played this while recovering from a major surgery in a hospital. there's probably like entire underground societies and institutions dedicated to this shit, dudes out there formulating the perfect monkey situations and learning optimal placements on each map. there's gotta be like one guy out there with a balloons tower defense tattoo. to me, it's that game i played while bleeding and dying and watching red letter media videos. i don't wanna know it any more intimately than that. it was like a cast for a broken arm on my brain, bracing the suffocating agony of my white ass away from insufferable boredom and loneliness. for that week, i understood the life of the ipad baby.

New Vegas and Morrowind have a shared, magical little quality that I think has gone mostly unnoticed even after all these years, something that’s been in plain sight but critically under-discussed. And that is:

Their titles.

… Not that the words themselves are what's particularly special, but how their respective titular locations actually do define the entire game. Morrowind was so interesting because it, for the most part, bucked the fantasy trend of having an unambiguously defined hero, and players instead had to prove themselves to all the various societies in the region. Each group interprets the role of the Nerevarine differently, in a way that reflects their values, conveying an understanding to the player of Morrowind and its people. New Vegas works the exact same way, with a similarly undestined hero slowly learning about all the conflicts that shape life in the Mojave. The opening hours of the game are genius for how they introduce the daily struggle of the wastelanders, the cruelty of the Legion, the ineffectual bureaucracy of the NCR, the brutal lives of the urban Freesiders, and finally, the resources of the strip that they’re all counting on to save them. Making it to the strip is only where the game begins, and even by then, the player has already been fully integrated in the setting. Choices have been made that had the weight of consequence, not just from the mechanical standpoint of NPC reputation, but from the knowledge that those choices could impact the future of New Vegas. You know an RPG is something special when you could take out all the skill points, character attributes, and traits but still have a compelling roleplaying experience, and that’s why I think it’s stuck in people’s minds the way Morrowind has. Gameplay systems may age, but a thoughtfully constructed world with relatable characters in a conflict you’re invested in has a timeless appeal.

Addendum on the DLC (includes some spoilers):
The date listed for this completion is for a replay, which was also the first time I played the DLC, so here’s the DLC for the review.
Firstly, Dead Money was an odd lurch in tone, but it’s probably my favorite of the bunch. It’s an interesting post-apocalyptic story that could honestly stand on its own, but its themes actually do tie back into the main story in an elegant way, coloring the player’s view of each faction with an understanding of how dangerous a fixation on the past can be. Just wish there were fewer bear traps.
Honest Hearts feels like a Yin-and-Yang companion piece to Dead Money, with societies that are trying to start without the baggage of the past. However, while obsessing on the past is dangerous, you can’t escape from its influence. In other ways, it feels like the rest of New Vegas in miniature, including its problems, most notably having a half-baked villain. A little bland as an expansion but basically ok.
Old World Blues is… a thing? I heard it was the best for years, but I found the dialog to be so painfully unfunny that I nearly stopped playing. Apparently there has been quite the heel-turn on how much people like it now though, and it’s been slowly sliding down the ranks. I just don’t have a feel for what this DLC was trying to say, other than “stupid sci-fi is fun”.
However, Lonesome Road might actually be my least favorite for other reasons. While Old World Blues is painful to listen to, I think this one actually hurts the narrative of the main game, which is hard to forgive. It attaches mythological significance to your character at the very last moment, and suddenly defines a specific backstory that robs players of the history they built with their character. While the rest of the game hinted at what Ulysses was like, it never went so far as to actually set up a conflict with him, so he had to patiently explain your own backstory to you in order to manufacture enough drama for the final showdown to occur. After all that, you can still just convince him to just bury the hatchet and walk away, which seems like an unusual option. As much as I hate forced combat in a game that lets you focus on speechcraft, I think that the game let slip a beautifully tragic theme of irreconcilable differences. Metal Gear Rising put it in a way that's oddly fitting for New Vegas:

Standing here, I realize you are just like me, trying to make history.
But who’s to judge the right from wrong?
When our guard is down I think we’ll both agree that violence breeds violence, but in the end it has to be this way.
I’ve carved my own path, you followed your wrath, but maybe we’re both the same.
The world has turned and so many have burned, but nobody is to blame.
Yet staring across this barren wasted land, I feel new life will be born, beneath the blood stained sand.

I think if Ulysses was more of a perfect devil’s advocate, who would always rationally and passionately stand for everything you stand against, killing him would be an incredibly emotional moment. If the series’ theme is “War never changes”, the courier’s final challenge being the most basic human violence of brother against brother, courier against courier, it would have been a perfect parallel to the past, to Romulus and Remus, and to the future, to the Bull and Bear. I imagine that this idea was the original concept, but sadly, it didn’t quite shake out.

Sorry that addendum went on longer than the actual review, thanks for making it all the way down here, I hope you're having a great day.

Video version/with photo accompaniment

CW: Sexual assault, sexual violence, bestiality, incest, pornography, victim-blaming/shaming, misogyny, sexualisation of minors, gore, obscenity, descriptions of the aforementioned. The four-letter 'R-word' is also invoked repeatedly without censoring or obfuscation.

This review is split into sections. While you can read them all at once, I advise taking breaks as necessary due to length and subject-matter, as well as to better digest the text.

I also wish to stress I am not endorsing these sorts of games. I am just presenting my own understanding of media in a culture different from my own, with my own Western perceptions and biases. Draw your own boundaries when it comes to the media you consume.

Introduction

On the 'List of controversial video games' page of English Wikipedia, there's an entry for a 1986 PC-8801 game by Macadamia Soft titled 177.[1] It has one incorrectly archived citation. The only article for 177 itself is on Japanese Wikipedia. Given that 177 allegedly "ignited a public furor that reach the National Diet of Japan," this absence of concrete evidence puzzled me.[2] However, as there remains an abundance of media of its ilk in contemporary Japanese culture, I was also curious as to what that furor achieved, and the why of 177's production. In this review, I will argue that 177 and similar such works represent gendered power dynamics in Japanese culture, operate in intentional contradistinction to moral sexuality as an extension of nation-building and family-making, and that these titles reflect Japan's interpretation of ethics -- in relation to pornography -- in a manner incongruous with Western perceptions, necessitating a knowledge of their context.

Rife

There's an undeniable prevalence to rape and sexual assault in eroge generally not seen in Western produced erotic games. The obvious keystones include AliceSoft's Rance series and Illusion's titles like RapeLay and Battle Raper. However, these works are not anomalies in the sea of eroge. Searching the Rape tag on VNDB gives over 5,400 total results. 3,855 have a tag score above 2.0, meaning a step up in importance above "the tag certainly applies."[3] 517 garner a 3.0 meaning "the tag applies, is very apparent and plays a major role."[4] These numbers do not account for the plethora of doujin works on platforms like the NEC PC-88 and PC-98, or contemporary releases on storefronts like DLsite. Furthermore, this only quantifies visual novel releases. A cursory search of DLsite bears 282 eroge titles tagged Rape. And this says nothing of Rape anime/manga hentai or erotica. ExHentai has over 81,000 doujinshi, manga, and CG galleries tagged Rape in Japanese, even then only representing uploads from 2007-onward. That's out of over 770,000 total works in those categories. Though a wider and more thorough analysis would garner more accurate numbers, what I am trying to convey the presence, prevalence, and pronouncement of rape in Japanese pornography.

None of this is new, as the 1986 release of 177 would already intimate. Depictions of rape in Japanese visual art go back at least as far as the late 18th century, seen in the ukiyo-e prints of Koryūsai and Utamaro. Even as far back as the Heian period, rape plays a prominent, if not important, role in Murasaki Shikibu's Genji Monogatari. Widely considered one of the first literary novels, Genji Monogatari is a critical work in its detailing of aristocracy in Heian Japan, including its moral code. Furthermore, its role in the cultural zeitgeist of Japan to this very day has it informing other works from nougaku theatre to television adaptations to manga to women's gossip magazines. Rape is by no means the primary focus of Genji Monogatari, to the extent that most discussion of the work either eschews mention of it or relegates it to a footnote, but I bring it up because it is undeniably a part of the work.

Esteemed translator of Genji Monogatari into modern Japanese, the late Jakucho Setouchi, noted that the clandestine and tasteful acts of sex therein were "all rape, not seduction."[5] English translator of Genji Monogatari, Royall Tyler, takes umbrage with this assertion of rape, stating that in this time period, no woman could properly give consent in a decent or proper manner, thereby making any first-time sexual encounter within established social bounds meet our contemporary definition of rape.[6] The particulars of a 'correct' reading here are far too complicated to dive into (and I don't consider myself well-read enough to argue one way or the other), but the chapters following Genji's death are so fervent in their description and criticism of rape that even if Genji is not a rapist, Murasaki's world is still abound with rape. Returning to Tyler's position, Genji can be understood to not be raping his victims because they are seduced prior to, during, or after sex. Regardless of if this is valid for those women, the work and this reading thus perpetuate a litany of rape myths we still deal with contemporarily, and that are still seen in the pages of hentai manga or the scenes of eroge. I bring this up because the claim of 'alleged' rape being a preliminary step to marriage is critical to 177, as well as RapeLay, the Rance series of titles, and a large swath of eroge.

An Overview of 177 by Macadamia Soft

「強姦…ゲームなら罪になりません」[7]
「Rape… it's not a crime if it's a game」

On the title screen for 177, we see a young red-haired woman flanked by trees on either side of the path she walks. The path splits into three branches. The woman wears a white sleeveless blouse and red skirt. She looks over her shoulder and breaks into a jog, accelerating to a rapid pace. The internal speaker of the NEC PC-88 clicks in time with her footsteps. As the game loads you hear a deep heartbeat. There's no build up to the chase here, it happens before the player even gains control.

The manual (emblazoned with 177 and an all-caps RAPE beneath it) stipulates that to enjoy the game, one must 'become' a rapist.[8]

The game screen features an animated sprite of the woman in the top left, constantly looking over her shoulder. Beside her is a map showing the start point, winding and branching paths, her home, and a graveyard.

The woman's name is Kotoe Saito. She is a 21 year old pink-collar worker for a foreign computer company. She is 160.9cm tall. Her blood type is A. Her three sizes are 82-60-83. She has a bright personality and a partner named Akira Shindo. Her parents approve of their relationship.

The player character is a 26 year old man named Hideo Ouchi. He has been working at an automotive factory for eight years. His hobby is browsing manga in convenience stores at night. His personality is serious but taciturn. He is poor at socialising. The other tidbit of biographical insight we get is that his 'target' is Kotoe Saito. This is a premeditated rape, as Hideo has been scouting out Kotoe's commute to and from work to determine how to chase and rape her. Hideo doesn't want to enact a sexual violence onto any woman, he wants to hurt this specific woman.

The bottom of the game screen shows Kotoe and Hideo in a mad dash to the left of the screen. Stumps, stones, graves, fans, cats, skunks, turtles, dogs, and moles stifle your chase of Kotoe. The player can throw bombs to increase their score, destroy obstacles, and slow Kotoe down. Picking up street signs changes Kotoe's escape route to keep her from getting home. Everything in your path hampers your movement, and the closer you get to Kotoe, the less time you have to react. When you're within striking distance of her it's a pure gamble as to whether or not you'll succeed. When the player reaches Kotoe, they strip an article of her clothing off as her portrait shrieks. First the blouse, then her skirt, then her bra, lastly her panties. The difficulty is obscene to the point of frustration, perhaps deliberately to make the eventual 'reward' of rape and sexual gratification all the more satisfying. Catching up to her a fifth time has Hideo pin Kotoe to the ground as the heartbeat returns. Thus concludes Act One of 177.

