Some cool tech & snappy gameplay trapped in Free-to-play hell. We talk a lot about games being tied to & shaped by their technology but little about how they’re shaped, and hollowed out, by their revenue model: GaaS “living games” are released (and shut down) before there is any life in them.

The Finals contains the movement & sugary energy of nu-battlefield (post-Battlefield 1) wrapped in the most horrid vibes: Forza Horizon-esque npcs at their infinite party, Siege/Valorant/Hyperscape-adjacent esports mush. Embark has managed to make Unreal resemble Frostbite, including impressive physics & destruction that echoes the chaos of bad company 2, but it’s all wasted here.

Even for a tight competitive shooter, this needs a more fleshed out setting, either leaning further into the surreal elements (bodies exploding into coins) or situating it in a world that is more than a watered down squid-game/mirror's edge/DICE's entire catalog. Feels like a very polished tech-demo and I refuse to play 100 hours to unlock interesting mechanics or outfits, which has led to every character running around in the default tracksuit/pyjamas. And don't get me started on the AI voices.

I am cautiously optimistic about embark’s other beautiful but empty sci-fi project, ARC raiders, which has seemingly transformed into yet another extraction shooter.

https://i.imgur.com/AbGZYCb.png
Game's heavier than a honey baked ham!!!
For every moment in Yakuza 5 that lead me into thinking I was playing an untamed vortex of passion and uncompromised vision, there were two-to-five other uncomplimentary moments that felt like spinning plates and taking the meandering narrative for walkies. Spreads its roots far & wide across so many ideas and gameplay concepts that, on paper, scans as a maximalist daydream I'd love to lose myself in, but all of it feels so perfunctory and checklisty. Fifty different minigames to micromanage and level up in individually to access Harder Levels of said minigames - - - Vidcon Gospel since time immemoria but my patience has limits :(

Haruka's chapter was probably my personal standout, if only with thanks to how vastly different her story played to any character to come before. The rhythm battles were so fun albeit with the game's slim tracklist, and her substories took on a refreshing dynamic too. The combat in these games has never impressed me but I'd much rather play an unimpressive rhythm game than a brawler I've lost heart in. From a narrative perspective, it is infuriatingly complacent with the practices Japanese idol industry in a way I find legitimately toothless in a series that tends to dedicate fisticuffs to rooting out corruption and it makes Haruka's characterisation weaker as a result.
When came the Shinada chapter I was desperately hoping the end credits would finally begin to roll, which is a shame because he and Koichi's dynamic is probably my favourite spark of character chemistry in the entire series.

I in complete honesty couldn't tell you a single thing that happened in the final hours. This was a game I had started months ago and it rather hilariously demanded for me to recall with perfect clarity a cloak and dagger conspiracy that happened in the initial chapters. The overarching story was a wash for me but I much preferred when the leading cast were locked in their own little bubbles, & exploring their own vignettes about dreams lost & worth aspiring 4. Truly believe that in another world, this would have been a younger me's One Playstation 3 Game For The Month and I'd have completely melted into it - but sadly, I had to play this in incredibly granular sessions that largely felt like clocking in for community service.

Disclaimer: There's no Spoiler tag on this, and while I'll refrain from spoiling story details for Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, I will be discussing spoilers for Yakuza 6 and 7, and would recommend avoiding this review if you haven't played through those games


I wasn't sure what I was getting into here. I'd avoided pretty much every piece of coverage after the initial teaser trailer. I was expecting something of a Ground Zeroes. A little Yakuza to present a few new story threads and warm us up for 8. I was also very willing to skip it entirely. I didn't like the idea.

