WEEPY: "Interesting"! "Interesting"!! Sleepy! Is there anything more nauseating than hearing a videogame described as "INTERESTING"??

SLEEPY: Zzz

WEEPY: As if... every second spent playing these things is time invested, to be someday repaid as an invitation to some kind of interminable cosmic dinner party, where we all get together to say INTERESTING things about INTERESTING ideas and deliver mildly poignant takes about Monster Hunter...

SLEEPY: Or we died and are there already.....

WEEPY: Like the idea of just reading enough books that you become "well read" and somehow transcend the pettiness of the world. I hate the phrase "thought-provoking", it makes me think of prodding a snail with a stick to watch it retract its eyes. I don't want to be PROVOKED, mother fucker, I want to DIE. I want this stuff to be like a concrete wall I can ram my head against!!! Videogames should be an ABYSS, unsayable, unthinkable, the void in a Neo-Geo Pocket format, absolute exteriority that you push your absolute interiority against to discover the limits and the movements of both.

weepy sleepy manifesto

Context matters. If Michael Meyers died with a single shot to the head after five minutes of screentime in the first Halloween , you'd probably write his death off as lackluster. It's the contemplation of what the ramifications of such an action would be after twelve movies where he was the villain that makes such an idea cathartic; "stay dead, asshole." Within the medium of cinema, context is somewhat straightforward. If the filmmaker wants to bend it into whatever shape they desire, that isn't a decision the audience is in on.

Video games like The Sims beg a certain type of question: what exactly happens when the audience is in control? The answer is a million stories per day about shady business ventures, fathers locked in rooms with fires, and Duke Nukem operating outside his zone of comfort. The deliberately flexible framework allows for a preposterous deluge of absurd scenarios to botched degrees that rarely fail to entertain. Calling The Sims a dollhouse is reductionist. Most dollhouses don't contain half the chaos that a single story can produce.

This is only what happens outside of the black box the developers have created for you. Once you catch a glimpse of what's in that black box, all hell breaks loose. The reason being able to fly with Blink by spamming it in Dishonored makes me laugh isn't because it's funny for traditional reasons. The developers never intended for you to have such power, as it would break the balance of the game instantly, thus they never considered what would happen if a player was able to do it. The result is stages that resemble some of Bethesda's greatest work in style but play more like Neon White in function, and it's adorable. Bethesda's greatest works, which can also be exploited in really funny ways, too. The Fat Man only has twelve Mini-Nukes for it scattered across 8.5k Square Miles of land in Fallout: New Vegas , but the second you hit the tilde key, that doesn't matter. Run faster, jump higher; Benny never knew what hit him and neither do I. I've been asked in the past why exactly I find humor in completely borking the context of the games I'm playing, but I don't believe I need to explain myself because the explanation lies within the footage itself.

Both inside and outside of that box is Shadow President , a presidential simulator made for MS-DOS with earnest intent. Where other games about the Cold War go for all-out action, Shadow President is a more strategic affair that punishes poor decision-making with a heavy hand. It's for this reason that I'd consider it an underdog of the genre in our current climate of Paradox Interactive keeping projects alive by drip-feeding hastily thrown-together expansion packs with aplomb. It's for this reason that it's also one of the funniest games I've ever played.

Ignore how serious this game tries to make your actions seem for a second and it's impossible to take seriously. What starts as a more cold and calculated version of Risk soon devolves into a game where you try to end the Cold War by arming rebels in Canada and trying to overthrow the government of Sweden because you think it's funny. These attempts almost never succeed, but unless you've done something on the level of launching 5,000 nukes at Norway, you can keep trying. The game's solution for getting you to reconsider your actions is a board of advisors you can resort to if you're ever unsure of how a certain action is going to play out in your situation. The game will have these advisors killed or even resign from their positions if you play your hand badly enough, but once "I just nuked Mexico and started a nuclear winter in my own country for shits and giggles" is out of the bag, this hardly comes off as a punishment. Why not nuke China while you're at it, try to invade Russia, or promote human rights in North Korea? The context necessitates that you're playing it seriously with deep consideration for your actions, but outside of it, this may well be the dumbest game I've ever played, and brother, I am here for it.