The screen goes black and shows us Hideo raping Kotoe. In the top we see percentages assigned to the four cardinal directions. Next to it is a Power metre rapidly counting down. Below that, a Desire metre changing its reading rapidly. Underneath the percentages is a pink orchid which slowly opens its petals fully in bloom. Drops of water land on it. The bottom left corner displays the four cardinal directions the player can maneuver themselves as they rape Kotoe. Assuming a position which obfuscates the penetration, we see Kotoe's distressed face and sometimes an exposed breast, the rest of her covered by Hideo and his undulating hips. Kotoe lets out the occasional yelp.

Should Hideo's power metre reach zero, he is arrested and Section 2 of Article 177 of the Japanese Criminal Code is quoted, which altogether states:

"Article 177. (Rape)
A person who, through assault or intimidation, forcibly commits sexual intercourse with a female of not less than thirteen years of age commits the crime of rape and shall be punished by imprisonment with work for a definite term of not less than 3 years. The same shall apply to a person who commits sexual intercourse with a female under thirteen years of age."[9]

This ending comprises one of two 'bad endings' in 177, the other happening if Kotoe reaches her home. In that event, she jumps for joy and the game ends, no punishment for battery or attempted rape.

If the player instead gets the Desire metre high enough for long enough, the orchid will quiver and Kotoe screams in a pink speech bubble instead to indicate her orgasm. The Desire metre isn't Hideo's own lust, it represents Kotoe's growing attraction to Hideo, suggesting continual rape eventually crosses a boundary of becoming ordinary, consensual sex. The screen fades to black again before we see a photograph of Kotoe in bridal attire with a demure expression. The sun rises behind Mount Fuji, and Hideo lays on the ground in the same clothes from Act One, propping his head up and wearing a weary expression. Below the picture reads "Well, I'm beaten." The implication is thusly, similar to Genji Monogatari and representative of rape myth beliefs, the victim's orgasm means they weren't raped, that she wanted it, and that this is an act of seduction rather than assault. Considering her protestation throughout the course of her rape, the genuine terror in her eyes during Act One, and her incredible glee if she makes it home successfully, her alleged enjoyment is a laughable falsehood, perpetuating rape myth acceptance by wrapping it all in a happy bow. So supposedly smitten is Kotoe that her relationship with her partner Akira is called off so she can wed her rapist. Hideo is meant to be an target of pity, doomed to domesticity with a woman he lusted after but perhaps did not love.

The 'Story' of 177

Across all discussions of 177, not a single one makes mention of the manual. I present here a transcription of the story of 177 presented therein, machine translated with some light edits for readability:

"強姦…ゲームなら罪になりません
[Rape… it's not a crime if it's a game]

「１７７」物語
このゲームを楽しむには、強姦魔になりきることが大切です。気分をもりあげる意味でもこのストーリーを読みましょう。クリアするためのテクニックもお教えします。
[177 Story - To enjoy this game, it is important to be a rapist. Read this story to help life your mood. We will also teach you some techniques to clear the game.]

[強姦]。 美際の行為に及ぷ者はいない。なぜならば刑法第177条「強姦罪」に触れる事になるからだ。しかし、ゲームなら可能である。このゲームは、世の男性・女性諸氏の健全かつ正常なる愛の営みを願い開発されました。あなたの心に潜む、その危険な願望をゲームの世界で存分にお楽しみください。決して現実の世界に足を踏み入れないために。
[[Rape.] No one should engage in the act of rape. This would be a violation of Article 177 of the Penal Code, outlining the crime of rape. However, it is allowed in a game. This game was developed with the hope that men and women in the world will have healthy and normal love lives. Please enjoy the dangerous desires that lurk in your heart to the fullest in the game world. Never bring these acts into the real world.]

Chapter 1
21歳のOL斉藤琴恵は、残業で帰りがすっかり遅くなってしまい、いつもの道を足速に家へ向っていた。ガサガサと、後ろの草むらから音が聞こえる。振り向いた琴恵の顔のすぐ近くに、目をギラギラさせた男の顔があった。「ねーちゃん、ええことせえへんか」男は琴恵のふくよかな胸を鶩づかみにした。琴恵は男の手をふり切って、一目散に逃げ出した。
[Kotoe Saito, a 21-year-old office lady, was heading home along her usual path at a quick pace after working overtime and leaving late. She heard a rustling sound coming from the grass behind her. When she turned around, the face of a man with glazed eyes was close to Kotoe's. The man grabbed Kotoe's plump breasts. Kotoe shook off the man's hands and ran away at once.]

Chapter 2
琴恵は必死に走った。今はとにかく逃げるしかない。あんなのにつかまったら何をされるかわからない。考えるだけで鳥肌が立ってくる。男は一瞬ひるんだが、二ヤリと不敵な笑いを浮かべるとまた、琴恵をめがけて追ってきた。だんだん琴恵に近づいてくる男の足音…。「追いつかれる…」男は琴恵の服をつかむと、カー杯引き裂いた。
[Kotoe ran desperately. Right now, she had no choice but to run. If that man grabs me, I don't know what he will do to me. Just thinking about it gave her goosebumps. The man flinched for a moment, but then he gave a wry grin and ran after her again. The sound of the man's footsteps gradually approached Kotoe… The man grabbed Kotoe's clothes and tore them off.]

Chapter 3
男は一瞬自分がが引き裂いた服に見とれていた。琴恵はその隙に逃差点まで来た。右側はいつも通っている近道だったが、琴恵は迷わず左へ曲がった。この男はつ琴恵を髪うのも計画的犯行だった。男は数日前から秘かに彼女の後をつけ、この辺ー帯の地形を把握し、スイッチを操作すれば、自動的に動く標識を交差点全部につけていたのだった。
[The man looked for a moment at the clothes he had torn off. Kotoe took the opportunity to run to a crossroads. On the right was a shortcut that she always took, but she did not hesitate to turn left. The man's attempts to rape Kotoe were premeditated. He had been secretly following her for several days, and he knew the topography of the area and had placed signs at all the intersections that moved automatically at the flick of a switch.]

Chapter 4
琴恵の必死の逃走も空しく、スかート、ブラジャー、パンティー、次々と脱がされ、全裸にされてしまった。「次で最後だ」男は期待に胸と下半身を膨ませて、こう思った。琴恵はもうこれ以上速く走ることはできなかった。だんだん男の荒い吐息が近付いて来た。琴恵はついに押し倒されてしまった。
[Kotoe's desperate attempts to escape were in vain, as she was stripped of her skirt, bra, and panties one after the other, until she was completely naked. "The next time I catch you will be the last," the man thought, his chest and loins heaving with anticipation. Kotoe could not run any faster. Gradually, the man's rough breathing came closer and closer. Finally, Kotoe was pushed down.]

Chapter 5
男は素早く服を脱ぐと、ぐったりした琴恵に乗っ掛ってきた。愛のないセックスは琴恵にとって苦痛だった。そんな彼女をよそに男は腰を動かすのに必死だった。なぜなら、「腰をうまく使って彼女が温れてしまえば、このセックスは同意の上ということになる。もし起訴されても罪に問われないだろう」男は患かにもそう考えたからだ。
[The man quickly removed his clothes and climbed on top of the limp Kotoe. The loveless sex was painful for Kotoe. The man was desperate to move his hips in spite of her. "If I use my hips well and make her cum, it means that this sex is consensual," thought the man. Even if he was prosecuted then, he would not be charged with a crime.]"[10]

The (Hi)story of Macadamia Soft

The specifics of development studio Macadamia Soft are difficult to pin down precisely, not only due to most resources being in Japanese, but also because early computer software was seen as ephemeral and inconsequential enough to not warrant extensive documentation. This section is my attempt to piece together the origins of Macadamia Soft and 177.

In 1980, a Sapporo-based computer shop was founded under the name 'Computer Land Hokkaido' (株式会社コンピューターランド北海道). As was typical of many developers in the infancy of the home computer revolution, 'Computer Land Hokkaido' was a store which sold computer software and hardware, with software development happening behind the counter as a secondary commercial endeavour. That department, under the name '7 Turkey,' released at least seventeen titles for the NEC PC-6000, PC-8000, and PC-8800 series of 8-bit home computers.[11] Around 1983, '7 Turkey' changed their name to dB-SOFT alongside the release of one of their most important games, Flappy.

dB-SOFT's first adult title, Don Juan, was released in March 1984. A 'game of debauchery,' it tells the story of a casanova trying to seduce a woman named Madoka while avoiding debt collectors.[13] Madoka can be sweet-talked into sex with a highly difficult pickup line guessing game. Eventually presenting her 'flowers' to Don Juan and having sex with him, her buttocks undulate similarly to Hideo's in 177. Don Juan is of low quality in terms of its gameplay and graphical goods, but this anti-social function of holing yourself away with a woman paved the way for dB-SOFT's later eroge releases.

By 1985, as recalled by Yasuhito Saito in a 2013 interview, 'Computer Land Hokkaido' was still operating as a general computer store in the front of their building.¹² Behind it were the administrative and sales departments, then a planning division, a Japanese-style work area (desk all together, no cubicles), and lastly a cordoned off area known as the 'secret development room.'[13]

That year saw the publication of Macadam: Futari Yogari [Foreplay for Two] under dB-SOFT's new Macadamia Soft imprint, created to further differentiate their adult works from their other titles as Don Juan had failed to do.[14] Not all reputable software firms created such imprints (though Koei did create their own "Strawberry Porno Game Series" label, for one), but what cannot be understated is how pervasive eroge was for those firms. Browsing databases for the era's Japanese home computers, and retrospective review sites like erogereport, show countless erotic works developed and published by the likes of Hudson, Enix, Square, Nihon Falcom, Championsoft, ASCII, JAST, and Pony Canyon. It should come as little surprise that the team that brought us Flappy also made Don Juan and 177; their contemporaries who would create Dynasty Warriors released 1984's My Lolita, an erotic surgery simulator; the makers of Dragon Quest slapped their publisher label on a contest winner's Lolita Syndrome in 1983.[15] There wasn't much shame in creating these works as a company as they satisfied a market niche and helped fill corporate coffers.

Macadam tasked the player with using vibrators, candles, their mouth, a feather, and a whip on four different women to bring them (and presumably the player) to orgasm. Each women presents herself in seven poses (stages), with their pleasure being increased by targeting their weak points (marked by stars) with their preferred implement. The astute reader might already be drawing parallels between Macadam's gameplay and Meet and Fuck flash games. The comparison is apt given the strict progression of pleasure therein, though Macadam has actual challenge to it, particularly in the 'final action scenes' for each woman which involve rapid keyboard presses of increasing difficulty.[16] This same style of quicktime gameplay reemerges in 177, just as the presence of candles and whips betray the softcore nature of Macadam like an ill portent of what was to come.

