i don't want to get too reliant on ignesque "this is the dark souls of rimjobbing your mother"-type comparisons, but i can't think of a more eloquent way to sum up the magic of wrestling empire than "wwf no mercy by way of postal 2".

my wrestler for most of my playthrough was sally, a transgender woman formerly known as "bathroom bill". fresh off landing a contract, she quickly becamed embroiled in a violent irl feud with another wrestler who was 100% A Butch Lesbian. problem was that sally had found herself in some sort of sickly stockholm unrequited love. how could you not when your job is to wrestle a hot chick? in a feat of dramatic (read: psychotic) frustration, she visited her rival in the hospital and beat her to death. sally then retired and spent the rest of her days chilling in the hotel across the street from the arena because there are no cops in this game.

i'm so glad i found this game. imo you haven't lived until you've crucifix dropped someone into a set of metal stairs, breaking multiple crucial bones and ending their career.

Some thoughts that I had stuck in my head:
Explore the world looking for a solution, a connection. Together. Maybe not physically, not by the same routes, maybe not delivering the same

It is difficult for Death Stranding to reach you playing it alone. Its nature emerges more easily online, and it's a great gesture and a statement of intent that you don't need a subscription to ps plus.

Kojima presents a digital world that is difficult to interpret and unite in words, a fiction that shoots directly into our reality.
Cursed, heartfelt, but also emotional. embrace the connections between things, but question them. a celebration of human duality
More prophetic than MGS2 and with better observation, generalizing and at the same time specifying the difficulties of our day to day, articulating them in the total art of videogames.
From the most abstract to the most literal, collective fears, traumas and very recognizable memories materialized. Visible, audible, and even palpable in an alien America full of dualities, of people who only intuit and show themselves through holograms and numbers.
But we are here. Maybe not next door, but in the same world. And the proof is the ladder that I have used to create an improvised bridge, I have left it here, for you, for me, for everyone. And that rope on the cliff, that capsule, that package on the ground. We are here.

Where the rejection of what forces us to leave this world is manifested in a kind of allergy for those who are more akin to these fears or have experienced them to the limit.
Where people are baptized for their present, for their office and condemned for their past. Where the heroes deliver packages and letters. They come to our futuristic shacks and install an esoteric Internet.
Everything is Sam Porter Bridges, whose name makes it STRONGLY EVIDENT what Death Stranding is about, and at the same time no, you cannot perfectly encompass anything as complex as earthly and afterlife connections, the natural and the mechanical, the Software and the Hardware, the "Ka" and "ha". reality and dreams. Much of Death Stranding's recontextualized iconography seems to suggest that.

It is a work that calls for thinking in an unprecedented way about it, because it offers an unprecedented reinterpretation of the transition and relationship with our environment, especially for gaming standards, obsessed with the mechanical-narrative relationship or the challenge, the suggestion and the satisfaction as a criterion to generate interpretations that are autopsies or descriptions. That in the best case.
At worst you have Far Cry 3.
Every species has the game in different facets and areas as a form of intellectual and emotional connection.
Children play and learn/relate, animals play to understand each other. We play to replace war.

Even before having sex we played.

Homo ludens. And Kojima welcomes a lot of this.

We need to be playful without losing focus.
There is no need for subtlety, just answer honestly to human questions. Use the forms of play as a response to the bitter obstacles of reality.
The example is the "Social Strand System", a mechanical reinterpretation of social networks where the game of deliveries and recovery of packages, manufactures and constructions has an impact on likes and statistics, but also on turning the environment into something more livable and peaceful, at the same time, shows that a more altruistic and ethical form of social interaction is possible.
It sounds naive to say that the reconstruction of the collective environment in an online video game is a lesson in altruism and community, even more so when there are likes involved, but the exercise of life begins somewhere, and now that we are waking up from this techno delirium -competitive utopian in which social networks had us flooded, now that we know how important they are to connect with each other more than to raise our ego, this "Social Strand System" shines more than in 2019.
Through the textures of slow gaming, an experiment of self-knowledge and updating is proposed, there is the unprecedented, in how the game confronts us with situations without necessarily connecting their thoughts or ideas and still achieving a certain cohesion. As in life, no one knows "what it is about" and yet we walk through it with what we own and what others leave for us.
And for a game that wants to embrace these themes without giving up the nature of its medium, its foundation, it's something really admirable.
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Not a single day goes by that I don't think about Death Stranding. Perhaps because of what has been happening in the world since 2020.
On arrival at Port Knot City.
How the corpses of people who have left explode, leaving an emotional and physical void in the form of a crater. Cities with people locked up, invisible. In the networks. In their inverted rainbows. How work becomes playing with its dozens of tools to transport, how enemies are my reflection, silence, likes, photos, stories... In life, how life can be everywhere.
And I can't even put into words practically anything that this game is for me. I plan to return to it in 2023 now that a sequel has been announced that begs the question: Should we have Connected?

relaxing, tedious, frustrating...always rewarding...such an utterly singular experience that it's hard to put into words...essentially had me from the minute i realized that delivering packages with little to no palpable reward or sense of progress was what the whole thing just...is

that sense of satisfaction when i accomplished a particularly tough delivery, often taking hours and suffering countless restarts due to little mistakes, even slight miscalculations...it's a high i haven't experienced anywhere else

i kinda fell in love with the medium due to this unique disposition...the way the form of the game itself reinforces every other aspect, the story, themes, etc...ideas that i've seen explored elsewhere are given such a tangible potency, resonate with me so directly; it's a sensation that couldn't have manifested in any other way

Power of Gaming moment fr

vague half formed ramblings but like this used to be sort of fun right?? like obv a gimmick and not smth you’d play around w for long stretches all at once but yeah i remember liking this site and being impressed/scared that he always got it right lol. was playing this w my bf last night and seeing who could win first one of us or akinator and this just straight up doesn’t work now. how is it that my bf was trying to get domnhall gleeson, famous midrate nepo baby actor, and the genie just ran to almost a hundred guesses before giving up. feel like before it would be able to guess way more obscure shit relatively fast,, idk shit got me reminiscing on when the internet was a lot smaller pre-2020 pre covid pre tiktok. like I remember being scared at like 12 bc akinator was able to guess a youtuber that i liked that always hovered around 300 k subscribers,, that impressed AND terrified me. and idk now this shii now keeps asking about cancelled-for-being-creeps mcyt ppl even after ive already answered several times that no i am not trying to get you to guess that im thinking of the mcyt guy that bit his girlfriend lol…
idk jus thinking and I don’t want this to seem like screams at cloud formation simpsons gag type review I understand enough of my perception of this is playing it at a v formative age and then not thinking about it for like almost a decade lol. rose colored glasses and all that and ig i dont know how to end this other than by saying it is nice when u revisit something from ur childhood/teenage years and it’s still v good. like ive been listening to lots of pure heroine lorde this week and i haven’t listened to that album in years,,,, still great !!!! 💗💗