The beauty of video games is this: had this kind of experience been translated to film, its content outweighing its context would have been a boondoggle for its talented cast and crew. As a game, it can be a total failure and still manage to be one of the most entertaining pieces of entertainment I've borne witness to. Because I'm in charge, I'm making the stupid decisions. And because I'm making those decisions, I can laugh at them without hesitation.

I would love to see a more modern take on this because, as is, I can't get its sequel to work on DOSBox. But as it stands, Shadow President is delightful to look back on.

Fuck it, I don't care, I don't have reasons, nor do I want them. I am capable of emotion, believe it or not, despite my scrawls of pontification. And I get feelings from these games. The first came out in 2017 (age of political awakening and steady decline) and this came out in 2022 (deep in the age of "it") and I needed it both times. Romance is dangerous for me; I avoid it because I get all up in my lonely feelings. This is my rare chance to curl up in it. There's no logical reason why this works for me so much and other things like it simply don't. I can dissect it or make a nuanced pitch, but it's a waste of words. This is not a recommendation or a review. I'm just saying things. I'm not going to compare one entry to the other; I don't much remember the first one other than adoring it deeply. Sure, maybe some of it is hamfisted this time around, and sure, there are anachronistic memes, but I literally don't care. I just like it. It makes me smile and I get warm fuzzies and I like it. It is so rare that I can just smile authentically and earnestly at art. Vulnerability can be embarrassing but it's liberating. Earnestness will set me free. And if you think it's cringe to find joy in something so vulnerable, then you can leave me the fuck alone

Ah - This is embarrassing. I guess I hadn't played nearly as much of Half-Life 1 as I thought I had. I didn't know there was so much... Valvey stuff in it. I've always thought of it as a kind of more grown-up Quake II. It's actually much more akin to its sequel or the Portal games than I realised. The vehicle sections, giant production line conveyor belts and cliffside descent. It's full of wee sections with their own ideas. Ambitious and exciting. Well paced and varied. Much longer than I expected too.

I've had access to the PC version for about 20 years, but picking up the relatively dated Gearbox PS2 port on Saturday was what finally got me hooked. I had it in my mind that there was something uniquely interesting about the PS2 version. Given some light research, it seems its primary USP is some local co-op stuff that I can't imagine many would be willing to sit through now, given how much the thing can chug in one-player. The thing that I appreciated the most is that the controls have been somewhat idiotproofed for the console market, simplifying the crouchjump command (something I felt was never really explained to me very well on PC) and including an optional lock-on system. That lured me in, I guess. All of a sudden, this juggernaut of PC gaming started to feel like Ocarina of Time.

I find the kind of time capsule aspect of retro gaming is something that's easier to appreciate on consoles than PC. If I loaded up Half-Life on Steam now, it'd be a rose-tinted vision of 1998, boosted with high resolution options and decades of patches. On PS2, the awkward save system and pre-title screen CGI rendered logo really evoke the era of £25 DVDs in cardboard digipacks and Rex the Runt.

Half-Life 1 is Valvey, but it's the "this was made by 20 guys in a rented office" Valve. It's not terribly slick, and the ideas frequently take precedence over the player experience. Unlike Half-Life 2, moments where you feel pinned down or overpowered frequently seem accidental.

I've long understood that Xen was the result of a team all pointing towards some wild, massive conclusion, and having nothing of substance up their sleeves. Actually playing it, it's miserable. Not a misery that's unique to Half-Life - It's pretty standard 90s FPS drudgery, not unlike many sections of Perfect Dark or Turok - but a massive step down from what had been established. Gonarch is particularly awful, and I'm not confident that the PS2 port is even doing it right. I did an honest playthrough of the fight on Half-Life: Source just to test my suspicions and turned on the cheats to power through on PS2 afterwards.

