Woodaba
2001
"After Y2K, the End of the World had become a cliché. But who was I to talk? A brooding underdog avenger alone against an empire of evil, out to right a grave injustice? Everything was subjective. There were no personal apocalypses. Nothing is a cliché when it's happening to you."
In Max Payne, New York City comes first. We have a few moments just with the city, and the chatter of police scanners cutting through the howling snowstorm, before Max hits us with one of his characteristic delightfully purple parodic noir metaphor.
This might not seem worth noting, given what a tiny slice of the game it is, but I think it's important in the context of how the rest of the game's narrative is portrayed (mostly from Max's narration) and from the rest of Remedy's games that followed in Max Payne's lineage. Control, Quantum Break, and Alan Wake all open with their protagonists and their narration before the world, giving the player no time to form an impression of it outside the lens of our central character. Alan Wake offers the greatest window of time for this at a whopping two seconds before he starts banging on about Stephen King. So Max Payne giving us about a minute of time in snow-covered New York feels almost luxurious in comparison. And then Max Payne barges in, bringing Helheim with him.
I spend so much time pointing this out because any attempt to talk about what Max Payne is doing on any level below the surface makes one sound like a particularly unhinged conspiracy theorist, something that Remedy are explicitly aware of and has playfully prodded at in their future game Control in particular. Part of this is the conscious silliness of the surface-level: comic-sans narration boxes filled with prose so purple it can make fine wine, and, of course, the way the entire story is told through delightful school-play images made from the developers and their friends and family putting on ill-fitting outfits and making silly faces. There is a pervasive charm to all of this that invites luxuriating in it, but I think a common mistake one can make when reading any work is to simply assume that something is thoughtless because it's a bit silly. Remedy was not somehow unaware of the fact that they were a bunch of nerds and their relations playing dress-up, and indeed, lean into it.
The archness, the artifice, and the absolute over-the-top-ness of it all, evokes the tropes and styles it is pulling from so bluntly that it becomes solid in the mind, manifesting into a brick thrown at your face that then falls into your lap, remaining there and weighing on you, never letting you forget what it's doing. From the comic panels, to the tvs throughout the levels playing broad parodies of soap operas, Twin Peaks, and, uh, The News, to Max Payne himself, as he intrudes upon the serenity of New York at the beginning, a noir cliche diving in through the door from one of the better issues of Frank Miller's Sin City (the comic panels and narration and image of a city in white bearing greater similarity to those comics than anything starring Philip Marlowe) and leaving reality covered with bullet holes in his wake.
But here's the thing. He doesn't close the door behind him. And slowly, other things start to creep in.
A superhero with a baseball bat climbs out of a comic strip and into the head of a mob torturer who is a fan of the comic. The apocalyptic snowstorm that blankets the city of New York, and the pervasive Norse Mythology references that litter the game, crawl out of a book about Ragnarok being read by someone in the club Ragna Rock. Max's actions are fed into a news cycle that makes entertainment out of it. The game's genre references become recursive and circular, wrapping in on themselves over and over. Max becomes aware of his own status as a loose cannon cop out for revenge. Mobsters make themselves into occult monstrosities in order to survive. People write fiction. Fiction crawls into peoples' heads, influences them, and through them, the world. And then people carry those ideas back into fiction. People imposing on fiction, fiction imposing on the world. On and on it goes.
It is an imposition the player performs as well. I can't bring too much to the table in terms of the mechanical construction of Max Payne's fantastic moment-to-moment gunplay, as in many ways, the sheer joy of diving in slow-motion through a doorway and riddling an entire room of goons yelling "PAYNE!" full of holes simply speaks for itself with more wit than I could ever manage. However, one thing I do want to mention is something has, to a certain extent, been obscured by successive ports to consoles and phones and back to the PC. Max Payne was a PC game first and, I think, foremost, and understanding this is key to understanding how the game handles checkpoints, or, to be more accurate, how the game doesn't. Autosave points are extremely few and far between, and most deaths will take you back to the start of the level, and these deaths come quickly and mercilessly, with only a single mistake standing between Max and the grave eagerly awaiting him.
Of course, the game does not actually expect you to restart from the beginning of each level every single time. The game expects - an assumption that was reasonable given that this behavior was ubiquitous across Max Payne's contemporaries on the platform - for you to manually save the game and create your own checkpoints from which Max can resume his story after his next future full stop. This seemingly innocuous feature might be the game's cleverest ludic move, as together with fast deaths and often-scarce painkillers demanding a certain degree of trial-and-error perfectionism, the player is put into the role of director, cutting the action when they are satisfied with the scene as it played out. It is a system that imposes storytelling structure onto every aspect of play, including even the act of entering the pause screen to save and reload into its all-consuming storyboard.
On every level of it's construction, Max Payne is a game about stories insinuating themselves, loudly and quietly, into the real, and it's surprising to find the DNA that runs through Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control already fully-formed in (Death Rally aside) the studio's debut title, arguably more deftly and charismatically than any of those later works would manage. The strength of Max Payne is that unlike, say, Alan Wake, all of this is left to crawl around the periphery, only bubbling up very occasionally, allowing the player to put together the disparate images in their head, like a detective attempting to solve a mystery by staring at connected pins on a bulletin board. Indeed, I don't know if I would have the confidence to make this read if not for Remedy's future work pulling on all this stuff much more explicitly. Max comments on some stuff, but not all, and one of the most compelling images the game has to offer eludes his notice completely.
Late in the game, Max is recruited by a shadowy illuminati-like organization known as the Inner Circle, and learns that pretty much everything in the plot stems from their influence, and in particular, from one of their number who manufactured the US Military super-soldier drug that drives the game's plot: Valkyr. In his own piece on the game, critic Noah Gervais explains Valkyr, the hilariously cartoonish green goop drug that has it's origins in a military super-soldier project, as a kind of uniquely video-game pulp that bleeds in from what was typical for video games in that moment, and I would say that is fairly accurate. Where I deviate from Gervais is that he finds Valkyr to be a kind of ancillary element, something that emerges out of the video game milieu of the time rather than an intentional element, and that is where I disagree. Valkyr is a consciously artificial video game trope that begins this video game, in the same way that Max's dead family is a consciously Noir trope that begins this Noir story, created by a US military project run by a member of a secret organization who's headquarters is draped in conspicuous US historical ephemera, from the room looking like the briefing room of the White House, to the Washington Monument replica at the center of it all.
There was something disturbingly familiar about the letter before me, the handwriting was all pretty curves.
"You are in an American world, Max."
The truth was a burning green crack through my brain. The film noir aesthetic, the American comic influence, even the bullet-time mechanics derived from a filmmaker who, contemporaneously, was being consumed by the Hollywood machine making strange twists on the Hong Kong action films he so excelled at.
I was in a cultural world shaped by the hegemonic influence of American fiction. Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of.
Everything after this point, after this moment, is perfunctory. The point is made, the statement is said. As Max would put it, the final gunshot is merely the exclamation mark to everything that led to this point. He fulfills his duties to the game and the genre strangely quietly, defeats the villain, and is taken away in the back of the car, knowing exactly what has, what is, and what will happen.
He releases his finger from the trigger, and then it is over.
Until you start again.
Try Hard Boiled mode or New York Minute mode for the next challenge!
In Max Payne, New York City comes first. We have a few moments just with the city, and the chatter of police scanners cutting through the howling snowstorm, before Max hits us with one of his characteristic delightfully purple parodic noir metaphor.
This might not seem worth noting, given what a tiny slice of the game it is, but I think it's important in the context of how the rest of the game's narrative is portrayed (mostly from Max's narration) and from the rest of Remedy's games that followed in Max Payne's lineage. Control, Quantum Break, and Alan Wake all open with their protagonists and their narration before the world, giving the player no time to form an impression of it outside the lens of our central character. Alan Wake offers the greatest window of time for this at a whopping two seconds before he starts banging on about Stephen King. So Max Payne giving us about a minute of time in snow-covered New York feels almost luxurious in comparison. And then Max Payne barges in, bringing Helheim with him.
I spend so much time pointing this out because any attempt to talk about what Max Payne is doing on any level below the surface makes one sound like a particularly unhinged conspiracy theorist, something that Remedy are explicitly aware of and has playfully prodded at in their future game Control in particular. Part of this is the conscious silliness of the surface-level: comic-sans narration boxes filled with prose so purple it can make fine wine, and, of course, the way the entire story is told through delightful school-play images made from the developers and their friends and family putting on ill-fitting outfits and making silly faces. There is a pervasive charm to all of this that invites luxuriating in it, but I think a common mistake one can make when reading any work is to simply assume that something is thoughtless because it's a bit silly. Remedy was not somehow unaware of the fact that they were a bunch of nerds and their relations playing dress-up, and indeed, lean into it.
The archness, the artifice, and the absolute over-the-top-ness of it all, evokes the tropes and styles it is pulling from so bluntly that it becomes solid in the mind, manifesting into a brick thrown at your face that then falls into your lap, remaining there and weighing on you, never letting you forget what it's doing. From the comic panels, to the tvs throughout the levels playing broad parodies of soap operas, Twin Peaks, and, uh, The News, to Max Payne himself, as he intrudes upon the serenity of New York at the beginning, a noir cliche diving in through the door from one of the better issues of Frank Miller's Sin City (the comic panels and narration and image of a city in white bearing greater similarity to those comics than anything starring Philip Marlowe) and leaving reality covered with bullet holes in his wake.
But here's the thing. He doesn't close the door behind him. And slowly, other things start to creep in.
A superhero with a baseball bat climbs out of a comic strip and into the head of a mob torturer who is a fan of the comic. The apocalyptic snowstorm that blankets the city of New York, and the pervasive Norse Mythology references that litter the game, crawl out of a book about Ragnarok being read by someone in the club Ragna Rock. Max's actions are fed into a news cycle that makes entertainment out of it. The game's genre references become recursive and circular, wrapping in on themselves over and over. Max becomes aware of his own status as a loose cannon cop out for revenge. Mobsters make themselves into occult monstrosities in order to survive. People write fiction. Fiction crawls into peoples' heads, influences them, and through them, the world. And then people carry those ideas back into fiction. People imposing on fiction, fiction imposing on the world. On and on it goes.
It is an imposition the player performs as well. I can't bring too much to the table in terms of the mechanical construction of Max Payne's fantastic moment-to-moment gunplay, as in many ways, the sheer joy of diving in slow-motion through a doorway and riddling an entire room of goons yelling "PAYNE!" full of holes simply speaks for itself with more wit than I could ever manage. However, one thing I do want to mention is something has, to a certain extent, been obscured by successive ports to consoles and phones and back to the PC. Max Payne was a PC game first and, I think, foremost, and understanding this is key to understanding how the game handles checkpoints, or, to be more accurate, how the game doesn't. Autosave points are extremely few and far between, and most deaths will take you back to the start of the level, and these deaths come quickly and mercilessly, with only a single mistake standing between Max and the grave eagerly awaiting him.
Of course, the game does not actually expect you to restart from the beginning of each level every single time. The game expects - an assumption that was reasonable given that this behavior was ubiquitous across Max Payne's contemporaries on the platform - for you to manually save the game and create your own checkpoints from which Max can resume his story after his next future full stop. This seemingly innocuous feature might be the game's cleverest ludic move, as together with fast deaths and often-scarce painkillers demanding a certain degree of trial-and-error perfectionism, the player is put into the role of director, cutting the action when they are satisfied with the scene as it played out. It is a system that imposes storytelling structure onto every aspect of play, including even the act of entering the pause screen to save and reload into its all-consuming storyboard.
