Originally posted here: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cfso_vnA-FE/

An autobiographical story of a transgender woman and her traumatic experiences with sex work. Personal and intense in its prose, abstract in its presentation. Defamiliarization and impersonation as representation of the coping mechanism, with a melancholic, surreal sea of consciousness bringing life to fuzzy, drowned memories. And a fitting pixel-art aesthetic - not just a stylistic choice born from lack of resources but the representation of the raw feelings of an innocent, hurt mind

Hey there! I’ll be honest, I don’t have a great deal of interest in talking about Elden Ring in any formal capacity. If someone wants to pay me to do it, I might, but no-one likely does. :/

Anyway, instead of a write-up, I’m just gonna list my 10 favorite proper nouns in the game.

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10. Vulgar Militiamen (keepsies on this one for my future hardcore punk band)
9. Shabriri Grape
8. Ancient Death Rancor
7. Morgott, The Omen King
6. Flame, Fall Upon Them (the choice to make spell names full sentences is always sick, regardless of property)
5. Fingercreeper
4. Land Squirt
3. Albinauric Bloodclot (I would ride around on Torrent just mouthing “albinauric bloodclot” a lot)
2. [Bastard’s Stars](https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Bastard's+Stars)
and finally, 1. Godskin Stitcher

Alright, bye!!

Haze's narrative is really cool, actually. A lot of people give Spec Ops: The Line credit for being the first game to really deconstruct the uber-patriotic, gung-ho military-nationalist psychopathy that had become present in games ever since the preset set by Modern Warfare 2 (ironic, given that COD4 had a staunch anti-war and anti-Bush message in the form of the fantastic nuke scene), but to my memory, it was actually Haze that was doing this even before MW2 even came out. The plot seemingly revolves around a conflict between the Mantel supersoldiers and the Promise Hand rebels, but in actuality, the plot actually revolves around Nectar, a drug that turns you into a killing machine at the cost of chipping away at your humanity.

The fact that Mantel's supersoldiers are actually a bunch of college frat boy psychos was a pretty brilliant decision - not only does it give Haze a kind of satirical undercurrent of black comedy, but it makes the message actually somewhat profound. They may be crazy frat boys, but they're just that, dumb college kids that were forcibly given a powerful drug that made them way stronger than they were ever equipped to handle, and it turns them into apex-predator monsters. Mantel isn't even fighting the Promise Hand out of any sense of xenophobia or anything, they just want the fields that the Promise Hand fight on because they can produce more Nectar in these fields. The war is just an excuse to engineer more wars, and like-- fuck, that's actually so cool, man! The fact that the main villain's final words are "don't tell my mom" (one of my favorite famous-last-words quotes in like, anything, ever) is not only incredibly sad and humanizing, but a genuinely profound anti-War message that ties beautifully into the game's themes.

Yeah, too bad the game is fucking shit, because the narrative rocks. But the game plays like trash. 2/5.

I probably didn’t need to add a full hour of playtime to this one hour game just grinding at the arena, but listen, what was I supposed to do? LET Doose hurt small businesses through his monster summoning, in some pathetic hunt for tourism? If Star Hollow falls, Lorelai would have to move back in with Emily and that be trapped in that abusive house all over again! Besides, getting Rory leveled up enough to use the game’s only master seal is the experience she needs if she’s gonna get to Harvard.

I’ve never watched Gilmore Girls. This was fun.

I love everything about this game, but especially Maria; disparagingly referred to by some as this game's easy mode, when the reality is her more free flowing movement just tests a very different skill-set to Richter whilst acting as the perfect bridge-point between the rigid, planned-out pathing of the Classicvanias and the more fluid motion we'd come to see from Symphony of the Night onwards. Whilst I can respect the strict jump arcs and very intentional movement of the older Classicvanias for what it is, I have to admit I find Maria's more modern movement sensibility here just much more fun to play with in basically every regard.

Shout-out to the kitschy cut-scenes and hyper-kitschy voice acting, and especially the orders of magnitude more kitschy that these get when you're playing as Maria (that ending, gods), and a bonus special shout-out to the stage names which are almost all just metal as hell (Dinner of Flames; The Vengeful King of Bloodshed; Atop the Corpses of Thy Brethren; Hear Now the Requiem of Blood).

Making a big choice based narrative rpg game seems like a nightmare in ambition and effort. These kinds of projects require an intense workload and consistency across a whole team. Writing all these competing factions that are (ideally) well-written, building a decent stat system, ensuring all these systems mesh together, making sure its all FUN by the end of it all... its a huge task! I don't envy the sheer effort it all took.

