Woodaba
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Cryostasis
2009
burial rites for the exiled and forgotten. what else can i do to save these people?
painterly in a way that eludes a lot of similarly inclined first-person shooters, genuinely really striking images presented here and accompanied with an eerie soundscape. it’s shackled to linearity both in rhythm and in how it opts to supply the player with resources, which admittedly may not have earned it the warmth it deserved back in 2009, but there’s an appreciated pointedness to its pace which perfectly accompanies its relatively short runtime. frankness is ultimately its greatest asset; most of the nonlinearity here is deployed through the vignettes comprising its narrative, portraying the north wind’s genuine tragedy with a leanness & brevity that underlines the humanity of its limited cast. as your journey shifts from something seemingly corporeal to metaphysical and impressionistic, it is this comfort with being construed as folkloric which allows its final moments to not only register as meaningful, but to provide this unexpected & poignant catharsis. really loved it.
painterly in a way that eludes a lot of similarly inclined first-person shooters, genuinely really striking images presented here and accompanied with an eerie soundscape. it’s shackled to linearity both in rhythm and in how it opts to supply the player with resources, which admittedly may not have earned it the warmth it deserved back in 2009, but there’s an appreciated pointedness to its pace which perfectly accompanies its relatively short runtime. frankness is ultimately its greatest asset; most of the nonlinearity here is deployed through the vignettes comprising its narrative, portraying the north wind’s genuine tragedy with a leanness & brevity that underlines the humanity of its limited cast. as your journey shifts from something seemingly corporeal to metaphysical and impressionistic, it is this comfort with being construed as folkloric which allows its final moments to not only register as meaningful, but to provide this unexpected & poignant catharsis. really loved it.
Metroid Fusion
2002
The X parasites look so tasty do you think samus pops them in her mouth like fruit gushers
Gun Force II
1994
after churning through most of the 90s-00s metal slug entries this week i was taken by two things. first: the games have a hilarious sense of Vonnegutian violence that makes all entries difficult to be mad at even if i found some of them tedious and grueling. in metal slug 1 & 2 in particular you can be killed by all sorts of 'Top 10 Worst WW2 deaths' sketches, like being crushed by a falling tank in disrepair or getting struck with an ejected shell casing from a Comically Large Cannon, as well as dishing out dark comedy of your own like pumping 20 pistol rounds into a suntanning grenadier or instagibbing a riflemen with 5 grenades as he leaves the latrine. it's hard to single out what gives a metal slug game that approachable aura that makes it a hot commodity but i imagine this aesthetic of humor, along with the plainly good slapstick like the inflation sprites and its death animation, has aided in the series' canonization and perpetual status in the zeitgeist.
second, these titles were alot slower than i remember. after perusing for a bit you can find dev interviews that state that metal slug was conceived as being branched off side-scrolling shmups like Irem's own R-TYPE instead of Contra, and its felt in the way hitboxes in the series are meant to imprison a poor position into a guaranteed death as in the shmup's philosophy rather than hitboxes being quick tests to jump or duck as in contra's philosophy. or at least, that's my perusal of the motivation--i'm nothing but a fledgling to both genres really but my main point is that I often "foresaw" my death happening in metal slug in the same way i "foresaw" my deaths in shmups, realizing too late i had put myself in an unwinnable screen position due to prior mistakes in dodging. i learned to accept this sort of difficulty for what it is as i moved on, but i wondered what a metal slug title might look like if it's challenges was more chaotic & reactive rather than guided & premeditated.
thus i have my question answered in gunforce ii, ironically the closest spiritual predecessor to metal slug, which manages to completely invert these two observations and separate itself out as a underplayed gem with its own sensibilities rather than some historical trivia for metal slug fiends. on the first observation, metal slug's wartime clownery is replaced instead with a mostly self-serious aesthetic of metal (in all forms), mecha, and masculinity: gunforce II stands next to SNK's Search and Rescue as perhaps the most attentive arcade title (to my knowledge) towards the late 80s-90s OVA & TV scene of seinen mecha and go nagai-derivated creature horror. the latter shows up only towards the ending stretch of bosses but this game is knee-deep in the bag of the former--the work of that era's staple mech designers like Katoki or Kawamori seemed like go-to references here, and shit like Bubblegum Crisis, 8th MS Team, Dragonar, L-Gaim, and Mellowlink were constantly running through my mind as i replayed this, not necessarily out of any explicit reference but just as being on the same wavelength as the game. its hard to notice this reference point of design at the game's breakneck speed but watching this HD run really honed it in--the sort of Neue Ziel-esque design of many of the common enemies, the power suited mini boss trio that appears in stage 2-1, a skeleton alien centipede demon inside a tekkaman blade-esque suit as the final boss--all of it feels crafted from a shared appreciation & study for that era's ability to engineer sleek instant classics of designs for narratives of dark melodramas and dystopian vignettes. in fact, the game cares so much for rendering these designs, for showing every healthy/damaged/destroyed state between pinion and gear, driver and driven, shear out and tear out that'll you probably spend at least 10% of your run time here in frame spikes of dropping to around 15 fps. while slowdown in metal slug becomes a crucial aid in assessment, gunforce ii never really ascends above being moderately hard for most of the time, so with slowdown often occurring in the denouement or initialization of encounters you'll just accept it for what it is. (tho I do find it really funny that the first 30 seconds of level one has the game's most noticeable slowdown). but it's rather serious passion for mecha without overt recapitulation or veneration makes it at really pretty & unique to look at it motion, and it's hard not to be charitable towards the title when you because of how singular it looks, in spite of its obvious ties to metal slug in user interface.
on the second observation, gunforce ii diverges from metal slug in being explicitly connected with Contra over any shmup, especially in how every platform, ledge, and wire in this game is scalable, similar to the former's platforming. this adds a much needed (for my tastes) dynamism to the greater metal slug encounter philosophy, letting you craft your own screen real-estate and angles of attack rather than following the rules as the encounter lays out for you. frankly, this scaling element is often not really necessary because again the game isn't that hard (stage 2-2 being a great example of where it's absence isn't even noticed), but there is great fun to be had in abusing the protagonists' absurdly double jointed arms to launch 360-degree assaults while hanging from the ceiling or bear hugging a ledge. it also adds a bit of strategy to the vehicular gameplay--since vehicles often aren't capable of switching vertical planes as easily as you are on foot, and because the game's equivalent of metal slug POWs can roam about both above and below your current height, there is some genuine strategy in regards to whether to abuse the hitpoints and firepower of vehicles for greater safety but miss the POWs, or to trust in your parkour skills and aim for saving all POWs even if it means a riskier section, or to mix the two and believe you can dismount & mount with the proper timings. again not every level engages with this idea to its full extent but it complicates the treatment of vehicles as a strict powerup as in metal slug, where losing a vehicle early often meant playing the rest of an encounter out at a tedious disadvantage.
where i fall off the train is unfortunate in that this is just not enough of a good thing--it's shorter than just about every metal slug title I'm sure, and the levels it really clicks on, the third and final levels, just remind me of how elite this or the planned third entry could have been if Irem didn't get the can right after gunforce ii released. but to be clear i think the rest of the levels are great, occasionally dipping into amazing on select sections and bosses, but not a consistent "damn..." like those two. in my opinion it's pretty tied with metal slug X as this dev's team best attempt at the whole idea honestly. also i'm mentioning it again but god these protagonists' arms are so fucking weird, please look at a clip or something it's like addicting-games.com tier in how you can get the arms to go out at weird angles. really endearing tho
second, these titles were alot slower than i remember. after perusing for a bit you can find dev interviews that state that metal slug was conceived as being branched off side-scrolling shmups like Irem's own R-TYPE instead of Contra, and its felt in the way hitboxes in the series are meant to imprison a poor position into a guaranteed death as in the shmup's philosophy rather than hitboxes being quick tests to jump or duck as in contra's philosophy. or at least, that's my perusal of the motivation--i'm nothing but a fledgling to both genres really but my main point is that I often "foresaw" my death happening in metal slug in the same way i "foresaw" my deaths in shmups, realizing too late i had put myself in an unwinnable screen position due to prior mistakes in dodging. i learned to accept this sort of difficulty for what it is as i moved on, but i wondered what a metal slug title might look like if it's challenges was more chaotic & reactive rather than guided & premeditated.
thus i have my question answered in gunforce ii, ironically the closest spiritual predecessor to metal slug, which manages to completely invert these two observations and separate itself out as a underplayed gem with its own sensibilities rather than some historical trivia for metal slug fiends. on the first observation, metal slug's wartime clownery is replaced instead with a mostly self-serious aesthetic of metal (in all forms), mecha, and masculinity: gunforce II stands next to SNK's Search and Rescue as perhaps the most attentive arcade title (to my knowledge) towards the late 80s-90s OVA & TV scene of seinen mecha and go nagai-derivated creature horror. the latter shows up only towards the ending stretch of bosses but this game is knee-deep in the bag of the former--the work of that era's staple mech designers like Katoki or Kawamori seemed like go-to references here, and shit like Bubblegum Crisis, 8th MS Team, Dragonar, L-Gaim, and Mellowlink were constantly running through my mind as i replayed this, not necessarily out of any explicit reference but just as being on the same wavelength as the game. its hard to notice this reference point of design at the game's breakneck speed but watching this HD run really honed it in--the sort of Neue Ziel-esque design of many of the common enemies, the power suited mini boss trio that appears in stage 2-1, a skeleton alien centipede demon inside a tekkaman blade-esque suit as the final boss--all of it feels crafted from a shared appreciation & study for that era's ability to engineer sleek instant classics of designs for narratives of dark melodramas and dystopian vignettes. in fact, the game cares so much for rendering these designs, for showing every healthy/damaged/destroyed state between pinion and gear, driver and driven, shear out and tear out that'll you probably spend at least 10% of your run time here in frame spikes of dropping to around 15 fps. while slowdown in metal slug becomes a crucial aid in assessment, gunforce ii never really ascends above being moderately hard for most of the time, so with slowdown often occurring in the denouement or initialization of encounters you'll just accept it for what it is. (tho I do find it really funny that the first 30 seconds of level one has the game's most noticeable slowdown). but it's rather serious passion for mecha without overt recapitulation or veneration makes it at really pretty & unique to look at it motion, and it's hard not to be charitable towards the title when you because of how singular it looks, in spite of its obvious ties to metal slug in user interface.
on the second observation, gunforce ii diverges from metal slug in being explicitly connected with Contra over any shmup, especially in how every platform, ledge, and wire in this game is scalable, similar to the former's platforming. this adds a much needed (for my tastes) dynamism to the greater metal slug encounter philosophy, letting you craft your own screen real-estate and angles of attack rather than following the rules as the encounter lays out for you. frankly, this scaling element is often not really necessary because again the game isn't that hard (stage 2-2 being a great example of where it's absence isn't even noticed), but there is great fun to be had in abusing the protagonists' absurdly double jointed arms to launch 360-degree assaults while hanging from the ceiling or bear hugging a ledge. it also adds a bit of strategy to the vehicular gameplay--since vehicles often aren't capable of switching vertical planes as easily as you are on foot, and because the game's equivalent of metal slug POWs can roam about both above and below your current height, there is some genuine strategy in regards to whether to abuse the hitpoints and firepower of vehicles for greater safety but miss the POWs, or to trust in your parkour skills and aim for saving all POWs even if it means a riskier section, or to mix the two and believe you can dismount & mount with the proper timings. again not every level engages with this idea to its full extent but it complicates the treatment of vehicles as a strict powerup as in metal slug, where losing a vehicle early often meant playing the rest of an encounter out at a tedious disadvantage.
where i fall off the train is unfortunate in that this is just not enough of a good thing--it's shorter than just about every metal slug title I'm sure, and the levels it really clicks on, the third and final levels, just remind me of how elite this or the planned third entry could have been if Irem didn't get the can right after gunforce ii released. but to be clear i think the rest of the levels are great, occasionally dipping into amazing on select sections and bosses, but not a consistent "damn..." like those two. in my opinion it's pretty tied with metal slug X as this dev's team best attempt at the whole idea honestly. also i'm mentioning it again but god these protagonists' arms are so fucking weird, please look at a clip or something it's like addicting-games.com tier in how you can get the arms to go out at weird angles. really endearing tho
Elden Ring
2022
I am called to revere Elden Ring out of spite. I once heard someone I no longer speak to for various reasons say, upon seeing a then new trailer, that they wish FromSoft would making something interesting like King’s Field again instead of this. Now, I was playing the King’s Field games for the first time when they said that, and I happen to love those games a lot, and I certainly want them to make another one or something like it, even though they never will because the games industry is full of cowards. But I also happened to know that this person had never played King’s Field, and were probably only saying it out of a smug sense of superiority. And this made me angry.
