Manhunt é um dos jogos mais irresponsáveis que eu já joguei na vida.

A Take-Two e a Rockstar toparem esse jogo nos tempos atuais é muito sem noção. Não tem nota de repúdio à violência que alivie o que foi feito.

Vai m0rrer gente por causa desse jogo, escuta o que eu tô falando.

Stray chamou a atenção de todo mundo e conquistou todos os corações sendo o famoso "jogo do gato". E, realmente, é muito legal e impressionante o quanto eles conseguiram capturar e reproduzir os movimentos e comportamentos do gatinho e é adorável e impossível não morrer de fofura. Mas isso passa. O que me conquistou MESMO e nunca deixou de me divertir e cativar foram os robôs.

Stray começa com você, literalmente, caindo nessa cidade subterrânea onde se passa o jogo. O cenário é um mundo pós apocalíptico onde, aparentemente, os humanos foram extintos e só sobraram esses robôs que absorveram hábitos e personalidades dos seus "ancestrais de carne". Eu acho interessante demais esse conceito e o mundo que eles criaram. Eu gosto, também, que em nenhum momento existe a discussão batida de "mas eles são seres vivos de verdade?". Você logo compra que são, e o jogo se preocupa em tratar de outros temas. Os robôs tem sonhos, aptidões, gostos próprios, medos, amores. Tem algo de muito tocante, pra mim, ver um robô querer aprender músicas novas, ou cuidar de plantas que não são vitais pra eles, porque oxigênio não significa nada pra alguém que não respira, mas eles acham as plantas bonitas e sabem que foram importantes, então cuidam. E eu sorria toda vez que meu personagem gato miava e eles olhavam pra mim com espanto, ou quando eu me esfregava nas pernas deles e ganhava um coraçãozinho no display deles. Praticamente todos os robôs são legais de conversar e eu me diverti explorando os diálogos. O único problema é que são poucas linhas por personagem, eu gostaria de MAIS. É compreensível ser limitado pelo escopo do jogo, no entanto.

A sociedade dos robôs copiou e manteve as partes ruins da humanidade, também. Então, assim como, sei lá, 99% das histórias que se passam em algo meio cyberpunk, aqui também existe uma crítica social ao capitalismo, à divisão de classes e etc. A busca principal do seu personagem é voltar ao mundo exterior de onde você veio, e na sua jornada você encontra outros que querem escapar do mundo subterrâneo, também. De novo, tem algo muito bonito nos robôs querendo ver estrelas de verdade. Ver o céu de verdade, em vez da simulação do mundo fechado deles.

Dava pra fazer tudo isso sem seu personagem ser um gato? Sim. Mas ai que está, ser um gato deixa a exploração mais interessante e a interação com o mundo mais legal também. Explorar o mundo sendo um ser pequeno, mas com habilidades de escalar e acessar lugares difíceis deixa tudo muito legal. Ver o mundo “de baixo”, também é interessante e diferente. E tudo é muito bonito. Eu não cansava de explorar porque era tudo bonito de olhar o tempo todo. E acho que o escopo ser pequeno favoreceu o jogo nesse sentido, porque as áreas eram todas do tamanho certo para não ser cansativo, quando eu começava a enjoar de um lugar, já estava na hora de ir para outro.

Stray, na verdade, é um jogo muito simples. Puzzles faceis de resolver, uma interação com o mundo que você já viu antes. Aquela mecânica de quests de “pega algo e trás pra essa pessoa”. Partes, inclusive, que são chatas e eu achei ruins, tipo um momento que você precisa “atirar” e é um controle ruim e eu não via a hora de acabar (felizmente dura pouco). Por isso, eu vi muita gente se decepcionar com ele, ou não achar tudo isso. Mas acho que essa mistura de elementos deixou o jogo único o suficiente e me fez gostar muito dele, então pra mim funcionou demais. Me apeguei muito aos meus amigos de metal, me emocionei com o jogo e já estou com saudades. Ser curto não é um defeito e ele dura o tempo que tem de durar, mas eu certamente jogaria mais um pouquinho.