On every level of it's construction, Max Payne is a game about stories insinuating themselves, loudly and quietly, into the real, and it's surprising to find the DNA that runs through Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control already fully-formed in (Death Rally aside) the studio's debut title, arguably more deftly and charismatically than any of those later works would manage. The strength of Max Payne is that unlike, say, Alan Wake, all of this is left to crawl around the periphery, only bubbling up very occasionally, allowing the player to put together the disparate images in their head, like a detective attempting to solve a mystery by staring at connected pins on a bulletin board. Indeed, I don't know if I would have the confidence to make this read if not for Remedy's future work pulling on all this stuff much more explicitly. Max comments on some stuff, but not all, and one of the most compelling images the game has to offer eludes his notice completely.
Late in the game, Max is recruited by a shadowy illuminati-like organization known as the Inner Circle, and learns that pretty much everything in the plot stems from their influence, and in particular, from one of their number who manufactured the US Military super-soldier drug that drives the game's plot: Valkyr. In his own piece on the game, critic Noah Gervais explains Valkyr, the hilariously cartoonish green goop drug that has it's origins in a military super-soldier project, as a kind of uniquely video-game pulp that bleeds in from what was typical for video games in that moment, and I would say that is fairly accurate. Where I deviate from Gervais is that he finds Valkyr to be a kind of ancillary element, something that emerges out of the video game milieu of the time rather than an intentional element, and that is where I disagree. Valkyr is a consciously artificial video game trope that begins this video game, in the same way that Max's dead family is a consciously Noir trope that begins this Noir story, created by a US military project run by a member of a secret organization who's headquarters is draped in conspicuous US historical ephemera, from the room looking like the briefing room of the White House, to the Washington Monument replica at the center of it all.
There was something disturbingly familiar about the letter before me, the handwriting was all pretty curves.
"You are in an American world, Max."
The truth was a burning green crack through my brain. The film noir aesthetic, the American comic influence, even the bullet-time mechanics derived from a filmmaker who, contemporaneously, was being consumed by the Hollywood machine making strange twists on the Hong Kong action films he so excelled at.
I was in a cultural world shaped by the hegemonic influence of American fiction. Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of.
Everything after this point, after this moment, is perfunctory. The point is made, the statement is said. As Max would put it, the final gunshot is merely the exclamation mark to everything that led to this point. He fulfills his duties to the game and the genre strangely quietly, defeats the villain, and is taken away in the back of the car, knowing exactly what has, what is, and what will happen.
He releases his finger from the trigger, and then it is over.
Until you start again.
Try Hard Boiled mode or New York Minute mode for the next challenge!
[Anamnesis] Try to recall Torment: Tides of Numenera by InExile Entertainment: FAILURE.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i think some people think of me as a bit of a hater at times, which makes me feel bad because I generally like most games I play and talk about, and even ones I don't think too highly of, like Elden Ring, have things about them that I appreciate. tedious negative formalism is, for me, the retreat of the disappointed romantic, and if i do end up there, it's only because I have tried and failed to love something. so please, know that when I say that I do, in fact, hate Tides of Numenera, it is because it is a genuinely rare occurrence for me: a game that repulses above and beyond anything it might have to offer.
i finished this fairly comprehensively when it first released and while I liked it quite a bit back in 2017, my fondness for it fades to an proportional degree to my strengthening fondness for the original Torment.
in a sense the problem is that I resent having to refer to Planscape: Torment as "the original Torment". there is a naked cynicism to the title that is hard to ignore, an almost desperate call to arms for fans of the original to treat this with the weight that something evoking a beloved work warrants. and yet, it rings so hollow. part of this is because by any reasonable metric, planescape: torment has plenty of sequels, there being a clear throughline of thematic exploration and continuity of staff from that game into the likes of Knights of the Old Republic 2 and Mask of the Betrayer, so this game tattooing "TORMENT" onto it's skin feels unnecessary at best and deeply insecure at worst. but the larger problem of the name is that this hollowness and insecurity seeps into the game itself.
a game like this really shouldn't be reminding me so strongly of Dark Souls 3 or - god forbid, The Rise of Skywalker - but those comparisons struggle to leave me when I weigh Tides of Numenera in my mind, this game that so desperately needs to be seen as a true successor to Planescape: Torment that it strains at every opportunity to deliver surface-level reference after vacuous call-back.
tattoos were part of Planescape, and so they are part of Tides of Numenera! except here the tattoos are given a weight and significance by the writing that is afforded only by the fact that they are a reference to the original. tattoos were important in Planescape because they represented the permanency of your past actions and effects on the world. tattoos do not leave us - and neither do our actions and the scars they leave on the world. there is no similar thematic resonance to the choice to use tattoos in numenera. the symbols are, as abstract symbols, important to it, but grafting them onto the flesh of the protagonist says nothing, other than "remember planescape?"
these kinds of embarrassing references are everywhere, but the one that got me to switch the game off in disgust was when you find a Bronze Sphere. The Bronze Sphere in Planescape was deeply important in that game, but its importance was something you had to discover. You can - and many do - simply ignore and forget about it once it first leaves your possession, to treat it like the insignificant bauble it seems. It's only by choosing to keep it - a choice that says a lot about your Nameless One, because the only reason you'd keep it is that you know it was important to a past version of yourself that you increasingly learn to be almost unimaginably cruel - all the way to the end of the game, do you finally learn what it is. in numenera, you find a bronze sphere - proudly labelled as such - in one of the first areas you have access to, a bronze sphere that, essentially, acts as little more than a place for your companions to hang out when you aren't with them. it is a rote mechanical feature that clads itself in one of the most resonant and evocative images of the game it's so desperately trying to summon within itself in order to afford it a weight derived entirely from the audience's recognition of that image in a completely one-dimensional way. it is planescape: torment reduced to brand recognition, a funko pop of the nameless one, dak'kon in fortnite, a disney+ limited series about fall-from-grace. it is the mcu-ification of a singular work that is very, very close to my heart. it fucking blows ass so much oh my god.
part of me wants to resist labelling this a truly terrible game. the writing is, in a vacuum, thought of entirely as a book of disconnected sci-fi short stories you can wander through, engaging, in the moment. there are some characters that work: I think most of the stuff surrounding the character of Rhin is genuinely fantastic and represents a genuinely thoughtful exploration of parenthood, the kind that the medium is historically lacking in. there are moments where the various mechanical concerns of the game - the crisis events, the resource management game you play through wandering the world - do come alive. the soundtrack is actually kind of fantastic. but what's it all in service too? this story, that has no ideas of its own, and is just stripping the scar tissue from one of my favourite games and selling it back to me on Kickstarter? this game that is torn in a dozen different directions by a dozen different writers with no cohesive ideas other than Being Like Planescape? i could begrudgingly admit that there are things Of Interest to be found in this game. but I don't want to, and nor do I think I should. i think i should reject this embarrassing, ambitionless, written-by-committee sludge as the failed attempt to colonize the affections of those who were earnestly affected by the travels of The Nameless One.
so much of the modern media landscape is built entirely on selling you back hollow tokens of your memories in the shape of lightsabers and web-shooters and synths and kids on bicycles. but what we remembered wasn't ever as important as why we remembered them. and because Torment: Tides of Numenera is so singularly focused on the what and not the why, it isn't much of a surprise that it's been so comprehensively forgotten: there's nothing about it to remember.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i think some people think of me as a bit of a hater at times, which makes me feel bad because I generally like most games I play and talk about, and even ones I don't think too highly of, like Elden Ring, have things about them that I appreciate. tedious negative formalism is, for me, the retreat of the disappointed romantic, and if i do end up there, it's only because I have tried and failed to love something. so please, know that when I say that I do, in fact, hate Tides of Numenera, it is because it is a genuinely rare occurrence for me: a game that repulses above and beyond anything it might have to offer.
i finished this fairly comprehensively when it first released and while I liked it quite a bit back in 2017, my fondness for it fades to an proportional degree to my strengthening fondness for the original Torment.
in a sense the problem is that I resent having to refer to Planscape: Torment as "the original Torment". there is a naked cynicism to the title that is hard to ignore, an almost desperate call to arms for fans of the original to treat this with the weight that something evoking a beloved work warrants. and yet, it rings so hollow. part of this is because by any reasonable metric, planescape: torment has plenty of sequels, there being a clear throughline of thematic exploration and continuity of staff from that game into the likes of Knights of the Old Republic 2 and Mask of the Betrayer, so this game tattooing "TORMENT" onto it's skin feels unnecessary at best and deeply insecure at worst. but the larger problem of the name is that this hollowness and insecurity seeps into the game itself.
a game like this really shouldn't be reminding me so strongly of Dark Souls 3 or - god forbid, The Rise of Skywalker - but those comparisons struggle to leave me when I weigh Tides of Numenera in my mind, this game that so desperately needs to be seen as a true successor to Planescape: Torment that it strains at every opportunity to deliver surface-level reference after vacuous call-back.
tattoos were part of Planescape, and so they are part of Tides of Numenera! except here the tattoos are given a weight and significance by the writing that is afforded only by the fact that they are a reference to the original. tattoos were important in Planescape because they represented the permanency of your past actions and effects on the world. tattoos do not leave us - and neither do our actions and the scars they leave on the world. there is no similar thematic resonance to the choice to use tattoos in numenera. the symbols are, as abstract symbols, important to it, but grafting them onto the flesh of the protagonist says nothing, other than "remember planescape?"
these kinds of embarrassing references are everywhere, but the one that got me to switch the game off in disgust was when you find a Bronze Sphere. The Bronze Sphere in Planescape was deeply important in that game, but its importance was something you had to discover. You can - and many do - simply ignore and forget about it once it first leaves your possession, to treat it like the insignificant bauble it seems. It's only by choosing to keep it - a choice that says a lot about your Nameless One, because the only reason you'd keep it is that you know it was important to a past version of yourself that you increasingly learn to be almost unimaginably cruel - all the way to the end of the game, do you finally learn what it is. in numenera, you find a bronze sphere - proudly labelled as such - in one of the first areas you have access to, a bronze sphere that, essentially, acts as little more than a place for your companions to hang out when you aren't with them. it is a rote mechanical feature that clads itself in one of the most resonant and evocative images of the game it's so desperately trying to summon within itself in order to afford it a weight derived entirely from the audience's recognition of that image in a completely one-dimensional way. it is planescape: torment reduced to brand recognition, a funko pop of the nameless one, dak'kon in fortnite, a disney+ limited series about fall-from-grace. it is the mcu-ification of a singular work that is very, very close to my heart. it fucking blows ass so much oh my god.
part of me wants to resist labelling this a truly terrible game. the writing is, in a vacuum, thought of entirely as a book of disconnected sci-fi short stories you can wander through, engaging, in the moment. there are some characters that work: I think most of the stuff surrounding the character of Rhin is genuinely fantastic and represents a genuinely thoughtful exploration of parenthood, the kind that the medium is historically lacking in. there are moments where the various mechanical concerns of the game - the crisis events, the resource management game you play through wandering the world - do come alive. the soundtrack is actually kind of fantastic. but what's it all in service too? this story, that has no ideas of its own, and is just stripping the scar tissue from one of my favourite games and selling it back to me on Kickstarter? this game that is torn in a dozen different directions by a dozen different writers with no cohesive ideas other than Being Like Planescape? i could begrudgingly admit that there are things Of Interest to be found in this game. but I don't want to, and nor do I think I should. i think i should reject this embarrassing, ambitionless, written-by-committee sludge as the failed attempt to colonize the affections of those who were earnestly affected by the travels of The Nameless One.
so much of the modern media landscape is built entirely on selling you back hollow tokens of your memories in the shape of lightsabers and web-shooters and synths and kids on bicycles. but what we remembered wasn't ever as important as why we remembered them. and because Torment: Tides of Numenera is so singularly focused on the what and not the why, it isn't much of a surprise that it's been so comprehensively forgotten: there's nothing about it to remember.