Yes, yes, the familiar gang is here. Yet another lowly warrior usurps the eternal cycle. The fallen order, the god-kings, corruption, the moon, the flame. Invasions, summons, messages, bloodstains. Tragic sidequests, Patches is there, and multiple endings. Magic is blue, holiness is yellow. You can parry and backstab enemies. You upgrade your weapons to scale with your stats. You dodge roll and stagger. These are familiar. They are played out, to a degree. And yes, they are not exciting in that old way. But I don’t really care, because I’m a “fan of the genre”. I am enthusiastic about the new things that come from this company, and the genre they’ve inadvertently spawned, and I’m always ready for innovation. But that doesn’t preclude me from finding joy in the familiar. Because it was never the uniqueness that mattered most.
There’s this kind of jealousy surrounding the Souls series. The fans (myself included) view them as special, unique, and precious gems. When something besmirches their name, it is a disgrace, because there is something transcendent about these games that we hold sacred. But as the series has become a prototype, a whole genre sprouting from its seedbed, the things that made a game like Dark Souls special have become no longer so special. How many games can we find that are trying to be exactly like it? Those qualities, whether it be difficulty, inscrutability, atmosphere, even specific mechanics, they’re not special anymore. How quaint does Super Metroid feel now? How cliche is The Shining now? Are The Beatles run of the mill? Is Seinfeld funny anymore? It’s like the old joke: “I don’t get the appeal of Hamlet. It’s just a bunch of famous saying strung together.”
It becomes difficult to vindicate why these games are good. So, we get jealous. We get protective. “No, you see, these games are special. How else could I love them so much if they weren’t? They are doing something different. They are beautiful in a way only I can understand.” Everyone thinks they are the sole prophet of Dark Souls liking, and that everyone else is some misguided mystic. I do, too. But I know I’m fooling myself. I know these games are mortal.
See, I’m not sure these games were ever that special to begin with. I remember, years ago, sitting on a couch playing Demon's Souls, and wondering out loud how they made this game, how they reached something so specific. And he said to me that "it had to have come from someone with a vision". As years go on, I find that statement less and less true. They were and are unique, sure. But they didn’t come from nowhere, sprouting from Miyazaki’s forehead like Athena. They were made by people in a company making a software product. Elden Ring was building off of Dark Souls, which was building off of Demon’s Souls, which was building off of King’s Field, which was probably building off of Ultima Underworld or something, and yadda yadda. Iteration is underrated. I think what ends up getting underrecognized, ironically, is that these are good video games. It’s not because they’re special. They haven’t unlocked a secret to games that no one else can know. These games don’t have to be special to be good. They can just be good. Which they are.
Anyway. I liked Elden Ring. I thought it was fun. I thought it was cool. I liked exploring its world. I liked crawling through its dungeons. I liked fighting bosses. That’s enough for me. And so you might ask, “Is Elden Ring even that special?” And I’m going to say, “Who cares?”
Yes, yes, the familiar gang is here. Yet another lowly warrior usurps the eternal cycle. The fallen order, the god-kings, corruption, the moon, the flame. Invasions, summons, messages, bloodstains. Tragic sidequests, Patches is there, and multiple endings. Magic is blue, holiness is yellow. You can parry and backstab enemies. You upgrade your weapons to scale with your stats. You dodge roll and stagger. These are familiar. They are played out, to a degree. And yes, they are not exciting in that old way. But I don’t really care, because I’m a “fan of the genre”. I am enthusiastic about the new things that come from this company, and the genre they’ve inadvertently spawned, and I’m always ready for innovation. But that doesn’t preclude me from finding joy in the familiar. Because it was never the uniqueness that mattered most.
There’s this kind of jealousy surrounding the Souls series. The fans (myself included) view them as special, unique, and precious gems. When something besmirches their name, it is a disgrace, because there is something transcendent about these games that we hold sacred. But as the series has become a prototype, a whole genre sprouting from its seedbed, the things that made a game like Dark Souls special have become no longer so special. How many games can we find that are trying to be exactly like it? Those qualities, whether it be difficulty, inscrutability, atmosphere, even specific mechanics, they’re not special anymore. How quaint does Super Metroid feel now? How cliche is The Shining now? Are The Beatles run of the mill? Is Seinfeld funny anymore? It’s like the old joke: “I don’t get the appeal of Hamlet. It’s just a bunch of famous saying strung together.”
It becomes difficult to vindicate why these games are good. So, we get jealous. We get protective. “No, you see, these games are special. How else could I love them so much if they weren’t? They are doing something different. They are beautiful in a way only I can understand.” Everyone thinks they are the sole prophet of Dark Souls liking, and that everyone else is some misguided mystic. I do, too. But I know I’m fooling myself. I know these games are mortal.
See, I’m not sure these games were ever that special to begin with. I remember, years ago, sitting on a couch playing Demon's Souls, and wondering out loud how they made this game, how they reached something so specific. And he said to me that "it had to have come from someone with a vision". As years go on, I find that statement less and less true. They were and are unique, sure. But they didn’t come from nowhere, sprouting from Miyazaki’s forehead like Athena. They were made by people in a company making a software product. Elden Ring was building off of Dark Souls, which was building off of Demon’s Souls, which was building off of King’s Field, which was probably building off of Ultima Underworld or something, and yadda yadda. Iteration is underrated. I think what ends up getting underrecognized, ironically, is that these are good video games. It’s not because they’re special. They haven’t unlocked a secret to games that no one else can know. These games don’t have to be special to be good. They can just be good. Which they are.
Anyway. I liked Elden Ring. I thought it was fun. I thought it was cool. I liked exploring its world. I liked crawling through its dungeons. I liked fighting bosses. That’s enough for me. And so you might ask, “Is Elden Ring even that special?” And I’m going to say, “Who cares?”
She said stop smoking...
I stop smoking...
She said stop drinking alcohal...
I stop drinking alcohal...
She said stop playing DRAKE OF THE 99 DRAGONS
I stop her Breathe...
I stop smoking...
She said stop drinking alcohal...
I stop drinking alcohal...
She said stop playing DRAKE OF THE 99 DRAGONS
I stop her Breathe...
𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐃 𝐒𝐏𝐄𝐀𝐊! 𝐀𝐆𝐀𝐈𝐍! 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐦𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐛𝐫𝐨𝐚𝐝𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐭, 𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐯𝐨𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞, 𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐁𝐀𝐑𝐎𝐍𝐄𝐒𝐒 𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐆𝐀𝐑𝐄𝐓 𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐓𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐑.
𝐅𝐚𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲'𝐬 𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐝 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐫𝐮𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐧𝐨 𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐇 𝐂𝐈𝐑𝐂𝐋𝐄 𝐎𝐅 𝐇𝐄𝐋𝐋:
𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐔𝐍𝐈𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐃𝐎𝐌 𝐎𝐅
𝐆𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐓 𝐁𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐀𝐈𝐍 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐍𝐎𝐑𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐍 𝐈𝐑𝐄𝐋𝐀𝐍𝐃
𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐠𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐚𝐬...
𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐓𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐑'𝐒 𝐓𝐄𝐂𝐇𝐁𝐀𝐒𝐄: 𝐀𝐑𝐂𝐀𝐃𝐄 𝐄𝐃𝐈𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍
------------------------------------
September 24th, 2021: About an hour after THATCHER'S TECHBASE is shared with the world, I'm filled with an overwhelming urge to never think about it again. I go out for a pint of Tennent's Lager at the pub.
September 25th, 2021: Despite my best efforts to pretend I don't care at all, I spend most of the day fixing all the bugs people found in THATCHER'S TECHBASE. There are a lot of them, but I'm buoyed by the fact that there is something really funny about debugging a joke.
September 27th, 2021: A representative from Channel 4 calls me up and suggests that THATCHER'S TECHBASE be included as a challenge in a reboot of the classic British gameshow GamesMaster. The smart part of my brain that thinks it sounds like Channel 4 are looking for someone to do a bunch of free work for them in exchange for exposure is immediately overridden by the mental image of famous British people shooting Margaret Thatcher in the face on television. I agree to make some stuff for the show.
September 28th, 2021: I have a surprisingly terse conversation with someone on Twitter who tells me that the Thatcher's Graveyard section of THATCHER'S TECHBASE is not optimised for four-player co-op play and that I should consider redoing that entire section of the wad for all the people out there who are playing THATCHER'S TECHBASE in 4-player co-op. I swallow the surreality of the situation and give in to plain old spite by making some of the corridors in that section a little narrower, immediately pushing a v1.3 to production.
October 15th, 2021: Conservative MP David Amess is stabbed multiple times at a constituency meeting in Leigh-on-Sea and later dies at the scene from his injuries. Ali Harbi Ali, a 25-year-old man, is arrested at the scene.
October 21st, 2021: Ali Harbi Ali is charged with murder and preparing terrorist acts.
October 22nd, 2021: Another representative from Channel 4 calls me up to say they are now considering whether THATCHER'S TECHBASE is a "right fit" for GamesMaster. They stop responding to emails shortly after.
November 1st, 2021: Putting faith in the great professional relationshop we had previously established, I apply for a £5000 creative funding grant from the Tennent's Lager Grassroots Arts & Culture Project, explaining my intention to make [REDACTED], a new game about [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] in the [REDACTED].
November 3rd, 2021: My application for a £5000 creative funding grant from the Tennent's Lager Grassroots Arts & Culture Project is rejected for "cultural" reasons.
November 11th, 2021: During his day job as a community organiser in an assisted living facility, my dad finds out one of his elderly residents has watched the trailer for THATCHER'S TECHBASE via a Hillsborough Justice advocacy group on Facebook. This is the kinda shit that just makes me smile and feel glad that I went insane making a DOOM wad lol, idk
November 17th, 2021: EDGE publish their Christmas 2021 issue, which contains an article about THATCHER'S TECHBASE entitled "How Doom mod Thatcher's Techbase became the most talked-about videogame satire of 2021". Therein, I sheepishly admit that Tim Rogers baited me into making a DOOM wad by doing an incredibly affecting video about how great DOOM is and Tim responds in kind, closing the loop on a year-long project that was inspired by an off-hand YouTube comment. I am happy that I convinced Chris Schilling to print some of the Irish Republican Army's most famous attack lines in his computer game magazine.
December 5th, 2021: THATCHER'S TECHBASE finally appears on Channel 4's GamesMaster, much to my surprise. Because of the game's content, it is shown from very far away, blurred down to a small assemblage of black and white pixels that kinda look like maybe it was maybe Doomguy punching something for a second? Who knows. The Scottish professional wrestler Grado claims he killed Margaret Thatcher with a chainsaw, but players of THATCHER'S TECHBASE know that you can't use the chainsaw in THATCHER'S TECHBASE. The chainsaw has been replaced with a stream of piss.
December 7th, 2021: The GamesMaster reboot is cancelled after three episodes.
December 8th, 2021: Margaret Thatcher wins the coveted "Best Demon" award at Esquire magazine's 2021 Esquire Gaming Awards.
December 24th, 2021: Following three months of surprisingly involved legal back-and-forth with the law firm representing Tennent's Lager, the company finally acquieses to my nervous demands and donates £500 each to Stonewall UK, The Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation, and the Hillsborough Justice Campaign. Realising they have no further legal obligation to reply to my emails, the company ignores my queries about donations for the other organisations on the THATCHER'S TECHBASE website.
January 1st, 2022: I start a new job; one that doesn't involve banking or banks or people having full-scale meltdowns about share prices.
March 18th, 2022: The Scottish government declares an end to all mandatory coronavirus measures across the country.
May 18th, 2022: After a long break from thinking about Margaret Thatcher, Hell and THATCHER'S TECHBASE, I return to the Tenth Circle of Hell once more when the wad is exhibited at the Southside Games Festival in Glasgow and I am invited to attend and do a Q&A panel. Expecting questions like "do you like doom lol" and "who is margaret thatcher??" I am completely utterly blindsided when actual, real, not-pretend game developers start asking me questions about political theory and its applications in game design. I don't remember the things I said because my brain was too busy suppressing the urge to piss and didn't have enough free CPU cycles to record memories, but I do know that one dude asked "So what's the deal with all the timewasting elevators?" and then nodded in a satisfied way when I told him I really liked that one part of The 25th Ward where you have to solve the toilet maze and knock on 100 apartment doors - the TECHBASE lifts are meant to be sort of like that. Thank you, Backloggd, for allowing me to get away with being a little bit pretentious in front of people who make real art games. To the guy who nodded - I know you totally have a Backloggd dude, drop the @ in the comments below.
July 7th, 2022: REUTERS, BREAKING (via CNN): "U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned Thursday, bringing an acrimonious end to a nearly three-year premiership that has been beset by controversy and scandal."