Macadam was allegedly a bit of a shock upon its release partly due to its novel gamification of foreplay, earning it the description of a 'touch game' (similar mechanics had actually been seen earlier in CSK/LOVECOM's 1983 卍 MANJI for Fujitsu FM-7 and NEC PC-88).[17] By pure coincidence, Macadam released in close proximity to Mike Saenz's MacPlaymate, wherein players similarly seduce a woman with different 'toys.' Though MacPlaymate took off like wildfire, Macadam was relegated to a more quiet interest as it required players to have a mouse back when they weren't standard with home computers.

In 1986, with two moderate eroge successes under their belt, dB-SOFT's development team sought to create another title for their new label. One employee who specialised in adult software, described by Saito as an ojii-san "who used to be a taxi driver," came up with the proposal for 177, with Saito charged as main programmer and composer, and graphic design being headed by an unnamed female employee.[28] Also known as Shibata-san, this employee, in addition to the core game, came up with the idea for the 'good ending'. Throughout development and following 177's release, there was allegedly never an air of concern at dB-SOFT. As Saito puts it, "We didn't think we were making something bad. It just happened to become the topic at the diet. But of course none of us were able to tell that to our parents, and even now my parents don't know that I was involved in creating 177."[19] That lack of worry towards their craft was purportedly due to the work culture of dB-SOFT, with employees working on a litany of software from word processors to games to erotic works. Their rotational schedules meant they regarded the work on 177 less as making a game about rape, and more as just programming, combining audio and visual parts with code. Takaki Kobayashi noted that "even female staff were debugging 177, and [they] would just do it without any particular emotion. [They weren't] embarrassed, and would say "Why can't I take her clothes?"" This would-be condemned title was internally considered fundamentally no different from working on productivity software. "It was what they did, and even the package was created by a female member of staff in the advertising section," recalled Kobayashi, just as female art students had reportedly made the scenes in Macadam as well.[20]

The 177 Controversy

On October 10, 1986, Councillor Shozo Kusakawa, member of the religious-conservative New Komeito party presented 177 to the Japanese National Diet to demonstrate that hurtful software should have its sales restricted. The lack of restrictions already in place, as he argued, had children effectively competing with one another for the purchase of eroge, to the point of children shoplifting them at times.[21] He asked the Diet to open the sealed plastic bags containing the software he had brought, and spoke firstly of 177. This was the first time eroge had been brought up in the National Diet. In Kusakawa's eyes, the title coupled with the packaging's claim that the rape experience is thrilling manifested a mockery of Japanese criminal law.[22] With computer use skyrocketing in the mid-1980s to the point where most Japanese households owned a computer of some form (including game consoles), the concern was that this space was unregulated and, in part, unknowable.[23] Independent doujin releases could be made in the privacy of a home or behind the closed doors of a computer shop's backroom, copies could be made rapidly and cheaply, they could be sold with little to no scrutiny by those same computer shops, they could be illegally duplicated with basic equipment; when a title like 177 released, it could theoretically spread like wildfire, including publication in magazines catered to computer users, long before parents could even be aware of its presence or content.[24] Worse yet, children and teens seemed to have more interest in using computers for games (including eroge) rather than what they were being pushed for, education purposes.

Kusakawa's issue with 177 and eroge was not merely its content, but its context. His argument centred on the notion that, "while people can read about or look at illustrations of such situations, the context of rape transformed into a game was far more problematic."[25] The manual may have stated that not to bring the contents of the game into the real world, but that required one to actually read the manual (resplendent with complex kanji without accompanying furigana) if players even had the manual. If a player had a copied version, they might not have the supplementary materials. Further still, one would have to read the manual's text without seeing it as a sarcastic afterthought, taking its stress on leaving rape purely in the game at face value; given the lighthearted tone and argumentation of what is and is not rape, such a serious reading seems unlikely. Kusakawa and Shiokawa Masajuro, then Minister of Education, firmly stated that, though these works were protected due to freedom of expression, there still needed to be an onus on developers and retailers to refrain from promoting and selling such software titles to minors. Concrete steps were not taken at first when the Ministry of International Trade and Industry implored the software industry self-regulate its content. It would not be until the arrest of Miyazaki Tsutomu in 1989 that the issue would re-emerge for debate.

The team at dB-SOFT never thought 177 would become a topic of national concern, particularly due to the anarchic state of software development in the early to mid 1980s. If anything, the ending was intended to ebb any consternation as Hideo was, in effect, 'taking responsibility' for what he had done by marrying Kotoe.[26] Even in the wake of the furor surrounding 177, dB-SOFT was largely unaffected. The national moral panic partly influenced their decision to pull out of the eroge space, though Konyamo Asama de Powerful Mahjong in 1988 would still bear light erotic elements. dB-SOFT was in fact pleased with the media coverage as it led to increased sales and notoriety afforded to them.[27]

The controversy might itself seem minor and quaint compared to the United States' 1993-1994 congressional hearings on video games in the wake of DOOM, Mortal Kombat, and Night Trap. That moral panic saw tangible effects with the development of the ESRB and countless other rating systems self-imposed by publishers, but the same was not the case for Japan. Even when eroge was under scrutiny in the 1990s, little firm action was taken, and CERO wouldn't be established until 2002. The RapeLay controversy did not stymie the development of rape-centric eroge either, instead Japanese publishers chose to deny access to their works to those outside of Japan. What the 177 incident demonstrated was an intense reluctance on the part of the Japanese government to impose censorship outside of what laws were already in place. The moral panic asked parents to be mindful of what content their children were or might consume, rather than punish the industry or its intended customer base more broadly. The following section goes into why Japan wasn't as concerned with the production of rape-centric work as the Western world has been.

Commodified Sex & Rape (Culture)

Anyone with a passing knowledge of Japanese erotic works knows the abundance of rape, bestiality, scat, gore, incest, and sexualisation of minors therein. It would be irresponsible to say it applies to a majority of works, but the point is these aspects are hard to miss. As demonstrated near the beginning of this text, rape plays a prominent role in innumerable Japanese-language works, but rape hentai and eroge have entered the zeitgeist outside Japan as well; consider the popularity and awareness of the aforementioned Rance series by Alicesoft or ShindoL's Metamorphosis. These 'disgraceful' works, be they about sexual disgrace, sexual assault, or rape, certainly stand out as Nagayama Kaoru highlights in their history of eromanga, but 'pure disgrace' works like 177 are a relative rarity, at least in theory.[28]

To understand the cultural context that permitted then condemned works like 177, we need to look at how erotic content is consumed in the Japanese market, particularly before the advent of the Internet. As Yakuza players are likely aware, vending machines did (and still do!) carry erotic works and sexual paraphernalia in a rather open context, as did (and do) konbini. These materials were not cordoned off in the same way they were in the western world; arousing items were everywhere to the point of their visibility effectively being an invisibility. While erotic photography was made to abide by strict guidelines vis-a-vis production, consumption, and promotion, ficticious works like eroge and eromanga were more openly tolerated and gazed upon.[29] The partaking of eromanga was thereby common, with a market saturated and open enough for prices to plummet and to breed a culture of rapid, consistent purchase. With skyrocketing land prices in the 1980s and 1990s, most Japanese workers in cities lived in the suburbs with potentially astoundingly long commutes by train. Those commuters were easy to convert into consumers in no small part due to the liminality of transit; a commuter train car is not conducive to a maximally realised relaxation, nor productive labour in a pre-Internet landscape. It should come as little surprise then that those commuters accounted for sixty percent of all printed mass media sales around 177's release.[30] This mass consumption would thus suggest a commonplace standing of the typified male dominance, female victimisation, and sexual violence/assault in Japanese eromanga and erotic works more broadly. As cultural anthropologist Anne Allison argues, this generalised and universalised reading of pornographic material as (re)producing male dominance, chauvinism, violences, and privileges -- proffered by anti-pornography radical feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon during the feminist sex wars of the 1980s -- ignores and erases cultural contexts and that non-cishet-males "have found pleasure and empowerment in particular pornographies […] which has the effect of moralizing against, rather than advocating, the sexual agency of women."[31]

Erotic works consumed in this mode by no means account for the totality of these sales, but they operate in service of a similar goal as other printed mass media. Consider the plethora of Japanese print mass media works dealing with the relatively mundane: slice-of-life, romance, sports, drama, mahjong, comedy. These are often as popular as more outlandish, bolder, fantastical works. What journalist Shinichi Kusamori claims regarding those grounded light novels, manga, and magazines, is that a lack of time for substantive engagement in hobbies or socialising necessitates the consumption of this material.[32] As a fan of mahjong unable to make time for actual play, Shinichi partook in the Baudrillarian simulacrum of mahjong, playing the game vicariously through manga. Counter to the notion that increasing popularity of mahjong manga would correlate with rising popularity of the physical game, Shinichi demonstrates that their relation is inverse, the simulacrum in effect supplanting the real.[33]

We can extrapolate this to other genres with ease and validity. Japan's birthrate has been on the decline since the mid-1970s, with the rigours of capitalism demanding ever more time and energy be devoted to work rather than the home life. With less time to enjoy non-work life, slice-of-life manga fills that void. With less time to pursue romance, romance manga fills that void. Without time and energy to engage in sexual relations, eromanga brings satisfaction without the actual act. It stands to reason that this is not unique to print media either. Mahjong, sports, romance, and sex are all time and energy commitments that can be approximated through play. Eroge thus serves a similar purpose to eromanga and pornographic works as a whole, but bringing it into the confines of the home (or computer cafe) without the additional effort and labour of the act. Skip the foreplay, get to the point of release. This can be taken even further with the popularity of soaplands, image clubs, pink salons, nuru/sumata massage parlours, compensated dating, fashion health shops, peep shows, mistress banks, and salacious karaoke bars. Sex and romance have and had become commodities in and of themselves, a labour on the part of the 'product,' paid for with the spoils of labour by the purchaser, the fiduciary cost being offset by the lack of time investment.[34]

Japanese commentators (as quoted by Allison) Kusamori, Takeru Kamewada, Tadao Sato, and Akira Nakano argue that sex fit the medium of manga better than anything else because the content depicted, usually of an 'offensive, secretive, dark, violent, evil, dirty, and lewd' nature reflects the attitudes in Japan towards sex as a whole. It is not some unconscious, accidental by-product that was willed into existence. Japanese erotic works are, as visual culturalist Sharon Kinsella puts it, "the end product of a series of complicated conscious social exchanges and intelligent cultural management," a deliberate realisation and commodification of acts which might not be attainable due to time, anxiety, or social knowledge.[35] The hows and whys of sex didn't stay in eromanga either. One of the first erotic games ever, Koei's 1982 Night Life was marketed not just for its lewd imagery, but as an aid for sexual education for couples, including a period tracker and questionnaire to suggest sex positions. Night Life and erotic works should thus be understood not purely for personal sexual gratification, but for sexual knowledge and the promotion of intimacy as well. Not that that stops the consumer from seeking pleasures off the page or screen, however, as the phenomenon of chikan on public transit demonstrates.