Hands down Sam Barlow's best work so far. Switching from textual to visual searches is a brilliant move in conjunction with a shift in storytelling from the literal to the symbolic, drawing the player's attention over and over again to the images that are shared across the stories. The mechanics themselves blur the line between the sign and its meaning, linking a picture at now to another picture and now to the person the picture depicts, harmonizing with the thematic focus on the dissolving boundary between actor, role, and audience.

Immortality is Lynchian, in the sense that it uses a nexus of symbols and raw emotion to argue that the banal humanity of everyday life affects and reflects the grand arcs of humanity. Although the initially-obscure narrative does eventually take clearer form once you dive deep into the depths of the game, it remains resolutely unwilling to sacrifice the breadth of its symbolic resonance at the altar of "lore" by answering every question the player has. It is a game that sticks in one's mind and demands to be mulled over again and again, rewarding this thought with glimmers of insight that feel deeply earned.

Certo dia minha noiva me contou que jogava um jogo da Hannah Montana com as primas dela quando elas eram crianças. Fomos atrás do nome do jogo e conseguimos encontrar uns vídeos. Daí num outro dia que ela tava meio borocoxô resolvi baixar o jogo e um emulador e levar até a casa dela pra gente jogar junto. A gente acabou jogando várias vezes depois até zerar o jogo.

Demos muito risada com as coreografias da Hannah e as falas dos personagens, discutimos muito sobre as roupas que devíamos comprar e usar e aprendemos diversas músicas que agora sabemos quase de cor.

Não se deixe enganar, é um jogo bem medíocre. Mas a companhia fez toda a diferença na experiência ❤️

Definitivamente não é um jogo pra mim.

No começo eu até consegui esboçar um pouco de identificação com os personagens e envolvimento com a narrativa. Mas ao longo do jogo foram rolando diálogos enormes e prolixos, a movimentação do personagem era lentíssima, interações com objetos pareciam não valer muito a pena, a história parecia estar meio perdida.

Eu tava real tão incomodado que nem li os diálogos no final do jogo, o que é uma pena porque parecem ser os mais importantes.

Deixo aqui as minhas sinceras desculpas ao meu amigo @PedroPBO que me deu o jogo de presente. E agora aqui estou eu cagando em cima do negócio.

Peço perdão.

Eu achei esse jogo muito bonito. Apesar de algumas fases serem meio DEMAIS na quantidade de cores, e coisas e todo o resto e ficar cansativo de olhar.

E... infelizmente acho que meus elogios param por ai. 90% do jogo é apertar pra frente enquanto segura um botão pra fazer o solo de guitarra mais genérico do mundo. E embora o visual e o design dos personagens seja legal de olhar, isso fica cansativo rápido. Eu achei chato. Foi CHATO de jogar.
O resto do jogo são uns mini games tipo Genius bem básicos e entediantes, e acompanhar a história fazendo algumas escolhas de diálogo que não influenciam em nada, só dão um saborzinho pra sua jornada pessoal. Mas a história na sua maior parte também foi pouco interessante pra mim.

Acho que um dos maiores pecados é ser um jogo com temática musical e as músicas serem tão... meia boca, e a mecânica tão rasa. As músicas que não são fruto dos personagens do jogo e tocam de fundo, ou nos créditos e etc são bacaninhas, no entanto.

Pra não encerrar num tom tão pessimista, pensar num nome pro personagem e montar o figurino dele foi divertido, também.

(todos humanos nesse jogo usam óculos, isso é estranho)

Attempting to characterize a website with a diverse community is always something of a fool's errand, as by definition you are making a broad generalization about a very large group of people, which is usually not a good thing to do. However, I don't think it would be remiss of me to observe that, at least among the writers I follow routinely putting out wonderful pieces, there is an interest in examining friction in game design, games that push back against a player rather than yield to them. It's a subject I've been interested in for years, and in my time on Backloggd, I've been absolutely feasting on these perspectives.