A lot of Xen is only made palatable on PC due to the game's quicksaves, but you can only make one at a time on PS2. If you're not careful, you can completely fuck a playthrough by using a gun too frequently or assuming there's going to be some health pickups around the next corner. I kind of liked that though. There was a more meaningful weight to decision making, even if I did cop out and Google the Invincibility code for a shit boss.

I'm embarrassed for asking for Half-Life 3 before I'd even finished the original game. It's far more reflective of what I like about the series than I had given it credit for. Playing it in 1998 likely felt just as exciting as Half-Life 2 did for me in 2004. I'm very sorry for chucking it on the "I'm never going to actually play this" pile alongside Unreal.

I'm a big Mega Man Fan (megafan, in the common parlance) so the GB titles have represented a pretty big gap in my resume so to speak. I am setting out to rectify this.

The game was outsourced and came out in the same year as MM4 so this falls nicely into the zone of 'console experience crammed into your portable with mixed results.' I think this is one of the better games in that vein I've played, even if we're talking about a really low bar here. I've previously said that Castlevania the Adventure felt like a Klik N Play game and I think that's also true here, but more complimentary. The gameboy was our home for KnPcore games. It's just the feel of the movement, the very screen-based nature of the play, and the way the little bullets come out.

What really works here are the visuals. Meggin' Man is all about big, expressive characters and in order to translate that to the small screen they had to give up a lot of screen real estate but they DID and while the game is full of hateful bullshit, especially in the lategame, it didn't usually feel like I was fighting the camera or anything. Some enemies, like the torch guys who throw fire, are definitely made to feel a bit more artificially tough with the zoom-in but they are the minority. The weapon acquired screen is the coolest one I've seen in the entire series with a sick cross-section of your boy himself too and that's gotta be worth something.

There's only four robot master levels, featuring masters from MM1 but featuring some stage hazards and enemies from MM2 as well. The weapons work the same as you'd be used to from the NES but they're really super useful against normal enemies now, which is really nice! The weapons felt like a big deal and since the bosses all die extremely quickly to their weaknesses you should be using them liberally. There are only two Wily levels but INEXPLICABLY the first one has you fight four guys from MM2 and a new dude named Enker and ALL OF THEM drop weapons that you get to use for just ONE LEVEL. This feels like the game was intended to be longer but instead just gives the finale a real manic energy to make up for the plethora of bullshit, both insta-kill and regular variety, thrown at you.

I'm definitely not likely to replay this any time soon but I had a good time and am looking forward to seeing what the rest of these bring to the table.

In the year 2001, something new was birthed.

A good video game.

The apex of an era. Of a franchise. Of a hedgehog. Cowards will tell you the game "aged poorly" becauase they are fundamentally weak. It's only gotten better with age as we've through the era of Shadow the Hedgehog being a cool guy to the era of Shadow the Hedgehog being a cringe guy and now into the golden age of Shadow the Hedgehog being the Best Guy.

The masses will hate me because I tell the truth. They'll say shit like "all the levels that aren't Sonic and Shadow suck" because they have failed to reached the zen state of running around them like a maniac racking up points and getting it faster. I'm right and I won't be stopped from saying it any more. It's the best Sonic.

Chao are cute too tbh

Not to be a bummer but I sort of resent this. My initial review, which I stand by, says that Norco did not leave me with questions about either its world or my own. Now, the developers release this, apparently a follow-up to a series of posts on Steam, that just answer and explain lore and answer some of the few ambiguous things left in the world.

Why? Why, for a game that seems to want you to linger on words like hauntology and ponder magical realist themes, would the creators also go out of their way to answer any remaining questions? Why is any of this necessary? Does this really enhance the experience, or does it rob us of what little mystery we had left?

There's only so many times I can say "the danger is in the neatness of identifications" before someone is going to slap me over the backside of the head. So, I'll take Beckett's rephrasing that I hope is easier to understand: "Literary criticism is not bookkeeping." Neither is writing.