2021
TOREE
- is a friend
- has a hat
- is on such an adventure
- is trans
- says "a" and that is so important
- is dating shadow the hedgehog
- has seventy alternative accounts
- has a number of world record speedruns under their deadname that they don't want to claim anymore
- didn't vote in the 2017 general election and despite their skepticism for electoralism they still feel culpable for the election of boris johnson as prime minister
- has two alternative costumes
- was ride or die on #ReleaseTheSnyderCut but thought the snyder cut itself was kinda mid
- killed a man just to watch him die
haters will try and tell you different but real toreeheads know...real toreeheads know...
- is a friend
- has a hat
- is on such an adventure
- is trans
- says "a" and that is so important
- is dating shadow the hedgehog
- has seventy alternative accounts
- has a number of world record speedruns under their deadname that they don't want to claim anymore
- didn't vote in the 2017 general election and despite their skepticism for electoralism they still feel culpable for the election of boris johnson as prime minister
- has two alternative costumes
- was ride or die on #ReleaseTheSnyderCut but thought the snyder cut itself was kinda mid
- killed a man just to watch him die
haters will try and tell you different but real toreeheads know...real toreeheads know...
2015
in the first dungeon of pillars of eternity, there's a moment that really stuck with me. you encounter a xaurip - a classic fantasy racism beastman that trades in aesthetics uncomfortably pulled from indigenous american stereotypes. it indicates that you go no further, that you do not follow it down a path into it's territory. there's no option to convince it to step aside and let you past: you either respect it's wishes, turn around and find another path, or you walk forward and kill it as an enemy. it's a moment with, i think genuine nuance, where the agency of the xaurip is respected, a moment that actually asks the player to respect the culture of this people or defy it, preventing them from taking a empowering middle road where they can do whatever they want if they have high enough numbers.
anyway, in the very next area you immediately encounter a bunch of them that attack on sight and that you have no recourse but to slaughter.
this moment is pillars of eternity in microcosm. on every level of it's construction, it is a game that feels simultaneously genuinely aware of the fraught nature of many of the images it is evoking and the things it is doing, aware of the stain left by games of this ilk in the past, and also resignedly committed to doing those things anyway without the brazen dumb confidence of a game like divinity: original sin 2. progressive and regressive, inventive and derivative, evolutionary and counter-evolutionary, pillars of eternity is the fascinating attempt to harken back to bioware's baldur's gate and the crpgs of it's era made by a game that doesn't wholly see the value in going back there.
i won't speculate on director je sawyer's intent any more than the man has directly said himself, as he has shown real discomfort towards people suggesting his opinions on certain games, but i know from my mercifully brief visits to the fascist haven that is the rpgcodex forums that sawyer is a quite strong critic of how the classic infinity engine games actually played, and despite my fondness for RPGs of that style, i find myself very much on his side. there's a reason these games struggle to find new fans that aren't just going to turn the games down to the lowest difficulty to sidestep most of the actual playing of it as much as possible: advanced dungeons and dragons is not, by any metric, an elegant or intuitive system at the best of times, and while real-time with pause was an elegant solution to just how long combat in d&d can go on for (larian's proud statements that BG3 has an authentic, turn-based translation of 5E rules should absolutely terrify any prospective players), it only raises the barrier to entry for those not already au fe with ad&d's eccentricities.
pillars of eternity feels utterly unique in that it is a real-time with pause CRPG based on rules that were designed for a video game, and not for a very different medium, and as a result it is...actually good and fun. the rules and statistics are far clearer, the resource game is far more sensical, and the pace of encounters is such that individual moves are less frequent but far more impactful, maintaining the weighty impact turns have in a traditional turn-based game at a speed far more under your own control. experientially, pillars of eternity feels closer to FF12 than it does baldur's gate, with a sliding scale of playstyles ranging from making each move with care and precision, to writing full AI scripts for each member of the party and letting battles play out automatically at hyperspeed.
when i play games in this genre, i usually keep the difficulty low and drop it even lower if i encounter friction. but with pillars, i kept the difficulty on normal the entire way through because I genuinely enjoyed the gameplay and tactical puzzles it presented. it helped me to see, for the first time, why someone might prefer rtwp over turn-based, and when i started a pillars of eternity 2 playthrough shortly after playing this, i decided to stick to real-time rather than playing the game's new turn-based mode, because i became genuinely enamoured with this system.
pillars of eternity is in the unique position of being a baldur's gate homage that doesn't feel like it holds any particular reverence or great love for baldur's gate, and makes good on that position by well and truly killing bg's darlings where the system design is concerned. this isn't exactly uncharted territory for obsidian: but despite it's progressive approach to it's combat, it feels much more burdened by it's legacy than either kotor 2 or neverwinter nights 2, neither as caustic as the former nor as quietly confident as the latter. it sits uncomfortably among many of the things it does, inherited and otherwise.
to demonstrate: this is, in many ways, a d&d-ass setting. it's a roughly-medieval setting in a temperate forested coastal region, and yet the dyrwood is not medieval france/britain like the sword coast is, it's far closer to colonial canada both in terms of regional politics and technology. you have humans, you have elves, you have dwarves, and things that are kinda like gnomes but with the serial numbers filed off, you have the godlike, which are a twist on the aasimar/tieflings of d&d, each with their own gygaxian race science bonuses to stats, but aside from the aforementioned fantasy racism with the beastmen, these fantasy races matter less in the actual story than national identities and cultures, which makes one question why the race science stuff is even here. even stepping into the mechanical dimension, most of the classes are reasonably interesting interpretations of classic stock d&d archetypes like fighter, wizard, paladin, etc, but the two unique classes, chanter and cipher, are so obviously the design highlights and work in a way that would be incredibly difficult in a tabletop game but are beautiful in a video game. they eagerly invite the question of what this game would look like if it wasn't obligated to include the d&d obligations within it.
while i can't speak for every member of the development team, i know that for je sawyer, pillars of eternity was not necessarily a game he wanted to make - at least not in the way that it ended up being made. elements like the traditional fantasy setting, the real-time with pause gameplay, and even the presence of elves, were all things that were there to fulfil the demands of a kickstarter promising a baldur's gate throwback from a company that had fallen on difficult times. these things that feel like obligations feel like that because they are obligations: concessions to appeal to expectations and desires forged by nostalgia for a game that obsidian didn't actually make. these aren't the only visible compromises that mark the game - "compromise" being perhaps a generous word to describe the game's obnoxious kickstarter scars - but it is this tug of war between the parts of itself that wish to remain within the walls of baldur's gate, and the parts that cry out for escape, that ultimately defines pillars of eternity.
while maddening dreams and an epidemic of children born without souls is what drives the plot of pillars of eternity, the story is really in the conversations between tradition and very colonialist notions of progress, and the very opinionated characters you converse with along the way. likeable characters will hold quietly conservative worldviews that feel natural for them, people will say the right things for the wrong reasons, or the wrong things for the right reasons. friendly characters will have beliefs that are extremely distasteful to you but are so deeply held that there is no way to use the power granted to you by being the player character to dissuade them from their belief system with a few honeyed words. this is not a game where each element works towards a clear thematic conclusion, one that confidently knows what is right and what is wrong when discussing the things it brings up. it is a messy world filled with ugliness and argument and contradiction, and no clear definitive statement on its themes. it has a perspective, but it is not one held with immense confidence. it is a perspective mired with doubts and second-guessing that feels very conscious and deliberate. in particular, the final hour of the game has a twist that recontextualises the nature of the setting, but it's noticeable just how much of the cast, both in this game and in the sequel. find this not to be a redefining moment of their lives, but simply something they have to let sit in their gut like a millstone. it lets them see with new light things they once valued, but they feel unable to simply cast those things aside.
i have a particular distaste for critiques in geek circles narrow their focus on what a work is saying to only the series or genre the work finds itself in, and ignoring whatever resonance it might have to the world outside the fiction, subconsciously because the author has little experience of that world. and yet, it's difficult to read pillars of eternity without looking at it's relationship to baldur's gate and it's ilk, especially given how it kickstarted (lol) the late 2010s CRPG revival that led to breakout hits like divinity: original sin 2 and disco elysium. it walks in the meadows of the past with an uneasy rhythm, constantly expressing it's discomfort with being there but never quite being able to find the way out. even at the end of the game, there is delightfully scarce resolution to the weighty philosophical questions raised by the final act - the immediate crisis dealt with, certainly, but the game ends on a world that has raised questions rather than answered them, and while you may have your own thoughts and perspectives, there is no great victory of ideologies to be found, no grand, world-defining choice about what to do with the wisdom of the past. it's a game that simply ends with you emerging back into a world that is materially largely unchanged but colored so different by the new perspective you have on it. it is a game that is deliriously inconclusive.
one could word that as a criticism - and indeed, a strict formalist lens would probably find it as such - but honestly, it's what i find delightful and resonant about pillars of eternity. i'm someone who thinks generally very poorly about d&d as a game, but my intermittently weekly d&d games with my friends that have been going on since the first lockdown have made some incredible memories, a world and story and cast that i find myself hugely invested in. despite my disdain for a lot of the recurring cliches and tropes of the genre, some of my favorite stories are fantasy stories. and despite my active distaste for a lot of the decisions pillars either makes or is stuck with, and indeed for some of the creative minds involved in it's production (chrs avellne's characters were substantially rewritten after his departure from obsidian to such an extent that neither he nor je sawyer recognize them as "his characters" but whoever was behind durance specifically is doing such a conscious avellone impression that i would be remiss not to note that his presence is certainly felt) i still enjoy it immensely regardless.
frequently, engagement with art is a negotiation with the parts about it that speak to us and the parts that fail to do so, where we may be able to excuse or enjoy parts that others find to sink the entire work for them, and it's unexpectedly moving to find a game that was so visibly having that conversation with itself as i played it, and rang so true for the relationship i have with the things that inspired it.
it's a game that embodies the sticky and troubling way all the games and stories of it's ilk sit in my mind and expresses them emotively through a story that, in fits and starts, writes quite powerfully on the unique pains and sensation of memory and tradition and progress. it's a game that feels all the more true, all the more real, for it's contradictions, compromises, and conversations capped off with trailing ellipses, leading down two roads to an uncertain future and a depressingly familiar past.
anyway, in the very next area you immediately encounter a bunch of them that attack on sight and that you have no recourse but to slaughter.
this moment is pillars of eternity in microcosm. on every level of it's construction, it is a game that feels simultaneously genuinely aware of the fraught nature of many of the images it is evoking and the things it is doing, aware of the stain left by games of this ilk in the past, and also resignedly committed to doing those things anyway without the brazen dumb confidence of a game like divinity: original sin 2. progressive and regressive, inventive and derivative, evolutionary and counter-evolutionary, pillars of eternity is the fascinating attempt to harken back to bioware's baldur's gate and the crpgs of it's era made by a game that doesn't wholly see the value in going back there.
i won't speculate on director je sawyer's intent any more than the man has directly said himself, as he has shown real discomfort towards people suggesting his opinions on certain games, but i know from my mercifully brief visits to the fascist haven that is the rpgcodex forums that sawyer is a quite strong critic of how the classic infinity engine games actually played, and despite my fondness for RPGs of that style, i find myself very much on his side. there's a reason these games struggle to find new fans that aren't just going to turn the games down to the lowest difficulty to sidestep most of the actual playing of it as much as possible: advanced dungeons and dragons is not, by any metric, an elegant or intuitive system at the best of times, and while real-time with pause was an elegant solution to just how long combat in d&d can go on for (larian's proud statements that BG3 has an authentic, turn-based translation of 5E rules should absolutely terrify any prospective players), it only raises the barrier to entry for those not already au fe with ad&d's eccentricities.
pillars of eternity feels utterly unique in that it is a real-time with pause CRPG based on rules that were designed for a video game, and not for a very different medium, and as a result it is...actually good and fun. the rules and statistics are far clearer, the resource game is far more sensical, and the pace of encounters is such that individual moves are less frequent but far more impactful, maintaining the weighty impact turns have in a traditional turn-based game at a speed far more under your own control. experientially, pillars of eternity feels closer to FF12 than it does baldur's gate, with a sliding scale of playstyles ranging from making each move with care and precision, to writing full AI scripts for each member of the party and letting battles play out automatically at hyperspeed.