August 3rd, 2022: As part of his election campaign, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak promises that people who vilify Britain will be treated as extremists and referred to the Government’s deradicalization "Prevent" programme.
August 18th, 2022: The build team from The World Transformed, a political festival that takes place at the same time as the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, ask me if they can turn THATCHER'S TECHBASE into an arcade machine that will support Living Rent, a Scottish tenants union who are struggling against record rent increases and ruthless landlord action.
August 19th, 2022: I try to explain to the build team from The World Transformed that a DOOM wad won't translate to a pleasant arcade cabinet experience, but my protests are finally suppressed by the part of my brain that is yelling "THEY ARE MAKING AN ARCADE MACHINE OF THE WAD YOU MADE". I give sincerely cheerful thumbs-ups when the design plans for the cabinet are waved in front of my eyes, irresistibly activating the huge clusters of "VIDEO GAME" neurons in my hippocampus.
August 20th, 2022: I get to work on making a version of THATCHER'S TECHBASE that's more suited for an arcade experience. This mostly involves unlocking all the doors and pumping the player full of ammo and milk.
August 28th, 2022: I realise that even Capcom puts a little bit more effort into their Arcade Editions than this, and decide to put out feelers for an artist who can help me add some new enemies to the game because I am not living through a coronavirus lockdown any more and cannot spend five hours a day dragging little blue suits onto cyberdemons. By pure luck, the guy who originally helped me make the CyberThatcher sprites - Rafael Batista de Lima - responds to my advert without even realising it's the same project, a moment of serendipity that I have no choice but to recognise as divine intervention from Satan himself.
August 30th, 2022: Keeping proud design traditions from the original game alive, I start dragging Thatcher wigs onto the Archvile and other baddies and share the designs with Rafael.
September 2nd, 2021: Upon finding out what the project is, a workshop in Liverpool offers to provide and work on materials for THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION free of charge. This, in essence, means that the game will be making a "net profit" for Living Rent from the moment it comes online.
September 5th, 2022: Liz Truss becomes prime minister of the Tenth Circle of Hell.
September 10th, 2022: Despite making a strong case for her inclusion, I ultimately reject the invitation from TWT to make Liz Truss one of the new enemies in THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION, fearing that someone may be pictured performing violence upon a standing Member of Parliament.
September 20th, 2022: Development work is completed on THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION.
September 22nd, 2022: Development work on THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION is no longer completed, because my artist legend friend Rafael comes in clutch at the last minute with some more incredible sprites. The final art and polish is applied, and development work is completed on THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION. For real this time.
September 23rd, 2022: I arrive in Liverpool. After spending some time looking at things that have been built to look like The Beatles and having a few surprisingly cheap pints, I head to the community centre where The World Transformed is being hosted. A little buzzed, I enter the basement of TWT's venue for the weekend and see a giant vinyl sticker of the CyberThatcher lying on the floor in front of me; it's probably the beers, but I suddenly have to suppress the urge to be sick. I feel like I'm in a weird dream, sort-of-a David Lynch dream, one of those intense dreams where you're interacting with things that had only ever existed in your mind as if they were/are real, tangible actors in meatspace - playing tulpa Tetris with real bricks from on high, going ice-skating with Sonic the Hedgehog, getting freaky with some 32-bit polygonal video game hero you found sexy when you were thirteen... That sort of thing. It shouldn't exist, but there isn't much time to contemplate this concept further because suddenly I am knee-deep in adhesive paste and wood shavings, a Glaswegian dwarf at a forge of MDF and gorilla glue, trying to create a convincing simulacra of a machine that existed in a forgotten age so that I can put my political parody satire game-mod-wad thing inside it and ask people to pay money to piss on graves and fight the ghosts in the shell, those nasty little demon dudes wearing Margaret Thatcher wigs. I also end up painting protest signs and hanging lights somehow - can you believe they gave the drunk video game guy a hammer?! - while a local school teacher uses his arts & crafts kit to give the cabinet its beautiful finishing touches. At 1am or thereabouts, the owner of the venue insists we cease our demonic rituals and go home for the night. He is thoroughly creeped out by this B&Q obelisk.
September 24th, 2022: Having failed to actually install the computer and PCBs the night before, most of the morning is spent rotating source ports and virtual machines to try and get the split-screen experience going - to no convincing avail. While I'm in the middle of looking up the best ways to emulate a local DOOM multiplayer server, a woman asks me what the fuck I'm doing in the basement's basement, a little sweaty goblin tapping away on a giant arcade machine with Margaret Thatcher's face down the side of it. I try to explain my deeds in a number of ways, but she rightly cuts through the bullshit with a hot, shameful knife of "I don't have a clue what you're on about". The woman encourages me to K.I.S.S. and get something, anything out on the floor - especially if it's for a charity. About half an hour later, the experience has been simplified down to just the single player campaign, the second stick and buttons functioning as a cool little Geometry Wars/Steel Battallion/whatever dual-stick aiming system. I try explaining the absence of multiplayer and the new control scheme to people who try playing the game on the conference floor, but I'm quite rightly drowned out by people going "you can punch her? coooool" and "have you seen the shooting game where you can go into wetherspoons". I eventually stick an Xbox controller on the front of the arcade machine because there is no fucking way people are getting past the first area of THATCHER'S TECHBASE without being able to turn and shoot at the same time. It bothers me a lot less than I thought it would.
September 25th, 2022: Nothing of interest happens. I go do some sleep-deprived disassociating at a talk about a student doctor's plan to do post-colonial restructuring of the global pharmaceutical industry through "community action", and some more people play the THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION cabinet, including a few old men who were in town for the Labour Party Conference. I go home and play with my cat for a bit.
September 26th, 2022: The Independent, a UK newspaper, publishes an article: "Jeremy Corbyn played a version of Doom that lets you 'kill Thatcher'". About an hour later, my phone is turned off and thrown into the back of my desk.
September 27th, 2022: I find out about Denis Through The Drinking Glass, a 1984 title for the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro where you play as Denis Thatcher and have to try and escape from Maggie's lair in No. 10 while maintaining a certain blood-alcohol level. I think it's kinda funny that despite hours of research on the original THATCHER'S TECHBASE, I never found this game. Life is crazy like that!
September 28th, 2022: I do an interview with a newspaper journalist where I'm just filled with this overwhelming urge to just, I dunno, keep apologising for how ridiculous every story I'm telling sounds. This can't actually have happened, can it?
September 29th, 2022: After doing some "ideological trolling" with a very tired and exasperated BBC intern, I sign over the rights for THATCHER'S TECHBASE to be used as material on Friday night's """political comedy""" panel shows in exchange for some private donations.
September 30th, 2022: THATCHER'S TECHBASE appears on BBC 1 panel show Have I Got News For You, wherein British newspaper editor and satirist Ian Hislop compares CyberThatcher to the current prime minister, Liz Truss. On Twitter, I jokingly claim this is yet another example of the BBC's left-wing bias and a woman from Basingstoke sends me a DM to accuse me of being a traitor to the nation of Great Britain because I "only think about the 1%". Whoops!
October 1st, 2022: I discover that there is a mod for DOOM II called Pinochestein 3D. The final boss of the wad is a giant robotic Pinochet. I've never heard of this one before either. Pretty cool!
October 2nd, 2022: THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION is released to the general public.
October 3rd, 2022: Jeremy Corbyn plays THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION in Duke Nukem 3D mod Duke Smoochem 3D.
October 4th, 2022: Conceding to pressure from the Scottish Greens, Living Rent and other tenants' unions, the Scottish Government institutes an immediate rent freeze for six months and makes it illegal for tenants to be evicted during this time.
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There isn't much to say about THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION that isn't covered by the events above. If you've ever "finished" making something - an essay, a presentation, a drawing, a song, a game - you'll probably know the feeling of wanting as little to do with your work as possible once it's done. We all know the Picasso quote about paintings never being complete. It's not necessarily a feeling of shame or dislike for what you've created, but when you finally hit 'Save' on a _𝐅𝐈𝐍𝐀𝐋_𝐅𝐈𝐍𝐀𝐋_𝐅𝐈𝐍𝐀𝐋.𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐣 once and for all, there's always this sense of a weight being lifted - a job done, a book closed, an era's ending. A past confronted, hopefully, by your idea, and now captured in some media that lies external to your self.
As I spoke about in the original review for THATCHER'S TECHBASE, there was an overwhelming sense during this project that I'd kicked out a stone of a joke and caused it - sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally - to gather more and more moss of meaning, rolling downhill at such speed that I couldn't really contain it. By the end of 2021 I thought it was all finally, mercifully, over, but somehow the stone managed to roll back up a bigger hill and start the nightmare all over again, with me reluctantly chasing behind it.
The funny thing about THATCHER'S TECHBASE is that I spent a lot of the intervening year haunting myself with the ghost of its imperfections as a mechanical device. I was ultimately nonplussed by its crass political implications, and the gamer within bubbled over to fuss about gameplay. Dumb, I know; but for some reason, people messaging me about bugs, puzzle problems and balance fuckups concerned me far more than the people who wanted to report the WAD to the police for unthink. I spent a lot of time in my own head about such a trivial issue, grappling over whether I should go back and fix layouts and redo encounters and hand over more ammo to players who were SOL an hour into the WAD, my own little welfare state in the battle against Thatcher. Fortunately, a good friend of mine shook me back to reality by pointing out how fucking annoying it was when George Lucas went in and changed Han Solo shooting Greedo in the Star Wars movies. I didn't wanna be like Kanye West patching The Life of Pablo or some shit, did I? I'm glad I put the stupidity behind me and moved on with my life, leaving that Save button untouched for good, accepting that I'd made what I'd made.
... For a while, lol. Just when I thought I was out, they etc. etc. etc. Oh, go on then.
If there was something that was going to draw me back to THATCHER'S TECHBASE, it was always the chance to rectify the failures of the project that lay beyond just correcting linedefs and spawn triggers. While I was delighted that Tennent's Lager made good on their promise to donate money to charity in exchange for me compromising my perfectly legal right to express myself in a satirical work, I was still pissed off that they chose not to associate themselves with some of the more "contentious" organisations on my list. Partnering with Living Rent on ARCADE EDITION was the resurrection of a dying dream come true once more for a useless bohemian layabout like me, a spindly little computer guy who looks at tenant action movements and picket lines up and down the country and feels like he can't do jack shit but spectate and hold a placard up the back.
You read about what's going on in the world in newspapers and on Twitter; you see the results of government policy in your bills, your loans and the rising cost of milk and bread at the supermarket; somehow, it still feels abstract, remote, and far away. But actually going to a "hard left extremist fringe event" (per the Daily Mail article on THATCHER'S TECHBASE, September 26th, 2022) makes a lot of this evil become real to you in a sense it hasn't been before: You see people planning military-like operations to keep soup kitchens and food banks running; you see collections that will keep picket lines fed and watered for weeks at a time; you see people teaching other how to get out of handcuffs; and then you look over at the little MDF box with its game controller hanging over some Margaret Thatcher stickers and feel like you didn't really do jack shit but make jokes and crack wise about the end of the world. I was stewing in this feeling for a lot of that Saturday at The World Transformed, a combination of sleep deprivation and day-drinking becoming an ironic feeling of self-involvement at a festival of collective action. Oh poor me and my selfish little video game toy. What have I actually done here?
That night, however, I attended a rally in support of the striking dock workers in Liverpool, who were standing in the rain only a few miles down the road from the festival. Many hard-working people spoke passionately about their unfair treatment and burning desire to address the injustice of neoliberal wealth distribution, but there was one speech in particular that has stuck to my mind. A union leader from the Port of Baltimore told the crowd about the 2013 longshore workers strike, and how the 2000 members of the International Longshoremen's Association had stepped up across the world to defend the rights of their friends in the United States by threatening strikes and collective action of their own, no matter how small or large the organisation - including the men and women who were now picketing the Liverpool Docks at this very moment. He spoke of a lodge banner that's brought out for special occasions like these. It’s almost a hundred years old. A simple symbol - two hands, joined together in a union. That’s what the labour movement means. You support me and I support you. Whoever you are. Wherever you come from. Whatever you can do. Shoulder to shoulder. Hand to hand.
If you’re one of the people who’s supported us by putting money into buckets - the literal one lurking within the innards of THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION's flimsy wooden hide, the virtual one at the other end of the QR code on its display panel, or in the real/virtual buckets of any other charity that's come to your attention because of the wad - thank you. Because what you’ve given the people who made THATCHER'S TECHBASE is more than money. It’s friendship. And when you’re in a fight as bitter and as important as this one, against an enemy - like the CyberThatcher and her minions - who is so much bigger, so much stronger than you... Well, to find out that you have a friend you never knew existed - it’s the best thing in the world. So thank you. 🙂
𝐅𝐚𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲'𝐬 𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐝 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐫𝐮𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐧𝐨 𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐇 𝐂𝐈𝐑𝐂𝐋𝐄 𝐎𝐅 𝐇𝐄𝐋𝐋:
𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐔𝐍𝐈𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐃𝐎𝐌 𝐎𝐅
𝐆𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐓 𝐁𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐀𝐈𝐍 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐍𝐎𝐑𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐍 𝐈𝐑𝐄𝐋𝐀𝐍𝐃
𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐠𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐚𝐬...
𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐓𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐑'𝐒 𝐓𝐄𝐂𝐇𝐁𝐀𝐒𝐄: 𝐀𝐑𝐂𝐀𝐃𝐄 𝐄𝐃𝐈𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍
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September 24th, 2021: About an hour after THATCHER'S TECHBASE is shared with the world, I'm filled with an overwhelming urge to never think about it again. I go out for a pint of Tennent's Lager at the pub.
September 25th, 2021: Despite my best efforts to pretend I don't care at all, I spend most of the day fixing all the bugs people found in THATCHER'S TECHBASE. There are a lot of them, but I'm buoyed by the fact that there is something really funny about debugging a joke.
September 27th, 2021: A representative from Channel 4 calls me up and suggests that THATCHER'S TECHBASE be included as a challenge in a reboot of the classic British gameshow GamesMaster. The smart part of my brain that thinks it sounds like Channel 4 are looking for someone to do a bunch of free work for them in exchange for exposure is immediately overridden by the mental image of famous British people shooting Margaret Thatcher in the face on television. I agree to make some stuff for the show.
September 28th, 2021: I have a surprisingly terse conversation with someone on Twitter who tells me that the Thatcher's Graveyard section of THATCHER'S TECHBASE is not optimised for four-player co-op play and that I should consider redoing that entire section of the wad for all the people out there who are playing THATCHER'S TECHBASE in 4-player co-op. I swallow the surreality of the situation and give in to plain old spite by making some of the corridors in that section a little narrower, immediately pushing a v1.3 to production.
October 15th, 2021: Conservative MP David Amess is stabbed multiple times at a constituency meeting in Leigh-on-Sea and later dies at the scene from his injuries. Ali Harbi Ali, a 25-year-old man, is arrested at the scene.
October 21st, 2021: Ali Harbi Ali is charged with murder and preparing terrorist acts.
October 22nd, 2021: Another representative from Channel 4 calls me up to say they are now considering whether THATCHER'S TECHBASE is a "right fit" for GamesMaster. They stop responding to emails shortly after.
November 1st, 2021: Putting faith in the great professional relationshop we had previously established, I apply for a £5000 creative funding grant from the Tennent's Lager Grassroots Arts & Culture Project, explaining my intention to make [REDACTED], a new game about [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] in the [REDACTED].
November 3rd, 2021: My application for a £5000 creative funding grant from the Tennent's Lager Grassroots Arts & Culture Project is rejected for "cultural" reasons.
November 11th, 2021: During his day job as a community organiser in an assisted living facility, my dad finds out one of his elderly residents has watched the trailer for THATCHER'S TECHBASE via a Hillsborough Justice advocacy group on Facebook. This is the kinda shit that just makes me smile and feel glad that I went insane making a DOOM wad lol, idk
November 17th, 2021: EDGE publish their Christmas 2021 issue, which contains an article about THATCHER'S TECHBASE entitled "How Doom mod Thatcher's Techbase became the most talked-about videogame satire of 2021". Therein, I sheepishly admit that Tim Rogers baited me into making a DOOM wad by doing an incredibly affecting video about how great DOOM is and Tim responds in kind, closing the loop on a year-long project that was inspired by an off-hand YouTube comment. I am happy that I convinced Chris Schilling to print some of the Irish Republican Army's most famous attack lines in his computer game magazine.
December 5th, 2021: THATCHER'S TECHBASE finally appears on Channel 4's GamesMaster, much to my surprise. Because of the game's content, it is shown from very far away, blurred down to a small assemblage of black and white pixels that kinda look like maybe it was maybe Doomguy punching something for a second? Who knows. The Scottish professional wrestler Grado claims he killed Margaret Thatcher with a chainsaw, but players of THATCHER'S TECHBASE know that you can't use the chainsaw in THATCHER'S TECHBASE. The chainsaw has been replaced with a stream of piss.
December 7th, 2021: The GamesMaster reboot is cancelled after three episodes.
December 8th, 2021: Margaret Thatcher wins the coveted "Best Demon" award at Esquire magazine's 2021 Esquire Gaming Awards.
December 24th, 2021: Following three months of surprisingly involved legal back-and-forth with the law firm representing Tennent's Lager, the company finally acquieses to my nervous demands and donates £500 each to Stonewall UK, The Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation, and the Hillsborough Justice Campaign. Realising they have no further legal obligation to reply to my emails, the company ignores my queries about donations for the other organisations on the THATCHER'S TECHBASE website.
January 1st, 2022: I start a new job; one that doesn't involve banking or banks or people having full-scale meltdowns about share prices.
March 18th, 2022: The Scottish government declares an end to all mandatory coronavirus measures across the country.
May 18th, 2022: After a long break from thinking about Margaret Thatcher, Hell and THATCHER'S TECHBASE, I return to the Tenth Circle of Hell once more when the wad is exhibited at the Southside Games Festival in Glasgow and I am invited to attend and do a Q&A panel. Expecting questions like "do you like doom lol" and "who is margaret thatcher??" I am completely utterly blindsided when actual, real, not-pretend game developers start asking me questions about political theory and its applications in game design. I don't remember the things I said because my brain was too busy suppressing the urge to piss and didn't have enough free CPU cycles to record memories, but I do know that one dude asked "So what's the deal with all the timewasting elevators?" and then nodded in a satisfied way when I told him I really liked that one part of The 25th Ward where you have to solve the toilet maze and knock on 100 apartment doors - the TECHBASE lifts are meant to be sort of like that. Thank you, Backloggd, for allowing me to get away with being a little bit pretentious in front of people who make real art games. To the guy who nodded - I know you totally have a Backloggd dude, drop the @ in the comments below.
July 7th, 2022: REUTERS, BREAKING (via CNN): "U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned Thursday, bringing an acrimonious end to a nearly three-year premiership that has been beset by controversy and scandal."
August 3rd, 2022: As part of his election campaign, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak promises that people who vilify Britain will be treated as extremists and referred to the Government’s deradicalization "Prevent" programme.
August 18th, 2022: The build team from The World Transformed, a political festival that takes place at the same time as the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, ask me if they can turn THATCHER'S TECHBASE into an arcade machine that will support Living Rent, a Scottish tenants union who are struggling against record rent increases and ruthless landlord action.
August 19th, 2022: I try to explain to the build team from The World Transformed that a DOOM wad won't translate to a pleasant arcade cabinet experience, but my protests are finally suppressed by the part of my brain that is yelling "THEY ARE MAKING AN ARCADE MACHINE OF THE WAD YOU MADE". I give sincerely cheerful thumbs-ups when the design plans for the cabinet are waved in front of my eyes, irresistibly activating the huge clusters of "VIDEO GAME" neurons in my hippocampus.
August 20th, 2022: I get to work on making a version of THATCHER'S TECHBASE that's more suited for an arcade experience. This mostly involves unlocking all the doors and pumping the player full of ammo and milk.
August 28th, 2022: I realise that even Capcom puts a little bit more effort into their Arcade Editions than this, and decide to put out feelers for an artist who can help me add some new enemies to the game because I am not living through a coronavirus lockdown any more and cannot spend five hours a day dragging little blue suits onto cyberdemons. By pure luck, the guy who originally helped me make the CyberThatcher sprites - Rafael Batista de Lima - responds to my advert without even realising it's the same project, a moment of serendipity that I have no choice but to recognise as divine intervention from Satan himself.
August 30th, 2022: Keeping proud design traditions from the original game alive, I start dragging Thatcher wigs onto the Archvile and other baddies and share the designs with Rafael.
September 2nd, 2021: Upon finding out what the project is, a workshop in Liverpool offers to provide and work on materials for THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION free of charge. This, in essence, means that the game will be making a "net profit" for Living Rent from the moment it comes online.
September 5th, 2022: Liz Truss becomes prime minister of the Tenth Circle of Hell.
September 10th, 2022: Despite making a strong case for her inclusion, I ultimately reject the invitation from TWT to make Liz Truss one of the new enemies in THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION, fearing that someone may be pictured performing violence upon a standing Member of Parliament.
September 20th, 2022: Development work is completed on THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION.
September 22nd, 2022: Development work on THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION is no longer completed, because my artist legend friend Rafael comes in clutch at the last minute with some more incredible sprites. The final art and polish is applied, and development work is completed on THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION. For real this time.
September 23rd, 2022: I arrive in Liverpool. After spending some time looking at things that have been built to look like The Beatles and having a few surprisingly cheap pints, I head to the community centre where The World Transformed is being hosted. A little buzzed, I enter the basement of TWT's venue for the weekend and see a giant vinyl sticker of the CyberThatcher lying on the floor in front of me; it's probably the beers, but I suddenly have to suppress the urge to be sick. I feel like I'm in a weird dream, sort-of-a David Lynch dream, one of those intense dreams where you're interacting with things that had only ever existed in your mind as if they were/are real, tangible actors in meatspace - playing tulpa Tetris with real bricks from on high, going ice-skating with Sonic the Hedgehog, getting freaky with some 32-bit polygonal video game hero you found sexy when you were thirteen... That sort of thing. It shouldn't exist, but there isn't much time to contemplate this concept further because suddenly I am knee-deep in adhesive paste and wood shavings, a Glaswegian dwarf at a forge of MDF and gorilla glue, trying to create a convincing simulacra of a machine that existed in a forgotten age so that I can put my political parody satire game-mod-wad thing inside it and ask people to pay money to piss on graves and fight the ghosts in the shell, those nasty little demon dudes wearing Margaret Thatcher wigs. I also end up painting protest signs and hanging lights somehow - can you believe they gave the drunk video game guy a hammer?! - while a local school teacher uses his arts & crafts kit to give the cabinet its beautiful finishing touches. At 1am or thereabouts, the owner of the venue insists we cease our demonic rituals and go home for the night. He is thoroughly creeped out by this B&Q obelisk.
September 24th, 2022: Having failed to actually install the computer and PCBs the night before, most of the morning is spent rotating source ports and virtual machines to try and get the split-screen experience going - to no convincing avail. While I'm in the middle of looking up the best ways to emulate a local DOOM multiplayer server, a woman asks me what the fuck I'm doing in the basement's basement, a little sweaty goblin tapping away on a giant arcade machine with Margaret Thatcher's face down the side of it. I try to explain my deeds in a number of ways, but she rightly cuts through the bullshit with a hot, shameful knife of "I don't have a clue what you're on about". The woman encourages me to K.I.S.S. and get something, anything out on the floor - especially if it's for a charity. About half an hour later, the experience has been simplified down to just the single player campaign, the second stick and buttons functioning as a cool little Geometry Wars/Steel Battallion/whatever dual-stick aiming system. I try explaining the absence of multiplayer and the new control scheme to people who try playing the game on the conference floor, but I'm quite rightly drowned out by people going "you can punch her? coooool" and "have you seen the shooting game where you can go into wetherspoons". I eventually stick an Xbox controller on the front of the arcade machine because there is no fucking way people are getting past the first area of THATCHER'S TECHBASE without being able to turn and shoot at the same time. It bothers me a lot less than I thought it would.
September 25th, 2022: Nothing of interest happens. I go do some sleep-deprived disassociating at a talk about a student doctor's plan to do post-colonial restructuring of the global pharmaceutical industry through "community action", and some more people play the THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION cabinet, including a few old men who were in town for the Labour Party Conference. I go home and play with my cat for a bit.
September 26th, 2022: The Independent, a UK newspaper, publishes an article: "Jeremy Corbyn played a version of Doom that lets you 'kill Thatcher'". About an hour later, my phone is turned off and thrown into the back of my desk.
September 27th, 2022: I find out about Denis Through The Drinking Glass, a 1984 title for the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro where you play as Denis Thatcher and have to try and escape from Maggie's lair in No. 10 while maintaining a certain blood-alcohol level. I think it's kinda funny that despite hours of research on the original THATCHER'S TECHBASE, I never found this game. Life is crazy like that!
September 28th, 2022: I do an interview with a newspaper journalist where I'm just filled with this overwhelming urge to just, I dunno, keep apologising for how ridiculous every story I'm telling sounds. This can't actually have happened, can it?
