Was drawn in by the hook of this being a postal worker simulator, only to be trojan-horsed into another Netflix-brained drama. A Life Is Strange-like that has you driving around a poorly-disguised and thoroughly-sterilised simulacrum of Twin Peaks (this was made by a Dutch dev team - why not show us NL's country life instead of leaning on a well-worn setting?).

You're relatively un-fussed by any of the day-to-day concerns that would no doubt come with delivering the post in a secure and timely manner, and there are so many missed opportunities for fun little gameplay pieces - the truck doesn't take damage, you can't break the speed limit, the parcels don't arrive late, you don't have to dodge dogs - any of these little things could have injected a small sprinkling of spice into it, but the game is only really interested in telling its story. I think I wanted it to be Shin Paperboy.

I get that it's nice, sure, and there are people who really do want a depressurised and bloodless GTA driving/walking game; but without anything really driving (lol) the experience, this is basically just a series of Walking Dead-style dialogue encounters split up with a cuddly coddling truck-driver experience. Nothing ever matters, which seems to kinda contradict the game's nascent notions of changing your life. Dialogue options only seem to be there to move the chatter along most of the time, and characters often react in the ways the developers wanted them to react, rather than the ways you hoped or expected they would. The different ending options are a perfect example of this, but as the game only really has its story going for it, I won't spoil the bizarre surprises here.

The romance options are exactly what we've all come to expect from indie games at this point - utterly toothless and sexless stuff that makes the 40-something main characters behave like preschoolers holding hands on a trip to the park. You can't have a single city gal discover her first kiss is now a huge sexy lumberjack and have it only lead to a nice hug. Come on now! It's about time one of these games played out with all the debauchery of a greasy pulp paperback like A Stranger In Her Bed or whatever.

My postman sometimes come up the stairs of our building mid-joint roll, banging crap metal out of his phone speakers and huffily hurling anything marked FRAGILE onto a rough approximation of our doorstep. Now that's the delivery guy game I wanna be playing. Lemme dropkick an Amazon parcel and shag some lonely lady after I break her windows with a Hello Fresh box.

The people who were around for the original punk movement and its derivatives are in their 60s, 70s, or even 80s now - isn't that crazy? My own dad, in his 60s himself, loves to remind me that he was actually there for Buzzcocks, The Clash, and Sex Pistols. His crown jewel "I was there" story is that he saw Diego Maradona score his first ever international goal at Hampden Park and then walked down the road to see Joy Division play their one and only gig in Glasgow later that day. Imagine living through that! When I go to a hometown gig and see a grey-haired dude or two hanging around the bar area, leaning on a walking stick or trying to sneak a breather, it's a surreal reminder that the ranks of "the older generation" are quickly being filled with people who raged against the machine before it was even a band. It's fun to imagine what these folks were like when they were young - what passions and dreams they held. How do I relate myself to them, and what do they have left to relate to me?

I'm not going so far as to say that Goichi Suda and his collaborators are synonymous with the occassional old men I see propping up the bar at their local PVSSYC#NT DIY show or Buzzcocks revival tour-stop, but the long-time staff at Grasshopper are, despite their pseudo-punk status, among the elder statesmen of game developers. Suda 51 has credits on 40 games that are spanned across three decades (will he retire at 51 games and release "The Suda 51 Games Collection"?!) and outside of secretive Nintendo legends like Miyamoto and Tezuka, I can't think of many individual game designers who are sitting on such broad production prestige and history. Travis Strikes Again, is, to my mind, the equivalent of one of those old greybeards finally sitting you down at a table in the beer-soaked venue and telling you all about their good old days stories - and how they're going to try and start a new band, too, of course.

It can feel somewhat ridiculous to attribute any video game to a single creator - as people often do with Suda - but Travis Strikes Again seems well aware of this, with frequent acknowledgements of the collaborative sacrifices that game developers make to create something that's either theirs or another's. It may feel unfair to the programmers and artists and guys who man the Twitter accounts, but I feel that it's imperative for games with "independent" spirit to continue transmitting truly single-personal perspectives in response to amorphous commitee-led industry dominators like Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed, and one of the only ways to tell a personal story is to focus it on one person - often the writer, or the director. Or the guy who is both. And the guy who is both in this case has an interesting life story (that's still in development, sorry) that I'd like to hear.