when i play games in this genre, i usually keep the difficulty low and drop it even lower if i encounter friction. but with pillars, i kept the difficulty on normal the entire way through because I genuinely enjoyed the gameplay and tactical puzzles it presented. it helped me to see, for the first time, why someone might prefer rtwp over turn-based, and when i started a pillars of eternity 2 playthrough shortly after playing this, i decided to stick to real-time rather than playing the game's new turn-based mode, because i became genuinely enamoured with this system.
pillars of eternity is in the unique position of being a baldur's gate homage that doesn't feel like it holds any particular reverence or great love for baldur's gate, and makes good on that position by well and truly killing bg's darlings where the system design is concerned. this isn't exactly uncharted territory for obsidian: but despite it's progressive approach to it's combat, it feels much more burdened by it's legacy than either kotor 2 or neverwinter nights 2, neither as caustic as the former nor as quietly confident as the latter. it sits uncomfortably among many of the things it does, inherited and otherwise.
to demonstrate: this is, in many ways, a d&d-ass setting. it's a roughly-medieval setting in a temperate forested coastal region, and yet the dyrwood is not medieval france/britain like the sword coast is, it's far closer to colonial canada both in terms of regional politics and technology. you have humans, you have elves, you have dwarves, and things that are kinda like gnomes but with the serial numbers filed off, you have the godlike, which are a twist on the aasimar/tieflings of d&d, each with their own gygaxian race science bonuses to stats, but aside from the aforementioned fantasy racism with the beastmen, these fantasy races matter less in the actual story than national identities and cultures, which makes one question why the race science stuff is even here. even stepping into the mechanical dimension, most of the classes are reasonably interesting interpretations of classic stock d&d archetypes like fighter, wizard, paladin, etc, but the two unique classes, chanter and cipher, are so obviously the design highlights and work in a way that would be incredibly difficult in a tabletop game but are beautiful in a video game. they eagerly invite the question of what this game would look like if it wasn't obligated to include the d&d obligations within it.
while i can't speak for every member of the development team, i know that for je sawyer, pillars of eternity was not necessarily a game he wanted to make - at least not in the way that it ended up being made. elements like the traditional fantasy setting, the real-time with pause gameplay, and even the presence of elves, were all things that were there to fulfil the demands of a kickstarter promising a baldur's gate throwback from a company that had fallen on difficult times. these things that feel like obligations feel like that because they are obligations: concessions to appeal to expectations and desires forged by nostalgia for a game that obsidian didn't actually make. these aren't the only visible compromises that mark the game - "compromise" being perhaps a generous word to describe the game's obnoxious kickstarter scars - but it is this tug of war between the parts of itself that wish to remain within the walls of baldur's gate, and the parts that cry out for escape, that ultimately defines pillars of eternity.
while maddening dreams and an epidemic of children born without souls is what drives the plot of pillars of eternity, the story is really in the conversations between tradition and very colonialist notions of progress, and the very opinionated characters you converse with along the way. likeable characters will hold quietly conservative worldviews that feel natural for them, people will say the right things for the wrong reasons, or the wrong things for the right reasons. friendly characters will have beliefs that are extremely distasteful to you but are so deeply held that there is no way to use the power granted to you by being the player character to dissuade them from their belief system with a few honeyed words. this is not a game where each element works towards a clear thematic conclusion, one that confidently knows what is right and what is wrong when discussing the things it brings up. it is a messy world filled with ugliness and argument and contradiction, and no clear definitive statement on its themes. it has a perspective, but it is not one held with immense confidence. it is a perspective mired with doubts and second-guessing that feels very conscious and deliberate. in particular, the final hour of the game has a twist that recontextualises the nature of the setting, but it's noticeable just how much of the cast, both in this game and in the sequel. find this not to be a redefining moment of their lives, but simply something they have to let sit in their gut like a millstone. it lets them see with new light things they once valued, but they feel unable to simply cast those things aside.
i have a particular distaste for critiques in geek circles narrow their focus on what a work is saying to only the series or genre the work finds itself in, and ignoring whatever resonance it might have to the world outside the fiction, subconsciously because the author has little experience of that world. and yet, it's difficult to read pillars of eternity without looking at it's relationship to baldur's gate and it's ilk, especially given how it kickstarted (lol) the late 2010s CRPG revival that led to breakout hits like divinity: original sin 2 and disco elysium. it walks in the meadows of the past with an uneasy rhythm, constantly expressing it's discomfort with being there but never quite being able to find the way out. even at the end of the game, there is delightfully scarce resolution to the weighty philosophical questions raised by the final act - the immediate crisis dealt with, certainly, but the game ends on a world that has raised questions rather than answered them, and while you may have your own thoughts and perspectives, there is no great victory of ideologies to be found, no grand, world-defining choice about what to do with the wisdom of the past. it's a game that simply ends with you emerging back into a world that is materially largely unchanged but colored so different by the new perspective you have on it. it is a game that is deliriously inconclusive.
one could word that as a criticism - and indeed, a strict formalist lens would probably find it as such - but honestly, it's what i find delightful and resonant about pillars of eternity. i'm someone who thinks generally very poorly about d&d as a game, but my intermittently weekly d&d games with my friends that have been going on since the first lockdown have made some incredible memories, a world and story and cast that i find myself hugely invested in. despite my disdain for a lot of the recurring cliches and tropes of the genre, some of my favorite stories are fantasy stories. and despite my active distaste for a lot of the decisions pillars either makes or is stuck with, and indeed for some of the creative minds involved in it's production (chrs avellne's characters were substantially rewritten after his departure from obsidian to such an extent that neither he nor je sawyer recognize them as "his characters" but whoever was behind durance specifically is doing such a conscious avellone impression that i would be remiss not to note that his presence is certainly felt) i still enjoy it immensely regardless.
frequently, engagement with art is a negotiation with the parts about it that speak to us and the parts that fail to do so, where we may be able to excuse or enjoy parts that others find to sink the entire work for them, and it's unexpectedly moving to find a game that was so visibly having that conversation with itself as i played it, and rang so true for the relationship i have with the things that inspired it.
it's a game that embodies the sticky and troubling way all the games and stories of it's ilk sit in my mind and expresses them emotively through a story that, in fits and starts, writes quite powerfully on the unique pains and sensation of memory and tradition and progress. it's a game that feels all the more true, all the more real, for it's contradictions, compromises, and conversations capped off with trailing ellipses, leading down two roads to an uncertain future and a depressingly familiar past.
It's easy to look back at The Stanley Parable and laugh at it. It is, after all, a kind of self-important game that said things about video games that were getting pretty tired even in 2013. I loved the Stanley Parable when I first played the mod, loved it a little less when I played the steam release, and ultimately have found it less and less compelling as time goes on, as the times in which the jokes landed got more and more distant and the commentary got more and more trite.
One might reasonably ask why such an aging process has harmed Stanley when it hasn't harmed other games on quite the same level, and my argument for that would be that Stanley, to use a memetic phrase devoid of meaning, insists upon itself. There's little room for interpretation or multifaceted interpretation of it: Stanley Parable is a two-dimensional game, and what I mean by that is that it works on two dimensions: the jokes, and the commentary. There aren't really any other characters or themes or aesthetic twists and flourishes to appreciate: it's a game that is very blunt about what it's saying, and doesn't really have anything to it other than that. Which is fine! Really! But it kinda relies on the things it's saying being really good, and maybe they were, once on the facepunch forums or on ModDb. But now? Not so much.
Which is why the prospect of Ultra Deluxe intrigued me. It represented an opportunity to provide a new experience, to build on what came before, and make a case for Stanley Parable still being relevant, over a decade after the original mod came out. Perhaps I built some unrealistic expectations for it going in, as I did honestly think that a Rebuild of Stanley Parable was the right step to take for this, and I remember feeling similarly deflated by the steam release of Stanley hewing so close to the original mod, but regardless, The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe arrives with the enthusiastic impact of a wet fart in an empty room, not so much making a case for the relevance of the work in 2022 as making a supreme demonstration for it's growing irrelevance.
What we have here is an acceptable repackaging of the original game (with some pluses being options to sidestep some of the edgier stuff in the original release, namely the unbearably cringeworthy suicide sequence, and some minuses being the stripping out of jokes in the subtitles and the loss of the language of jokes that Source familiarity provided) alongside some, on the whole, pretty dire new content. Teeth-grindingly ancient observations on collectibles and DLC that would make CTRL+ALT+DEL groan paired with the Bucket. The fucking bucket. All the bucket stuff is absolutely unbearable humor that felt like being trapped in 2012-era reddit with people going on about narwhals and bacon. The superfluity of The Bucket Arc is clearly an argument about the futility of adding extra content in a re-release, but you still went and did it, and it was shit. It's satirical bent never rises above putting a dunce hat on itself and going "look at how dumb we're being". Ultra Deluxe has the same problem as Stanley Parable proper: it cannot help but slam you in the face with it's Point and it's Jokes, and when those land it works, but in Ultra Deluxe they almost never do, so you're just left trudging through a tediously unfunny experience reliving 2015 neoGAF in the most agonizing manner imaginable.
Ultra Deluxe is not without merit: there are truly talented artists and level designers at Crows Crows Crows, and they've crafted some really amazing spaces here. It's something they're really great at: their online multiplayer game/space TheClub.zone (which was shut down to give them time to develop this lol) is proof positive of that. But underneath the enormous weight of The Writing, they're never allowed to live, to breathe beyond the confines of The Writing's vehicle, and unfortunately, The Writing here is crap. It's as simple as that.
I wanted Ultra Deluxe to let me love Stanley Parable again. To prove once and for all that it has stood the test of time, that it does have a worthwhile place in video games and video game culture. But after seeing everything Ultra Deluxe has to offer, all I can do is sigh wearily, and type my review, which is as follows.
(ahem)
"Reddit Game."
One might reasonably ask why such an aging process has harmed Stanley when it hasn't harmed other games on quite the same level, and my argument for that would be that Stanley, to use a memetic phrase devoid of meaning, insists upon itself. There's little room for interpretation or multifaceted interpretation of it: Stanley Parable is a two-dimensional game, and what I mean by that is that it works on two dimensions: the jokes, and the commentary. There aren't really any other characters or themes or aesthetic twists and flourishes to appreciate: it's a game that is very blunt about what it's saying, and doesn't really have anything to it other than that. Which is fine! Really! But it kinda relies on the things it's saying being really good, and maybe they were, once on the facepunch forums or on ModDb. But now? Not so much.
Which is why the prospect of Ultra Deluxe intrigued me. It represented an opportunity to provide a new experience, to build on what came before, and make a case for Stanley Parable still being relevant, over a decade after the original mod came out. Perhaps I built some unrealistic expectations for it going in, as I did honestly think that a Rebuild of Stanley Parable was the right step to take for this, and I remember feeling similarly deflated by the steam release of Stanley hewing so close to the original mod, but regardless, The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe arrives with the enthusiastic impact of a wet fart in an empty room, not so much making a case for the relevance of the work in 2022 as making a supreme demonstration for it's growing irrelevance.
What we have here is an acceptable repackaging of the original game (with some pluses being options to sidestep some of the edgier stuff in the original release, namely the unbearably cringeworthy suicide sequence, and some minuses being the stripping out of jokes in the subtitles and the loss of the language of jokes that Source familiarity provided) alongside some, on the whole, pretty dire new content. Teeth-grindingly ancient observations on collectibles and DLC that would make CTRL+ALT+DEL groan paired with the Bucket. The fucking bucket. All the bucket stuff is absolutely unbearable humor that felt like being trapped in 2012-era reddit with people going on about narwhals and bacon. The superfluity of The Bucket Arc is clearly an argument about the futility of adding extra content in a re-release, but you still went and did it, and it was shit. It's satirical bent never rises above putting a dunce hat on itself and going "look at how dumb we're being". Ultra Deluxe has the same problem as Stanley Parable proper: it cannot help but slam you in the face with it's Point and it's Jokes, and when those land it works, but in Ultra Deluxe they almost never do, so you're just left trudging through a tediously unfunny experience reliving 2015 neoGAF in the most agonizing manner imaginable.