It would be disingenuous to describe eromanga or eroge on the whole as elucidating and informative to the public, or as some wholesome if lascivious body of work. It is a fact that erotic works largely recreate the male gaze, the Freudian fetish, the Lacanian objet petit a. What is placed on the page or screen is a recreation and representation of sexual fantasy and desire, reinterpreted, reiterated, and reproduced by and for a culture. The female body is frequently transgressed upon, be it through molestation, harassment, being gazed upon voyeuristically, rape, or sadomasochism. Whether these fictitious women are shown enjoying this transgression or not, they bear physical, mental, or spiritual marks of violence imposed upon them, as men see, possess, penetrate, and hurt them.[36] Should women demonstrate their own will and initiative, they are often put back in their place as subordinate to men, subservient to the gender order. And yet these works were and are available with astounding openness compared to the Western (particularly, American) compartmentalisation of sex into the realm of privacy.[37] In the mid-1980s there was more clamouring from the government and advocacy groups about depicting pubic realism than there was about showing rape, or the sexualisation of minors.[38] By 1993, it was reported by the Youth Authority of Somucho that approximately 50% of male and 20% of female middle and high schoolers frequently read eromanga, yet the Liberal Democratic Party's 1991 introduced legislation to reduce sales of eromanga to minors floundered.[39] Japan at the time had a Child Welfare Law which prohibited child prostitution, but no law against child pornography; even the consumption of pornographic materials by minors was more a moral concern than a legal one. Maybe it really is no big deal. Japan has one of the lowest rates of rape in the world after all; perhaps this openness and contextualisation of sex actually serves its purpose as a sort of release valve for frustration. Perhaps they know something we don't.

The (In)Visiblity of Rape in Japan

Allow me to problematise the notion of Japan's low rape rate. A reading of sex crime statistics done at face value shows a clear downward trend for already obscenely low numbers.[40]

This downward trend from 1972-1985 seems concomitant with rising sales and production of sexually explicit material, including that which depicts rape. Similar trends were historically seen with the rise of sexually explicit materials in Denmark, Sweden, and West Germany following the legalisation of pornography therein in 1969, 1970, and 1973, respectively.[41] Sexologist Milton Diamond and cultural anthropologist Ayako Uchiyama emphasise that rape has always been taken seriously in Japan, and that inhibiting factors for the reporting of rape (and other sex crimes) have diminished, thus making this trend reflective of an actual decrease in rape cases.[42] Furthermore, the Japanese Ministry of Justice espouses its own rationale for Japan's low crime rate, citing, among others, a highly law-abiding citizenry, a web of informal social control in local communities, a highly cooperative spirit of the citizenry towards the criminal justice system, and efficient, just, and effective investigations and functions by criminal justice agencies.[43] If we work with the numbers for 1985, when Japan's population was 120.8 million, that means there was only one rape victim for every 67,000 citizens. In the United States that same year, 88,670 forcible rapes were reported, or one per 2,680 citizens. That Japan could have, per capita, only 4% the number of rapes as the United States should raise eyebrows, particularly when so much sexually explicit material caters to sexually violent proclivities.

It is difficult to outline the situation for rape victims in 1985, but we can look at the situation in other years to see how Japan's still low numbers do not add up. A 2000 survey by the Gender Quality Bureau founds 48.7% of women over the age of 20 had at least one experience of being groped.[44] Similar surveys in 2001, 2003, and 2004 found a wide range of between 28.4% and 70% of young women being victim to chikan incidents. By all accounts, chikan constitutes sexual assault even according to the Japanese Criminal Code, but a mere two to three thousand chikan are arrested annually. Immediately we see a phenomenal discrepancy between the number of incidents, and the number of reports/arrests; chikan is such an epidemic in Japan that women only trains have been operating in Tokyo since 1912. Such settings were not exclusively to limit the incidents of sexual misconduct - there was belief that women were unsuited to crowded commuter trains - but it was informed by it nonetheless as their rise in prominence came after the newspaper Yomiuri reported on chikan incidents.[45]

Sexual violence too has been tremendously under reported according to the Japanese government's own statistics. Around 2015, over 95% of such incidents were not reported to the police, in so small part due to the culture of shame around rape in Japan, typically placing blame on victims rather than their rapists.[46] In a period before 2017's reform of Article 177, rape was also difficult to prove and only constituted violent, force vaginal penetration by a man's penis. Oral or anal rape, or forced penetration with implements thus didn't constitute rape, making it more difficult to report and to see justice served. Returning to 177, there remains a popular misconception that rape is part of the courting act, that it is a flattery, that it is not rape if a woman 'enjoys' it; Kotoe was in effect seducing Hideo rather than Hideo enacting a sexual violence upon Kotoe. Even when rape victims do try to seek help, they are subjected to ridicule, trauma, and apathy. By way of example, when Catherine Jane Fisher, an Australian woman, was raped in 2002, she was brought back to the scene of her rape, questioned relentlessly by male officers, and denied the opportunity to go to a hospital as rape victims did not constitute urgent patients.[47] Following her gangrape in 2000 Mika Kobayashi sought from and provided support to other rape victims, finding that only 1% of them had made a report to the police.[48] When Shiori Ito was raped in 2015, the Japanese legal system undermined and ignored her, unable to get information on where to get a rape kit without going through a preliminary in-person interview. Police discouraged her from filing a report, she was told her career would be in jeopardy, she was told she didn't act like a victim, she was discouraged from pursuing legal action, she was forced to recreate the scene of her rape and the act of the rape itself while investigators photographed her.[49] In the wake of Ito's story, a 2017 survey by Japan's central government found one in thirteen women said they had been raped at some point in their lives.[50]

Make it make sense, make it add up

It is my sincere hope that I have demonstrated that Japan's widespread plethora of rape-centric sexually explicit materials do not, in fact, represent a release valve for societal frustration, and do not explain a 'shockingly low rape rate.' The prevalence of 'disgraceful' works seems to have no direct causal effect on rape rates at all, and certainly not to the extent that advocates for Japan's pornographic leniency would have us believe.

Over 7,000 words and I don't have a conclusion. I thought my research would give me an answer to the prevalence of rape media in Japan that was more nuanced than that people enjoy it. It didn't.

I was paralysed by fear of what talking about 177 would entail. How can I talk about a culture that isn't my own and impose upon it my own morals and ideals? The answer is that I can't without coming across as aggressively neutral, and so I'll put aside that hang-up for a moment. This is off the cuff so forgive the brain dump.

I don't personally have a problem with rape playing a central role in works of fiction. So long as it is not overly glorified, I consider it akin to any other fetishistic representation of depravity in explicit material. I don't think it should be readily available with the same openness as, say, PornHub's frontpage content, but prohibiting its circulation and creation only breeds an atmosphere of want. We want what we can't have. When I read that 177 had caused a controversy, I thought it would be substantial with wide-reaching effects towards an ethical betterment of Japanese society. Rape itself is bad. Rape is deplorable. Rape should not be enacted on anyone. The carefree attitude the Japanese government and Japanese society had (and largely still have) towards rape and rape victims is appalling. Not only does it perpetuate the same patriarchal notions of male dominance over women, but it reinforces the stifling of progress for and by anyone who is not a cishet-male. Call me an SJW if you'd like, if it means not being on the side which is defending rape, I'll wear the label with pride. It isn't that I want Japan to be more like the Western world. Far from it. It is that I want women, queer people, and minorities to be afforded the same opportunities, the same privileges as men have. It is that I don't want my heart to ache when I read some unrepentant weeaboo defending rape or lolicon or guro as evidence of an 'enlightened culture'. What I want more than anything is for people to consider the cultural contexts of that which they consume. I want people to understand this being considered okay, that not looking at these works critically is itself abhorrent and ignorant. I want people to be able to live their lives without fear.

I want there to not be hurt in this world.

Is that so wrong?

----------------------------------------------------

[1] "List of controversial video games," Wikimedia Foundation, last modified November 14, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversial_video_games.

[2] Ibid.

[3] "Tags & traits," The Visual Novel Database, accessed November 26, 2022, https://vndb.org/d10.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Kaori Shoji and International Herald Tribune, “Setouchi Jakucho Takes Japan Back 1,000 Years,” The New York Times (The New York Times, January 23, 1999), https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/23/style/IHT-setouchi-jakucho-takes-japan-back-1000-years.html.

[6] Royall Tyler, "Marriage, Rank and Rape in The Tale of Genji," Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 7 (March 2002): note 2.

[7] Macadamia Soft, 177 Manual, 1986, https://archive.org/details/177_manual/page/n6/mode/2up.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Japan, Penal Code: Act No. 45 of April 24, 1907, Tokyo: Ministry of Justice, https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/1960.

[10] Macadamia Soft, 177 Manual.

[11] See PC-6001活用研究 プログラミングの基礎からマシン語の応用まで (Dempa Shimbunsha: 1983).

[12] "『ドンファン』　概要," エロゲ調査報告書, accessed November 26, 2022, http://erogereport.blog.jp/archives/1301698.html.

[13] John Szczepaniak, The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers (United States: Hardcore Gaming 101, 2014).

[14] Ibid, note 282; "『マカダム』　概要, エロゲ調査報告書, accessed November 26, 2022, http://erogereport.blog.jp/archives/1301712.html.

[15] Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon and Martin Picard, “Beyond Rapelay: Self-Regulation in the Japanese Erotic Video Game Industry,” in Rated M for Mature: Sex and Sexuality in Video Games, ed. Matthew Wysocki and Evan W. Lauteria (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 30-31.

[16] "『マカダム』　概要," エロゲ調査報告書.

[17] Ibid.; "Macadam 二人愛戯 （マカダム）," Macadam 二人愛戯 （マカダム） - 1985年発売 (美少女ゲーム マイヒストリー, January 11, 2022), https://bishojoghist.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-271.html; "『卍(まんじ)』　概要," エロゲ調査報告書, accessed November 26, 2022, http://erogereport.blog.jp/archives/1301696.html.

[18] Szczepaniak, The Untold History.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Japan National Diet, "First Meeting of the 107th Members' Committee of the Balance of Account of the National Diet [第107回国会　衆議院　決算委員会　第1号　昭和61年10月21日]," Kokkaikaigisen kesna shisutemu, October 21, 1986, transcript, no. 169.

[22] Ibid., no. 169-171.

[23] Pelletier-Gagnon and Picard, "Beyond Rapelay," 32.

[24] Japan National Diet, "First Meeting," no. 173.

[25] Pelletier-Gagnon and Picard, "Beyond Rapelay," 32.

[26] Szczepaniak, The Untold History.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Kaoru Nagayama, Patrick W. Galbraith, and Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto, Erotic Comics in Japan: An Introduction to Eromanga (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 169.

[29] Anne Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics,and Censorship in Japan (S.l.: Routledge, 2019), 54.

[30] See Lawrence Ward Beer, Freedom of Expression in Japan: A Study in Comparative Law, Politics, and Society (Tokyo: Kodansha International Ltd., 1984).

[31] Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires, 54-55.

[32] Kusamori Shinichi, "Mizu no Ranpi," Juristo 25: 235.

[33] Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires, 59. See Nagisa Oshima, "Bunka.Sei.Seiji," Juristo 5401: 39.

[34] Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires, 59.

[35] Sharon Kinsella, Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society (Routledge, 2015), 14.

[36] Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires, 62, 64-65.

[37] Anonymous, "Racy comics a labeled lot now in Japan," Sunday Honolulu Star Bulletin and Advertiser, March 31, 1991, E-7.