September 29th, 2022: After doing some "ideological trolling" with a very tired and exasperated BBC intern, I sign over the rights for THATCHER'S TECHBASE to be used as material on Friday night's """political comedy""" panel shows in exchange for some private donations.
September 30th, 2022: THATCHER'S TECHBASE appears on BBC 1 panel show Have I Got News For You, wherein British newspaper editor and satirist Ian Hislop compares CyberThatcher to the current prime minister, Liz Truss. On Twitter, I jokingly claim this is yet another example of the BBC's left-wing bias and a woman from Basingstoke sends me a DM to accuse me of being a traitor to the nation of Great Britain because I "only think about the 1%". Whoops!
October 1st, 2022: I discover that there is a mod for DOOM II called Pinochestein 3D. The final boss of the wad is a giant robotic Pinochet. I've never heard of this one before either. Pretty cool!
October 2nd, 2022: THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION is released to the general public.
October 3rd, 2022: Jeremy Corbyn plays THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION in Duke Nukem 3D mod Duke Smoochem 3D.
October 4th, 2022: Conceding to pressure from the Scottish Greens, Living Rent and other tenants' unions, the Scottish Government institutes an immediate rent freeze for six months and makes it illegal for tenants to be evicted during this time.
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There isn't much to say about THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION that isn't covered by the events above. If you've ever "finished" making something - an essay, a presentation, a drawing, a song, a game - you'll probably know the feeling of wanting as little to do with your work as possible once it's done. We all know the Picasso quote about paintings never being complete. It's not necessarily a feeling of shame or dislike for what you've created, but when you finally hit 'Save' on a _𝐅𝐈𝐍𝐀𝐋_𝐅𝐈𝐍𝐀𝐋_𝐅𝐈𝐍𝐀𝐋.𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐣 once and for all, there's always this sense of a weight being lifted - a job done, a book closed, an era's ending. A past confronted, hopefully, by your idea, and now captured in some media that lies external to your self.
As I spoke about in the original review for THATCHER'S TECHBASE, there was an overwhelming sense during this project that I'd kicked out a stone of a joke and caused it - sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally - to gather more and more moss of meaning, rolling downhill at such speed that I couldn't really contain it. By the end of 2021 I thought it was all finally, mercifully, over, but somehow the stone managed to roll back up a bigger hill and start the nightmare all over again, with me reluctantly chasing behind it.
The funny thing about THATCHER'S TECHBASE is that I spent a lot of the intervening year haunting myself with the ghost of its imperfections as a mechanical device. I was ultimately nonplussed by its crass political implications, and the gamer within bubbled over to fuss about gameplay. Dumb, I know; but for some reason, people messaging me about bugs, puzzle problems and balance fuckups concerned me far more than the people who wanted to report the WAD to the police for unthink. I spent a lot of time in my own head about such a trivial issue, grappling over whether I should go back and fix layouts and redo encounters and hand over more ammo to players who were SOL an hour into the WAD, my own little welfare state in the battle against Thatcher. Fortunately, a good friend of mine shook me back to reality by pointing out how fucking annoying it was when George Lucas went in and changed Han Solo shooting Greedo in the Star Wars movies. I didn't wanna be like Kanye West patching The Life of Pablo or some shit, did I? I'm glad I put the stupidity behind me and moved on with my life, leaving that Save button untouched for good, accepting that I'd made what I'd made.
... For a while, lol. Just when I thought I was out, they etc. etc. etc. Oh, go on then.
If there was something that was going to draw me back to THATCHER'S TECHBASE, it was always the chance to rectify the failures of the project that lay beyond just correcting linedefs and spawn triggers. While I was delighted that Tennent's Lager made good on their promise to donate money to charity in exchange for me compromising my perfectly legal right to express myself in a satirical work, I was still pissed off that they chose not to associate themselves with some of the more "contentious" organisations on my list. Partnering with Living Rent on ARCADE EDITION was the resurrection of a dying dream come true once more for a useless bohemian layabout like me, a spindly little computer guy who looks at tenant action movements and picket lines up and down the country and feels like he can't do jack shit but spectate and hold a placard up the back.
You read about what's going on in the world in newspapers and on Twitter; you see the results of government policy in your bills, your loans and the rising cost of milk and bread at the supermarket; somehow, it still feels abstract, remote, and far away. But actually going to a "hard left extremist fringe event" (per the Daily Mail article on THATCHER'S TECHBASE, September 26th, 2022) makes a lot of this evil become real to you in a sense it hasn't been before: You see people planning military-like operations to keep soup kitchens and food banks running; you see collections that will keep picket lines fed and watered for weeks at a time; you see people teaching other how to get out of handcuffs; and then you look over at the little MDF box with its game controller hanging over some Margaret Thatcher stickers and feel like you didn't really do jack shit but make jokes and crack wise about the end of the world. I was stewing in this feeling for a lot of that Saturday at The World Transformed, a combination of sleep deprivation and day-drinking becoming an ironic feeling of self-involvement at a festival of collective action. Oh poor me and my selfish little video game toy. What have I actually done here?
That night, however, I attended a rally in support of the striking dock workers in Liverpool, who were standing in the rain only a few miles down the road from the festival. Many hard-working people spoke passionately about their unfair treatment and burning desire to address the injustice of neoliberal wealth distribution, but there was one speech in particular that has stuck to my mind. A union leader from the Port of Baltimore told the crowd about the 2013 longshore workers strike, and how the 2000 members of the International Longshoremen's Association had stepped up across the world to defend the rights of their friends in the United States by threatening strikes and collective action of their own, no matter how small or large the organisation - including the men and women who were now picketing the Liverpool Docks at this very moment. He spoke of a lodge banner that's brought out for special occasions like these. It’s almost a hundred years old. A simple symbol - two hands, joined together in a union. That’s what the labour movement means. You support me and I support you. Whoever you are. Wherever you come from. Whatever you can do. Shoulder to shoulder. Hand to hand.
If you’re one of the people who’s supported us by putting money into buckets - the literal one lurking within the innards of THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION's flimsy wooden hide, the virtual one at the other end of the QR code on its display panel, or in the real/virtual buckets of any other charity that's come to your attention because of the wad - thank you. Because what you’ve given the people who made THATCHER'S TECHBASE is more than money. It’s friendship. And when you’re in a fight as bitter and as important as this one, against an enemy - like the CyberThatcher and her minions - who is so much bigger, so much stronger than you... Well, to find out that you have a friend you never knew existed - it’s the best thing in the world. So thank you. 🙂
This review contains spoilers
Problematic fav. Not that like, it's super problematic or anything, I mean there's certainly some problematic ELEMENTS, but really it's more in the sense that I keep staring at it and go "problematic fav :)".
Breaking that down is a little difficult. Especially now. I want to warn that there is some heavy shit I'm about to divulge, talks of suicidal thought, attempted suicide, incredibly personal stories being dropped in topic on a game that, in all honestly, doesn't super deserve that kind of baggage. It's inextricably tied, in the sense that I think about this game a lot, too addicted to the point that I use it as comfort gruel in awful times, and that as of today, during one of the most important moments that's fucking me up right now, I am hyperfixated on it once again.
It's kind of a beautiful mess. Yoshi-P just decided "fuck it we're squeezing three expansions into one" and they actually went for it (and it is core to how fucked up this all is). So much of it is a little too underdeveloped even if it, quite well, ties back to the thesis. It also retroactively works against Shadowbringers, demystifying some of its best components and outright throwing itself at a fanservice pile to redeem a past version of a really clearly unforgivable villain. It kills the potential of some of its most teased characters that could've struggled with such a clearly "fascism eats itself" state and try to find a sense of what to do next in that discovery and what that meant for them, but they're all sidelined!!!
But also, its story is too poignant for me to discard. Extremely so. From its decrepit sunset to the sunrise at the end it's an uplifting, championing vibe. In particular I think a lot about that final dungeon, how it's so fucked up and depressing that it really tries to tear you down, as much as it can through its medium. All in service to building up to that great moment, that pushback against an intense hopelessness that's always seeping out the ends of everywhere we look. I admire, as awful a tightrope as it is to walk, its attempts at dealing with depression. This is the point that's kind of unarguably problematic about it at the same time though, not so much in terms of the main story, but really the job quests. It's such a gross mishandling, you fight the monstrosity of someone who's succumbed while (most of) the city states do nothing to even address their problems. Just remember, understand what happened, and move on. Nothing to fight against what caused the dead. That part was kind of painful for me really, like that's a bit callous, that's not honorable, that's heartless even.
It's only today that it screams a bit more sympathetic. A very close friend of mine, who hasn't really ever expressed interest in my game talks much at this level, has attempted to commit suicide. Maybe even still, I don't know. They're all the way across the country and I don't have anymore prior contacts to hunt down or a number to call (it has already been called). I've been ghosted for the past 24 hours and all I know at this very very moment is that they did, and might still be trying to. Yesterday I dealt with that by crying with my SO and being stuck in bed staring at the ceiling praying until I went to sleep, which wasn't even good sleep. I spent today planning on a hopeful future where I pray they just show up the next morning and hoping that, this last attempt I can DO something about it or else ALL I can do, without strictly blaming myself, is just steel myself to not let that pain bring me down in a fucked up psychiatrically way and just keep his memory.
Close in the Distance is a song near the end that plays while your friends, while temporary, are completely gone but you have to hold steadfast that they're right here with you. Sometimes, unfortunately or not, worlds will meet their end, and people, close people you wish you could fucking save right now, wish they could hear your voice or you could hear theirs, can't and have already fallen. Whispers, now a memory, promises broken, an endless array of tears. Those quests still aren't right, I'm actually really angry with them still right now, but I feel weak. I feel almost like giving up, that maybe at some point I have to let go so I don't have it completely ruin me. If they come back tomorrow, and my last ditch effort to set them down and tell them everything, my one last barely-qualifies-as-a-gambit to get them on a path to live and improve, if they said no it'd ruin me. If they don't come back tomorrow, or ever again, that would also ruin me. I tie myself here, writing this, in an act of coping with that, maybe. I don't know, last time I felt fucked up like this I chose Persona 3. I'll probably still replay that too.
But for now I'm going to sit at a screen playing endwalker music on an endless cycle, crying probably, feeling better hopefully. This work has that sort of pathos effect on me. I often run to art to distract me now and help me fix problems later and here I am again hedging myself on that and blasting this awful stream of words out into others' void.
If you made it this far, thanks. Comments are off for you, but I appreciate you getting this far and reading me ramble on this site I've chosen to be my venting ground for a long time now. If the friend in question has found this, and you're still alive. Fuck you for leaving me like this, Fuck you for refusing to let yourself be confronted, Fuck You for dismissing mine and others' faith in you, Fuck you for being a real shitty friend absently from this and trying to break me down and push everyone else you know away. But also please keep fighting. Please. It is never too late, hope is never lost. And I want to be here for you. I don't want to leave you out there in the wind and the cold and you don't deserve that.
Breaking that down is a little difficult. Especially now. I want to warn that there is some heavy shit I'm about to divulge, talks of suicidal thought, attempted suicide, incredibly personal stories being dropped in topic on a game that, in all honestly, doesn't super deserve that kind of baggage. It's inextricably tied, in the sense that I think about this game a lot, too addicted to the point that I use it as comfort gruel in awful times, and that as of today, during one of the most important moments that's fucking me up right now, I am hyperfixated on it once again.
It's kind of a beautiful mess. Yoshi-P just decided "fuck it we're squeezing three expansions into one" and they actually went for it (and it is core to how fucked up this all is). So much of it is a little too underdeveloped even if it, quite well, ties back to the thesis. It also retroactively works against Shadowbringers, demystifying some of its best components and outright throwing itself at a fanservice pile to redeem a past version of a really clearly unforgivable villain. It kills the potential of some of its most teased characters that could've struggled with such a clearly "fascism eats itself" state and try to find a sense of what to do next in that discovery and what that meant for them, but they're all sidelined!!!
But also, its story is too poignant for me to discard. Extremely so. From its decrepit sunset to the sunrise at the end it's an uplifting, championing vibe. In particular I think a lot about that final dungeon, how it's so fucked up and depressing that it really tries to tear you down, as much as it can through its medium. All in service to building up to that great moment, that pushback against an intense hopelessness that's always seeping out the ends of everywhere we look. I admire, as awful a tightrope as it is to walk, its attempts at dealing with depression. This is the point that's kind of unarguably problematic about it at the same time though, not so much in terms of the main story, but really the job quests. It's such a gross mishandling, you fight the monstrosity of someone who's succumbed while (most of) the city states do nothing to even address their problems. Just remember, understand what happened, and move on. Nothing to fight against what caused the dead. That part was kind of painful for me really, like that's a bit callous, that's not honorable, that's heartless even.