I felt Yakuza 6 left Kazuma Kiryu with a perfect out, and he'd more than earned it. He'd been through more than his share of hardship. It was enough to make The Dragon want to retire, man. We saw him as a new grandparent, making friends at his new local, joining in with the baseball team, and finding happiness in his peaceful new life. He was going to be alright, and it was a lovely way to say goodbye to a character we've all grown so fond of. I knew he'd be back eventually, but I had hoped they'd work a little for it. Like when shit got really real, and more than our new protagonists could handle, he'd emerge from the shadows to bring back justice. Kazuma Kiryu was the nuclear option. When he appeared in 7, I wasn't thrilled with it, but as a means of passing the torch to Ichiban Kasuga, and tie us back to the old side-characters, I accepted it. And I've seen a lot of fans take issue with 7's gameplay, but the game did terrifically well both commercially and critically, and Kasuga wasn't a Raiden. Most people actually seemed happy with him. I had faith that they wouldn't run back to Uncle Kaz to do another game.

It's a shock that Gaiden justifies this seemingly cynical decision. It was naive to suggest Kazuma Kiryu could live a life in peace and obscurity. The people who were securing his identity and the safety of Sunshine Orphanage would want him to do something for them. Like beat up a bunch of guys. To the yakuza, he's as recognisable as Elvis Presley, and even fewer of his fans believe he's dead. It's very in-character with Kazuma's sense of honour and ludicrous, straight-laced forthrightness, that he wouldn't do more to hide his face than wear a pair of sunglasses. He didn't even change his shaving pattern. Gaiden risks disrespecting the fans who bought the Song of Life After Hours Edition who wanted to toast the man's departure with a dram from an officially licensed glass, but there's a genuine reason to keep his story going. We didn't really know him well enough.

Gaiden is a shorter Yakuza game. That still puts it around 20+ hours, and it hasn't lost any of its interest in side-content. There's five whole late-nineties Sega arcade games to play, for a start. Gaiden mainly takes place in Yakuza 2's Dotonbori Sotenbori, it's one of the series' smaller maps, though it's becoming increasingly comparable to Kamurocho-levels of familiarity. It's long worn off its novelty, but it's a decent location to structure a more modest entry around. Side-missions are dished out by new character, Akame, and has you carrying out favours all across town. It gives them a bit more structure and narrative justification than nebulous experience point systems, and I welcome the change. Akame's a lot of fun, and I don't think she's leaving the series anytime soon.

Another surprise - I think Gaiden has the best fights. Maybe it's the shorter length of the game to thank, but it's nice to have an entry where Kazuma doesn't start the game feeling far crapper than he did at the end of the prior one. And now he's got a bunch of spy bullshit to play with. It's inherently silly, and there's a couple of big laughs when he pulls out the Spider-Man shit during otherwise serious fight sequences, but it's a lot of fun to play around with.

I think the relief of playing a somewhat breezier entry (particularly after the overstuffed Ishin) has a lot of fans giving the game maybe a little too much credit. I am pretty tired of the Osaka map, and I was hoping to spend more of the game in any of the series' other locations. Yakuza really benefits from tighter pacing, though. I'm quite used to playing a thrilling Act 1, and then spending a full week trying to get to the exciting stuff again. I dropped out of Judgment before the hypothetical "fun bit" started. I'm, again, avoiding all the pre-release 8 coverage, but I have heard it's intended to be the biggest game in the series, and that's making me quite weary.

Anyway. He's back, and they've convinced me that's the right decision. If you're new to the series, perhaps annoyed that I keep calling it "Yakuza", I don't think you really need this one. It's a side-story for the Kazuma Kiryu fans, but also one that pays off on some recent plot threads that 7 merely glossed over. If you started these games multiple console generations ago, and you're still willing to continue, this could be the thing that brings back the passion. It is more than a prologue for 8. Sega are kind of taking the piss with all the money they're getting out of us, though.

Pretty fun seeing and agreeing with this tweet yesterday & blindly starting From Dust only to realise it was exactly the same thing.
I think being an observer of the press cycle and online blowback in 2011 for this game coloured my expectations a little - those were my halcyon Born Different, Born Innocent days - I expected shit from a butt I'll be perfectly honest with you. Thoughts and prayers for the unfortunates who purchased this game at release, full price, expecting a fully-fledged God Game by the then on-top-of-the-world Ubisoft. People were pretty scathing as a result of their expectations being sidestepped, to the extent that I was successfully scared away from even trying the game all the way until now, over a decade later.