[38] Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires, 150-151.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Anonymous, "Racy comics," E-7; Milton Diamond and Ayako Uchiyama, “Pornography, Rape, and Sex Crimes in Japan,” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 22, no. 1 (1999): pp. 1-22, https://doi.org/10.1016/s0160-2527(98)00035-1, 6-7.

[41] Diamond and Uchiyama, "Pornography, Rape, and Sex Crimes in Japan," 9.

[42] Ibid., 11.

[43] Ibid., 12.

[44] Minoru Shikita, Crime and Criminal Policy in Japan from 1926 to 1988: Analysis and Evaluation of the Showa Era (Tokyo: Japan Criminal Policy Society, 1990), 353.

[45] Mitsutoshi Horii and Adam Burgess, “Constructing Sexual Risk: ‘Chikan’, Collapsing Male Authority and the Emergence of Women-Only Train Carriages in Japan,” Health, Risk & Society 14, no. 1 (2012): pp. 41-55, https://doi.org/10.1080/13698575.2011.641523, 42.

[46] Teppei Kasai, “Japan's Not-so-Secret Shame,” Sexual Assault | Al Jazeera (Al Jazeera, July 29, 2018), https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/7/29/japans-not-so-secret-shame/.

[47] Karryn Cartelle, "Victims finally learning to speak out against Japan's outdated rape laws," (Japan Today, April 21, 2008), https://japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/victims-are-finally-learning-to-speak-out-against-japan%25e2%2580%2599s-outdated-rape-laws.

[48] National Police Agency, "Notes of crime victims," Fiscal Year 2009: Measures for Crime Victims, 26-28.

[49] Julia Hollingsworth and Junko Ogura, “Japanese #MeToo Symbol Wins Civil Court Case Two Years after She Accused a Prominent Journalist of Raping Her | CNN Business,” CNN (Cable News Network, December 18, 2019), https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/18/media/japan-shiori-ito-legal-intl-hnk/index.html.

[50] Ibid.

Forget about misplaced film analogies, I’m starting to think Resident Evil 4 might be the Abbey Road of video games - not just a title that shook the industry and course corrected everyone even thinking about flexing their own creative muscles in its wake, but also arriving fully formed after years of refinement and experimentation, effectively acting as a thunderous mic drop for their creators and the years of work that preceded it. In fact, this game has been so universally and thoroughly praised, that the idea of picking it apart critically feels futile.

Don’t worry, I’m not about to denounce a modicum of this game’s quality here. Anything I say for the rest of my mortal life that resembles intense negative criticism of RE4 ought to be interpreted as a cry for help, and the authorities should be alerted of my status immediately. What I am suggesting though, is that its monolithic status in the industry has likely steered away modern critics from really digging into the systems to discern what really makes the package sing. “Resident Evil 4 is one of the greatest games of all time” is a sentiment that’s as natural as breathing to most (myself included), so why even bother trying to justify that notion? I won’t be challenging that instinct today, as breaking down every positive element to RE4 would be an exercise in futility at this point, but there is a single ever-present thread that permeates through the game’s massive campaign that I would like to discuss today.

Call it a theory (a game theory, if you will) but I think many modern “gamey” games have taken RE4 and its sneakiest qualities for granted, or just completely missed certain brushstrokes that brought the game together. It’s hard not to love everything here, obviously, but something that really stood out to me on my numerous recent playthroughs was how RNG influences every corner of play across the game’s massive campaign.

We all know by now how masterful Resident Evil 4’s restricted control scheme is, but in my eyes, the reason why is due to everything else surrounding the control scheme. Say for the sake of argument you’ve just cornered yourself in a room with a dozen Gonados. A fate worse than death in a traditional action game, but it shouldn’t be too scary here due to Leon’s plethora of ranged options, right? If you’ve played RE4 before (and if you haven’t, what the hell are you doing here?) you know that encounters rarely play out in such a breezy fashion. Enemies and their movement patterns are erratic, their attack options are multifaceted and frequently require different countermeasures, and the silent difficulty scaling that pulls the strings on normal mode means you always have to stay on your toes to fight for your survival. This dynamism swings in your favor too, with critical hits and item drops occasionally feeling like the determining factor between success and failure during bouts. Even in the most ideal of circumstances you always have to stay on high alert, with every layer quickly crumbling with the slightest of breeze and collapsing over your plan near constantly. It’s miraculous how you can play one room over and over again with a vague route in mind, and things can still go wrong.

The item drops are another point too: while the game gives you far more ammo than you could ever need, relying on one weapon will all but guarantee its depletion, forcing you to fall back on other options until you find more ammo. It’s easy to rely on the shotgun due to its range and power, but it feels like for every encounter where you want to fall back on it, another harder fight is sure to come soon. Despite the clearly uneven power scale between your arsenal of weapons, the game somehow remains near-perfectly balanced for an entire playthrough as a result of these micro-decisions you’re forced to make every 5 seconds.

Loot drops from villagers and the economy as a whole also go great lengths towards affecting Resident Evil 4 long-term, but it's revealing to me that even on the highest threshold of difficulty, it's something you never actually need to engage with. Due to the strength of universal options like the knife and invincible melee attacks, combined with the breadth of ways to use crumbs of ammunition for even the weakest guns, you always have a strong chance of survival. The core gameplay design is so tight knit that even the addition of an in-game shop that lets you sell every weapon and item in your arsenal simply exists as a way to mix and match gameplay styles on the fly, and try out distinct strategies in a way that feels totally customized to the player and no one else. If you want to sell everything just to max out the Killer7 at the very end of the game and kill the final boss in 8 shots, you can do that! If you want to kill off the Merchant entirely and only use the tools the game is guaranteed to give you, go for it! You’re all but directly encouraged to do so. That’s true dynamism.

Considering everything at play, from Leon’s limited control to the intense variables that shift the playing field with every passing second, it’s fair to say the outcome of the game is at the mercy of RNG in some way. Generally speaking I’m wary about this flavor of design - I always like to have control over my inputs and consequences if I have the dexterity to overcome a challenge, so the idea of a spinning wheel of numbers guiding me towards (or away) from victory isn’t something I normally want to engage with. This may be why I’ve gravitated towards fighting games as a competitive outlet over the past decade, as their mechanics are so cut and dry that the only thing standing in the way of success is my own skill (and often, my hubris).

Resident Evil 4 isn’t like the other girls though. The core mechanics and encounters are so good on their own that the designers didn’t need to weigh down on the player in other more heavy handed ways. It doesn’t need to randomize the shape of rooms to differentiate encounters, weapon stats are never clashing up against the power level of enemies in a way you can’t be expected to work around, and the player is still largely in control of their success at all times despite factors that are genuinely out of your control. Even an enemy randomizer, something that has been proven through ROM hacks to still add to games in meaningful ways, is simply unnecessary when you have a campaign so tightly packed with variety and interesting scenarios. The unpredictable elements that do come into play simply follow the player and force them to engage with the mechanics in cool and interesting ways - no more, no less. It’s one of the more elegant threads of randomization I’ve ever seen, and is a clear sign from the designers that they absolutely knew what they were cooking with. Capcom created perfectly optimized systems around the simple act of pointing and shooting, and could be as hands off from the player as possible to let the design of this suplex of a game speak for itself.

Full disclosure of video-game-journalistic integrity: I have been in love with Mario Kart 8 for close to ten years. I think it is one of the best video games ever made, sheer perfection that would be impossible to surpass with a Mario Kart 9 - hence why I have been banging the drums of DLC for this masterpiece for a long time. My review of these eight courses is extremely prejudiced by the fact I am just happy to be booting up Mario Kart 8 and seeing something that I haven’t already seen 10,000 times. But is it possible to add to something perfect without making it not perfect?? Without further ado, let’s review each of these courses in unnecessarily exhaustive detail:

Paris Promenade: If you browsed the video game internet in the mid-2000s, you’re likely familiar with this advert. I think it is one of the greatest video game adverts of all time, and most people who posted on video game message boards in the mid-2000s thought so too. If you posted on the Nintendo Official Magazine UK Official Forums, as I did, at least four dudes in every thread would have an avatar or at least a signature that referenced this advert in some way. It was the shit. Just funny as hell, and it also perfectly captured the excitement of finally being able to play Nintendo games online. Don Draper wishes he could've made it. I’m not one of those Ricky Gervais Jordan Petersen Richard Dawkins “cant say that these day” whatever-the-fucks but it does feel like an advert you could not do today and I am sad about that because I am currently envisaging a 2020s version of the advert for Mario Kart 8 that includes more good-naturedly outrageous cultural stereotypes and it’s super funny, dude, just trust me, honestly, please, it’s not offensive at all. Bro. Please. Anyway, as I was about to say - this course really reminds me of that advert and I get a real kick out of that, a sort of personal-liminal cyberspace, a private joke between me and my own Nintendo history, riding my little Donkey Kong motorbike around the Champs-Élysées (which is in itself pretty fucking funny imagery) and laughing to myself, having a good time.

As far as technical analysis goes - there are, in my opinion, two types of Mario Kart course: player-competitive courses and course-competitive courses. Course-competitive courses are primarily battles between the players and the environment - taking tight bends round steep cliffs, avoiding stage hazards, anticipating the movements of Goombas and Monty Moles. Other players are still an ongoing concern, of course, but they’ll also likely be too preoccupied by giant lava Bowsers and rain-slicked roads to give you their full attention. These kinds of courses usually serve as the finale of a cup, such is their intense make-or-break nature; a Survival Mode of sorts that rewards players who commit the fewest unforced errors (A Smash Bros-style stock battle for Mario Kart where you try and Death Race 99 other racers round a tough track would be so fucking sick dude, like honestly, just think about it for a minute) Player-competitive courses are, naturally, an inversion of this paradigm. With simple wide raceways and few hazards, if any, players are focused a lot more on each other and how they’re doing - expect green shell snipery, a focus on clean driving lines and a lot more counting of passing seconds. The bread-and-butter of Mario Kart, the sort of courses your gaming-illiterate little brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers probably prefer; the type of course your average anime-avatared Twitter luddite will probably call “mid and basic” because their TikTok-addled synapses require constant multicoloured stimuli in order to feel anything resembling satisfaction.

As you might have already worked out, Paris Promenade is a player-competitive course. Don’t get it twisted, though - “player-competitive” isn’t just some dogmatic mind palace I’ve created to justify the paucity of a simplistic Mario Kart course. There are bad player-competitive courses out there - take the mindless Grand Old Duke “marched them up, marched them down” tedium of 8’s GBA Mario Circuit, for instance - but Paris Promenade isn’t like that at all. It has branching turns, cute little roundabouts and a brand-new hyper-literal interpretation of “player-competitive” - the ability to drive head-first into the oncoming traffic that was bringing up your rear only a few seconds ago: a tense series of who-dares-wins moments where the leaders can fuck up the losers and the losers can get a far more visceral shot at the top than the game usually affords.

One of Mario Kart 8’s few flaws is that it’s quite easy for the podium-position racers to distinctly disparate themselves from the pack - strong defensive play leaves 4th-thru-12th to fight amongst themselves for scraps of coin and redshell, but folding the racing line back in on itself and forcing the tops/bottoms to go brave-or-grave is an ingenious little noteless balance patch that’s contained to a single lap of a single track, a very Nintendo solution to a very Nintendo problem that I’d like to see spill out entirely across the next instalment of the franchise. Paris Promenade is a track of deceiving simplicity that we’d all do well not to dismiss as “an asset flip” (curse the YouTuber who taught 11 year olds this phrase), it could well be the blueprint for more Karts to come.