It's only today that it screams a bit more sympathetic. A very close friend of mine, who hasn't really ever expressed interest in my game talks much at this level, has attempted to commit suicide. Maybe even still, I don't know. They're all the way across the country and I don't have anymore prior contacts to hunt down or a number to call (it has already been called). I've been ghosted for the past 24 hours and all I know at this very very moment is that they did, and might still be trying to. Yesterday I dealt with that by crying with my SO and being stuck in bed staring at the ceiling praying until I went to sleep, which wasn't even good sleep. I spent today planning on a hopeful future where I pray they just show up the next morning and hoping that, this last attempt I can DO something about it or else ALL I can do, without strictly blaming myself, is just steel myself to not let that pain bring me down in a fucked up psychiatrically way and just keep his memory.
Close in the Distance is a song near the end that plays while your friends, while temporary, are completely gone but you have to hold steadfast that they're right here with you. Sometimes, unfortunately or not, worlds will meet their end, and people, close people you wish you could fucking save right now, wish they could hear your voice or you could hear theirs, can't and have already fallen. Whispers, now a memory, promises broken, an endless array of tears. Those quests still aren't right, I'm actually really angry with them still right now, but I feel weak. I feel almost like giving up, that maybe at some point I have to let go so I don't have it completely ruin me. If they come back tomorrow, and my last ditch effort to set them down and tell them everything, my one last barely-qualifies-as-a-gambit to get them on a path to live and improve, if they said no it'd ruin me. If they don't come back tomorrow, or ever again, that would also ruin me. I tie myself here, writing this, in an act of coping with that, maybe. I don't know, last time I felt fucked up like this I chose Persona 3. I'll probably still replay that too.
But for now I'm going to sit at a screen playing endwalker music on an endless cycle, crying probably, feeling better hopefully. This work has that sort of pathos effect on me. I often run to art to distract me now and help me fix problems later and here I am again hedging myself on that and blasting this awful stream of words out into others' void.
If you made it this far, thanks. Comments are off for you, but I appreciate you getting this far and reading me ramble on this site I've chosen to be my venting ground for a long time now. If the friend in question has found this, and you're still alive. Fuck you for leaving me like this, Fuck you for refusing to let yourself be confronted, Fuck You for dismissing mine and others' faith in you, Fuck you for being a real shitty friend absently from this and trying to break me down and push everyone else you know away. But also please keep fighting. Please. It is never too late, hope is never lost. And I want to be here for you. I don't want to leave you out there in the wind and the cold and you don't deserve that.
Final Fantasy X
2001
after a lot of people died in sin's attack, yuna dances. this dance is called "the sending", where she makes sure their souls are not staying on this plane, wandering, with envy for the living and then turning into fiends. instead, she sends them to the farplane, where they can live in peace. a lot of cultures around the world have rituals for the dead where you dance to celebrate how great their lives were or to just be a kind of grieving. you see, our bodies express our feelings more than we could ever think they do. when you are anxious you are always shaking your legs, even grinding teeth sometimes. i like to believe that yuna's dance is not only to send those people to better places but also her cope mechanism to deal with everything -- spira's condition, her father's dead, her destiny.
then yuna finds a pair. this blonde boy that appears from nowhere, claims to be from a thousand years old civilization that does not even exists anymore. he is also constantly dancing. he has problems with his father, which calls him a crybaby -- and he is, really. he is constantly expressing his pain through his smile but you know he's not always happy. he just don't want to show his sadness or, as everyone, just don't want to be sad. yuna's not so different, too. and since her has a pair, it's important to say that when you are dancing with someone, at first it may not work -- your pair can be at the wrong tempo, overstepping you etc. when your steps synchronizes and you are connected, though, this is what we call love. not necessarily romantically, of course. yuna have a lot of friends with their own dances, grieving and trying to live their lives as hard as it can be. but, when everyone is together, even dancing with the dead, they can share their insecurities, being open about their problems and, truly, overcoming it. maybe not stopping dancing but dancing towards the truth -- the painfully beautiful truth.
the last time yuna dances, she's not only grieving, but also celebrating.
then yuna finds a pair. this blonde boy that appears from nowhere, claims to be from a thousand years old civilization that does not even exists anymore. he is also constantly dancing. he has problems with his father, which calls him a crybaby -- and he is, really. he is constantly expressing his pain through his smile but you know he's not always happy. he just don't want to show his sadness or, as everyone, just don't want to be sad. yuna's not so different, too. and since her has a pair, it's important to say that when you are dancing with someone, at first it may not work -- your pair can be at the wrong tempo, overstepping you etc. when your steps synchronizes and you are connected, though, this is what we call love. not necessarily romantically, of course. yuna have a lot of friends with their own dances, grieving and trying to live their lives as hard as it can be. but, when everyone is together, even dancing with the dead, they can share their insecurities, being open about their problems and, truly, overcoming it. maybe not stopping dancing but dancing towards the truth -- the painfully beautiful truth.
the last time yuna dances, she's not only grieving, but also celebrating.
Drakengard
2003
this game requires no introduction anymore so i'm not beating around the bush. drakengard has been on my mind a fair bit recently - on the off chance you'll forgive a second log i think it's worth examining some of what the title accomplishes uniquely well, or what it's able to achieve with respect to the various titles that it's in conversation with. first of all: there's nothing quite as flatline-inducing or revealing of the author's own tendencies as reading that drakengard was intentionally poorly designed, a commonly held idea in various hobbyist communities frustratingly stemming just as often from its supporters as from its detractors. not only is this a frightfully pedantic and dull reduction of the text - it's also just an elaborately constructed fiction masking deeper truths. for instance, i think it's plain as day our burgeoning critical language still struggles with titles seemingly antithetical to traditional enjoyment, and are only able to escape from suffocating evaluative lexicon through irony or genre labels. survival horror isn't normally 'fun' & people appear willing to understand this so the genre gets a normative pass en masse, although it seems worth mentioning that the longer they exist in the public eye the more their mechanical frameworks get totally demystified by the public, arguably reducing them to vehicles for pleasure and gratification anyways, resident evil being the prime example.
drakengard, of course, isn't survival horror. it's largely a musou with some horror trappings, but it's rather plain about its affectation. however, because the traditional 'game' part of it is in such conflict with its aesthetic, we end up with the idea that this dissonance is a result of intentionally languid, engineered dissatisfaction. oh wow that wacky yoko taro wanted you to feel bad so he made his debut game bad. bzzzzt. wrong. square enix wanted a commercial success with drakengard. if they didn't, they wouldn't have requested that a project starting out as a simple remix of ace combat (owing massive inspiration to electrosphere in particular, another game that combines peerless arcade bluster with bleak narrative proceedings) would incorporate elements of its contemporary blockbuster peer, dynasty warriors. none of this is to say that drakengard can't be an awkward game, but it's in large part due to a friction with cavia's inexperience/lack of technical expertise, their attempts at holding true to their initial vision for the project, and square enix being desperate for a worthy competitor to koei tecmo's success.
here's where i'll stake a claim on something potentially contentious and risible. on the basis of the title's struggles in production & development, it is somewhat shocking that drakengard is not just 'not bad', but is a totally competent musou game. given the milieu in which it released, you might even dare to call it 'good', or 'well-made'. i'll double down with something absolutely no one wants to hear: most people have no point of reference because musou is rarely put in its historic context, appreciated for its strengths, or even, broadly speaking, played. disregarding popular experimental offshoot licensed games which carry their own unique magnetism, dynasty warriors has an especially prevalent stigma in contemporary action game circles, and few seem willing to return to reevaluate the franchise. if we accept this as the case, we can begin to understand why nostalgia is the primary driver of fondness for early musou, and why you always hear dynasty warriors 3 is the best one. 'load of bull', you say, 'drakengard is not good', you say, 'dynasty warriors sold millions and is beloved for inventing the drama; surely it's better', you say, but take a look at these admittedly small sample sizes (evidence A and evidence B) and you tell me which is actually the niche ip at present. one of these broader game worlds got a FFXIV collaboration. it was not dynasty warriors.
anyways the idea that drakengard could be a respected peer to dynasty warriors - or even, perhaps, better - is not ahistorical. drakengard came out in 2003, only a few months after the release of dynasty warriors 4. by this point in the dynasty warriors timeline, your only sources of inspiration for the musou canon are dynasty warrior 2 and dynasty warriors 3. they're fine games for what they are - content-rich, pop recontextualizations of romance of the three kingdoms that fold the intense political drama, grandiose character dynamics, and poeticizing of feudal history intrinsic to the novel and morphs them into larger-than-life battles of one against one hundred. it works for that series, but having played dynasty warriors 3, it's also very simply orchestrated. DW3 is kinetic and energetic, sure, but form is not function. as a still nascent series, DW3 has yet to experiment with elements that would come to define later entries, such as a strong emphasis on field management - its presence in 3 is largely muted and, dependent upon your stats, can often be negated. it is mostly a game of fulfilling your objectives, grinding up your stats, and engaging in undemanding combat pulling the same strong combo strings against some unique generals and a multitude of carbon copy generic ones. and i happen to appreciate it for what it is, but there is no question in my mind if you slotted that exact same mechanical framework into drakengard's tone and setting, it would be similarly deemed bad on purpose.
other than its tone what does drakengard do differently from this purely mechanical perspective? honestly, not too much from DW3! archers are still often priority targets, because if you don't prioritize them you will get knocked off yourhorse dragon. mission structure is usually quite similar, arguably with a bit less back and forth. combos require virtually the exact same input. the camera in both games is kind of fucked up. aside from abstruse unlock requirements and a...unique, system of progression, the biggest differences are mostly relegated to additions rather than subtractions. there are more enemy designs than just grunt soldiers. you can dodge now. the game is weapon-driven rather than character-driven ala DW3, which allows for its own form of unique experimentation. the soundtrack is excellent, i'm not accepting complaints. to aid in breaking up the pace, there are aerial missions that play somewhat comparably to panzer dragoon on-rail segments which are actually quite fun; likewise, the hybrid missions allow for angelus to be used as a means of offence in ground warfare and rain hellfire from above. it keeps things relatively varied. there's no troops to manage because caim is fighting a losing war and willingly formed a pact with the only being capable of potentially turning the tides, and the game is content to use the musou form to communicate ideas about caim and angelus to great effect.
of course, it's the narrative which gives drakengard a lot of its greatest texture (and is also demonstrative of its greatest strengths and appeals as a DW clone), but we can save discussion of that for some other time; for now it's more important for me to say that it's not quite the outright condemnation of violence through ludology that so many claim it is (it's far more interested in more subtle forms of violence than the explicit and ceaseless murder it depicts anyways). really, this was just a self-indulgent exercise in placing drakengard in its historic context once and for all, away from all the retrospectives it's been getting as a result of nier's runaway success. drakengard is a game that won't be for most, but it's a game that's lingered in my memory long since i first played it. it takes an, at the time, relatively new genre, and through sheer passion and dedication spins it into a uniquely transgressive idea while still remaining an enjoyable title to let unfold. if it feels numbing or meditative, that's more or less the exact emotional resonance that something like DW3 is targeting - drakengard just uses it to achieve more things than a sense of gratifying white noise. it remains peerless because of all of its contradictions, because of how messy and thorny it is as a game, and because we'll never see anything approaching this utterly unique interplay of emotional rhythms and macabre, uncanny storytelling wearing the skin of its crowdpleasing predecessors ever again.
drakengard, of course, isn't survival horror. it's largely a musou with some horror trappings, but it's rather plain about its affectation. however, because the traditional 'game' part of it is in such conflict with its aesthetic, we end up with the idea that this dissonance is a result of intentionally languid, engineered dissatisfaction. oh wow that wacky yoko taro wanted you to feel bad so he made his debut game bad. bzzzzt. wrong. square enix wanted a commercial success with drakengard. if they didn't, they wouldn't have requested that a project starting out as a simple remix of ace combat (owing massive inspiration to electrosphere in particular, another game that combines peerless arcade bluster with bleak narrative proceedings) would incorporate elements of its contemporary blockbuster peer, dynasty warriors. none of this is to say that drakengard can't be an awkward game, but it's in large part due to a friction with cavia's inexperience/lack of technical expertise, their attempts at holding true to their initial vision for the project, and square enix being desperate for a worthy competitor to koei tecmo's success.
