there is a reward. I will not excuse Gearbox for not including a "Read This Text To Me Because I'm a Lazy Bum" option.

Downloadable Content
There are 4 pieces of DLC for Borderlands. The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, and Claptrap's New Robot Revolution. A main issue I have with the DLCs is the pure lack of a Fast Travel system I had grown accustomed to using throughout the main game. Monotony is an understatement here. There is nothing I enjoy less than traveling for 15 minutes in a video game to pick up a quest, only so I can travel 15 minutes back to do the quest, and then another 15 minutes to hand it in. Then there's Mad Moxxi's lack of a save feature, forcing you to either complete the round, or be forced to restart that entire Colosseum. Not to mention that an entire Colosseum play through of just 5 rounds can last a good 3-4 hours. And the "It Stopped Being Cool 50 minutes ago" Moxxi theme song doesn't help. To be entirely honest, the only reason I bought Moxxi was because of the Bank feature which lets you store some of your items. Oh, and you get no experience for killing enemies either, so if you thought Moxxi would be a good, easy way of leveling up, you were wrong.

Verdict
As long as you have someone else to play with and go 50-50 on the DLC (unless you're not like me and waited for the Game of the Year Edition, and in that case I hate you), I recommend Borderlands and most of its DLC. The game can be fun if played with others and is satisfying when your weapons don't suck.