Fans weren’t lying, this really is the best Sonic game we’ve had in years.

If you’re looking for a balanced review of the game, you won’t be finding one here. If you’d like more positive perspectives on the latest Sonic hotness, I’d highly recommend reading Pangburn and MagneticBurn’s written pieces on the game, as well as watching ThorHighHeels and Cybershell’s recent videos on it. This review will not discuss any story spoilers, but will vaguely touch upon the final few bosses.

Initially I had (unfairly) written the game off based on its truly awful press coverage, but it’s not like I had much faith in this franchise’s future anyway after getting a game as vapid as Sonic Forces. Though let it be known that I’m always willing to give something a chance, no matter how little I think I’ll like it. I hadn’t planned on getting to this for a while, but after my brother bought it on Steam out of the same curiosity for the game that I had, I knew I should probably just go ahead and play it. Now that I’m on the other end of the experience I think I’m even more concerned for this franchise's future.

After his last 3D outing this series was bound to take a sharp turn somewhere, but I think this genuinely might be Sonic’s most baffling course correction yet. True to its name, Sonic Frontiers stands as the dividing line between the older boost era of games and whatever empty path the series may decide to take next. This should be cause for celebration as I think everyone was essentially done with standard boost games after Forces, but I’m not convinced this open world zone approach is the right way to go if this series wants to stay on the cutting edge.


Over his career, Sonic has always been nothing if not a trend chaser, and that’s abundantly clear here. Shifting away from a straightforward progression though linear stages, Frontiers dumps you into a huge, empty map and sends you off on your way to do whatever it asks of you, knocking out dozens of menial checkmark tasks on your way to the next Thing. Generally you’ll be bouncing between haphazardly placed waves of enemies, puzzles that feel like they were made by a computer, and traditional boost stages in some of the most shameless methods of content rehashing I’ve seen in a long time. In-between these game-percentage ticks are the vast open fields themselves, letting Sonic stretch his legs a bit and run freely and mindlessly like the little rascal he is. After getting all the chaos emeralds on any given island (a process normally executed by fighting a boss to get a gear, using that gear to open a boost stage, playing the boost stage to collect keys, and using the keys to unlock emeralds), you’ll be thrust into a massive set piece pitting Super Sonic against a massive titan, and after beating the boss you’ll be ejected to the next island where the process begins anew.

It may sound harsh to explain this loop so bluntly and unceremoniously, but it’s not like I’m being totally uncharitable. This is the large bulk of what you’ll be doing during an average playthrough. Even among those who love the game, most would agree that a lot of the content in the open world itself can feel tedious at best or downright poor at worst, and I’d be inclined to agree.

Stopping dead in your tracks while zooming from place to place to complete another copy and pasted “puzzle” to fill out a map you’ve already explored is a recipe for disaster in any Sonic game as far as I’m concerned, and that's before you even consider the quality of the puzzles themselves. I think I’d be more charitable towards these if they were taxing in any way whatsoever, but they genuinely amount to turning your brain off for a variable period of time and getting rewarded with the mild satisfaction that you’re working towards a greater task in some small way. Sometimes you’re holding a button down for 30 seconds, sometimes you’re following a path around an obstacle course, sometimes you’re drawing a circle on the ground, sometimes it may even give you a slightly more valuable trinket as a reward for your hard work, but none of it will meaningfully latch onto you regardless. The game may as well just give you the stat boost / item for finding them (see also: looking at the marker on your map and running from one side of the map to the other to get to it) because the puzzles ultimately add nothing to the experience but provide a shallow time waster between story moments.