Which is not to say I always agree with them. One game I was disappointed to find myself somewhat let down by was perennial backloggdcore crown jewel Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days, which was a game I found to honestly be a little trite and vapid. As an aesthetic achievement it's wonderful, and I have nothing but praise for that side of the equation, but I found myself really disappointed by how ultimately unadventurous I found it's play. It reminded me of Spec Ops: The Line, another game that has much I find praiseworthy in it's presentation, but kinesthetically unsatisfying because of how the game's presentational and narrative ideas failed to transfer over to the play experience.

Despite the claims of many purveyors of the most profoundly annoying and vacuous "critique" ever made of a game, Spec Ops doesn't think you are evil for playing it, and it does want you to finish it, to see the end, which is partly why it remains an interesting but unsatisfying game for me. The same is true of Kane & Lynch 2: while I don't think that game wants you to finish it, exactly, as the basically nonexistent narrative has no direction or payoff and neither does the gameplay design, it doesn't really resist you either, beyond the initial culture shock that comes from trying to get to grips with this presentation. The thing that let me down about K&L2 is that I simply learned to deal with it, and play it like I would Spec Ops or Binary Domain. I think it's a fine game, but I don't really find it terribly remarkable in the same way that I don't get a lot out of A Serbian Film. It's an important step in the development of video games as an art-form, in that it's one of the first mainstream video games to successfully make me shrug and move on the same way I do at a lot of empty transgressive art.

While I am sure there are some artists who are able to derive fulfillment from the act of creation alone and have no need for an audience, I imagine that most artists are like myself, in that they need an audience for their work to come alive. Certainly, when I was making (excruciatingly bad) games more regularly, I wanted people to play them, wanted people to see the end, even when I wrote awful dialogue about how, actually, by playing this game you have fallen into some nebulously defined trap and how you should have simply stopped playing, blah blah blah. If I didn't need other people to see my work, to share my thoughts and ideas, then they would remain in my own head, where my words are immune to the cold gaze of time and the imperfect translation process of thought to word. Most of us make games because we want people to play them. It may be harder to work out why, exactly, we want people to play them, but I know that we do. And those of us who write and post do so because we want people to read what we have to say.

None of this is written with a shred of condemnation. It's natural, and good. But it presents a problem when it comes to making truly frictional art, games that actively do not want you to finish them, games that do not push back a little but eventually relent, because ultimately, most people care about their art, and most of those people want people to see it.

What then, would a truly repellant game look like? A game that truly did not want the player to finish it, to see it through to the end, a game that, in every aspect of it's construction, repelled enjoyment? Let me introduce you all to Taz-Mania: friction embodied, and the ultimate Backloggdcore video game.

I'll save you the trouble of regurgitating in detail the ways in which this game sucks, partly because it would be identical to a list of things that are in this game, but mostly because every other review for Taz-Mania have accomplished that task better than I ever could. Instead, I'd like to draw your attention to the GDQ run of this game where one of the co-commentators claims to unironically love this game. Before I sat down and actually tried to play this, I thought this was just hyperbole, but now...I think I'm with them. I think I love Taz-Mania too.

Preemptive apologies for the navel-gazing that is to follow here, but I've been thinking a lot lately about writing, about why I do it, and specifically why I write about video games and how they tell stories. Professionals in the industry are exhausted individuals who lead thankless jobs and who inevitably try to seek succor elsewhere in the industry or beyond it rather than continue to write guides for Horizon Two Dawn or whatever for GamerCum Dot Com. Why do I aspire to this? Why do I aspire to write my own games, when all around me people who write and talk about games assert wholeheartedly that games are just bad at telling stories compared to films? What worth is to be found here?