Ultra Deluxe is not without merit: there are truly talented artists and level designers at Crows Crows Crows, and they've crafted some really amazing spaces here. It's something they're really great at: their online multiplayer game/space TheClub.zone (which was shut down to give them time to develop this lol) is proof positive of that. But underneath the enormous weight of The Writing, they're never allowed to live, to breathe beyond the confines of The Writing's vehicle, and unfortunately, The Writing here is crap. It's as simple as that.
I wanted Ultra Deluxe to let me love Stanley Parable again. To prove once and for all that it has stood the test of time, that it does have a worthwhile place in video games and video game culture. But after seeing everything Ultra Deluxe has to offer, all I can do is sigh wearily, and type my review, which is as follows.
(ahem)
"Reddit Game."
2000
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
04. kohta / "euphoria"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
last year, I played Astro's Playroom, the PS5 pack-in game. it was ok. i was immensely endeared to the way it posited itself as taking place "inside" your PS5, which i thought was a great conceit for kids to enjoy a prohibitively scarce piece of tech that is being taken out of their reach by assholes like me who aren't so much interested in the games available on it now but in the promise of games to come out in the future (Final Fantasy XVI) while they complain about how bad the Demon's Souls Remake looks.
the most interesting part of it, though, was it's reverential references towards the past of playstation, in ways that sit increasingly strangely with me. Certainly, sony acknowledging that they have a past was a breath of fresh air against their landmark launch title, the aforementioned Demon's Souls remake, speaking to a greater desire to obliterate the past with the gleeful cooperation of myriad voices in the industry. but as a launch title, as something that is designed to get you excited about playstation 5, it feels like a strange foot to put forward, spending so much time in the past rather than on the exciting future playstation 5 has to offer. maybe that's because there is no vision for what the future looks like, certainly not a vision that we'd like to live in. what's coming out for the PS5? what does it have to offer? i can't tell, and astro's playroom couldn't either.
Ridge Racer V is not a pack-in game, but it has the essential soul of one. released in 2000 alongside the playstation 2, the year that Ridge Racer Type-4 rang in ahead of schedule, RRV's jaw-droppingly sick UI, smooth rounded Y2K futurism feels molded around the PS2 and it's dashboard, an atmospheric place that feels most at home in the dead of night when everyone else has gone to bed. the use of the PS2's system configuration aesthetic in the save menu clinches it: this is a game intrinsically linked with the PS2, set inside it just like Astro is set inside the PS5, to such an extent that playing it on emulator felt wrong to me, and compelled me to seek out a physical copy and find a way to hook up my PS2 to a TV that has outmoded it to the point of needing a technological prothesis to facilitate communication between the two. the game's use of a a singular, compact space only enhances this sensation: these are the streets of the PS2, a city of pristine tarmac and glass monoliths that reflect the rays of the sun onto the streets, empty save for the machines that ride through them and give them life.
it is a game not only about the PS2 and why you should feel great about having spent money on one, but also about the promise the PS2 represents, about the future it represents, and what it means to be here. in many ways, this makes it the philosophical antithesis to Astro: a game that never once looks in the rear-view mirror for more than a second.
to underline this point, we must look at the front-cover star: ai fukami. reiko nagase was only in ridge racer for a couple installments, but already her presence was ingrained enough in the minds of ridgeheads that her replacement immediately produced frustration and rejection. but her replacement was purposeful. this is a new ridge racer for the new millennium. we're not going to keep anything, even the fake cgi girl you like.
the racing itself is similar kinesthetically to R4 but in practice feels almost completely different. if R4 was about pushing your machine through ultimately forgiving tracks to hit the front of the pack, then RRV is a game of perfection, of mastery of it's language of curves and bends and aggressive opponents, who no longer exist as obstacles to be passed like the wind but as snarling competitors who can and will leave you in the dust if you make even a single mistake. a single graze against a single wall is all it can take to leave you out of the race: nothing less than fluency can be accepted.
this is the future. this is what it is like. it will not wait for you, and will not carry you forward into it. sink or swim. adapt or die.
and i love it. i'm shit at it, don't get me wrong. this is second only to F-Zero GX in terms of sheer difficulty i've experienced in a racing game, it took me hours to complete the first grand prix on the normal difficulty level, but that's why i like RRV, for reasons quite apart from why I like R4. it's a game that demands something totally different, and something that I relish to give it, a sense of mastery buoyed by the genius decision to repeat curves and straights and corners across multiple tracks, simulating the sense of growing mastery in a series that would otherwise risk bringing you back down to zero with a single new track that doesn't gel with you. even when you're on a new grand prix, you know that corner coming up. you know what to do. you're ready.
it's still really, really hard. but no one said that forging a future, staying alive in it, would be easy. lord knows we all struggle enough in the future we've found ourselves in.
racing through ridge city at night on solitary time attack roads made me strangely sad. not because i wasn't enjoying myself, but because i realized that i miss this. i miss this feeling, the feeling that the future is here and god we are so excited that it's here, i miss the boundless optimism we had about how the internet would change the way we talk and think and connect us like never before, before we started talking about hellsites and posting and post-post-post-post-post-ironic self loathing. i miss the sheer unbridled enthusiasm for mobile phones, of cloud strife in advent children whipping one out being given the same triumphant framing as arthur pulling the sword from the stone. i miss when launch titles were so brazenly about the future instead of desperate attempts to relive the past. despite never playing it till this year, i miss Ridge Racer V. i miss PlayOnline. i miss dot hack. i miss The 25th Ward. i miss The Bouncer.
god, do i miss The Bouncer.
i recognise that this is oxymoronic, contradictory, to pine nostalgically for a sense of anti-nostalgia futurist optimism that burned out two decades prior, but i can't help but feel this. i've become more and more invested and interested in this kind of early 2000s futurism over the past year, and more and more eager to find the way it makes me feel in my daily life. because I think we might have done this to ourselves. i see it in how the people i know who are most jaded about Online are the people who actively seek out people to be miserable and angry at, consciously or otherwise. i see it in how we characterize our phones as evil bricks that siphon away our life even when they offer us the world in our hands. i see it in myself, and the way i engage with this website, hyper-focusing on interactions that make me feel miserable and worthless instead of the majority of warm, lovely people i interact with on here.
i'm not advocating for a removal of critical thought, here. there are critiques to be made of all of these things and reasons for why these resentments and frustrations spring. there are a great many things wrong with the internet - and the world at large - right now. but what i do want is to be more optimistic. i want to find that hope that there is a brighter future, that technology can connect us in ways that are positively transformative, and that we can transcend the now and race into a brighter tomorrow, together.
i've been trying to write a book for...too many years now. it's always in mind - not a single day goes by where i don't pore over it in depth in my head. it's about the world, and how i feel about living in it, about two people who are aware that they are living in the last days of the world and how they come to terms with that. because that's how i feel, all the time. my cringe bio on backloggd i've had for a year now is how i feel: stuck at the end of everything, playing video games. and that isn't necessarily a statement of hopelessness: i do think that the world we live in now is corrupt and evil. but it's only ever the end that i think about, there is never a thought about what comes after. that's why the book has remained mostly unwritten: i don't know how it ends. i don't know what comes after this world. but i think i would like to start trying to imagine it, if i can. to change my perspective so that i do not look on the future with an eagerness for the end, but with an excitement for what comes after that.
i want to find that world. i want to find that tomorrow to believe in, the one that Astro's Playroom couldn't discover, but one far away from the world Ridge Racer V arrived in. i don't think i can find it here, and i don't think i can find it now. but, still. i want to believe in it. because sony computer entertainment sure as hell doesn't.
04. kohta / "euphoria"
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last year, I played Astro's Playroom, the PS5 pack-in game. it was ok. i was immensely endeared to the way it posited itself as taking place "inside" your PS5, which i thought was a great conceit for kids to enjoy a prohibitively scarce piece of tech that is being taken out of their reach by assholes like me who aren't so much interested in the games available on it now but in the promise of games to come out in the future (Final Fantasy XVI) while they complain about how bad the Demon's Souls Remake looks.
the most interesting part of it, though, was it's reverential references towards the past of playstation, in ways that sit increasingly strangely with me. Certainly, sony acknowledging that they have a past was a breath of fresh air against their landmark launch title, the aforementioned Demon's Souls remake, speaking to a greater desire to obliterate the past with the gleeful cooperation of myriad voices in the industry. but as a launch title, as something that is designed to get you excited about playstation 5, it feels like a strange foot to put forward, spending so much time in the past rather than on the exciting future playstation 5 has to offer. maybe that's because there is no vision for what the future looks like, certainly not a vision that we'd like to live in. what's coming out for the PS5? what does it have to offer? i can't tell, and astro's playroom couldn't either.
Ridge Racer V is not a pack-in game, but it has the essential soul of one. released in 2000 alongside the playstation 2, the year that Ridge Racer Type-4 rang in ahead of schedule, RRV's jaw-droppingly sick UI, smooth rounded Y2K futurism feels molded around the PS2 and it's dashboard, an atmospheric place that feels most at home in the dead of night when everyone else has gone to bed. the use of the PS2's system configuration aesthetic in the save menu clinches it: this is a game intrinsically linked with the PS2, set inside it just like Astro is set inside the PS5, to such an extent that playing it on emulator felt wrong to me, and compelled me to seek out a physical copy and find a way to hook up my PS2 to a TV that has outmoded it to the point of needing a technological prothesis to facilitate communication between the two. the game's use of a a singular, compact space only enhances this sensation: these are the streets of the PS2, a city of pristine tarmac and glass monoliths that reflect the rays of the sun onto the streets, empty save for the machines that ride through them and give them life.
it is a game not only about the PS2 and why you should feel great about having spent money on one, but also about the promise the PS2 represents, about the future it represents, and what it means to be here. in many ways, this makes it the philosophical antithesis to Astro: a game that never once looks in the rear-view mirror for more than a second.
to underline this point, we must look at the front-cover star: ai fukami. reiko nagase was only in ridge racer for a couple installments, but already her presence was ingrained enough in the minds of ridgeheads that her replacement immediately produced frustration and rejection. but her replacement was purposeful. this is a new ridge racer for the new millennium. we're not going to keep anything, even the fake cgi girl you like.
the racing itself is similar kinesthetically to R4 but in practice feels almost completely different. if R4 was about pushing your machine through ultimately forgiving tracks to hit the front of the pack, then RRV is a game of perfection, of mastery of it's language of curves and bends and aggressive opponents, who no longer exist as obstacles to be passed like the wind but as snarling competitors who can and will leave you in the dust if you make even a single mistake. a single graze against a single wall is all it can take to leave you out of the race: nothing less than fluency can be accepted.
this is the future. this is what it is like. it will not wait for you, and will not carry you forward into it. sink or swim. adapt or die.
and i love it. i'm shit at it, don't get me wrong. this is second only to F-Zero GX in terms of sheer difficulty i've experienced in a racing game, it took me hours to complete the first grand prix on the normal difficulty level, but that's why i like RRV, for reasons quite apart from why I like R4. it's a game that demands something totally different, and something that I relish to give it, a sense of mastery buoyed by the genius decision to repeat curves and straights and corners across multiple tracks, simulating the sense of growing mastery in a series that would otherwise risk bringing you back down to zero with a single new track that doesn't gel with you. even when you're on a new grand prix, you know that corner coming up. you know what to do. you're ready.
it's still really, really hard. but no one said that forging a future, staying alive in it, would be easy. lord knows we all struggle enough in the future we've found ourselves in.