Anyway I thought this was fine lol. A fun little puzzle game where you worm around a map, scooping up elements and plopping them where they'd hopefully aid and protect your villagers from natural disasters. Hits some surprisingly high notes at points with thanks to some surprisingly good fluid physics and overall level of presentation - making tsunamis, terrain-warping earthquakes and volcano eruptions a truu thrill. Routinely £2 on Steam, which I'd say is apt, but you're honestly better off pirating the thing. The version of uPlay From Dust is packaged with is about ten layers deep into being fucked beyond repair, and the port in general feels like it's peddling to power its own iron lung.

A tremendously handsome visual novel, illustrated by the talented Aogachou. The character designs are pretty good across the board, but the key art in particular is nothin short of breathtaking and captures that brothers grimm vibe the story is trying to shoot for..

Believe me, I find nothing more boring than technical complaints in a video game review, but if this thing was held together with spit and a dream it'd only be more structurally sound. We're talking 'every launch is a dice roll as to whether or not u'll make it past the intro fmv'-grade craftsmanship here.
There is no save system - the text scroll animation is so agonisingly slow - no skip function - crashes constantly - there is a folder in the game's root titled & i'm not shittin u: "BackUpThisFolder_ButDontShipItWithYourGame" lol. At a certain point you just need to cut your losses and just remake the game in Ren'Py my guy.

Apparently the story and screenplay was by Suzuki Kazunari, one of the writers behind Shin Megami Tensei - and more convincingly "Additional Crew" for a bunch of other shit. He's on the Steam store description looking really funny in a little credit portrait they gave him. I dunno man it's kinda rough, yet another unmarinated dark fairy tale from a twisted mind type beat. A horse has sex with a sleeping 14 year old almost immediately as a tone setter. I can't be fucked with it honestly.

"Flashback 2" is a game I used to dream about. I don't know if I can eloquently express just how cool the original game seemed to me as a child. It was unusual to find a game where you played as a character with realistic human proportions, for a start, but it was the wild diversity of its locations, and the satisfying consistency of its controls that really captivated me. The weird, lush alien jungle you wake up in leads you to a weird, concrete underground that reminded me of the alleyways and backrooms I wasn't allowed to go in. Flashback was dangerous and sort of illicit. It was satirical about adult subjects like part-time jobs, public transport and bureaucracy. It was a million miles from any other Mega Drive game. At that time, no game seemed better lined-up to deliver all the rich potential of the future than "Flashback 2".

I don't really want to bully this game too much. I love Flashback, and I didn't buy this to fuel an online rant. I'm an earnest fan, and while I saw many red flags on my approach, I was curious about the game that Paul Cuisset decided was worthy of branding as its first numbered sequel. I recently viewed a behind the scenes video on YouTube that had been uploaded around a week prior. I was the twentieth viewer. I'm well aware that the braver members of the development team may be trawling the internet for player reactions, and by posting a review, there's a fair chance they'll read it. I don't want to ruin their week, and given this, I'll pepper this review with a couple of pieces of faint praise.

1- Flashback 2 isn't as bad as I'd anticipated
2 (even fainter)- Flashback 2 is the best continuation of Flashback I've played (including that truly abysmal Flashback Legend GBA prototype)

For all the talk of unacceptable performance issues and idiotic design, I don't think the game is that bad. On calm waters, I felt the game was acceptable. It's a first-time project from Microids' new in-house development studio, and given the state of independent multiplatform development in continental Europe these days, I think the game they delivered makes sense. Ubisoft's acquisitions ravaged France, Belgium and much of Northern Europe's games industry with relentless studio buyouts, and I'm thankful Cuisset retained the rights to his greatest achievement after working with the publisher on that atrocious "remake" ten years ago. All the attention surrounding the game's release has been put on IGN's 2/10 review, but if this had been released as a 3DS eShop game without a familiar title behind it, I fully expect some outlets would have risen to a 5 or even 6.