What is it for? Who is it for? Is it for me? Is it for you? I don't know. I genuinely don't know. Sometimes I fucking hate this place. Believe me, I have often wondered if I would be happier if I hadn't posted a stupid mean Xenoblade 2 review last year. But it's also given me a lot of joy. Sometimes I want to pack it in. Sometimes I want to write more. Sometimes I feel proud of what I've written, and sometimes I feel deeply embarrassed about it. And sometimes I feel all of these things, at once.

I thought about all of this as I tried to play Taz-Mania. Why was I here? Why was I pushing myself forward through a game that was hurting my eyes and was actively miserable to play? For the sake of a joke? For the sake of a meme?

But I kept going. For a good bit, anyway. Sadly, Taz-Mania defeated me because it just became too frustrating to master. But still, for a good while, I persevered. Partly because I went to the trouble to find a Master System/Game Gear emulator, something I was sure I would never use again, but also because, well, someone wanted to know what I thought about this game, and no matter how much of a joke that was, no matter how serious or why they did that, they still did it. And others did the same and wrote reviews I got great enjoyment out of reading. In this barren wasteland of thought, these people found meaning. They made something out of nothing.

Taz-Mania is not just backloggdcore, Taz-Mania is video games. It is amateurish, barely functioning, and devoid of the qualities that prescriptivists about "quality of art" extol in other mediums. And yet it lives, lives in the words and in the minds of others, breathing life into a collection of pixels held together by tape and code and hope. More repulsive than Kane & Lynch, and providing a truer test of the meaning and worth of video games than Ending E of Nier: Automata could ever muster.

To a certain extent, I do agree with many of those why say that video games struggle to reach the narrative heights of other mediums, but I also acknowledge that those heights are there because we put them there: regardless of the theory and thought behind it, sound as they may be, ultimately things are considered good because we like them, and great literature and great filmmaking and great game design is considered such because we've, consciously or unconsciously, come to some kind of a general agreement over factors that are desirable in a work of art. And to be sure, Taz-Mania doesn't meet any of those factors. But I like it anyway. Because I choose to. Because that's really all it comes down to, isn't it?

Why do I write? Because I want to. Why do we like and care about video games? Because we do. Why do we find profound meaning in Kane & Lynch, in Paper Mario, in Ocarina of Time, in Persona 4 or Kingdom Hearts? Because in play, in investing in these dumb things wholeheartedly and earnestly, we create that meaning. And Taz-Mania is here - will always be here - to remind us that that deep down, no matter what else we might say, this is the truth at the heart of it. Video games are stupid, broken, vacuous, often ugly and repellant. But we love them anyway, and because we love them, they come to life.

Now and forever, we're gaming.

Thanks for the recommendation, LetsHugBro!

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“Life does not have inherent meaning; to say that our lives are pointless and our achievements meaningless is to state the obvious. No matter how grand our achievements or how broad their scope, time turns all to dust and death destroys all memory. But that does not mean we cannot ascribe our own meaning to what we do. It is because nothing has meaning unto itself that we are free to create meaning, to make metaphor, and in doing so reflect on ourselves and our world.

Leveling to 99 in the first reactor is pointless and meaningless. So why do I do it? I do it to express my hatred, and more importantly my disdain, for Dick Tree. I do it to express the camaraderie I feel for those of us who have followed this topic for years only to be disappointed by Dick Tree. I do it to prove to myself that I can persevere. The act is meaningless; I give it meaning.”

- CirclMstr

Contained herein is reasonable evidence to suggest that Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, decades before their "game" debut, were better environmental storytellers than just about anyone who has worked on a game with "-shock" in the title.

On a less caustic note, this is a pitch-perfect accompaniment for two albums that I thought would never be capable of eliciting strong feelings from me again after wearing them out in my younger years. Wish there was a Optimistic sequence but the triple-threat of How To Disappear/Pyramid Song/You and Whose Army? will make up for it.