racing through ridge city at night on solitary time attack roads made me strangely sad. not because i wasn't enjoying myself, but because i realized that i miss this. i miss this feeling, the feeling that the future is here and god we are so excited that it's here, i miss the boundless optimism we had about how the internet would change the way we talk and think and connect us like never before, before we started talking about hellsites and posting and post-post-post-post-post-ironic self loathing. i miss the sheer unbridled enthusiasm for mobile phones, of cloud strife in advent children whipping one out being given the same triumphant framing as arthur pulling the sword from the stone. i miss when launch titles were so brazenly about the future instead of desperate attempts to relive the past. despite never playing it till this year, i miss Ridge Racer V. i miss PlayOnline. i miss dot hack. i miss The 25th Ward. i miss The Bouncer.
god, do i miss The Bouncer.
i recognise that this is oxymoronic, contradictory, to pine nostalgically for a sense of anti-nostalgia futurist optimism that burned out two decades prior, but i can't help but feel this. i've become more and more invested and interested in this kind of early 2000s futurism over the past year, and more and more eager to find the way it makes me feel in my daily life. because I think we might have done this to ourselves. i see it in how the people i know who are most jaded about Online are the people who actively seek out people to be miserable and angry at, consciously or otherwise. i see it in how we characterize our phones as evil bricks that siphon away our life even when they offer us the world in our hands. i see it in myself, and the way i engage with this website, hyper-focusing on interactions that make me feel miserable and worthless instead of the majority of warm, lovely people i interact with on here.
i'm not advocating for a removal of critical thought, here. there are critiques to be made of all of these things and reasons for why these resentments and frustrations spring. there are a great many things wrong with the internet - and the world at large - right now. but what i do want is to be more optimistic. i want to find that hope that there is a brighter future, that technology can connect us in ways that are positively transformative, and that we can transcend the now and race into a brighter tomorrow, together.
i've been trying to write a book for...too many years now. it's always in mind - not a single day goes by where i don't pore over it in depth in my head. it's about the world, and how i feel about living in it, about two people who are aware that they are living in the last days of the world and how they come to terms with that. because that's how i feel, all the time. my cringe bio on backloggd i've had for a year now is how i feel: stuck at the end of everything, playing video games. and that isn't necessarily a statement of hopelessness: i do think that the world we live in now is corrupt and evil. but it's only ever the end that i think about, there is never a thought about what comes after. that's why the book has remained mostly unwritten: i don't know how it ends. i don't know what comes after this world. but i think i would like to start trying to imagine it, if i can. to change my perspective so that i do not look on the future with an eagerness for the end, but with an excitement for what comes after that.
i want to find that world. i want to find that tomorrow to believe in, the one that Astro's Playroom couldn't discover, but one far away from the world Ridge Racer V arrived in. i don't think i can find it here, and i don't think i can find it now. but, still. i want to believe in it. because sony computer entertainment sure as hell doesn't.
not only is melee island one of the video game spaces that i truly want to visit, it really feels like a place i could visit, because it's such a consciously artificial place staffed by jaded workers who are barely interested in maintaining the image of a pirate cove for the latest clueless wide-eyed sap to wander into, and that feels more real and true than any game about a mystical world of pirate lore could possibly be.
the stories this is riffing on - robinson crusoe, treasure island, pirates of the caribbean the ride - are all positively ancient, and are as ramshackle and weary as Melee Island is itself, an island trapped in a cynical world of t-shirt prizes, used car salesmen barely maintaining the facade of their role on the stage, and guys in bars who would much rather be talking about LOOM, the revolutionary new game from LucasArts that boasts a serious and complex fantasy story that uses its experimental interface, to eschew the traditional paradigm of graphical adventures than the tired old pirate role they're trapped in.
time has left a lot of these jokes languishing in the same contextless past that they originally drew on, but the greatest joke of all, the joke of this ridiculous fake invention of what a Pirate was that never had any basis in history, being perpetuated long past the point of relevancy by a staff that truly doesn't really care, has aged like the finest vintage now that disney is the one maintaining melee island.
game kind of falls part imo once you actually reach the titular island but everyone should visit Melee Island at least once in their life. the sets are held together with duct tape and string and the refurbishment job they've done is deeply suspect, but it's still a once-in-a-lifetime destination. just be sure to keep the visitor's guide handy.
the stories this is riffing on - robinson crusoe, treasure island, pirates of the caribbean the ride - are all positively ancient, and are as ramshackle and weary as Melee Island is itself, an island trapped in a cynical world of t-shirt prizes, used car salesmen barely maintaining the facade of their role on the stage, and guys in bars who would much rather be talking about LOOM, the revolutionary new game from LucasArts that boasts a serious and complex fantasy story that uses its experimental interface, to eschew the traditional paradigm of graphical adventures than the tired old pirate role they're trapped in.
time has left a lot of these jokes languishing in the same contextless past that they originally drew on, but the greatest joke of all, the joke of this ridiculous fake invention of what a Pirate was that never had any basis in history, being perpetuated long past the point of relevancy by a staff that truly doesn't really care, has aged like the finest vintage now that disney is the one maintaining melee island.
game kind of falls part imo once you actually reach the titular island but everyone should visit Melee Island at least once in their life. the sets are held together with duct tape and string and the refurbishment job they've done is deeply suspect, but it's still a once-in-a-lifetime destination. just be sure to keep the visitor's guide handy.
2011
in contrast to it's reputation in some circles as a sophisticated and unapproachable masterwork that only the most capable in the medium can dare claim to have really conquered, revisiting dark souls in 2022 has the same essential feel as revisiting elric of melnibone in the same year. dark souls is pure pulp fantasy, absolutely lascivious in it's enthusiasm to play the hits and delight in the playing of them. there's no attempt to hide the basic moods and beats the game is playing, instead it simply enjoys the classics with an infectious delight. about the only thing that isn't pulp about dark souls' fantasy is the sexism, which is mostly just deeply boring and conservative instead of being as weird and outrageous as a lot of those old paperbacks could be.
undead burg. darkroot basin. lord of light. the abyss. the dark. fire. the sun. demon ruins. Big Hat Logan. fuckin blighttown. it's deeply mundane in a way that really works. there's no Tarnished-esqe straining towards the illusion of novelty when there is none, none of the worldbuilding has any facade or pretense to it, it is what it is on the tin, which is exactly the spirit of a pulp novel that promises swords and legends and tits and proceeds to deliver exactly that, but with a visual artistry and methodically slow pace that all but forces the player to take the time to appreciate why we like these base concepts in the first place. getting Cursed in The Depths and having to spend not-inconsiderable time on a grueling backtrack up to The Undead Parish to talk to Oswald to get it cured is not a traditionally "fun" or "novel" journey but it is one that invites consideration of every step of that journey. it is sophisticated appreciation of "junk food" art, and that is just quintessential Video Games to me.
the game's writing is (mostly) wonderfully unpretentious, in stark contrast to it's most ardent fans, fans who have done a tremendous disservice to the game's narrative by archiving it in the form of videos and wikis that tear it from the aforementioned pacing and stunning visual direction that brings it life and meaning. a lore wiki about the primorial serpent kaathe and his darkstalkers in the abyss would read like the rote fantasy claptrap that it ultimately fundamentally is, but the way the game deploys it, the way it hides Kaathe and what he has to say from the standard progression of the journey of the Chosen, the way the Abyss and the Dark is depicted as a literally blank void, a Nothingness that exists totally apart from our conception of the world as we can possibly conceive of it, that is what makes these concepts compelling.
though admittedly, the game hardly does itself any favors in the honestly quite weak DLC, which recasts the Dark from a compelling evocation of the unknown, and literalizes it as a Spooky Cave with a Fucked Up Guy inside that spreads Corruption Juice that turns people into Monsters. dark souls works because it puts in the work to make concepts like this visually and poetically compelling, but the dlc is much more traditionally interested in the exposition of Lore as a beginning and end, and demonstrates the very thin line between Compelling Pulp Fantasy and Drearily Rote Pulp Fantasy. artorias of the abyss, for better or worse, for good or ill, feels completely haunted by the future of Fromsoft, and feels at odds with what I found so loveable about dark souls upon this revisit.
the story and world of dark souls is nothing you haven't seen before if you're even lightly read in fantasy and mythical literature. but because it deeply invests in the presentation of and love of these things without pretension or subversion, through the delightfully shonky and functional UI and the warm PS3 sheen, it works. dark souls knows that sometimes, we just want to read about elric of melnibone, the eternal champion, brooding on his ruby throne while the Lord of Dragon Cave scowls from across the court. i don't think i'll ever love it like i love it's younger, weirder, rougher, moodier sibling, but it'll always make me smile.
undead burg. darkroot basin. lord of light. the abyss. the dark. fire. the sun. demon ruins. Big Hat Logan. fuckin blighttown. it's deeply mundane in a way that really works. there's no Tarnished-esqe straining towards the illusion of novelty when there is none, none of the worldbuilding has any facade or pretense to it, it is what it is on the tin, which is exactly the spirit of a pulp novel that promises swords and legends and tits and proceeds to deliver exactly that, but with a visual artistry and methodically slow pace that all but forces the player to take the time to appreciate why we like these base concepts in the first place. getting Cursed in The Depths and having to spend not-inconsiderable time on a grueling backtrack up to The Undead Parish to talk to Oswald to get it cured is not a traditionally "fun" or "novel" journey but it is one that invites consideration of every step of that journey. it is sophisticated appreciation of "junk food" art, and that is just quintessential Video Games to me.
the game's writing is (mostly) wonderfully unpretentious, in stark contrast to it's most ardent fans, fans who have done a tremendous disservice to the game's narrative by archiving it in the form of videos and wikis that tear it from the aforementioned pacing and stunning visual direction that brings it life and meaning. a lore wiki about the primorial serpent kaathe and his darkstalkers in the abyss would read like the rote fantasy claptrap that it ultimately fundamentally is, but the way the game deploys it, the way it hides Kaathe and what he has to say from the standard progression of the journey of the Chosen, the way the Abyss and the Dark is depicted as a literally blank void, a Nothingness that exists totally apart from our conception of the world as we can possibly conceive of it, that is what makes these concepts compelling.
though admittedly, the game hardly does itself any favors in the honestly quite weak DLC, which recasts the Dark from a compelling evocation of the unknown, and literalizes it as a Spooky Cave with a Fucked Up Guy inside that spreads Corruption Juice that turns people into Monsters. dark souls works because it puts in the work to make concepts like this visually and poetically compelling, but the dlc is much more traditionally interested in the exposition of Lore as a beginning and end, and demonstrates the very thin line between Compelling Pulp Fantasy and Drearily Rote Pulp Fantasy. artorias of the abyss, for better or worse, for good or ill, feels completely haunted by the future of Fromsoft, and feels at odds with what I found so loveable about dark souls upon this revisit.
the story and world of dark souls is nothing you haven't seen before if you're even lightly read in fantasy and mythical literature. but because it deeply invests in the presentation of and love of these things without pretension or subversion, through the delightfully shonky and functional UI and the warm PS3 sheen, it works. dark souls knows that sometimes, we just want to read about elric of melnibone, the eternal champion, brooding on his ruby throne while the Lord of Dragon Cave scowls from across the court. i don't think i'll ever love it like i love it's younger, weirder, rougher, moodier sibling, but it'll always make me smile.
one of gaming's all-time great punchlines is how this is, to this day, one of the most technically fraught and unstable games ever made, chugging and stuttering on computers made nearly 20 years after it's release, where the game will, at every loading screen crash and then reload itself in the new area just to keep the memory leak from crashing your whole PC, and then you see the majesty, the sheer ambition of Downtown Seattle that this game struggles so hard to render...is like three rooms where if you look at a lightbulb the framerate is halved. genuine comedy gold.