Right. Hopefully that's cushioned the blow.

With the couple of software updates the game has received since launch, Flashback 2's biggest problem isn't its performance. It's just that it's really fucking boring. Conrad Hart wakes up after sending himself to cryosleep, drifting off to the boundless unknown at the end of the first game, and wakes up a few moments later having to revisit all the same locations and do a bunch of the same shit. New Washington, the jungle, Planet Morph, IAN. They're all back, expecting you to have remembered them from 30 years ago. Only a few things actually resemble the original game. Mainly the elevators. The original game's art hasn't been referenced for much beyond the colour of Conrad's jacket. Typically, if anything in Flashback 2 reminds you of the first game, it's coincidental.

The game uses a Kirby and the Forgotten Land-style diorama view, with Conrad appearing small and distant in these elaborate sci-fi environments. Conrad isn't a big pink ball, though, and it's often quite a challenge to see where this drab little man is on the screen. The camera often obscures ledges and jumping points, and you need to line yourself up with each one perfectly to be able to use them. So much of the game is spent wobbling into the intended position to progress. I'm still trucking on with my 2009 Sony Bravia, but the combination of Flashback 2's obtuse camera and Black Friday sales was the closest I've come to buying a bigger TV in 14 years.

Despite the precedent for falls killing you in Flashback, this sequel loves a sheer drop. You take zero damage from them now. It just makes designing environments easier when you don't have to line up different floors properly. To Flashback 2's great benefit, if an obligation is ever at risk of making the game truly insufferable, they just don't bother putting it in. The unbalanced gunfights, the disjointed level design, the wonky puzzles. Don't worry, the game's not asking you to commit to any of it. They essentially give you a "skip content" button whenever things are getting too rough. If you continue after dying, there's no punishment. All your progress carries over to your new spawn. Trivialising every action sequence is a good way to prevent players from feeling frustrated, though it jeopardises any sense of tension or excitement the designers may have once hoped for.

Different levels take distinct approaches to gameplay. Sometimes subtly so. One may play more like an RPG, or a standard twin-stick shooter, or even a Metroidvania. Typically, the less demanding a style is on the surrounding game design, the less of a pain in the arse it is to play. There's a wee hacking mini-game in here. It's something you could run on a solar-powered calculator, and it's far and away the most solid part of the whole package. There is a sense that this team could make games, but expecting them to make a PS5 release is like asking your cat to paint your house.

A fundamental problem with the game's structure is they've jumped to the conclusion that "action" equals "fun", without making combat in any way exciting or challenging. These parts are supposed to be the fun bits, to reward you for pushing through the tedious bits, but there's no distinction between the two. The game constantly throws medikits at you, and no matter how many hits I took from complete lack of care, I never ended up with less than 10 in my inventory at any time. Gun play operates like a twin-stick shooter, and it just makes no sense with Flashback 2's floating - sometimes side-on, sometimes isometric - camera. The automatic lock-on function does all the work, lining up shots and playing the game for you. Geometry does nothing to spice up these sequences either, with bullets flying through cover and Conrad having little meaningful relationship with his environment. Thanks for making this game, guys.

I wouldn't call Paul Cuisset a household name. He hasn't had the best career. Shockingly, he does not seem ashamed of it. I'm used to cute wee nods for the fans in games from Kojima, Suda or Suzuki. I almost leapt out of my seat when I saw this prick reference the PS3 survival horror shitshow, Amy, in Flashback 2. What's he doing? The old man has left the house with his trousers down. Please arrest him for his own safety.