Toad Circuit: Mario Kart 7, the hardworking Josephian father who helped give birth to the Christ-child Mario Kart 8, will always have a special place in my heart. In 2011, it helped form the bedrock of at least twelve friendships I still maintain to this day, its surprisingly robust online multiplayer providing a great opportunity for one of life’s most underrated means of forming a human connection - being absolutely fucking awful to other people via the medium of video games, strangers hurling “FUCK YOU BLUE SHELL PRICK” messages at each other via group DM until the ironic venom hardens in the veins of their hearts and forms the bonds of friendship.

Toad Circuit was one of my favourite courses in Mario Kart 7 because it played a sort of upbeat funky version of the game’s main theme and my brain naturally built neural links between that music and being online with my online friends playing Mario Kart online and having fun online. Sometimes it’s enough just to drive three laps to some music you enjoy and think about your friends. Who cares that the grass texture isn’t well-defined enough for you? You don’t have any friends because you’re comparing screenshots of Mario Kart grass on Twitter.

Choco Mountain: Super Mario Kart defined almost every element of the Mario Kart iconography/featurology that we know and love today, but I think it’s fair to say that Mario Kart 64 was the progenitor of the “fucked up little weird place that doesn’t really have anything to do with Super Mario” trend that has followed Mario and his friends all the way to Twisted Mansion and Sweet Sweet Canyon. The original Choco Mountain leveraged the Nintendo 64’s smudged-signature fog effects to create a terrifying Silent Chocolate Hill, and it’s unfortunate that Nintendo have chosen to prioritise things like “visuals” and “performance” over “looking like shit in an endearingly eery way”, perhaps traumatised by anime-avatared Twitter luddites who called the Switch port of Ocarina of Time “mid and basic” because their favourite YouTuber told them that the fog effects were wrong, totally trust me bro, I know you hadn’t been born yet and your dad was still in middle school but it’s all wrong man, go reply to @NintendoAmerica RIGHT NOW when you’re done talking about Mother 3 and Geno in Smash, man. Anyway, removing the creepy lag fog from the peaks of Choco Mountain is a besmirchment of Mario Kart’s legacy as a horror game; they added a cave, but forgot to make it scary. It’s still fun, though!

Coconut Mall: The Wii era of Mario Kart more or less passed me by because Mario Kart Wii came out at a time when I thought getting called “a feckless little irish cunt” (I’m not Irish) in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2’s Xbox Live lobbies was a preferable multiplayer experience to this. I do remember the majesty of Coconut Mall course quite well, though, because I was old enough to do Serious Babysitting when Mario Kart Wii was huge, and I spent a lot of time observing my little cousins and their horrible little friends play it all the time, maintaining a safe distance that afforded me plausible deniability if ever seen in the vicinity of Baby Daisy instead of a virtual M4A1. Undoubtedly a missing link in Mario Kart 8’s chain that has now finally been restored, albeit as a weaker polygon-carbonfibre replica of the Wii’s solid steel original. (Though shouldn’t we have cause to return to the old games now and again?) This broken circle now only awaits Waluigi Pinball.

Tokyo Blur: An unfortunate salvo of ammunition for the people who rightly or wrongly accuse Nintendo of hiring Miyamoto’s work-shy grand-nephew to drag and drop mktour3.track into the Mario Kart 8 codebase and call it a £30 product. There isn’t all that much to remark on here, I think - the course transforming on each lap isn’t all that impressive when it’s done off-screen, and we already know the game’s track designers can do cool revolving-set shit that evokes Prey’s opening level. I’m sick of driving under thwomps! What do thwomps have to do with Tokyo, anyway?! I know Nintendo love to represent their home nation in their work, but wouldn’t it be cool if, idk, they reproduced Barcelona or Budapest or Bangkok or something other than the usual New York/Tokyo/London/Paris real-life fare?? I just wanna do a bike flip over the Dublin Dracula Museum or the Potsdam Hanging Rhino…

Shroom Ridge: Course-competitive courses that seek to emulate the feeling of player-competitive courses are nothing new (Toad’s Turnpike, Mushroom Bridge, Moonview Highway), but I feel like this one is special because it also uniquely emphasises some course-competitive elements, like sheer cliffs, and puts you and some cars next to them like you’re a henchman driving in the second-act chase scene of a James Bond movie where he’s trying to overthrow the Mushroom Kingdom’s leadership on behalf of MI:6. The traffic is enjoyably dense, forcing players to sometimes choose between weaving and bending knife-edges and cartoon fenders (try it in 200cc time trial!) and you can even try for a mushroom-jump off the back of a moving car and over a crevice, which is surprisingly daredevil for a game that is usually one step away from putting giant flashing neon signs labelled SHORTCUT over their shortcuts. I’m now hoping for a course with cars and trucks that can actively fight back instead of passively crushing you by merely existing.

Sky Garden: lol u just gotta love it. Has three of my favourite Mario Kart 8 tropes in one neat package: the random copy-pasted Koopa Troopas floating in unison at the starting line like busted Disneyland animatronics begging for mercy; Nintendo blatantly going “ehhhh the o.g. track sucked” and just ‘remaking’ it by doing a whole new tangential optioning of another course (in this case, Cloudtop Cruise); and of course, everyone’s favourite -  busted-ass giant-ass leaves and fruits that serve as quintessential Mariokartian devil’s shortcuts that give you like a 33% of getting thoroughly fucked in the abyss if even one tire isn’t aligned right, only a step removed from just watching Bowser Jr. spin a Russian Roulette revolver and press it to his scaly little temple before pulling the trigger. Apparently this one was in Mario Kart Tour too, but who played that game after launch week? Nintendo, there’s no need to tell on yourself by acknowledging that game in any way - we’ll forgive you, like we always do.

Ninja Hideaway: This fucking Wanokuni-ass shit right here!!! I have no idea why Nintendo thought it was a good idea to package this directly in a cup with the relatively-unremarkable Tokyo Blur - while Hideaway perhaps leans a little too heavily into every single “omg cool japan” design trope ever committed to cartridge, it is undoubtedly a far better advert for Edo-Nihon-Nin-Nin-Nintendo culture than anything else I can remember them making - and Nintendo fuckin love doing Edo-Nihon-Nin-Nin stuff. How good was Bowser’s Castle in Super Mario Odyssey, folks? Yeah!! How much time do I have left to talk about the music that brings this all to life? Funny to think that most people who originally played this course were looking at it on their iPhones with their sound off while riding the subway. Is it any wonder Nintendo wanted to free these little masterworks from their skinner-boxes and let normal people play them?

Let’s take a deep breath now and turn the other blind eye for a moment, pretending once again that Mario Kart Tour didn’t happen, and this course is brand-spanking new (which it will be to 99% of players). Operating on the exciting assumption that this is the logical next gameplay step for Mario Kart 9 (it won’t be called that, I hope!!) will take in 2025 or 2026 or whatever unfathomably far-off date that Nintendo decide to make a new Mario Kart game, is this an example of the “u can go anywhere!” design principles that Nintendo have been toying with in Breath of the Odyssey: Arceus’s Fury, now applied to a driving game?? Could the next Mario Kart be an off-road jam, finding new, personal routes through sprawling open Horizons or maze-like spaces? C’mon man, that would be kind of cool, man!! Mario Kart 8 is the apex of the traditional kart game - so how do you improve on that? Maybe, just maybe(!!!), the next Mario Kart isn’t going to be on a traditional track…?! Are we going somewhere where we don't need roads?

Some might argue that Ninja Hideaway’s exceptionally tight turns and freeform movements are more a consequence of this trying a straight transplant of Tour’s invisi-barriered track design tenets to the high-octane world of Mario Kart 8,  but I see it more as a prototype, accidental or otherwise, that addresses another of Mario Kart’s few flaws: that even in 150cc, the game often doesn’t require you to think all that hard about how you’re driving. See bend, take bend. See ramp, do trick. You might, at most, have to apply a slight brakepadding on a wet Neo Bowser City hairpin, but even then, that’s usually just a wrist-slapping punishment for favouring the kinda-broken top-speed big-boy builds. 

200cc is an admirable quick-win solution to this problem, but you can’t play 200cc with your grandma. And if your grandma can’t play Mario Kart, you’re not playing a Mario Kart game, right? It’s almost impossible to broach the skill canyon that exists between your grandma and proverbial snakers who pick the optimal weight class, but what if this is what the Booster Pass is intended to explore? Are there ways to make Mario Kart equal for all again after creating an essentially perfect game? With the last pack not coming until the end of 2023, this is a two-year experiment in the future of a game that has sold 35 million copies. I’m excited to see where it goes.

The nice thing about Nintendo Switch Online for old people like me is that you get a little involuntary nostalgia hit every couple of months. I wouldn’t download and emulate Mario Party of my own volition, but something about it being readily available on my Switch just makes the access to those old memories so much more enticing - even when said memories now launch with an updated warning about how they can cause permanent damage to the palm of your hand.

Funny story about this game - my younger brother and I had it in our heads that it was possible to be skilled at it. Our misguided belief that the winner of a game of Mario Party was in some way deserving of recognition and admiration eventually came to a head when our neighbour - who didn’t own or play video games of any kind whatsoever at any time - played a round with us one rainy afternoon. He came out comfortably 3 stars ahead at the end of 50 turns, brutally shredding our fragile preteenage egos to tatters. This trauma sent my brother crazy, and he had to be locked in the bathroom for an hour because he was quite simply going completely apeshit-crackers at the notion that someone who didn’t even hold the N64 controller correctly could beat him at a game he’d played for a hundred hours. Very funny to recall his little cheeky face lying on a floor sodden with Chance Time-induced tears. Great game.

You can jape endlessly about the unfairness of the original Mario Partys, but there’s nothing you can really say that’s more amusing than participating in it. Taking huge inspiration from the capitalist chaos of Monopoly, this is definitely one of Nintendo’s most postmodern games, directly stating on many occasions that the rules are made up and the coins don’t matter. It revels in unfairness and mean-spiritedness (literally, with the inclusion of a robber Boo) in a way I imagine Shigeru Miyamoto would frown very hard at, and I presume the meaning of Bowser hollering “That’s often the way things go in life!” while tap-dancing on the spot as Mario wails about being mis-sold a suspicious “super duper star” for the tidy sum of 200 coins just completely passed me by as a kid. Just like the game of Life, the lesson to be learned here is that no matter how carefully plot your course and how hard you twirl your joystick, all the money in your bank can be swept away in an instant because some stupid prick stepped on a big red button with your face on it.

Nearly a year removed from its launch, free of recency bias, no longer swarmed by the theses of those more eloquent than I, I'm content in saying I don't like Elden Ring. I've beaten it a couple times, played solo and online, used a variety of builds, gone completionist and not, tackled its world in intended and unintended order, had fun and glazed my eyes over in boredom, been in awe of and readily mocked it through and through. I like so very much of it, but I don't like Elden Ring.