I think its inevitable, under these conditions, that a game like this turns out to be rife with bugs. In fact, I think sometimes you need a game to have bugs. As much as some people may crave a perfect, fully immersive experience, I think the real heart of video games is laughing at a goofy glitch. And its a good reminder to an audience just how difficult it is to make a video game. They dedicated hours and hours of craft to force these disparate programs to play nice together, here's the stuff that slipped through the cracks. There's a sincerity to the flaws. Its almost community building in a weird way. We're all enjoying our passion for games here, why not share that awkward passionate sincerity alongside the devs, rather than against them?

And god damn can you feel the sheer weight of this studio's passion in this game. Troika studio was collapsing as this game was rushed out the door, but the team cared so much for the project, they worked on community patches to help even out the flaws they couldn't fix in house. In the decades since the game's release, the fan community built a more elaborate patch with rediscovered lost content, quality of life features, and little touches for a better experience. I could ramble about the clever writing or how the different upgrade systems add a specific challenge and thrill to the game, but it really comes down to four words: the game is fun! Its just fun to play! Playing all the politics, maneuvering different clever set-pieces, its all fun to dig your teeth into.

The two main flaws of the game are more issues of the time it came out and the nature of production. In the latter case, the final hours lose the game's perchant for multiple solutions to problems and kind of descend into endless corridors of enemies. I've heard some modern complaints lodged at new narrative rpgs for letting you talk down endbosses or things, claiming it means your villains don't actually stand for anything. While I understand that critique, I'll take that any day over the absolute slog that is the final hours of this game's combat. The combat is at its best in short chunks. Relying on it too much makes for a more exhaustive experience.

The other problem is, well, it is an 00s game. Split personality storylines, weird asian stereotypying... This is all coupled with a tendency towards some edgelord dialogue. I generally tried to play my character with the mentality of "bro i just work here." My character's been a vampire for like two days and the game wants me to be saying lines like "you will bow before ME, mortal!"

This is particularly noticeable when dealing with Heather Poe. The game gives you the chance to give a dying woman some blood. This is a clear good guy action to do. Save the human, gain some humanity back. Well, things aren't that simple. Giving a human vampire blood quickly makes them an addict. Heather quickly tracks you down and leaps all the way into putting herself in the role of slave. She calls you master, she offers you her college fund, she starts luring victims to your apartment, you can demand that she change her appearance... the whole situation is profoundly fucked. While the game does let you try to treat Heather gently, its all with an air of condescension. I'm not allowed to say "hey girl, wanna hear about my work day?" The options are all "Ah yes, you have been a good loyal pet." The writing is inclined to being a cool edgy vampire who's just better than humanity. That's excellent for that kind of roleplayer, but sometimes I want my character to just be a normal guy. I guess that speaks to a wider problem in video games though. Video games are inherently designed for the player. You will always be the big special person who everything revolves around.

Still, the game is a cult classic for a reason. There was love put into this game, from both creators and fans. The VTM universe is a complicated world and putting that system into a video game was a huge challenge to begin with. The fact this managed to pull it off despite everything going against it is truly a marvel.

what exactly is "friction"? the backloggd community frequently evokes this term to describe a wide array of moments and mechanics, yet without any sort of ontological basis to unify disparate uses of the term. I don't seek to define any axioms regarding the term, but I would like to take the opportunity of my completion of freedom unite's arduous village questline to ruminate on the uses of friction as an intentional and unintentional design technique. let's first establish friction at a high level:

Friction consists of gameplay elements that oppose player progression or elongate time spent on it.

this is a nice open-ended definition that gives us plenty of room to explore. possibly the most basic example of this is movement: the physical limitation of your avatar being unable to exist at all coordinates at once or being able to instantly teleport to any coordinate is within itself an act of friction. this spans a wide range of mechanics; consider tetris, where at high speeds the frame count behind a single lateral movement of the falling piece becomes a limitation against being able to place a given piece at the desired location before the piece lands, or games with areas that change the kinematics of a player's movement to become slower or faster than their base speed. for a walking simulator, the act of movement is the primary element separating their narratives and environments from less frictional genres such as interactive fiction and visual novels. of course, this above classification isn't necessarily useful for discussion given how wide-ranging it is, so I'll present a taxonomy to cover the most common types.