only other real reason to play this is to witness how The Bush Years hit Deus Ex so hard. any semblance of rebellion or hope from the original's world has been stripped away completely, Alex D is a remorseless gun for hire without any of the charm of JC Denton, well-meaning terrorists like Tracer Tong from the original are suddenly apologetic state actors utterly condemnatory about their past dreams of a world free from the yoke of megacorps and fascism, and where any path not based in the perpetuity of the american empire will lead to the actual destruction of humanity. either With Us or Against Us indeed. the possibility for subversion, either narratively or experientially, is crushed underfoot by this contrition to the status quo and the obscenely narrow level design. as a game about Choice and Consequence and Freedom it's a disaster, but as a game about the lack of those things, about living in Francis Fukuyama's End of History? Invisible War can only be called a tremendous success.
don't know if i would call this a good game, exactly, but it is a deeply fascinating one. i think the ideology it espouses is truly evil but as a game design object I have to recognize the care and attention to which the game goes about communicating it. each deus ex game is a fascinating time capsule of the moment in which it was made, for good and ill, and this one is maybe the most unhinged and weird of them all. would love to give it a full proper replay to pick over it in greater detail but that would require it not crashing my computer every 25 minu-
only other real reason to play this is to witness how The Bush Years hit Deus Ex so hard. any semblance of rebellion or hope from the original's world has been stripped away completely, Alex D is a remorseless gun for hire without any of the charm of JC Denton, well-meaning terrorists like Tracer Tong from the original are suddenly apologetic state actors utterly condemnatory about their past dreams of a world free from the yoke of megacorps and fascism, and where any path not based in the perpetuity of the american empire will lead to the actual destruction of humanity. either With Us or Against Us indeed. the possibility for subversion, either narratively or experientially, is crushed underfoot by this contrition to the status quo and the obscenely narrow level design. as a game about Choice and Consequence and Freedom it's a disaster, but as a game about the lack of those things, about living in Francis Fukuyama's End of History? Invisible War can only be called a tremendous success.
don't know if i would call this a good game, exactly, but it is a deeply fascinating one. i think the ideology it espouses is truly evil but as a game design object I have to recognize the care and attention to which the game goes about communicating it. each deus ex game is a fascinating time capsule of the moment in which it was made, for good and ill, and this one is maybe the most unhinged and weird of them all. would love to give it a full proper replay to pick over it in greater detail but that would require it not crashing my computer every 25 minu-
a more confident, accomplished, and nuanced use of deliberately tedious game mechanics than almost any other game yet made, that will struggle to be popularly recognized as such because it stars mickey mouse and tetsuya nomura OCs, and also because square enix have done their best to erase the actual game from existence and leave only a bad compilation movie in its place.
uses the framework of daily missions handed out by actively malicious older men exploiting the identity crises and ennui of teenagers to explore the simple but ever-present existential nightmare that is Work, the hold it has over our lives and the fact that we're just expected to Deal With It without any reason or justification, as well as the uniquely cruel violence of enforced identity society enacts on the young. all this and one of the medium's best accidental trans narratives. if this had Grasshopper Manufacture's logo on it instead of H.A.N.D we'd be neck-deep in thinkpieces every single day.
the co-op multiplayer is neat but also extremely baffling for a game that is Like This. imagine if Pathologic 2 had a separate co-op mode where the Bachelor, Harsupex, and Changeling ran through the termitary competing for a high score and that's the vibe
uses the framework of daily missions handed out by actively malicious older men exploiting the identity crises and ennui of teenagers to explore the simple but ever-present existential nightmare that is Work, the hold it has over our lives and the fact that we're just expected to Deal With It without any reason or justification, as well as the uniquely cruel violence of enforced identity society enacts on the young. all this and one of the medium's best accidental trans narratives. if this had Grasshopper Manufacture's logo on it instead of H.A.N.D we'd be neck-deep in thinkpieces every single day.
the co-op multiplayer is neat but also extremely baffling for a game that is Like This. imagine if Pathologic 2 had a separate co-op mode where the Bachelor, Harsupex, and Changeling ran through the termitary competing for a high score and that's the vibe
2022
This review contains spoilers
"You have died, and the Nexus has trapped your soul."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
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CW: Brief discussion on the game's use of rape
In Elden Ring, you can never discover anything once. That was the thought that entered my head early in the experience and never quite left it. One of the most evocative parts of the game's genuinely stunning art direction is the walking cathedral, a strange and arresting colossus that stumbles across the Weeping Peninsula, each step ringing the bell that hangs beneath its torso. It was a sight of strange, beautiful magic, the kind of which these games have been good at in the past.
Except, to describe this creature in the singular would be inaccurate. Because Walking Cathedrals appear all over the world of Elden Ring, each one identical in appearance, each one performing an identical, express mechanical function for the player. This cannot be left alone as a strange, unique beast, it has to be reduced to a Type of Content a player can engage with over and over again for a characterless transaction of pure mechanics. It is the excitement of coming across something esoteric that the Souls games have made a core part of their identity, utterly commodified and made into the exact same arc that applied to Assassin's Creed the moment climbing a tower to survey the environment and taking a leap of faith into a haystack below shifted from an exciting and evocative moment into a rote and tiresome mechanical interaction.
Because, that's right everyone, Dark Souls Is Now Open World. Not an open world in the same way that Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, or Dark Souls II were, where you could freely venture down different paths to different bosses and take things in an order outside of the game's expected leveling curve. No, this is an Open World as we understand it today: an enormous ocean of discrete repeated Activities dotted with islands of meaningful bespoke design. There's plenty of stuff to do in this world, but it's all of a specific type - in a catacomb you will navigate stone gargoyles and chalice dungeon designs to a lever that will open a door near the entrance that will contain a boss that you've likely found elsewhere in the world, and will be filled with stone gargoyles. Mines will be filled with mining rock-people and upgrade materials. Towers will have you find three spectral creatures around them in order to open them up and obtain a new Memory Slot. Camps will contain a patrolling enemy type and some loot. Even genuinely enchanting vistas and environments get their space to be repeated in slight variations. Boss battles too will be repeated endlessly, time and time again, with delightful designs like the Watchdog tragically becoming something I sighed and was annoyed to see crop up half-a-dozen times over the course of the adventure, and I was truly, deeply annoyed at fighting no less than about ten or twelve Erdtree Avatars and Dragons, with whom the moves never change and the fight plays out the exact same way every single time.
The first time I discovered these things, I was surprised, delighted even, but by even the second time, the truth that these are copied-and-pasted across the entirety of the Lands Between in order to pad it out became readily apparent, and eventually worn away even the enthusiasm of that first encounter. When I look back on my genuine enjoyment of the first battle with the Erdtree Avatar, I can only feel like an idiot for not realizing that this fight would be repeated verbatim over and over and become less fun every single time. When you've seen one, you've really seen all of them, and this means that by the time you leave Limgrave, you've already seen everything the Open World has to offer.
This is, of course, to be expected. Open world games simply have to do this. They are an enormous effort to bring into life, and the realities of game production mean that unless you're willing to spend decades on one game, you're going to have to be thrifty with how you produce content. I expect this, I understand this. Fallout: New Vegas is probably my favorite Open World game, but its world is also filled with this template design. But what's to be gained from this in a Dark Souls game? Unlike contemporaries like Breath of the Wild, your verbs of interaction in these games are frighteningly limited, with almost all of the experience boiling down to fighting enemies, and without a variety of interactions, the lack of variety in the huge amounts of content stands out all the more. Does fighting the same boss over and over and traversing the same cave over and over make Souls better? Even if you choose to just ignore all of these parts of the Open World (which is far easier said than done, as due to a very harsh leveling curve and the scarcity of crucial weapon upgrade materials outside of The Mines, the game's design absolutely pushes towards you engaging in these repetitious activities), the Legacy Dungeons that comprise the game's bespoke content are functionally completely separate from the Open World, with not even your Horse permitted to enter. This is no Burnout: Paradise or Xenoblade Chronicles X, which retooled the core gameplay loop to one where the open world was absolutely core to the design: this is a series of middling Dark Souls levels scattered among an open world no different from games like Far Cry or Horizon: Zero Dawn that many Souls fans have historically looked down on, and the game is only worse for it.
NPC storylines in particular suffer massively, as the chances of you stumbling upon these characters, already often quite annoying in past games, are so low as to practically require a wiki if you want to see the end of multiple questlines. However, that assumes that you will want to see the end of these stories and that you are invested in this world, and I decidedly Was Not. Souls games have always had suspect things in them that have gone largely uninterrogated but Elden Ring really brings that ugliness to the surface, with rape being an annoyingly present aspect of the backstories of many characters, and even having multiple characters threaten to rape you, none of which is deployed in a way that is meaningful and is just insufferable edgelord fantasy writing, and the same could be said of the grimdark incest-laden backstory, the deeply suspect trans panic writing surrounding one of the characters, and the enthusiastic use of Fantasy Racism tropes in the form of the Demi-Humans. I remain convinced that George RR Martin's involvement in this game was little more than a cynical publicity stunt, but certainly the game's writing indulges in many of that man's worst excesses, whilst having almost none of his strengths.
None of this is to say that Elden Ring is devoid of enjoyment. While the fact that it did hit just in time for a manic-depressive mood that made me perfectly suited to play a game I could just mindlessly play for a couple of weeks, I did see it through to the end in that time, even if I did rush to the end after a certain point. From Software's artists remain some of the best in the industry, with some incredible environments and boss designs that deserve Olympic gold medals for how much heavy-lifting they're doing to keep the experience afloat. I loved being kidnapped by chests into other parts of the world, and I wish it happened more than a couple of front-loaded times. But the enjoyment I had in it never felt like stemmed from the open world, and even its highest points don't hang with the best bits of the prior installments. Stormveil is probably the level design highlight of the game but it already fades from my mind in comparison to the likes of Central Yharnam or the Undead Burg or the Dragon Shrine. Indeed, the fact that they exist as islands in an ocean of vacuous space between them precludes the so-called "Legacy Dungeons" of this game from having the satisfying loops and interconnections that are often the design highlights of prior entries. The bosses are a seriously uneven mixed bag as well; even setting aside the repetition, as the nasty trend of overturned bosses that started in Dark Souls III rears its unfortunate head again. The superboss Melania is an interesting design utterly ruined by her obscene damage output, and my personal highlight of the game, Starscourge Radagon, who is the only boss fight that felt like it played to the things that Elden Ring brought to the table, and is a moment among the series that the game can truly claim as it's very own...but the tuning of the fight prevented it from being the triumphant coming-together moment that it is clearly attempting for many of my friends, who left the fight feeling that it was just annoying and tedious. Modern From Software could never make a fight like Maiden Astrea again because they'd insist on making her really hard in a way that actively detracts from the emotional experience in the fight. Boss fights can be about more than just providing a challenge, and I think From has forgotten that.
Taken as a series of its legacy dungeons, of its finest moments, I think Elden Ring would only be a middling one of these games. The additions to the formula feel anemic and unbalanced, the multiplayer implementation is honestly a quite considerable step back from prior games (the decision to have the majority of invasions only occur during co-operation feels like an attempt to weed out trolls picking on weaker players but in reality what it does is make equal fights are next-to-impossible and put Seal-Clubbers in a place where they are the only players who can effectively invade, a completely baffling decision), but it's really the open world I keep coming back to as the reason this game doesn't work. Not only does it add nothing that wasn't already present in better ways in prior games, but it actively detracts from the experience. The promise of the Open World is one of discovery, of setting off in uncharted directions and finding something new, but do Open Worlds actually facilitate this any better than more linear games? I don't know if they do. I felt a sense of discovery and finding something in so many of these games, even the most linear ones, and felt it stronger because the game was able to use careful, meticulous level design to bring out those emotions. Walking out of a cave and seeing Irithyll of the Boreal Valley, or Dead Man's Wharf stretch out before me, were moments of genuine discovery, and they would not be improved if I found six more Dead Man's Wharfs throughout the game. Contrary to their promise, in my experience, the open world, rather than create a sense of discovery, undermine it due to the compromises necessary to create these worlds. All the openness does for your discoveries is let you approach them from a slightly different angle as everyone else.