I don't like this GRRM-gilded world. There's a prevailing sense of deliberate obfuscation that apes the peculiarities of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls but it's a mere mimick. It is an inverse Rowling-style approach to worldbuilding -- she fills her holes and says they were always filled, Dark Souls had holes and never noticed them, Elden Ring creates holes to taunt the VaatiVidya watcher with the tar with which to fill them.

I don't like this ocean of content. Even if wondrous tsunamis are few and far between, the impetus to purposefully seek them renders them decreasingly effective. The novelty of Walking Mausoleums, Erdtree Avatars, winding tombs, subterranean cities all turn quickly to routine. I can only laugh so many times at a man getting hit in the groin by a football.

I don't like the perpetual breadcrumbs. Scattered like millet for fowl lay treasures for the taking. Of what use is a thousandth herb, a hundredth spirit, a tenth greatsword? None, so say I, if it caters only to that which I am not: the theorycrafter, the PvPer, the challenge runner. And for these redundant fragments to be handed to me after a repetitious romp through yet another imp infested tileset with a singular twist? I am left wondering why I put in the effort.

I don't like the ramp. Other FromSoftware titles, deliberately or not, have tremendous peaks and valleys in their presentations of power and the scope of encounters. From the terror of Ornstein and Smough to the odd simplicity of Sif to the potential headache of Four Kings to the humour of Pinwheel to the fear of Nito to the melancholic ease of Gwyn. Here, outside of minibosses, I proceed uphill eternal as Sisyphus. On paper it is an ideal, in reality it is a fatigue. Does it seek to frustrate? Does it matter? There is no reprieve on the intended path.

I don't like that this is designed for me to like it. Polished to a mirror sheen, every aspect is intended to appeal to me. A personality in flux to receive my adoration, never showing me that true, imperfect self. I long for the idiosyncrasies of a chance encounter.

I had so much fun with you, and I came away with the understanding it was all a falsehood. The dopamine was real. The sentimentality, a fiction.

to the best of my knowledge, character movement exists within giant state machines dictated by the player input and the properties of any current collision. if you touch a slope, transition to sliding state; if you press the jump button, transition to a jump state unless you're sliding or etc. etc.. in those behind-the-scenes tales of miyamoto meticulously testing mario's movement in low-poly sandboxes during sm64's development, these state transitions and their corresponding kinematics values were the real meat of the tweaks on the programmers' end. "let's make the flip jump transition available even before the turn animation begins, also if mario jumps onto a slope less steep than X degrees maybe we could try giving him a few frames standing or moving to give the player some time to jump again, also if you collide in the air with a slope steeper than X degrees make sure you don't add horizontal momentum when you transition to a slide" these are just ideas off the top of my head and don't represent the actual code, but this is how I conceive of it. the character is a tightly tuned system that functions as a simulacrum of real movement, realistic where our brain wants it and exaggerated where our hands desire it. code with the model ingrained into its logic teeters the line between pretty and messy, and sm64 perhaps got the closest in its era to actually getting somewhere with this system.

sunshine unfortunately lacks this level of polish. mario's main movement feels tighter and more responsive than in the game's predecessor, but at the same time the introduction of fludd and of dynamic object geometry strains whatever was in the previous character state table. accordingly mario feels at his most chaotic in this entry. floating into a slope could result in him suddenly sliding away with no ability for the player to break out of his helplessness, or a rotating platform could cause mario to stutter as the line between "flat" and "slope" becomes blurred. mario will legitimately phase through objects on the rare occasion he doesn't clip in and out or plummet out of the sky having lost his jump. this distinct lack of polish (likely due to the game's rushed development) pervades each aspect of the game.

second-to-second these movement quirks will likely be the most apparent issue to the player, but zooming out reveals level design and structure indicative of the game's troubled history. immediately out of the gate: no star (or rather "shine sprite") requirements, with the first seven shines of each main area now mandatory and the rest completely optional and pointless outside of bragging rights. the seventh shine of each is a brief shadow mario chase that varies little from location-to-location, leaving just the first six of each area as notable challenges. so how do these stack up?

many of these (at least one per world) are obnoxious "secret" stages that steal mario from the sunkissed vista of isle delfino and drop him into gussied-up debug rooms. the level design here mainly consists of a few half-hearted platforming challenges made from hastily-assembled generic blocks slapped together with a smattering of coins and 1UPs, and none of them are very fun. the rotating objects that mario must ride in a few of these especially aggravate that previously-mentioned unstable character state table, and mastering them requires a frustrating level of practice given how unnatural the physics of these sections are. of special note is the infamous chuckster level, which involves having mario awkwardly thrown from platform to platform over death pits with restricted influence from the player. talking to each chuckster at a slight offset will result in getting thrown at angles that will often result in certain demise, and learning how to best exploit them again requires more frustrating practice in a stage that should be otherwise brief. all of this is exacerbated by the fact that you have no access to fludd, leaving mario with solely the sideflip and the spin jump. these are good moves in their own right, but I can't help but miss a low-and-long movement option like the long jump, or potentially a high vertical option that doesn't require the control stick shenanigans the sideflip/spin jump necessitate.

removing all of the secret stages (of which there are ten) and all of the shadow mario (of which there are seven) yields just 32 unique shines as part of the main game. some more categories of stages quickly become apparent:

sunshine is often criticized for its number of red coin stages, and while the postgame adds one to each secret stage along with a couple other optional ones, the main game itself features just five. the windmill village and pirate ship ones are more traditional platforming challenges, and I'd say the windmill village one is a solid exploration of the titular area in bianco hills. the pirate ship one is frustrating given the difficulty of staying put on the actual pirate ships, but the majority of the red coins are on climbable grating and are much more straight-forward to obtain. the coral reef red coin challenge revolves around sunshine's spotty swimming mechanics (questionable for a game with such a focus on watery environments) and ultimately boils down to a game of I Spy with a fiddly camera. there is also one using the rideable bloopers in ricco harbor (I often failed this one after collecting all the coins by crashing into the pier with the shine on it, which surprisingly enough didn't kill me playing on the 3DAS version), and one that takes place with the underwater scuba controls within a large bottle, which I can't really say is particularly interesting given how few obstacles there are in your way.

boss stages appear frequently throughout each world to little surprise from players of sm64 prior. bianco hills features petey pirahna, whose mouth must be filled with water before he spits sludge at you. his first fight is pretty on-par for what I'd expect from a first boss fight, and his refight is pretty similar with a couple little additions, such as flying about the main area and creating tornados (?). gooper blooper appears no less than three times throughout the game and severely wears out his welcome by his noki bay appearance, although this is proceeded by a legitimate platforming challenge that makes up for it. of note is that his first two ricco harbor appearances are virtually identical except for that one fight requires one extra spin jump in order to reach the arena. wiggler, mecha-bowser (who you fight with rockets from a rollercoaster car), the manta, king boo, and eely-mouth all have singular fights throughout the other worlds that generally are the better shines of their respective worlds. they fall about on the level I would expect from a 3D platformer: not necessarily enthralling, but decent diversions from the actual platforming.

there are also three il piantissimo races akin to koopa the quick from sm64. I would say some of the latter's races are somewhat challenging, whereas the former's chosen routes leave a lot to be desired and thus can easily be thwarted by anyone with a reasonable understanding of the controls. they unfortunately feel like 30-second throwaway shines. there is also a time attack on the rideable bloopers with a couple minor obstacle that seem pulled right out of the secret stages.

all of the above shines removed from the total, we now have 13 shines left. in theory these are the "interesting" objectives, the ones that would hopefully pop up when reminiscing about what made this game special. when I look at this list, the first one that pops out to me is sand bird... the infamous filter for many new players, including myself when I first finished this game. this stage actually involves collecting red coins, although this objective is somewhat auxillary considering the first seven can be scooped up in less than 15 seconds and the final one can't be reached until the bird that you stand upon finally reaches the top of the tower in the middle of the area. rather, the main obstacle is simply that the bird rolls 90 degrees, releasing you into the ether if you don't scramble over onto the bird's side before it completely rotates. learning to correctly time mario's walk over the edge between the different faces of one of the bird's many cubes (I usually do it at the tail) is entirely unintuitive and unforgiving. once it clicks, the stage becomes an auto-scroller without any point or challenge, as it has the last couple times I've played it. there is no sweet spot in the middle where the shine feels obtainable with some effort; it either feels insurmountable when you're first trying it and then rote on each subsequent playthrough.

this describes a lot of these remaining shines unfortunately, especially when it comes to the proper platforming challenges in each stage. the caged shine sprite in ricco harbor atop a large structure of steel girders caused me to tear my hair out initially with the wind sprites that assault you, requiring a full tower reclimb; on this attempt I forgot the intended path and instead skipped about 60% of the area with a well-timed spin jump. the runaway ferris wheel stage in pinna park had the same result for me: on my original playthrough I struggled greatly with the electrified koopas and their unpredictable movement cycles, whereas on this playthrough I skipped past the entire top half of the climbable grating with another spin jump, making the challenge moot. simply knowing the movement tech completely obliterates the challenge, and yet I feel obligated to do it because without using it I'm thrust into the jank. the same goes for those who know how to use the spam spray: timed slime-clearing levels such as the one in sirena beach are incessently precise without knowing how to shotgun your water blasts, but once you do they become pointlessly easy. simply knowing discrete strategies or moves renders the game moot, and thus there is no linear difficulty curve. between my first playthrough and now there is simply a void where a fun game should be; never has sunshine felt like a accessible trial to be overcome. there is simply a gulf between aggravation and tedium.

this is to say nothing of the hub, the optional content, the one-of-a-kind environmental throughline, hell, even fludd itself. it just all feels... slight in its rushed nature and uneven scope. levels are expansive but exploration is heavily discouraged given how scripted many of the individual shines are, and on this playthrough I felt like I missed entire swaths of each level. new fludd abilities or yoshi aren't given bespoke unlock levels such as in sm64, and instead simply are dropped from even more shadow mario chases. the plaza hub does come to life more and more as the game continues, but compared to peach's castle it lacks progression even as it opens up new challenges (among which are the particularly infamous sunshine levels everyone discusses like pachinko or the lilypad death river). the one thing that keeps me going is that sense of locality that few other games of this era can point to, that feeling of seeing the ferris wheel far off in the background of another stage, or the hotel delfino off in the distance. no other game I can think of attempts something so drastically removed from typical delineation of themes between areas like sunshine, and it's a shame that it jettisons a lot of its potential by flooding the shine list with these dripless special stages in a floating void.

in many ways I don't see sunshine as truly mechanically paired with 64 as the "collectathon" mario games. in fact, I don't think 64 was even intended as a collectathon as we understand them today; instead its explorable areas feel more like opportunity seized from technical restraints preventing true linear platforming challenges from really succeeding. sunshine attempts to move more in the latter direction, without the same sense of non-linearity or potentiality that arose from 64's seeming vastness at the time. in this regard it feels more like an ancestor to galaxy; galaxy is hatched from the egg of sunshine, something with the same genes as 64 but woven within a new form and flesh. it may have even been genius in its own right had it not been hastily released in an attempt to bolster the gamecube's faltering performance. in another way it's the reverse of much of nintendo's modern "meh"-tier output: full of soul but completely unpolished.