Immersive friction consists of frictional gameplay elements that seek to heighten the sense of existence in the game's environment.

a good example of the above would be plant growth mechanics, where seed items are planted and then can be harvested after a given amount of in-game time. while this poses a time restraint on the player in terms of obtaining the items, few would object to such a feature given that it simulates crop cultivation in reality. unless the player has no exposure to agriculture, they will be able to make a connection from reality to the in-game environment and integrate the mechanic into their understanding of how the world operates. this doesn't necessarily have to consist of elements that correspond to our reality, as I would suggest it also encompasses elements that exist to introduce the player to the particular quirks or "unrealistic" elements of the in-game world.

Oppositional friction consists of frictional gameplay elements that seek to heighten difficulty.

this design methodology is the reason that many of us find many 8-bit games unbearable; games that lean on oppositional friction too heavily can suffer from serious artificial difficulty. otherwise this is pretty bread-and-butter design fundamentals in order to present a proper challenge to players. damage balancing, enemy counts, time limits, and cooldown timers (among others) all fall under this umbrella, and often these values are the first to be tweaked in post-game updates in order to dial in the exact amount of challenge players need.

Unintentional friction consists of frictional gameplay elements resulting from oversights in the development process.

bugs, glitches, and their ilk all fall into this category. the shining example of this in my head is the sonic adventure duology: both of these games would likely be far better tolerated by the gaming community at large (who already are relatively forgiving of these games' failings) if they simply weren't riddled with countless collision issues, screwy camera sections, and physics goofs. of course, it's not always easy to tell whether a given mechanic falls into this category or one of the others given that specific design intentions are not always known. it's also certainly true that "unintentional smoothness" or something similar exists in many games, where development oversights actively reduce friction in other areas.

every game has frictional elements that fall into each of these categories, and identifying them within freedom unite (which I'll hereby refer to as mhfu) is easy. monster hunter games have retained a loyal fanbase that appreciates the dense internal logic of the series's world, all of which relies on immersive friction. weapons become dull with repeated use and must be frequently sharpened, materials must be gathered by hand or farmed over time, certain monster materials come from breaking or severing specific parts of the monster, and powerful items must be combined by hand. while understanding the intricacies will never come easily to a new player, the games do provide ample resources to those willing to learn, and the difficulty is balanced in such a way that new players won't have to leverage every mechanic in order to succeed during the early hours of the game.

mhfu is not a truly standalone product, as it is not only the culimination of the first two generations of monster hunter and an expansion of monster hunter freedom 2, but it is also at some level a retooled port of the ps2 title monster hunter 2 dos (or mh2). that game pushes the envelope on immersion past the first generation of entries by heavily expanding the single-player village scenario and introducing a cycle of seasons that solidified the game's setting. day and night alternate and change the map layouts, huntable monsters vary based on time of year, and the overall progression befits that of a living area that grew with the player day by day. players need to plan for seasons in advance; for example, beehives with vital honey deposits dry up in the cold seasons, forcing players to either stockpile in advance or lie low until the season passes over. every material carved or received post-hunt must fit in your limited pouch, and items in your box only stack to the point that they would in your regular inventory. all of this was carefully considered by the developers in order to create an enticing hunter/gatherer simulation that pushed difficult decision-making and world knowledge onto the player (for more information I highly recommend this rather lengthy retrospective of the game).

mhfu rolls back many of these changes in favor of streamlining the hunting experience. virtually all the mechanics I've listed above are absent: there is no seasonal system, day/night features are now simply part of the quest instead of cycling, item box space is nigh unlimited, and quest rewards teleport directly to your box. I want to stress that changing these isn't inherently a problem (something that the above video struggles to articulate). the monhun portable devs had decided to center the boss fight aspect of the series rather than the survival mechanics, and given the boost that mhfu gave the franchise, it seems like they successfully identified what enticed most players to begin with.

however, this absence of immersive friction seriously wounds the believability of the world. mhfu lacks the undergirding framework that made mh2 so interesting as a simulation of hunter-gathering lifestyle, and without that structure the cracks in the foundation begin to show. monsters here are endless scores of polygonal marionettes to be plopped into one of the many areas on a whim. they frequently walk in place, awkwardly jitter between moves, and refuse to interact with other monsters in their vicinity. stripped of the ecological backgrounds underpinning their mh2 appearances, these monsters can do nothing except serve as punching bags for the player to idly and repeatedly kill. later games would substitute back in more immersive elements that make these fights feel more dynamic and alive: the exhaustion system in the third generation slows down the monster and makes them feel as if they are legitimately expending energy battling you, and the fourth generation adds a significant amount of environmental interaction with the focus on verticality. mhfu sits at an awkward crossroads where it streamlines the mechanics to the point of killing some of the charm while simultaneously not possessing any innovations that make up for the lack of immersion.