If you're a true Flashback nut (i.e. me and the other nineteen guys who watched that YouTube video), you may have some knowledge of a "Flashback 2" that was briefly worked on for the Mega CD. Not much is known about the project, and most of its story would be reworked for Fade to Black, but one thing they were most keen to implement was a mech suit for Conrad. In this radically different version of Flashback 2, they have been keen to implement the feature. Weirdly, and amusingly so. Multiple characters will surprise you with their familiarity with Japanimation robots. From a Marlon Brando pastiche mobster to a mutated village oracle figure, there's a wide range of personality types who will act against type to discuss just how intimately familiar they are with mechs. The mech stuff amounts to an atrocious minigame you play once, and another section later on, where you walk in a straight line. I think the 1993 Flashback 2 "mechs" more resemble this game's power armour - a feature that the game barely introduces, and rather, just dumps in without much explanation. You press triangle, and Conrad goes into morphin' time, adopting a full body metallic suit. It prevents him from taking damage from radiation. Like most of the game, it's completely lacking in substance, but it's cute to think that maybe Cuisset was thinking of the first time he attempted to make this game at some point during production.

I'm a fan of early 3D games from small, inexperienced developers. I can enjoy a 10fps Game Boy Color conversion of a PC FPS. I have completed Deadly Premonition. It's fair to say I have a high tolerance for poor performance in games. That said, Flashback 2 pushes at the furthest reaches of my empathy. Environments are often very large, and you may spend over an hour in some of them. Interact with them too much, by destroying breakables, attacking enemies, or opening pathways, and the software will dedicate more processing power to remembering that interaction, dropping the framerate. Even menus seem affected by the increased burden, taking multiple seconds to scroll through options. In one Metroidvania-like section, I was completely stumped for well over an hour, retreading the same ground over and over. By the end, the game looked like I was attempting to run Half-Life 2 on Windows 95. Leaving the area and coming back doesn't reset the environment to default. The game does not forget. It does not forgive. It encumbers itself with remembering each little interaction you ever deigned to commit to it in your flailing cluelessness, warping and sweating for your sin. Somehow, I eventually fiddled with the Analyser's frequencies enough in enough rooms to find my way out of this rapidly-degrading purgatory, but it's not an experience I will forget anytime soon.

There's also a lot of weird presentational setbacks. The bold utilitarian typeface, clashing hard against the overdesigned neon, semi-transluscent HUD elements. The menus that feature synonymous terms for different options. The dialogue trees that display the wrong characters' portraits, and once, a blank white square. Character artwork and in-game models bear little resemblance to each other, too. One fairly significant character appears with blonde hair in portraits and cutscene artwork, but with pink hair on their in-game character model, and I highly doubt it's intended as an homage to A Link to the Past. I've seen people accuse the game of using AI-generated artwork. I will not libel myself by commenting on that. Environments frequently look surprisingly complex, attractive, and intricately detailed, though some of the most interesting-looking locations are blocked off by invisible walls, and only serve as elaborate backgrounds. There's also the script and the apparent lack of any voice direction. I suspect it wasn't written by native English speakers, but French programmers who were confident enough in their fluency to avoid hiring any English localisation staff. There's a lot of awkward terminology, weird, bad jokes, and conversations with no sense of natural flow. Conrad doesn't feel anything like any previous version of the character (which thankfully means he's not like the Ubisoft remake Conrad, either), mainly coming across like a college student who wants to be cool and funny, but has no idea how to tell a joke. Locations, technology and character names get pronounced differently by each member of the cast, and one of them even struggles with the name "Ian". Maybe the most nostalgic part of the package is that it feels like years since I've played a game that had a script this bad.

I almost respected the story. It looked like it was headed towards some amusingly pulpy territory that surprised me with a sort-of clever twist. I thought they were using some very silly logic to make both Flashback 2 and Fade to Black simultaneously canon sequels to the original game. They don't, though. They use modern "multiverse" shite to tell a story that's both completely incoherent and inconsequential. There's two Conrads, and a supporting character that's named suspiciously closely to one from Fade to Black, but I don't think the team ever thought about the story half as hard as I did. There's some interesting stuff regarding a subclass of mutants on Titan, and what that suggests about the enemies at the start of the first game, but I'm not sure they even had those guys in mind. It's mainly just a hodgepodge of worn-out tropes, and very little of it gels together in any meaningful way. There's a Deku Tree, and AVALANCHE, and a bit where you have to tell which of the two presidents is the real one before killing the imposter. It's nonsense. Don't make the mistake I did by thinking it might be worth paying attention to.