Despite speaking so highly of Suda (and Grasshopper) here, I'd say it's fair to say that it's rare that I outright love any of the many games they've made. There's always some glaring, punishing flaw or Duchampian aggression against the status quo that just reminds me too much that I'm wasting precious time. Time-wasting feels like a trait that's almost exclusively reserved for video games, and perhaps it's a unique aspect of the medium that Suda just loves to take advantage of time and time again to differentiate his work from that of a movie or painting or book. But I don't often appreciate it! And while it's nowhere near as brain-mummifiying as The 25th Ward or FSR, Travis Strikes Again still likes to hold up your clock. It feels to me like the game is hamstrung by a perceived need to offer value for money - despite its attempts to stand apart as a genuine art-piece of personal history, it's still constrained on some level by a desire to be a consumable product that people can "get their $40 from" and put 6/10 or 4/5 star ratings or whatever against in a games magazine or website or review blog. It fills its levels with stuff that simply doesn't need to be there, feeling like a guitar solo that goes on too long. But that's punk, right?

The greatest artwork-transgressor is likely the combat itself. While surprisingly strategic and satisfying at times (especially in the later levels), it eventually boils down to the same patterns/plays as always, and ultimately serves as an overbearing obstacle that stands in the way of getting more personal insights and pseudohistorical musings from the remembering minds at Grasshopper. Golden Dragon GP and Killer Marathon are probably the most enjoyable Death Balls in the collection due to the generous ways they interrupt the monotony of streets of raging/geometry warsing across Pac-Man mazes, and I kinda wish the game had been a minigame collection that homaged the different Grasshopper genres. It might have been even better if Travis had just peacefully walked round an Unreal Engine recreation of Suda's headspace and history in a manner not unlike Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective; the game is at its best when it's just sharing its secrets and fun with you.

It's cute that the Serious Moonlight section bills itself as a Shadows of the Damned mini-sequel, but how fun would it have been if they're actually tried to emulate that game's feel, even superficially? C'mon! It's Unreal! The engine that everyone and everything uses for TPS action! (Given how much this game honours Unreal Engine/Tournament, it's a shame that Travis hasn't flossed his way into Fortnite yet) Perhaps too much to ask of our developers, but I honestly feel like there's a human limit to how much mindless swinging of a beam katana one can do while waiting for their clinch super move to charge back up. I went to the UK National Video Games Museum recently, and it proved to me that there's genuine value in getting people to experience gaming history by actually playing those games in quick, sequential succession. I think an Any% playthrough of Grasshopper's entire history is maybe what Vicarious/Grasshopper wanted for Travis Strikes Again, but probably didn't have time to do. Again, video games continue to take away our time in ways other artworks don't quite manage...

It's interesting to parallel this game with something like this year's Iwata Asks book - Iwata's auto/biography has some insightful stories and letters, but doesn't truly bear any of the guy's emotion or soul much beyond vague pleasantries like "I respect the developers at Nintendo" and "Shigeru Miyamoto was my friend". Suda, by contrast, seems more than willing to (sparsely) share his silver threads of thought, often in ways that can be uncomfortable for players - the infamous "the CEO of EA is a woman-beating piece of shit because he didn't let me make my high-concept AAA RPG game wacky enough" is an ugly piece of thinly-veiled thought from Suda, but it's preferable to the Nintendo CEO's polite corporate mannerisming. If video games really want to take that next artistic step, they do need the space to let out some of the ugly problematic thoughts inside our heads (the need to "burn sadness like life-giving fuel" as Travis surprisingly says), and I feel like Travis Strikes Again is moving things in the right direction. This is arguably an art-therapy session for these old boys.

At its core, I guess that's what Travis Strikes Again is. Something that's kinda ugly and protracted and painful, but undeniably worthwhile by virtue of its willingness to be earnestly personal and transgressive. A game that isn't so much about the act of playing the game itself, but more focused on the process of putting your brain against a gamepad to see inside someone else's brain on the other side of the cartridge. It's been a long road to this point, and there's still a long way to go, but they'll keep going. 10 hours of video games a day.

In the human world,
the time for games has ended.
Nothing binds us now.

somehow one of the most miserable gaming experiences i've ever had. i'm not categorically against musou series, but the format detracts heavily from the emotional gravity of the situation age of calamity is trying to portray. this dissonance is only reinforced by the relatively mournful story moments peppered throughout the game. the way the game was marketed in comparison to how negligible the game is to the overall botw experience is infuriating. gets points for letting me play as urbosa and revali, and i wound up really loving impa (she's by far the most fun to play as)

In October, Nintendo opened a limited-time buffet.