Let me slow down for a second, I know that these puzzles aren’t the primary draw of the game and it’d be foolish of me to pretend they are. This is a Sonic game after all, it’s always been more about the journey than the destination. Even the best 3D Sonic games are usually pretty fun to move around in regardless of any extraneous elements that may bog it down, so how is the movement in Frontiers? Well…

I’ll be upfront and admit that boost Sonic has never exactly been my thing, but there was a real opportunity here to transform this style of control into something that not only felt fresh, but managed to hold up the rest of the experience on its shoulders, flawed as the surrounding game may be. Against all odds, the system presented here managed to be possibly the most underwhelming iteration on this formula yet, but it’s not entirely the fault of the physics engine.

There was clearly an effort made here to give Sonic more tools to work with and add extraneous world elements to make field traversal flashier. but ultimately most of your experience will just be spent boosting everywhere if you’d like to get to your destination with any semblace of expediency or natural flow. It feels like most movement options (barring a few niche maneuvers like boost jumping off of a rail or other admittedly interesting speedrunning tricks for the Cyberspace stages) just punish you for trying anything other than the prescribed fun it wants to give you. Gone are the days of empty homing attacking to convert air acceleration into ground speed or spin dash jumping off a slope and shooting into the stratosphere, and in their place lie disconnected setpieces of rails and platforming challenges to stumble into and sit back in awe of. Admittedly, it can be rewarding in its own way to string these setpieces together in a way that can very occasionally bring me back to the beautiful labyrinthian nightmares of Sonic CD, but this type of traversal just is not my thing at all - boosting off a bump in the ground and entering a stiff arc in the air will never scratch the same itch to me as some of the crazy shit you can do in Sonic Adventure.

The elephant in the room regarding the openworld design is Breath of the Wild, a game that not only breathed new life into its own series back in 2017, but inadvertently spawned a wave of imitators that wouldn't pop up for at least a few years after the fact (you can’t make a game like Elden Ring in just a weekend). Sonic Frontiers is clearly drawing inspiration from this title, and while this isn’t a terrible thing on the face of it, I’m intensely bothered by the approach taken by Sonic Team. On the surface, both games are strikingly similar: A desolate, wide open map to explore, exceedingly simple puzzles sprinkled across the land, an emphasis on player growth in its collectables, and short cutscenes that add almost nothing but small moments of character growth to bolster the main plot. A common critique I’ve seen levied at Breath of the Wild over the years is that the land of Hyrule is boring to traverse, that nothing you do ever feels significant and that there’s nothing truly special to be discovered. I obviously resent this notion, but the reason why its crept back up in my mind is how Sonic Frontiers just feels like that imaginary game people have occasionally punched down on for 5 years. While many will bring up these two games in the same conversation primarily as a point of praise for Sonic, I feel like the core of each game couldn’t be any different.

Sure, it may be true that not every single task you perform is Breath of the Wild is exemplary, the secret to their success is one word: freedom. The freedom to go anywhere, do anything, see new sights, play at your own pace, and tie it in a nice bow at the end of it all. There are more granular elements to the game I adore, like how truly alive the world actually feels, but the thing that stands out the most to me in this concoction of fun is how decision making affects the game on such a massive scale. It’s not just that the game gives you a stat boosting item for a large portion of puzzles, it’s that you have to make the choice between boosting health or stamina. The world can be vicious early on with enemy camps dangling good early-game rewards on a string just in your grasp, so upgrading health might be desirable. At the same time, having a higher stamina bar is all but essential to make some of the more treacherous climbs in the game, and may also inadvertently make some combat encounters easier on the defensive if you need a hasty escape plan. While both of these can be mitigated somewhat through clever uses of the cooking system, it’s this consideration for player choice and their long term consequences that really make Breath of the Wild special to me, and go some way towards recapturing what made the original The Legend of Zelda feel like such a magical bolt of lighting on the industry.