Despite the myriad of problems I have with the game, I do have a little respect for it. On some level, as a boring game for the world's biggest nerds, Flashback 2 almost works. Through all the ideas that don't quite come together, you can see the things that were once attempted with it. The ambition it once had, that was later sacrificed as they had to be realistic about what the team's capabilities. I'm not going to pretend that it represents the fulfilment of a creator's long-discarded personal dream in the way a Shenmue III does, but it's a much more curious prospect than something as homogenous as a typical PS5 action game. The twin-stick, Metroidvania, lite RPG, wannabe cinematic epic. I don't know. I haven't played many games like that, and if I really squint, I can almost see the game they once wanted to make. If the team had a Satoru Iwata-level talent on board, they might have been able to refocus the project to deliver something worthwhile. There is not a single person on the planet who I'd recommend play the game, but if I was to hear a Real Flashback Guy ranting against it, I might ask them to calm down a bit.

When I completed the game, the ending cutscene failed to play. Goodbye, Flashback 2.

There's been this notion around the Sonic games that if Sega just stopped making stupid decisions, it'd be perfect and we'd all have a great time. You know, I don't buy that. Maybe I'm just a little sick of Sonic.

Despite everything else, the old Mega Drive games are still fairly precious to me, and I have some affection for a half dozen other Sonic titles, but I wasn't as bowled over with Mania as most seemed to be. There wasn't a lot of truly new stuff in it. I just don't know how fertile this formula is. If running around rollercoaster tracks and jumping when necessary is all that captivating, or if it can really be taken to interesting new places without a radical shake-up.

Don't get me wrong, Superstars is pretty crap. They've been understandably keen to promote the physics they've pulled from Sonic Mania, but that doesn't save the poor collision models, the rotten level design or the dogshit mechanics. Even if Sonic runs up hills properly now, it doesn't prevent the game from being tedious as all get out. It just doesn't seem to have been designed with much insight. Sonic Team have included a Fantasy Zone level in here, solely because they didn't get the joke when they saw Mania's Mean Bean Machine boss. I struggle to recall any moments where I had fun. Mostly, I remember the shock when I saw they thought to bring back the bouncy floor from Sonic CD's Wacky Workbench.

Oh, and everybody's already talked about it, but those bosses are truly appalling. I couldn't bring myself to replay a single level, knowing one of those were at the end of it.

There's pockets of positivity in the project. Basically all aesthetic. The character models are generally pretty nice, but their limited animation makes them look like they were extracted from a better game and dumped onto a Steam community page. Sonic Mania/Shredder's Revenge boy, Tee Lopes, has composed a few typically great tracks, and they stand out alarmingly in among the synthesised dredge from Sonic Team. The 2D animation sequences are nice too, as is typical of all the post-Mania stuff, and like those, they're let down by lacklustre music.

At its best, it's a halfhearted retread. It's attempting to mine nostalgia from a source that's been tapped out relentlessly for decades. Bold, youthful confidence used to be Sega's whole thing. They'd speed into new potential anywhere they saw it, and all their most beloved projects carried a sense of boundless energy. Now, they're sitting in the paddling pool, trying to make Samba de Amigo a thing again, and too scared to do a Yakuza game without Kazuma Kiryu.

I wasn't even excited for this, and I'm still bitterly disappointed. They've really fucked this one up, and if you bought it on launch day, you might have paid £55 for it. I can't recall the last time I've been this upset with a new game, and I'm in the middle of playing Flashback 2 right now.

The original game came out when I was a compsci undergrad minoring in applied physics, so you can imagine how badly the patter stunk in the intervening time-space; the sequel only exacerbated the situation, and by the end of my degree I'd developed a debilitating cake-based neurosis. Not really the game's fault, but I still hold it accountable.