here's where i'll stake a claim on something potentially contentious and risible. on the basis of the title's struggles in production & development, it is somewhat shocking that drakengard is not just 'not bad', but is a totally competent musou game. given the milieu in which it released, you might even dare to call it 'good', or 'well-made'. i'll double down with something absolutely no one wants to hear: most people have no point of reference because musou is rarely put in its historic context, appreciated for its strengths, or even, broadly speaking, played. disregarding popular experimental offshoot licensed games which carry their own unique magnetism, dynasty warriors has an especially prevalent stigma in contemporary action game circles, and few seem willing to return to reevaluate the franchise. if we accept this as the case, we can begin to understand why nostalgia is the primary driver of fondness for early musou, and why you always hear dynasty warriors 3 is the best one. 'load of bull', you say, 'drakengard is not good', you say, 'dynasty warriors sold millions and is beloved for inventing the drama; surely it's better', you say, but take a look at these admittedly small sample sizes (evidence A and evidence B) and you tell me which is actually the niche ip at present. one of these broader game worlds got a FFXIV collaboration. it was not dynasty warriors.
anyways the idea that drakengard could be a respected peer to dynasty warriors - or even, perhaps, better - is not ahistorical. drakengard came out in 2003, only a few months after the release of dynasty warriors 4. by this point in the dynasty warriors timeline, your only sources of inspiration for the musou canon are dynasty warrior 2 and dynasty warriors 3. they're fine games for what they are - content-rich, pop recontextualizations of romance of the three kingdoms that fold the intense political drama, grandiose character dynamics, and poeticizing of feudal history intrinsic to the novel and morphs them into larger-than-life battles of one against one hundred. it works for that series, but having played dynasty warriors 3, it's also very simply orchestrated. DW3 is kinetic and energetic, sure, but form is not function. as a still nascent series, DW3 has yet to experiment with elements that would come to define later entries, such as a strong emphasis on field management - its presence in 3 is largely muted and, dependent upon your stats, can often be negated. it is mostly a game of fulfilling your objectives, grinding up your stats, and engaging in undemanding combat pulling the same strong combo strings against some unique generals and a multitude of carbon copy generic ones. and i happen to appreciate it for what it is, but there is no question in my mind if you slotted that exact same mechanical framework into drakengard's tone and setting, it would be similarly deemed bad on purpose.
other than its tone what does drakengard do differently from this purely mechanical perspective? honestly, not too much from DW3! archers are still often priority targets, because if you don't prioritize them you will get knocked off your
of course, it's the narrative which gives drakengard a lot of its greatest texture (and is also demonstrative of its greatest strengths and appeals as a DW clone), but we can save discussion of that for some other time; for now it's more important for me to say that it's not quite the outright condemnation of violence through ludology that so many claim it is (it's far more interested in more subtle forms of violence than the explicit and ceaseless murder it depicts anyways). really, this was just a self-indulgent exercise in placing drakengard in its historic context once and for all, away from all the retrospectives it's been getting as a result of nier's runaway success. drakengard is a game that won't be for most, but it's a game that's lingered in my memory long since i first played it. it takes an, at the time, relatively new genre, and through sheer passion and dedication spins it into a uniquely transgressive idea while still remaining an enjoyable title to let unfold. if it feels numbing or meditative, that's more or less the exact emotional resonance that something like DW3 is targeting - drakengard just uses it to achieve more things than a sense of gratifying white noise. it remains peerless because of all of its contradictions, because of how messy and thorny it is as a game, and because we'll never see anything approaching this utterly unique interplay of emotional rhythms and macabre, uncanny storytelling wearing the skin of its crowdpleasing predecessors ever again.
To some degree, I don't know what I expected. It's a Dragon Quest game. Of course it's going to have pretty basic turn-based combat, a straightforward job and skill system, a generic storyline, and the same art style this entire series has. But there's always a part of me that goes into a game, regardless of what it is, thinking that maybe this'll have something special in it. Maybe it'll just be a lil nugget of an idea but there's at least something for me to latch on to and obsessively point at and exclaim "No! No, you don't get it! This is secretly really good!". But Dragon Quest IX seems to be sorely lacking in that "something special" department. I'm sure playing this on emulator and completely missing out on the various online features (co-op play, doing dungeons with people, whatever else there is there) makes for an incomplete experience but, if I'm being honest here, I don't think I would've messed around with those much had they actually been available. I'm just not much of a multiplayer gamer these days.
I need to talk about how miserable grinding in this game is but I don't want to get too long-winded and mechanics-dense, please bear with me, I will do my best here. The game expects you to grind. A lot. This isn't an inherently bad thing but it was a bit of surprise because I've always felt that this era of RPG is around when developers started making games that could be constantly progressed through and generally allowed for, but didn't require, grinding. But, see, this is a Dragon Quest game. So Metal Slimes exist and, in this game at least, are the objectively correct and most optimal way to grind. But the best way that I found to farm Metal Slimes is to use Metal Slash, a sword skill. So before I even got to the part of the game where I could figure that point out, I had already specced my characters into different weapons and had to spend time specifically speccing them differently so that I could be able to do the farming the game expected of me. (This is in addition to me, foolishly, having one of my characters put a significant chunk of their skillpoints into the Shield skill, which is borderline useless, before I had a strong grasp of how the skills and jobs worked.) So the game requires you to grind and funnels you into grinding in a specific way that restricts your character builds... but also because of how the jobs work it means all your characters are going to end up with the same stat bonuses and skills as each other and it really wears away any sort of personality an individual character can have. And as someone who tends to play RPGs more for the characters' stories/arcs rather than the big picture main plot, this was a pretty big disappointment to stack on top of the disappointment I faced when I found out that this game is entirely about custom created collections of stats and not having a party of actual characters to adventure with.
All that said, I did play this game for nearly 82 hours so if nothing else this game did wonders for my podcast backlog - listening to people talk about video games or books or whatever while grinding metal slimes.
And, once again, this is a Dragon Quest game so, to some degree, what the hell was I expecting. But. This game continues the franchise's long storied tradition of being Weird about women. And the ways in which it objectifies women is just so boring. Like, damn, this is all y'all got? Really? "What if a woman wore a bikini!!! OOOOO [eyeballs telescope out of skull, stomps feet on the ground, lights a stick of dynamite in mouth like a cigar, smacks myself over the head with a large mallet, all while a loud AWOOOGA sound effect plays]"
Rest in piss Koichi Sugiyama, you were a piece of garbage and your music wasn't even very good, this game's OST is mid at best.
I need to talk about how miserable grinding in this game is but I don't want to get too long-winded and mechanics-dense, please bear with me, I will do my best here. The game expects you to grind. A lot. This isn't an inherently bad thing but it was a bit of surprise because I've always felt that this era of RPG is around when developers started making games that could be constantly progressed through and generally allowed for, but didn't require, grinding. But, see, this is a Dragon Quest game. So Metal Slimes exist and, in this game at least, are the objectively correct and most optimal way to grind. But the best way that I found to farm Metal Slimes is to use Metal Slash, a sword skill. So before I even got to the part of the game where I could figure that point out, I had already specced my characters into different weapons and had to spend time specifically speccing them differently so that I could be able to do the farming the game expected of me. (This is in addition to me, foolishly, having one of my characters put a significant chunk of their skillpoints into the Shield skill, which is borderline useless, before I had a strong grasp of how the skills and jobs worked.) So the game requires you to grind and funnels you into grinding in a specific way that restricts your character builds... but also because of how the jobs work it means all your characters are going to end up with the same stat bonuses and skills as each other and it really wears away any sort of personality an individual character can have. And as someone who tends to play RPGs more for the characters' stories/arcs rather than the big picture main plot, this was a pretty big disappointment to stack on top of the disappointment I faced when I found out that this game is entirely about custom created collections of stats and not having a party of actual characters to adventure with.
All that said, I did play this game for nearly 82 hours so if nothing else this game did wonders for my podcast backlog - listening to people talk about video games or books or whatever while grinding metal slimes.
And, once again, this is a Dragon Quest game so, to some degree, what the hell was I expecting. But. This game continues the franchise's long storied tradition of being Weird about women. And the ways in which it objectifies women is just so boring. Like, damn, this is all y'all got? Really? "What if a woman wore a bikini!!! OOOOO [eyeballs telescope out of skull, stomps feet on the ground, lights a stick of dynamite in mouth like a cigar, smacks myself over the head with a large mallet, all while a loud AWOOOGA sound effect plays]"
Rest in piss Koichi Sugiyama, you were a piece of garbage and your music wasn't even very good, this game's OST is mid at best.
Sonic's world is low-key the weirdest part of the franchise. Let's start back at Sonic 1. You know how it goes, right? It all starts in the lively and stylishly geometrical vistas of Green Hill, moves onward through damp ruins, eventually ending in the heart of the technological hellscape empire that a single Dr Robotnik threatens to expand. A simple formula its immediate sequels followed that is resonant with the growing environmentalist concerns of the 90's, concerns that only continued to grow since then but I digress. All that said, it makes sense that this series be set in some kind of modified version of Earth right? And it is, and was at the time... in Japan. Sega of America decided that the world of Sonic seemed otherworldly enough that they could actually sell it as another world, which does seem fair I guess. And so, the Mobius of all of the Sonic spinoffs ever except for Sonic X and Boom was born, sometimes a place resembling the games, sometimes a totally conquered planet, sometimes written by Archie so uh... you know how that goes. Weird thing about Sonic X is that despite Sonic's world effectively being Earth since the beginning in Japan, the plot of that series still has Sonic being unwillingly transported from His World™ to Earth and so he teams up with Chris Thorn-slur-for-lesbians to do Sonic things like... re-enact all of the events of Sonic Adventure 2 wait how does that-
The concept of Mobius, while completely incompatible with the games past Adventure, is still kept alive in the side content, such as the current Paramount movie series, in which Sonic is unwillingly transported from Mobius to Earth and so he teams up with-
As mentioned this idea being applied to the games comes to an end in Sonic Adventure where the setting becomes very apparently Earth but funky, the biggest giveaway being the appearance of a city-ass city, with human-ass people that aren't Eggman. The continuity started here is carried on and built on top of all the way to Sonic 06, and then Sonic Unleashed happens and all of that just kind of becomes irrelevant, and then Unleashed becomes irrelevant, and basically the writing goes from Saturday morning cartoon(tho, not like THE Saturday morning cartoon) to Friday evening. While the first half of the 3D era can be considered weird because it jumps from Sonic being arrested by Not-The-US-Military, to an alien race that helped Gerald Robotnik of earlier games achieve his goals coming to reap the seeds they've sown, modern Sonic's world is weird because... what is modern Sonic's world? It's just kind of this non-descript amorphous blob that doesn't really take shape unless we're viewing it at some moment in time. And you know, that's not necessarily a bad thing, they took the adventure continuity pretty far and now we're in territory where anything is possible, and that's fine. The later writing style has bigger crimes than continuity, just look at Shadow. Honestly it feels weird to even be talking about this before whatever's about to happen in Frontiers happens, so all I can say is, yeah that looks pretty wacky innit.
No matter where Sonic actually is tho, his world is always one filled with sunny blue skies, treacherous obstacle course shaped ruins, and cool robots. Overall, that's pretty cool.
Having said all that, it sure would be weird if this was a Knuckles review instead.
Knuckles is a simple guy, he sit by his emerald, emerald gets fucked up, he puts it back together. Focused, in his lane, dedicated to his own cause. The echidna of all time.Just like the humble building owner of Station Square. We don't know what his building is for, but he owns that building, and for that he is satisfied. Perhaps we can learn a lot from the inhabitants of Sonic world... nah building owners are cringe actually.
Exploration as an explicit gameplay element, a common part of games that I oddly do not actually see interrogated deeply by any usual suspects... I mean I'm not going to today either. All I can say is that, yeah, it makes sense for Knuckles' moveset, and that without a real relevant fail state being threatened, the main thing to take away from this side mode of play is just being able to vibe in these spaces. That's really cool when you're dealing with the idyllic streets of Station Square and their burger signs, the theatrical antics of the Casino and their pirate ship. This kinda just becomes some busy fetching tho when you're just flying around red cliffs, or dealin with the cute but ultimately gimmicky last level (why is there one lever). If there's another simple takeaway from this, it's that Sonic Adventure 2 fucked it. Everyone knows about the weird radar change they made in 2 but also Knuckles' moveset is more suited to these levels that are big and open with only some amount of verticality as opposed to SA2's involved and sometimes vertical to all hell stages. It's weird, Knuckles as a part of SA2 is weird, how fortunate we are that there is nothing weird about our Echidna friend in Adventure 1...