No such consideration exists in Sonic Frontiers. Every task feels like it's being done for the sake of itself, rather than acting as a vehicle for interesting engagements with the world. Stat boosting has no bearing on how you play the game and does nothing but make combat slightly less tedious, so those rewards you get for completing puzzles may as well not exist. Enemy encounters similarly feel slapdash, there was not a single fight in my 15 hours of playtime that instilled any excitement in me whatsoever and I was tired of fighting the same mobs and minibosses by the time I saw them more than once. I guess it must appeal to someone that there are hundreds of little things on the map that go in one ear and out the other, but it certainly doesn’t to me. Frankly I don’t feel like this new approach fits the playground philosophy of Sonic in the slightest, and unless they come into the next game with a fresh mind on how puzzles and combat are designed, I think this approach should just be scrapped altogether. If Breath of the Wild was Zelda’s come to Jesus moment, Frontiers is Sonic’s JESUS IS KING moment.

As I’ve tried to lay out so far, I have massive fundamental problems with this game, but what truly breaks my heart is every small crevice of the game that just blows its potential for no good reason. It feels like with every nearly decent idea Sonic Frontiers has, it somehow undermines it and makes you realize the whole thing was built on an extraordinary shaky foundation to begin with. Why go to the effort of divorcing the homing attack from the double jump, only to layer it over another opposing action anyway with the combo button? Why even force a stamina bar on you when it takes two seconds to enable infinite stamina? Why offer me the choice of pumping my stats into ring capacity when you simultaneously benefit massively if you can reach the maximum rings, making an increase in rings tantamount to wasting my time long term? Why dangle a defense stat in my face when I can spawn infinite rings at any point negating every single challenge in the game? Why would you design these massive bosses in a game with combat at the forefront only for me to fight every single one in exactly the same way. Why would you add a mediocre fishing minigame to your laundry list of side activities and skip out on the presentation side of it (the only good reason to have a fishing minigame), completely? Why include Big the Cat in your roster of side characters if Jon St. Jon’s goofy ass voice isn’t the one backing him up? Why include a parry if you can just hold it down indefinitely, defeating the entire point of adding a parry to your game? What’s the point of living if we are all just going to die?

Even beyond the gameplay itself, I never found the actual primary tasks you’re bouncing between to be very satisfying either. Between chaos emerald runs, you’ll be collecting island specific collectables to satisfy the needs of a few of Sonic’s friends, and will be treated to short cutscenes of banter between Sonic and the character in question. Occasionally these conversations will directly tie into or work to resolve the current events unfolding in the game, but oftentimes are just quick conversations about old adventures or ad libs about the current psyche of the characters. The writing of these scenes (and by extension the story as a whole) have honestly eclipsed all other discussion surrounding this game, and part of me understands why. It's clear Ian Flynn cares for these characters and wanted to push this series forward in a big way, nearly every scene feels far more grounded than what you’d find in an older game with even this same cast, and with every character interaction you can practically feel the love flowing from the heart of Flynn as he tries to humanize everyone to the best of his ability. I see why people are into his approach of character writing, but man it’s just really not my thing.

To me, the highest highs of this series were always founded on sincerity through the shmaltz and camp. It's not that you had to take it seriously, it's that it was all coming from a genuine place of earnesty to make something fun first, and to write a compelling character drama second. Even when Sonic is absolutely fumbling over himself trying to weave together an interconnected mess of a story, he still somehow manages to bring it all home with an absolutely legendary finale. I’ll admit that much of this may be down to personal taste, but none of the melodrama here in Frontiers really managed to resonate with me, and I think part of that may be due to the presentation and escalation of scale here.

One of my favorite elements to the older Sonic games, (and you’ll have to bear with me here) was the buildup and anticipation to Super Sonic. This was less the case in the 2D games as it served more as a completion reward more than anything, but with the transition to 3D came a far grander scope, and an attempt at narrative pacing. The key word there is attempt - I think most would admit the writing in Sonic games has never been Shakespearean - but the effort was certainly appreciated, and likely played a large part in how these games were remembered over time. Even the blindest of Sonic haters would have to admit that he rarely disappoints for the finale, and this shift where Super Sonic went from a cute in-game bonus to a crazy big payoff right before the curtain call was a brilliant move on SEGA’s part. I tend to be one who prefers intrinsic gameplay benefits over extrinsic ones, but the buildup to the inevitable Super Sonic encounter in every subsequent 3D Sonic game has excited me ever since I first finished Sonic Unleashed back in 2008. Not only was it a smart move to ensure players couldn’t steamroll the challenge of the game (assuming they didn’t also intensify the requirements to unlock Super Sonic), but also to make the game’s final moments land way harder than they could have if say, you had repeated access to Super Sonic at multiple points throughout the game up until that point.