Replaying it again after all these years, I was prepared to hold my nose and dive through all that unpleasantness - but to my surprise, the Redditisms just felt quaint and harmless, a playful reminder of a time when that corner of the internet wasn't a testing platform for Mossad COINTELPRO programs. The simple joy of the game almost made me ashamed of all the ways I've blithely scorned the earnest energy of /r/ifuckinglovescience shit, but alas, there's still a solid hour where you're trapped in an industrial colouring book, dutifully shading wee squares of orange and blue in order to receive reward-pellets that take the form of a Stephen Merchant podcast recording; excruciating stuff from a developer that usually wedged narrative all the way down the back of their gameplay's comfy couch. It's no surprise that this was Valve's last single-player effort for a decade - as espousers of the "always step forward" philosophy, I doubt they could stomach any more competition with the succeeding decade's first-person rollercoasters.

The original game was far more merciful, and the co-op mode's main purpose here is to remind you of that fact. This was my first time through it, and I relished almost every moment - especially the parts where you can invite complex chain-reactions of misfortune upon your companion. Aside from a few sections where you're returned to the colouring book with four squares instead of two, there's a much tighter focus on the square pegs, round holes and triangular hammers, with concepts often being combined in far greater depth than they were in the single-player. Perhaps it's a limitation of this game's (unshowing) technical age, but I'm still disappointed that neither campaign offers a testing chamber that combines light bridges, gravity wells, colour goos and laser grids... I feel like you could - as Wheatley tries to do at the end - mash up some really cool shit with all the toys in this ̶o̶r̶a̶n̶g̶e̶ ̶ white box. It's still fun!

In the 1983 film A Christmas Story, the main character's father receives a large package in the mail as a prize for solving crossword puzzles. The giant crate contains a lamp in the shape of a larger-than-life-size leg wearing a fishnet stocking. His wife hates it, eventually destroying it. He tries to put it back together. It might seem obvious but it's important to emphasize that while the film's narrator sees it as a primal signifier of sex, the father surely must know how tacky and shameful it is to display it in the window for all to see. He doesn't like it because it's good, he likes it because it's his, because he won it, because it's a symbol of his accomplishment. It's a matter of pride.

"It is the first American-produced visual novel"

For the first several years of my adulthood, I worked in a retail store. Christmas came and went, and every year we stocked a variety of holiday novelties and trinkets, including cheap reproductions of recognizable objects from a number of Christmas movies. Every year we got the leg lamp. We got it in different sizes. They sold, they sold out, and once it was sold out people would still come in asking if we had it.

"They sold this. To people. For money."

Plumbers Don't Wear Ties has no redeeming qualities. It isn't a good game, it isn't a good piece of software, it isn't a good video or PowerPoint presentation or whatever. James Rolfe could have told you that, and he did, and that's the only reason anyone knows what this is, and the people publishing the remaster know this. The original is a piece of shit from top to bottom, beginning to end, from concept to production to release, and it is a piece of shit in earnest. There is no reason to go back to it, it deserves no legacy.

Yet it's being re-released for purchase and play on modern systems, under the pretense of historical significance or preservation. It will be bought out of irony, to share in some arms-length observation, a gross curiosity. From tip to tail the cultural object that is Plumbers Don't Wear Ties has been transformed from something honestly and irredeemably bad, to a completely disingenuous empty spectacle.

I haven't played it. You haven't played it. Nobody should play it. Nobody can play it, because it isn't a game. It shouldn't be here, it shouldn't be on the Switch or the PlayStation or the Xbox, it shouldn't be in your library, it shouldn't be in your thoughts. Let it fade away.

At this point, Konami can't make a move without causing a controversy, especially with Metal Gear fans. But my PS1 shelves are already full, so I have to thank them for allowing me to experience all the European dubs without having to buy a 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th copy of PS1 Metal Gear Solid.