simultaneously as the immersive friction is dialed back, the oppositional friction stings ever greater. the hitboxes are one of the most infamous examples from this entry (and prior ones); virtually every monster has an attack with a disjointed hitbox or a frame one activation that seriously strains depth perception and reaction time, especially for players new to the game. with the artifice of progression already so apparent here, these questionable design decisions scan more as cruel tricks to increase playtime and encourage reliance on multiplayer. the game seems as if it were self-aware, less truly a hunting game and more a endless boss rush that relies on compulsion to drive playtime. in response, the player begins to push back, bending the game even further away from a microcosm of elevated reality. why not just spam flash bombs if every monster can be repeatedly blinded by them? why bother exploring all the different quests when I can just look up key quests online? what's the point of fighting two monsters at once when I can wait for minutes on end in a different area waiting for them to split up? at this point the game begins to lose sight of the thrill of the hunt at all, and for every pound of pain it dishes out it receives a karmic retribution threatening its ability to convince me that its conceit has any basis to it at all.

so while its many weak points have been rectified in later entries and it performed incredibly well when released, from a design perspective I see mhfu as a cautionary tale in many ways. friction is not just a blunt weapon but a nuanced tool that requires care to truly apply properly. to that end: simply removing elements of friction from a game does not necessarily have a net positive effect on a game. removing key elements of immersive friction can in turn kill a player's desire to exist within the world the game creates. removing some elements of immersive friction may be for the best, but it may be equally or more pertinent to target elements of oppositional friction instead, especially if the goal is to streamline gameplay. finally, there are other ways to include immersive elements that are not necessarily frictional. including these can retain essential depth even when frictional elements are absent. I intend that none of these conclusions are dogmatic, but merely that they are my examinations of how this game feels slight compared to others in its series.

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gonna be upfront here: I didn't really finish the village quests. once I got to 9 star quests I did a quick tally of how many wyverns I had defeated and the number was probably around 60 or so, which is way under the 100 threshold you need to unlock the silverlos/goldian key quests. no way in hell I was going to needlessly grind when I already had 80+ hours and was desperately tired of this game, so I went ahead and set a goal to defeat rajang and call it quits. honest to god I was surprised I got that on the second try given how much of a pain it is... when enraged he could easily knock out 75% of my life bar if I got hit with the beam or some of his other attacks, especially since I was still using LR gravios armor (heavily upgraded of course).

nekoht's quests in general are probably the most abysmal key quest choices I've seen in the series up to now. for one: great forest is barely ever featured even though it's supposed to be the new map for the entry. it's a solid map but given that I've literally fought no one other than hypnocatrice and narga there I don't have super strong opinions on it either way. meanwhile you're pushed into a bunch of the shitty first gen maps... I read a gamefaqs thread stating that first gen desert is far superior to its dunes remake in fourth gen and I am perplexed about how anyone can hold that opinion. another place where the lack of other immersive friction fails: here is a map with two gigantic flat areas that I never get to explore organically at all and where I can be knocked into the adjacent areas off of virtually any border with no indication of where said border falls. the white monoblos fight here walled me for a bit and it was so infuriating. the basarios fight is bizarre since it takes place in old swamp and basarios literally never leaves a single area... the khezu fight is fine, even though having to run back and forth between the two separate cave areas isn't particularly fun. the double hypnocatrice refight is pointless (what a boring addition) and the rest of the 8 star rank keys are sort of here-or-there, just more hunt-a-thons.

except for yian garuga... what the fuck were they thinking. supposedly this Elegy of a Lone Wolf quest features the souped up scarred garuga variant and it hits like a truck with a cushy hp boost as well. I legitimately timed out on this fight using gunlance much to my absolute bafflement. my bit of hammer practice from mhgu recently came in handy here however, as I grinded out a nice iron hammer for HR and proceeded to crush the poor bird's skull in a truly cathartic 25 minute blast. this is truly the mhfu dichotomy: you feel like absolute shit when you do poorly and an absolute god when everything's going in your favor. just a year after starting my true monhun journey I finally felt like I accomplished one of the major elements of being a strong player, which is actually being able to switch weapons to counter a specific monster rather than leaning on a single weapon type for everything. it felt like such a natural fit too, as I was sussing out the safest quarter-turns to get fully charged standing shots on, nailing rolls through certain attacks, and watching my positioning to ensure I couldn't be caught by frame one moves at any point. that's some fucking monster hunter. same with the rajang fight; he's total bullshit but then it just clicks and suddenly I'm side-hopping through his punches and exploiting his janky beam hitbox.