This is why the approach found in Sonic Frontiers feels extremely flaccid to me. It's hard to get excited over an encounter that may have been the equivalent to smashing my childhood toys together had it happened in an older Sonic game, but when it gets repeated 5 times without any build up or escalation on subsequent encounters, it quickly loses its luster. At first I thought this may have been done to amplify the impending finale where we’d really do some mad shit with Super Sonic, but that's not the case. Instead you have two choices based on the difficulty you’ve selected: on Normal you can have a final boss that plays just like the final encounters on the previous 4 islands followed by a Super Sonic cutscene, or on Hard you can have that followed by an… Ikaruga inspired final boss? I know I’m normally the biggest blind defender of shoving shmup sections in games where they admittedly rarely belong, but there was such a missed opportunity here to blow the roof off the finale of the game and at least end with a bang, but I suppose that would require some amount of buildup to be paid off by a hypothetical section like this.

I don’t wanna rip this game away from anyone who’s having a good time with it, after suffering for years with no reinvention I can totally buy that this game would be the one that ties everyone together and brings back a feeling of hope for this series that hasn’t been felt on this scale since Sonic Generations. That said, I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed this on any level. This genuinely might just be a case of me growing up and this type of thing not really being for me anymore, which would be a genuine shame if that's the case. This series that once felt like a cause for joy and celebration in my life now feels trite to me, like the ship is finally sinking and the Captain is trying everything in their power to keep the cruise afloat. I’m sure they’ll still find some way to wrangle me back in to see how the blue bastard is doing in the future, but there’s no doubt that the spark is starting to fade for me.

the whole uproar about its premature release aside, i would say that (both collectively speaking and for myself) the primary grief with cyberpunk 2077 is its familiarity. there is—understandably, i think—a sort of unspoken and paradoxical desire for cyberpunk to simultaneously push boundaries and somehow return to what most would see as its conceptual roots: neuromancer, blade runner, and other works which set forth the feel and iconography of future worlds run by tech and overwhelming corporate power and corruption, as well as a profound posthuman interest. all of these ideas are well beyond familiar, now. this doesn't mean there aren't new frontiers for the genre... it just means that cd projekt red opted for nostalgia and pastiche. this isn't entirely a bad thing. (even those recent shadowrun games were very character-driven, nestled comfortably in their established and frankly derivative universe. and they're great!) it's a perfectly serviceable backdrop for character-driven stories, and for better or for worse, 2077 is abundant in this realm. for the most part, i think it's all really good! i mean, i really like some of these characters and enjoyed spending time with them unreservedly. to the point that... well, the culmination of my time with some of them almost left me feeling a bit empty, knowing there would be little left to look forward to outside my own imagination. (sux 2 b lonesome... heh heh.) maybe there is something "cyberpunk" about playing a game that makes one feel so forlorn in this era of everyone being so terminally online, connected by tech, yet no closer for it... seriously, i fuckin dream every night of finding someone who loves me and... uh, i kind of love those dreams despite the bittersweet aftermath of awakening.

The Go trilogy comprises some of my favorite puzzle games. While not as charming as Hitman Go or as all-around exquisite as Lara Croft Go, the Deus Ex entry is still a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I didn't replay this game now just because I like it.