When you're as deep in the hole as I am, the idea of playing the entire thing through in French actually sounds like a compelling proposition. I'm quite impressed by how seriously late-90s KCEJ approached an international release. It wasn't common to see much beyond French and German options in PAL releases, and very few games had as much writing in them as MGS1 did. Especially not spoken dialogue. Sequels stripped back on localisation efforts, with only Japanese and English audio tracks, but every single line in MGS1 had been recorded in Japanese, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. It's interesting to hear the game with different voice direction. Some of the cutscenes play a little differently with the unique interpretations of each relationship. Without exception, I think all the female characters in French MGS1 sound really great, though many of the boys lose a lot of their nuance. Like the Japanese version, Liquid mainly just sounds like a big tough guy, lacking some of the pompousness and elegance of Cam Clarke's performance. I was really looking forward to French Revolver Ocelot, but he mainly just sounds like some old geezer. Jim Houseman didn't even sound particularly well recorded. French Snake has moments of brilliance, but his delivery is a little one-note, lacking some of Akio Ohtsuka and David Hayter's range. For my money, Mei Ling is the real stand-out among the French cast, sounding much bouncier and more excitable. I never would have expected a world-class designer of military technology to sound so... cute.

I think the biggest issue with this release is in its visual presentation. I'm completely on the side of whoever decided to stick with the PS1's 240p rendering, with reverence to the original team's approach to presentation, but I don't think it's scaling to HD resolutions correctly. The visuals are far below the standard of a PS1 with a clean RGB output, with the Master Collection release blurring over the dithered texturework that I love so dearly. It's perhaps closer to the composite signal that the majority of players will be used to, but I've grown to associate the game with a much cleaner image. Apparently this port is from M2, most widely known for their brilliant SEGA AGES releases, but I think this is their first time working with a PS1 game, and the lack of tweakable emulation settings may be the result of that. Scanlines are reportedly on their way via a patch, but I really hope display settings go much further than that. Throw in a Duckstation-style hi-res mode for the kiddiwinks if you must, but please give me a mode that presents those original 76,800 pixels as sharply as possible.

The extras in the pack aren't all that exciting. I've heard alternating reports of what the "Master Book" actually is, with some claiming it's a new English version of an old Konami MGS1 book. No. It's new. The fact that it's new might actually be the most interesting thing about it, as it presents the series' timeline with knowledge of all the retcons and inconsistencies that have been injected into the series up to the end of The Phantom Pain. There's even a page that bluntly explains everything that's said about Ocelot's backstory in MGS1 is a bare-faced lie. This is "the official version" of the series' story, although I'd never suggest that those who play Metal Gear 1 for the first time today ought to be thinking about Major Zero and Venom Snake. The book's fine, though its presentation is a little closer to a modern Konami website than a Japan-only 1998 MGS1 book, which would typically be filled with bespoke artwork, debug-mode screenshots of each environment, and often, interviews with the game's key staff. There's a lot of notes on secrets and checklists to follow through the game, but it can't be accessed while you're playing, so it could be a little more useful.

The script book is a little cooler. There have been officially-released script books for MGS1, 2, 3, 4 and Peace Walker in Japan, though I think western fans are being presumptuous about the vintage of these. They're based on the games' English localisations, and I'd assume the direction notes are newly-written, as opposed to insight into how the games were originally written. I'm pretty sure the Metal Gear 1 & 2 script books are entirely the result of someone playing the games and transcribing all the text, instead of someone digging into Kojima's decades-old production notes. Nonetheless, they're still pretty neat. It's nice to have easy access to all the CODEC conversations without having to experiment with every single variable in the games to potentially trigger alternate dialogue. It would have been cooler if you could access each of the scenes - with their audio - from within the book, but that would have been much more of a logistical nightmare.

The Master Collection release of MGS1 is a pretty cool package for hardcore fans of the game, and it does the job of bringing MGS1 to new hardware for less demanding players, too. It's not the end-all, be-all definitive release that some seem convinced they're entitled to, but I'm satisfied enough with all the things it does to stop myself from buying those alternate PAL discs. That's an achievement. If you're not rabid enough to have bought it already, either wishlist it on the platform you find most appealing, until it's inevitably on sale for a good discount, or stick with an emulator you already like. There's not much real value in investing in the wider online discourse.