Most game genres have a landmark title that’s considered the definitive template. For platformers it’s Super Mario Bros, for first-person shooters it’s Doom, these are legendarily great games that not only established a genre, but shaped the course of the entire industry. However, it’s not always the best games that earn a spot in history, sometimes it’s the ones that fill an unserved demand. This is the case for Uncharted, a game that doesn’t have the same timeless appeal as its genre-founding contemporaries. Even series fans commonly suggest to skip it and play Uncharted 2 instead, the more successful followup which raised the bar for games to come. While I agree that this game isn’t as good, I would recommend it to anyone interested in the genre exactly for that reason. These cinematic adventure games might seem mindless and simple at first, but Drake’s Fortune has flaws that highlight the otherwise subtle details that make these games work. Developers would soon learn how cover-based shooting isn’t interesting on its own, and would instead use it as the glue that links setpieces and narrative moments together. This game’s jungle was little more than a backdrop, but future installments would use locations like sinking ships and burning buildings to ramp up the excitement in interesting ways. Even though you’re essentially doing the same shooting and climbing in each game, the difference in player engagement is vastly different. It’s a perfect demonstration of how the unobvious details can be the difference between mediocrity and greatness.

Calling this Mastered because I beat Champion's Road. Only a true Super Mario Psychopath would aim for the 100% file in this game (beating each of the 82 levels with every character!!).

My girlfriend discovered Super Mario via last year's 3D All-Stars, and has since voraciously consumed pretty much any plumber-based video game I've put in front of her. To see her go from "so if I hold the button in longer, he jumps higher?" in the castle grounds of SM64 to the end of Champion's Road in the space of 6 months is what I think it would probably feel like to see your child winning the 100m sprint at the Olympics.

3D World essentially has two distinct difficulty modes: solo and co-op, each with its own unique challenges. Having to return to the start of the level every time you die in solo play makes it arguably harder than co-op, where fallen players return in bubbles after five seconds, but solo players don't have to contend with the multiplayer-exclusive enemy types - bloodthirsty versions of Mario, Luigi, Toad and Peach who relentlessly chase you across the entire course and attempt to throw you into pits at any convenient opportunity. Terrifying!

In all seriousness - who the hell at Nintendo decided that [Run], [Use Powerup], [Throw] and [Pick Up Player] should all be mapped to the same button?! By trying to simplify the control scheme as far as possible, 3D World's designers have inadvertently made the game harder to play with friends... B-but I also kinda like the chaos that ensues when someone's accidentally picked up? Hmmm...

The pick-up button dilemma is emblematic of the bold design dichotomy at the heart of this game - it wants to be a friendly-family romp that everyone can enjoy, but it also has a fairly obvious desire to return to the days when Mario games were breathless challenges that required talent and nerve - perhaps partly as a response to all those people who complained that 3D Land gate-kept its good shit behind eight worlds of relatively mindless, toothless platforming.

I read in Iwata Asks many years ago that this game's Captain Toad sections were an attempt to wean casual New Super Mario Bros. fans onto the concept of a 3D camera that's controlled by an analog stick - a new take on the castle grounds for people who weren't around for the Nintendo 64. I think 3D World's secret agenda was to sell Mario Luddites on the Triple Jump Era...

For the most part, 3D World succeeds in its aim to bridge casual and hardcore mindsets - the placement of green stars in the early worlds feel almost tailor-made to cater to multiplayer setups where one person is still trying to grasp the idea of running and jumping while their partner is side-flipping, wall-kicking and dive-rolling all over the space. Unfortunately, around the time of World 6, auto-scrollers and slidey platforms and boost pads begin to run riot and gaps in skill become much more pronounced and frustrating. The bubble-up mechanic is a best-of-a-bad solution to the co-op camera problem, but it can sometimes feel like certain levels were never meant to be played multiplayer. The final showdown with Cat Bowser in particular is a complete fucking nightmare - I remember hating it as a single man and player back in 2013, but trying to get me and my girlfriend up that stupid auto-scrolling tower together in 2021 was nigh-on impossible, with us both randomly disappearing off-screen and becoming bubbles at seemingly random intervals! Ugh!! It's really annoying, because the idea of Bowser getting into Mario's big bag of tricks for a final boss battle is really fun and cool - it deserved better execution!

Funnily enough, we had far less problems with the post-game levels, which in many cases felt specifically designed for ridiculous Mario Party-style fun. The rolling block level in particular is almost a game unto itself, a true test of co-operative spirit and patience that could probably stand alone as its own fun little indie game! Oh how we laughed!! And the shmup-homage level? Wonderful! I like when Nintendo's designers are allowed to crib from boxes of toys outside their own corporate playpen.

I'm gonna go ahead and give the 3D World + Bowser's Fury package a whole-assed 5 stars because even though Bowser's Fury and 3D World are probably worth four stars each when packed apart, together they form this really joyous, heartfelt whole that encompasses almost the entire Super Mario experience - there's homage to just about every mainline game here and then a whole lot more! The ideal jumping-on point for anyone who has somehow managed to miss out on the Mario phenomenon in the last 35 years.

ok. so. I've been on a streak of these story games after realizing with telltale walking dead that sometimes games without shotguns can be awesome. It did sort of have this barrier of the whole setting being .. medieval times in some buttfuck country I never heard of set dozens of years before I was even born. Medieval times is a pretty boring setting. If you ask me, the only three settings I will accept are modern day, zombie apocalypse, or the cold war. Games CANNOT be set in the future because they will be outdated when we get to the time the game alleges it's set in. It also cannot be set in space because there's no sound in space so I have to turn off my volume every time for full immersion and its so lame. My most important rule is games cannot be set in medieval times because I don't want motherfuckers saying "thy, thee, thine, thou, wasn't, shakespeare," and other medieval words. Also I can't help but think it just really smells bad there.

But you know what, I gave this one a try. And I'm glad I did because despite the boring, lame setting and naming all these old monks from like 1500 in conversation as if I'm supposed to know who they are, I found peace within the world through the protagonist, Andy. You see, Andy is a visitor and an artist. You play as him and choose what he says. What I did was I self inserted as him and I thought I was him. So when people said "oh yeah saint reactine from the denzel mountains said pablo neruda and max brooks of loeb city went to the pottage shop to eat pottage" (authors note: pottage is like beans sort of ) both me and Andy can nod our heads and pretend to know wtf is going on.

You see I'm a big fan of games that make me feel smart without having to be smart or do anything. There are no real puzzles in this game or any way to fail, it's completely linear and no matter what you do you win. But it makes me feel smart because I didn't know it was impossible to lose. So when I kept winning, I felt sooo really sodding smart. (Authors note: sodding is ancient slang for fucking) Andy quickly became one of my favourite characters in recent memory because of how relatable he is not just in his fish outta water attitude in the town, but his personal arc also really resonated with me. Anyone can relate honestly. The game says a lot about passions and goals love and people and building on the past and the economy's relation with art and the passage of time and faith and a whole lotta fancy pants college degree bullcrap but I won't get into that because I want YOU to get into it.

Yeah you play the game yourself and comprehend the themes and subtext and stuff. That's gonna be real fun for you. The side characters are also super fleshed out and seeing these guys change over the course of the game was amazing and I was really really invested, which is surprising especially for such a short -ish game, I have to admit its very hard to get me to care for a whole town of people but I did even if sometimes I couldn't pronounce their medieval ass names. There's a whole lot of them and it normally would be easy for them to feel really similar visually and personality wise considering there's no voice acting but the art style is so outta this world that not only does everything look smooth and the animations feel real and sick and awesome, but each npc has their own look and style where you from a glance can almost tell what they're like just from their face and what they're doing and their posture or whatever. I had some complicated ass relationships with these townspeople. And I think that's really awesome.

One thing I did think was sort of underdeveloped was the actual quest design and time passage mechanics. Your quests are always very similar, go here and ask this person about this. Like I get it there's no funny business its a straight up realistic medieval times thing, and there are some exceptions where the quest can be action packed... But yeah it can get boring to make a break in the case and my next goal is to talk to these three people about this topic and gather info, which I guess is the point since you're solving a murder mystery but, whatever. Aside from the variety I just wish the actual stuff was more robust and clear. Like ok this quest tells me to talk to this guy. I go to the guy. He gives me a "wassup Andy" and I can't respond. Is the quest broken? did I come at the wrong time? who knows. The in game journal ain't tellin me jack squat. I also thought the pacing could be off at some times, some chapters felt very long and some felt like they were over in a second. But if those tiny ass baby ass complaints are all I got then I don't see why I can't bestow upon this game one of elk's highest honours, the coveted, the exclusive, the cool and badass 5/5. Yeah. Hell yeah.

good night!

EDIT: Josh sawyer blocked me on twitter so im dropping my rating of this game. Thanks for understanding.

I love how genuinely nasty this is for a AAA release in 2017; in one game you get your hand chopped by a chainsaw in first person, fist a dead guy's neckhole, watch a crackhead rip his nails off and shoot a half-naked grandma's bulging beehive crotch inbetween moments of listening to her give birth to a swarm of locusts. There's something beautiful in the fact that under all the Evil Dead and Texas Chainsaw inspiration, Biohazard makes room for its own irreverence as one of the filthiest games you'll ever play from a high-budget studio production.
I don't have much to add to the gameplay discussion that hasn't been said yet. I guess the last third was not nearly as bad as people build it up to be, it's decently short and functions well enough as a climax. Hope nothing bad happens to the Winters family after this kooky quest!

Seriously good stuff. I heard early on they were planning the season to be like 20 episodes long and this might be a look at the type of filler episodes we would’ve gotten albeit with probably 1/4 the budget. And I say filler in the most polite sense, this is so amazing and out of all the episodes this could work most as a standalone story. Not that it should but it could. If it wanted. This is also the episode that telltale really finds their footing. There’s still puzzles but none as drawn out as the pharmacy from the first episode but theres still plenty of opportunity to talk to your group. And just on a personal note I like how this part kind of echoes the whole idea of the entire walking dead franchise. Here is some happiness. Oops we’re in the apocalypse there is no happiness allowed. But you’re still happy anyways because human beings are the best and as long as we have friends we can live through anything. # power to the players. #power to the GAMERS.

ive played a lot of this but never really went and did every campaign solo, so that's what I did today. All the campaigns back to back without stopping, took me about 7 or so hours and man valve really just makes perfect games don't they? This game had gore that would not be matched until doom eternal, and even then this game's insane animations make it look timeless. Guns still feel great, and the special infected's are cool too. Do you have any problems with the game? literally just mod it out. Or mod something in. It's ridiculous how easy it is to mod this game and how many mods there are. Valve is so far ahead of the universe that they had creation club before creation club and without taking money... you just downloaded the mod. Straight from the game. Anyways, let's talk about the real reason why this game is so awesomesaucitacular. The characters are really funny. One of my favourite aspects of zombie apocalypses with the exception of killing zombies is how a group of people who never would have met or even interacted now have to work closely and help keep each other alive for their own safety, even if they cant stand each other they gotta work together or else they all die. Its very sweet and hearing ellis and nick argue is really funny and I like it. I wonder why this game isn't included in best game of all time conversations like with half life and portal. I personally prefer this game to the portals, but hey to each their own maybe being a co op zombie game disqualifies you from art status because umm idk. Watever everyone already likes this game whats there to say