I've been playing Hitman 2 (2) recently and its stinky always-online DRM requirement to access many features always gives me pause. I understand its purpose and implementation, and there is still a (neutered) offline mode, but I think it's rather unfortunate for any single-player game to include something like that, especially one that costs money. Lo and behold, a few days ago the DX IP's new owners revealed that, as of January 4th, Deus Ex Go will no longer be playable. This is a single-player game that, while usually only around 99 cents, has a purchasing fee. Though it does have online functionality involving community/seasonal missions, there is absolutely no reason for the main story content to be rendered unplayable at any point. But it seems the DRM was baked in so heavily that it cannot function offline, and unlike the other two Go games, this one was never ported to not-phones ("supposedly" there's a PC port on the Microsoft store but I've never seen it available for sale or even piracy), so it will more or less cease to exist in a little over a month.

I am reminded of the endless runner Spider-Man Unlimited, a game I poured untold hours into and even spent a little bit of money on - I don't think it was necessarily anything great, but I played the shit out of it during a difficult time in my life and it holds a special place in my heart. After a certain point, an app I needed for work caused all my phone games to run terribly, so I put it on hold, and when I tried going back to it after getting a new phone, the servers were gone; another single-player game I very much enjoyed that just cannot be played anymore at all. And then there's the one phone game I truly adore - Another Eden - but every time I think about it playing it, I wonder if I'll ever get to experience most of its content and always back off, because despite being a high quality single-player RPG, it needs the internet to work. The lack of permanence in online DRM-enforced titles goes beyond inducing FOMO or being "anti-consumer," it means some of our favorites may be rendered unplayable in the future, only to be forgotten to the point where they may as well have never existed at all, and that's heartbreaking.

A lot of people probably consider Deus Ex Go a throwaway little thing, and it's certainly not as devastating losing it as it would have been to lose one of the series' main entries, but for me it stings all the same. The terms of service for games always states that publishers are giving us permission to play their games, which they can revoke at any time - that's why you can't redownload PT or play it on the PS5, because Konami doesn't want you to, and you implicitly agreed to that by downloading it in the first place. Is that okay? Are our generation's video games trivial enough to not want to share them with future ones? There can be value in fleeting experiences, certainly, but these decisions are made solely out of viewing games as products rather than art, and that makes me very sad.

Hahahahaha

I played this back at release as a massive fan of the series, and clearly just wiped 99% of it from my mind at the time. This streamed replay was such a miserable experience.

The pivot to full action shooter was a wild decision. There is no horror to be found here. I think I put my head in my hands when 7 chapters deep they introduce a dodge roll. Isaac Clarke was never supposed to dodge roll, what the fuck were you thinking? And co-op? Deary me.

Carver is yer player 2 who's technically with you throughout almost all of the game, but playing on single player means you enter some cutscenes and he just steps out from behind you like creepy Watson. Even him being an AI partner when playing solo would have worked, but as such, it feels like the guy only exists sometimes. This gets even more jarring when you're seeing cutscenes like these two dudes have come to depend on each other, and built up a rapport, despite having maybe spent eight minutes actual game time together. Resulting in it all seeming so forced.

Another way the co-op aspect harms single player is that I'm convinced they didn't turn down the amount of enemies or item pickups. I was never not holding 19 medkits. My inventory was filled with two people's worth of stuff. Which helps when almost every encounter is you getting stuck in a corner by what feels like just too many enemies. Good thing they gave you plenty of ammo, right?

Wrong. Universal ammo was a crap decision. It exists only to facilitate the FUCKING CRAFTING mechanics, but we'll get to those later. You have a gun that fires single rounds. Sweet. You are being told on the HUD that you have 300 ammo. Hella nice... You do not have 300 shots for that gun. 300 is how many rounds of universal ammo you have, but that single shot gun you're weilding might use "5 ammo" per shot. You know, because that makes sense. The numbers might as well not exist.

We're not going to get to the crafting because I can't be bothered moaning about the game anymore. I'm glad it killed Dead Space. The scariest part of all this was going on the Wiki and reading that the director had plans for fourth and fifth entries.