So the year is 1996, Sonic team are now on a mission to make the next game(crazy right). For inspiration on where the blue blur should blaze through next, the team went on a journey, to Central/South America. More specifically, the ruins of several separate cultures whom dotted the landscape long ago, getting a close first hand experience of the remains of these cultures, via long tourist trip. Their efforts culminate as large chunk of that game which would become Sonic Adventure, would be set in not South America, South America is in Sonic Jump, but rather an allegorical amalgamation simply called Mystic Ruins. A place where its main modern inhabitants are white men looking for rocks to plunder. Ok, I'm obviously not the person to talk to about cultural appropriation, what that even is, what effect that even has, especially in the context of a Sonic game, but I think we can all take a step back and acknowledge how weird it is, even tho it was common at the time, that the team went through so much effort to "get real knowledge of the ancient cultures" that they want to depict, and then shat out this motherfucker. Pachacamac, leader of the Echidna ethnostate, spearhead of the Chao massacre who was smitted by the god of the land Chaos for his arrogance and violence, this guy's existence kinda fuckin sucks lol. It's current year, I'm not taking John Sega to task on this or anything, besides for all legal purposes the weird cultural mine field of the wider Echidna family is entirely Ken Penders' problem now, but damn, what a weird ass slice that existed in this franchise huh.
Sonic Adventure 1 was a weird ass way start to the expansion of Sonic's world, and Knuckles is equally a weird way to explore it, but for all that it's worth, that station do be square tho.
Also you know how it is, Unknown from M.E., iconic. They simply don't do it like that anymore.
See you later as we enter uh... you know, there's something I must confess. This is not a review of Sonic Adventure DX as packaged from the Steam store. Ever since the Tails review, this has been the Sonic Adventure DX steam port, modded to be more like the Dreamcast version in all ways except for the water. You have been deceived. I have made FOOLS OF YOU ALL. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-
The concept of Mobius, while completely incompatible with the games past Adventure, is still kept alive in the side content, such as the current Paramount movie series, in which Sonic is unwillingly transported from Mobius to Earth and so he teams up with-
As mentioned this idea being applied to the games comes to an end in Sonic Adventure where the setting becomes very apparently Earth but funky, the biggest giveaway being the appearance of a city-ass city, with human-ass people that aren't Eggman. The continuity started here is carried on and built on top of all the way to Sonic 06, and then Sonic Unleashed happens and all of that just kind of becomes irrelevant, and then Unleashed becomes irrelevant, and basically the writing goes from Saturday morning cartoon(tho, not like THE Saturday morning cartoon) to Friday evening. While the first half of the 3D era can be considered weird because it jumps from Sonic being arrested by Not-The-US-Military, to an alien race that helped Gerald Robotnik of earlier games achieve his goals coming to reap the seeds they've sown, modern Sonic's world is weird because... what is modern Sonic's world? It's just kind of this non-descript amorphous blob that doesn't really take shape unless we're viewing it at some moment in time. And you know, that's not necessarily a bad thing, they took the adventure continuity pretty far and now we're in territory where anything is possible, and that's fine. The later writing style has bigger crimes than continuity, just look at Shadow. Honestly it feels weird to even be talking about this before whatever's about to happen in Frontiers happens, so all I can say is, yeah that looks pretty wacky innit.
No matter where Sonic actually is tho, his world is always one filled with sunny blue skies, treacherous obstacle course shaped ruins, and cool robots. Overall, that's pretty cool.
Having said all that, it sure would be weird if this was a Knuckles review instead.
Knuckles is a simple guy, he sit by his emerald, emerald gets fucked up, he puts it back together. Focused, in his lane, dedicated to his own cause. The echidna of all time.Just like the humble building owner of Station Square. We don't know what his building is for, but he owns that building, and for that he is satisfied. Perhaps we can learn a lot from the inhabitants of Sonic world... nah building owners are cringe actually.
Exploration as an explicit gameplay element, a common part of games that I oddly do not actually see interrogated deeply by any usual suspects... I mean I'm not going to today either. All I can say is that, yeah, it makes sense for Knuckles' moveset, and that without a real relevant fail state being threatened, the main thing to take away from this side mode of play is just being able to vibe in these spaces. That's really cool when you're dealing with the idyllic streets of Station Square and their burger signs, the theatrical antics of the Casino and their pirate ship. This kinda just becomes some busy fetching tho when you're just flying around red cliffs, or dealin with the cute but ultimately gimmicky last level (why is there one lever). If there's another simple takeaway from this, it's that Sonic Adventure 2 fucked it. Everyone knows about the weird radar change they made in 2 but also Knuckles' moveset is more suited to these levels that are big and open with only some amount of verticality as opposed to SA2's involved and sometimes vertical to all hell stages. It's weird, Knuckles as a part of SA2 is weird, how fortunate we are that there is nothing weird about our Echidna friend in Adventure 1...
So the year is 1996, Sonic team are now on a mission to make the next game(crazy right). For inspiration on where the blue blur should blaze through next, the team went on a journey, to Central/South America. More specifically, the ruins of several separate cultures whom dotted the landscape long ago, getting a close first hand experience of the remains of these cultures, via long tourist trip. Their efforts culminate as large chunk of that game which would become Sonic Adventure, would be set in not South America, South America is in Sonic Jump, but rather an allegorical amalgamation simply called Mystic Ruins. A place where its main modern inhabitants are white men looking for rocks to plunder. Ok, I'm obviously not the person to talk to about cultural appropriation, what that even is, what effect that even has, especially in the context of a Sonic game, but I think we can all take a step back and acknowledge how weird it is, even tho it was common at the time, that the team went through so much effort to "get real knowledge of the ancient cultures" that they want to depict, and then shat out this motherfucker. Pachacamac, leader of the Echidna ethnostate, spearhead of the Chao massacre who was smitted by the god of the land Chaos for his arrogance and violence, this guy's existence kinda fuckin sucks lol. It's current year, I'm not taking John Sega to task on this or anything, besides for all legal purposes the weird cultural mine field of the wider Echidna family is entirely Ken Penders' problem now, but damn, what a weird ass slice that existed in this franchise huh.
Sonic Adventure 1 was a weird ass way start to the expansion of Sonic's world, and Knuckles is equally a weird way to explore it, but for all that it's worth, that station do be square tho.
Also you know how it is, Unknown from M.E., iconic. They simply don't do it like that anymore.
See you later as we enter uh... you know, there's something I must confess. This is not a review of Sonic Adventure DX as packaged from the Steam store. Ever since the Tails review, this has been the Sonic Adventure DX steam port, modded to be more like the Dreamcast version in all ways except for the water. You have been deceived. I have made FOOLS OF YOU ALL. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-
Cool concept, but walking in molasses from combat area to combat area with no sprint button, then to a boss with no dodge button is terrible. Does have a boss with an always active tail hitbox, which is an idea so intuitively awful I'd thought no developer would do it, but alas
Gunstar Heroes
1993
I haven't even FINISHED this yet and I already need to comment on how good it is - it's fucking insane how quickly you learn to parse all the insane shit going on in these levels and reach that state of intentionality + flow, for me stage 5's combat gauntlet became a kind of "holy shit i get it" moment where everything just CLICKED
hoping the last few levels aren't too much of a wall bc i want to get into treasure's catalog so bad, I started this and alien soldier on the same day and both have me v excited to dive in more
update: the last few levels were - in fact - quite the wall LMAO, I've finished harder stuff so this isn't going on shelved just yet but god it's hard to find the motivation to get good enough at the final stage to complete all those consecutive bosses, especially when green is kicking my ass so hard
hoping the last few levels aren't too much of a wall bc i want to get into treasure's catalog so bad, I started this and alien soldier on the same day and both have me v excited to dive in more
update: the last few levels were - in fact - quite the wall LMAO, I've finished harder stuff so this isn't going on shelved just yet but god it's hard to find the motivation to get good enough at the final stage to complete all those consecutive bosses, especially when green is kicking my ass so hard
Umbrella Corps
2016
against all odds, i squeezed in multiple matches today on PC. i wasn't able to find anyone to link with for its admittedly interesting 4 survivors mode, but i managed to squad up with a few intrepid brazillians and was subsequently able to access a lot of regular team match games. team match is split into two playlists: there's one mode that's essentially permadeath, and there's a mode which rotates missions for your team to carry out successfully in which you have infinite lives. all of my experience was with the latter. as a result it's difficult to tell if umbrella corps is actually capable of living up to its tactical shooter billing, but my strong impression is that it isn't, which is why most of its extremely sparse, sporadically active community prefers the multi-mission mode. the game is so brisk in pace and so homogenous in its weapon selection that stopping for even a second to pretend it's truly tactical would be dishonest, radial menus rife with commands be damned. the modern warfare xp progression system similary disincentivizes even the slightest pretense of strategy here since you recognize you'll be locked out of some interesting tools for a while, and it won't be an even playing field while you're out there.
but as a scuzzy and unsanitized arcade deathmatch...it's honestly a good time. detach yourself from the nightmare unity engine vibes and what you find is a PVP/PVE title in which every map does its utmost to replicate the skin of your teeth scrambles inherent to rust in modern warfare 2. every map is small, cluttered, and anarchic, and the multi-mission mode is structured around completing various objectives in these cramped locales within short three minute windows. sometimes it's a traditional deathmatch; occasionally, it's oddball with briefcases; sometimes it's collecting DNA samples from UC's repertoire of enemies, pulled from all corners of the resident evil world, and from time to time you'll be playing king of the hill. it's a roll of the dice every time, but it's varied enough in these offerings to keep things exciting. getting used to the wildly shifting perspectives and claustrophobic field of view is arguably the toughest adjustment, but it effectively complements frenzied close-quarters skirmishes, arguably makes this one of the only third person shooters i've played in which toggling which over-the-shoulder perspective you resort to is important, and denies you an ease of environmental legibility which would reduce tension. it's impossible to overstate just how quickly you move in this game; even crawling prone is faster than crouchwalking in some games. my favourite implementation here is a jammer auto-equipped on each player. while the jammer's active, the zombies present in a level will ignore you, but if you take enough oncoming damage to break the jammer, every single one of those NPC enemies will start descending on you at once. it's insane. i kind of feel like multiplayer games forgot to have decent soundtracks over the years too, so it's nice to revisit all of these recontextualized locales from past entries and listen to some throbbing tunes. just running around the village from RE4 with my bizarre sci-fi ice axe and parrying opponents who try to swing at me with their bizarre sci-fi ice axe. lovely.
it remains a highly difficult game to recommend because there are basically only ten people, if that, left playing it...similarly, its single player mode is in shambles, existing as nothing more than repackaged multiplayer mechanics absent of the mayhem other players can provide. i like it though. it just needs like, thorhighheels level clout to have some form of multiplayer renaissance. that's not my job, it's his.
but as a scuzzy and unsanitized arcade deathmatch...it's honestly a good time. detach yourself from the nightmare unity engine vibes and what you find is a PVP/PVE title in which every map does its utmost to replicate the skin of your teeth scrambles inherent to rust in modern warfare 2. every map is small, cluttered, and anarchic, and the multi-mission mode is structured around completing various objectives in these cramped locales within short three minute windows. sometimes it's a traditional deathmatch; occasionally, it's oddball with briefcases; sometimes it's collecting DNA samples from UC's repertoire of enemies, pulled from all corners of the resident evil world, and from time to time you'll be playing king of the hill. it's a roll of the dice every time, but it's varied enough in these offerings to keep things exciting. getting used to the wildly shifting perspectives and claustrophobic field of view is arguably the toughest adjustment, but it effectively complements frenzied close-quarters skirmishes, arguably makes this one of the only third person shooters i've played in which toggling which over-the-shoulder perspective you resort to is important, and denies you an ease of environmental legibility which would reduce tension. it's impossible to overstate just how quickly you move in this game; even crawling prone is faster than crouchwalking in some games. my favourite implementation here is a jammer auto-equipped on each player. while the jammer's active, the zombies present in a level will ignore you, but if you take enough oncoming damage to break the jammer, every single one of those NPC enemies will start descending on you at once. it's insane. i kind of feel like multiplayer games forgot to have decent soundtracks over the years too, so it's nice to revisit all of these recontextualized locales from past entries and listen to some throbbing tunes. just running around the village from RE4 with my bizarre sci-fi ice axe and parrying opponents who try to swing at me with their bizarre sci-fi ice axe. lovely.
it remains a highly difficult game to recommend because there are basically only ten people, if that, left playing it...similarly, its single player mode is in shambles, existing as nothing more than repackaged multiplayer mechanics absent of the mayhem other players can provide. i like it though. it just needs like, thorhighheels level clout to have some form of multiplayer renaissance. that's not my job, it's his.
Sexy Invaders
1990
they made me work my ass off for a few nip slips. chica featured on the cover is not in the game. im pretty sure girl 2 called me a super pig pilot. reward for completion is a lady gyrating her hips on loop to the credits theme. surprised this made it onto this site given IGDBs policy but the panties stay on at all times in sexy invaders so maybe that's part of the reason why. deeply amusing seeing the nintendo logo before slotting this bad boy in. the intersection of established arcade design & early 90s digital eroticism is as always conceptually interesting but totally insubstantial & boring, at least in practice. they hadnt yet realized that the strongest & most powerful gamers are volcels. lady killer (1993) better