that nargacuga fight is the most telling of where the series was destined to go from this game on. narga might be using tigrex's skeleton (I think anyway) but its moveset is completely its own. it moves with grace, braces itself for attacks, and features unique windups for virtually everything in its arsenal. I've fought narga dozens of times in p3rd when grinding for his endgame weapon, so I never expected this fight to be tough, but it really did put into relief how clunky many of the other monsters are. the move pool for 1st gen monsters is absolutely barren; expect to see virtually every wyvern have a tail whip, a hip check, a basic bite, and a turn-around swipe, all with virtually identical animations. some of the skeleton reuses are particularly glaring as well, like what are the differences between diablos and monoblos really? is it just that diablos jumps further from the ground when reemerging and also has more hp? it's pretty cleared why they've phased sone of these out in more recent years... it's an absolute crime that gigginox hasn't replaced khezu though, that fight is miles more interesting.

really it comes down to how much information you have going in. I already knew the controls from p3rd so I wasn't too thrown off by not having little context icons to let me know how to gather in certain spots or climb ledges. I started farming armor and power seeds from day 1 as a cash crop, and I ended up having to extensively use them not only for demondrugs/armorskins but also to consume on their own; who knew that they give +10 to a stat and stack with your drugs? in many of the other games I could coast without really preparing for each monster, but here it's an absolute necessity. flash bombs for everyone, sonic bombs for diablos, tainted meat for tigrex, etc. etc. I needed to spare no expense just to get by here. without all that prior knowledge it would've been curtains for me with this game a lot faster I think, and I would absolutely not recommend this game at all to those who haven't played any of the other pre 5th-gen games at least. I'm soloing G4 stuff in mhgu without thinking twice and then getting my ass handed to me by high rank village in this game. rough.

one day I'd love to flex my assembly knowledge and maybe make an easy-type hack for this game, which seems potentially feasible given that FUComplete exists. my ideas:
+base value of 50 defense. this is what mh3u did, and it would hopefully dull the edge on some of the truly insane attack values in this game.
+dung bombs actually scaring off monsters. this works on khezu, so it may be possible to either expand this check for all monsters or hook in the code for it into other monster AI routines, wouldn't be easy though. would really make double monster quests far more bearable
+felyne chef auto-cooking. just always give me 50/50 please, stop making me look at the wiki for the various recipes
+high rank village harvest tours. what the hell were they thinking leaving these out??

anyway back to mhgu... I'm an agnaktor x set grind away from getting to enjoy that kickass ahtal-ka fight. I'll come back to this and do multiplayer sometime, I'm sure I'll get an itch eventually and hunstermonter is still very active. maybe then I'll finish off village... which btw I already fought akantor a bunch in p3rd so it's not like I'm missing that fight completely, and I skipped HR shen gaoren because that fight is easily the most boring siege I've ever played.

another quick note: sony rules so much for making their handheld save data easy to access and move. originally started this on my dad's vita, moved the save to ppsspp, then back to vita, then to my psp, then back to ppsspp. playing this with claw on psp actually feels pretty viable but it was starting to give me some arm pain so I decided to call it quits on real hardware. it looks so gorgeous on that screen though...

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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.

FYI this is still the best one. Most inspired soundtrack, most painterly and phantasmagorical setting, best hub zone and maiden, and laden with the most lyrical sense of tragedy and loss. Sure the gameplay is a little bit clunky compared to (some of) the later titles, but Deal With It!!

it makes me deeply sad that the online has been discontinued and we haven't heard anything about a re-release. Still totally playable offline, but the full experience deserves to be remembered and kept alive!

EDIT: WAIT I SAID RE-RELEASE NOT SLEEK HIGH POLY REMAKE DEVOID OF ATMOSPHERE AND RESTRAINT!!! WHY MUST THE DEVILS AT BLUEPOINT CONSPIRE TO MURDER EVERYTHING I LOVE