"589,00 Norwegian Krone to enter!" they said. "Come now or miss a chance to try some of our best hits!"

Nintendo? They had always been a pretty good chef. I'd always enjoyed their dishes, even if I've had a bone to pick with many of their newer recipes.

"Say what you will about their lows," I thought to myself, "but their highs have always been some of the highest I've ever tried. All right, I'm interested."

I walked in, thanking my boyfriend for being willing to get the reservation as a Christmas-turned-Valentines-turned-Easter-turned-birthday present for me.

"Thanks for waiting. Here's your spaghetti, served with mushrooms and alfredo sauce just like you remember it!" Nintendo said, getting me settled at a table. "And the tropical fruit salad, and one of our most beloved specials: the black forest cake!"
And they served it all up on one big plate.

I froze for a second, and looked up at the corporation serving me my plate.

I asked: "Um, wouldn't it have been better if you worked on how you'd serve this up just a bit? I mean, it's kind of weird to imagine eating spaghetti, salad and cake all out of one plate, and I thought a chef like you would know better."

"Not at all!" Nintendo immediately responded, so quickly they almost snapped. "This is the most direct way of serving you our classic recipes just how you remember it, isn't it? No nonsense!"

I blinked. "Maybe? I mean, it still all tastes good. But shouldn't I get to pick my own plate at a buffet? It's how you used to do at The VC."

"Oh, we decided that we know what's best for you." Nintendo casually said, waving their hand with confident nonchalance. "It's like our Switch Online cookbook, right? You get to try our repertoire exactly the way we decide you should!"

"...sure. but why are you closing down in April?"

"I, well, you see... it's to encourage everyone who wants to come to get their reservations!"
And with that, Nintendo walked away.

I get it, Nintendo. You've had a rough year, and you probably wanted to make sure your fiscal year would end on a profit, even if it involved resorting to pretty desperate measures.

But we've all been hit by recent events. We're all getting quite impatient with a lot of things, and I'd like to think our tolerance for hostile decisions is getting lower by the day.

I liked the spaghetti and the salad, right? And the cake was fine, I guess. I don't necessarily regret that, but if this is the kind of ventures you see fit to do more regularly from here on, I think I'll be happy looking for my noodles elsewhere, even if nobody makes spaghetti like you do.

It's funny how both of my All-Stars review ended up being food-themed.

imagine someone just waking up some day and thinking "what if i made a game about a small guy with a ball than can go big with the many things it collects? all of the objects having it's own kind of collision, causing that crispy sensation? and, logically, the ball itself getting slower with the amount of things you collect? oh, and of course, the art style being so colorful and caricatured in a humurous - but never offensive - way? having one of the best soundtracks of the medium? man, it's gonna be awesome"

well, someone actually thinked. thanks to keita takahashi, now we have katamari damacy, the greatest videogame production since super mario bros. (1985).

at least for me!

Tetsuya Takahashi: "i skimmed the abstract of like 5 different philosophy books and arthur c clarke novels and i'm here to just vomit all that back at you for 70 hours without saying anything meaningful about any of it"

Me: "sounds bad"

Tetsuya Takahashi: "i've also included kung-fu and robots"

Me: "sounds sick"

Yoko Taro: (furiously taking notes)

Just so you know, this is review is coming from someone who played XC2 first. So going in I already had pretty large expectations from what the community has said. And you know what? It lived up to every single one of them for me. The story was absolutely better than XC2's, with so many twists and turns that always got me to keep playing to find out what happened next. The characters are amazing too, with some of my favorites being Reyn, Alvis, Melia, and Egil. Riki is so much better than Tora it's not even funny. Not only that, but it also has an amazing soundtrack. Guar Plains, A Tragic Decision, Engage the Enemy, You Will Know Our Names, Riki's theme, Beyond the Sky, Mechanical Rhythm, An Obstacle in Our Path, and many others are absolutely amazing. Out of the games I've played, I think the Xenoblade OSTs usually tower above the rest. The one gripe I have is that sometimes the gameplay can get extremely repetitive. A good amount of the game is spent topple locking enemies, and struggling for ages to kill opponents that are immune to topple and break. However, it was also pretty fun at times and it was hilarious how much you could cheese some fights. This game gets a Better than Wii Play out of 10