That is, if you can even claim to have discovered anything in the first place. To call Elden Ring derivative of prior games in this milieu would be a gross understatement. I am far from the first person to note that the game's much-hyped worldbuilding is largely content to regurgitate Souls Tropes with the Proper Nouns replaced with much worse ones, but it goes beyond that - entire questlines, plot beats, character arcs, dungeon designs, enemies, and bosses are lifted wholesale from prior games practically verbatim. More often than not Elden Ring feels closer to a Greatest Hits album than a coherent piece in and of itself, a soulless and cynical repackaging of prior Souls Classics, irrevocably damaged by being torn from the original context from which they belonged. I'm not a fan of Dark Souls III, in part because it too is also a game that leans on repetition of prior games, but at the very least the game was about those repetitions, where yes, old areas and characters would be repeated, but at least it was thematically resonant with what the game was doing. Elden Ring can't even claim that. Whatever this shallow mess of a narrative, easily the worst of the franchise thus far by my reckoning, is going for, it is done no favors by being this stitched-together Frankenstein of Souls.
I was particularly shocked by the sheer ferocity with which the game steals from the fan-favorite Bloodborne. Quick, tell me if you've heard this one before: you encounter a hunched, bestial foe, who fights you with their fists, but once you get their health halfway down, the battle stops, a cutscene plays, where they speak coherently, summon a blade from their past, and stand with their former dignity restored, the music changes, and their name is revealed to be "X the Y Blade". Or what about a hub area, separated in its own liminal space from the rest of the map, that can be discovered in its True Form in the material world? What about when that hub area is wreathed in spectral flame and begins to burn as the final hours of the game is nigh? These are far from the only examples, as there are multiple enemies and ideas throughout the game that are shamelessly lifted from my personal favorite From Software effort, but these stand out as the most noxious of all, as they simply repeat beats that were effective in the game they originated from because the game was able to build to them and have them resonate with the rest of the experience. You cannot just graft things whole cloth from prior work onto a new one and expect it to work as a coherent piece, the very prospect is ridiculous.
When Elden Ring did all this, my jaw about hit the floor from the sheer unmitigated gall. When it chose to conclude itself with a straight-faced Moon Presence reference, complete with an arena that directly evokes the Hunter's Dream, I just had to laugh. The final statement the game made on itself, the bullet point it chose to put on the experience, was "Remember Bloodborne? That was good, wasn't it?" Because in many ways, that really was a perfect conclusion to this game.
While it would be a mistake to claim, as people seem increasingly eager to, that Souls emerged entirely out of the magical ocean that is Hidetaka Miyazaki's unparalleled genius or whatever, as these games have always drawn heavy inspiration from properties like Berserk, Book of the New Sun, and The Legend of Zelda, and were built on top of a framework clearly established by past Fromsoft series King's Field, the reason I think that myself and many others were initially enthralled by the promise of Demon's Souls or Dark Souls was because they were decidedly different. Their esoterica, willingness to buck modern design conventions and hugely evocative online elements were why these games set imaginations alight so strongly, and proved enormously influential for the past decade of game design.
Demon's Souls felt like something new. And while successive games in this series have felt far less fresh, none of them have felt as utterly exhausted as Elden Ring: a final statement from the designers and writers at From Software that they have officially Ran Out of Ideas, that the well has long gone dry, that all they can do is to hastily staple on the modern design trends they once rejected onto a formula that does not gel with them, and that they are wandering without life through a never-ending cycle of their own creation, branded by the Darksign. Perhaps it's no surprise that their least inventive, least consistent, and least creative game since Demon's Souls is also by far their most successful. Once From Software defied conventions and trends, and now, they are consumed by them.
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"You have died, and the Nexus has trapped your soul."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
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CW: Brief discussion on the game's use of rape
In Elden Ring, you can never discover anything once. That was the thought that entered my head early in the experience and never quite left it. One of the most evocative parts of the game's genuinely stunning art direction is the walking cathedral, a strange and arresting colossus that stumbles across the Weeping Peninsula, each step ringing the bell that hangs beneath its torso. It was a sight of strange, beautiful magic, the kind of which these games have been good at in the past.
Except, to describe this creature in the singular would be inaccurate. Because Walking Cathedrals appear all over the world of Elden Ring, each one identical in appearance, each one performing an identical, express mechanical function for the player. This cannot be left alone as a strange, unique beast, it has to be reduced to a Type of Content a player can engage with over and over again for a characterless transaction of pure mechanics. It is the excitement of coming across something esoteric that the Souls games have made a core part of their identity, utterly commodified and made into the exact same arc that applied to Assassin's Creed the moment climbing a tower to survey the environment and taking a leap of faith into a haystack below shifted from an exciting and evocative moment into a rote and tiresome mechanical interaction.
Because, that's right everyone, Dark Souls Is Now Open World. Not an open world in the same way that Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, or Dark Souls II were, where you could freely venture down different paths to different bosses and take things in an order outside of the game's expected leveling curve. No, this is an Open World as we understand it today: an enormous ocean of discrete repeated Activities dotted with islands of meaningful bespoke design. There's plenty of stuff to do in this world, but it's all of a specific type - in a catacomb you will navigate stone gargoyles and chalice dungeon designs to a lever that will open a door near the entrance that will contain a boss that you've likely found elsewhere in the world, and will be filled with stone gargoyles. Mines will be filled with mining rock-people and upgrade materials. Towers will have you find three spectral creatures around them in order to open them up and obtain a new Memory Slot. Camps will contain a patrolling enemy type and some loot. Even genuinely enchanting vistas and environments get their space to be repeated in slight variations. Boss battles too will be repeated endlessly, time and time again, with delightful designs like the Watchdog tragically becoming something I sighed and was annoyed to see crop up half-a-dozen times over the course of the adventure, and I was truly, deeply annoyed at fighting no less than about ten or twelve Erdtree Avatars and Dragons, with whom the moves never change and the fight plays out the exact same way every single time.
The first time I discovered these things, I was surprised, delighted even, but by even the second time, the truth that these are copied-and-pasted across the entirety of the Lands Between in order to pad it out became readily apparent, and eventually worn away even the enthusiasm of that first encounter. When I look back on my genuine enjoyment of the first battle with the Erdtree Avatar, I can only feel like an idiot for not realizing that this fight would be repeated verbatim over and over and become less fun every single time. When you've seen one, you've really seen all of them, and this means that by the time you leave Limgrave, you've already seen everything the Open World has to offer.
This is, of course, to be expected. Open world games simply have to do this. They are an enormous effort to bring into life, and the realities of game production mean that unless you're willing to spend decades on one game, you're going to have to be thrifty with how you produce content. I expect this, I understand this. Fallout: New Vegas is probably my favorite Open World game, but its world is also filled with this template design. But what's to be gained from this in a Dark Souls game? Unlike contemporaries like Breath of the Wild, your verbs of interaction in these games are frighteningly limited, with almost all of the experience boiling down to fighting enemies, and without a variety of interactions, the lack of variety in the huge amounts of content stands out all the more. Does fighting the same boss over and over and traversing the same cave over and over make Souls better? Even if you choose to just ignore all of these parts of the Open World (which is far easier said than done, as due to a very harsh leveling curve and the scarcity of crucial weapon upgrade materials outside of The Mines, the game's design absolutely pushes towards you engaging in these repetitious activities), the Legacy Dungeons that comprise the game's bespoke content are functionally completely separate from the Open World, with not even your Horse permitted to enter. This is no Burnout: Paradise or Xenoblade Chronicles X, which retooled the core gameplay loop to one where the open world was absolutely core to the design: this is a series of middling Dark Souls levels scattered among an open world no different from games like Far Cry or Horizon: Zero Dawn that many Souls fans have historically looked down on, and the game is only worse for it.
NPC storylines in particular suffer massively, as the chances of you stumbling upon these characters, already often quite annoying in past games, are so low as to practically require a wiki if you want to see the end of multiple questlines. However, that assumes that you will want to see the end of these stories and that you are invested in this world, and I decidedly Was Not. Souls games have always had suspect things in them that have gone largely uninterrogated but Elden Ring really brings that ugliness to the surface, with rape being an annoyingly present aspect of the backstories of many characters, and even having multiple characters threaten to rape you, none of which is deployed in a way that is meaningful and is just insufferable edgelord fantasy writing, and the same could be said of the grimdark incest-laden backstory, the deeply suspect trans panic writing surrounding one of the characters, and the enthusiastic use of Fantasy Racism tropes in the form of the Demi-Humans. I remain convinced that George RR Martin's involvement in this game was little more than a cynical publicity stunt, but certainly the game's writing indulges in many of that man's worst excesses, whilst having almost none of his strengths.
None of this is to say that Elden Ring is devoid of enjoyment. While the fact that it did hit just in time for a manic-depressive mood that made me perfectly suited to play a game I could just mindlessly play for a couple of weeks, I did see it through to the end in that time, even if I did rush to the end after a certain point. From Software's artists remain some of the best in the industry, with some incredible environments and boss designs that deserve Olympic gold medals for how much heavy-lifting they're doing to keep the experience afloat. I loved being kidnapped by chests into other parts of the world, and I wish it happened more than a couple of front-loaded times. But the enjoyment I had in it never felt like stemmed from the open world, and even its highest points don't hang with the best bits of the prior installments. Stormveil is probably the level design highlight of the game but it already fades from my mind in comparison to the likes of Central Yharnam or the Undead Burg or the Dragon Shrine. Indeed, the fact that they exist as islands in an ocean of vacuous space between them precludes the so-called "Legacy Dungeons" of this game from having the satisfying loops and interconnections that are often the design highlights of prior entries. The bosses are a seriously uneven mixed bag as well; even setting aside the repetition, as the nasty trend of overturned bosses that started in Dark Souls III rears its unfortunate head again. The superboss Melania is an interesting design utterly ruined by her obscene damage output, and my personal highlight of the game, Starscourge Radagon, who is the only boss fight that felt like it played to the things that Elden Ring brought to the table, and is a moment among the series that the game can truly claim as it's very own...but the tuning of the fight prevented it from being the triumphant coming-together moment that it is clearly attempting for many of my friends, who left the fight feeling that it was just annoying and tedious. Modern From Software could never make a fight like Maiden Astrea again because they'd insist on making her really hard in a way that actively detracts from the emotional experience in the fight. Boss fights can be about more than just providing a challenge, and I think From has forgotten that.
Taken as a series of its legacy dungeons, of its finest moments, I think Elden Ring would only be a middling one of these games. The additions to the formula feel anemic and unbalanced, the multiplayer implementation is honestly a quite considerable step back from prior games (the decision to have the majority of invasions only occur during co-operation feels like an attempt to weed out trolls picking on weaker players but in reality what it does is make equal fights are next-to-impossible and put Seal-Clubbers in a place where they are the only players who can effectively invade, a completely baffling decision), but it's really the open world I keep coming back to as the reason this game doesn't work. Not only does it add nothing that wasn't already present in better ways in prior games, but it actively detracts from the experience. The promise of the Open World is one of discovery, of setting off in uncharted directions and finding something new, but do Open Worlds actually facilitate this any better than more linear games? I don't know if they do. I felt a sense of discovery and finding something in so many of these games, even the most linear ones, and felt it stronger because the game was able to use careful, meticulous level design to bring out those emotions. Walking out of a cave and seeing Irithyll of the Boreal Valley, or Dead Man's Wharf stretch out before me, were moments of genuine discovery, and they would not be improved if I found six more Dead Man's Wharfs throughout the game. Contrary to their promise, in my experience, the open world, rather than create a sense of discovery, undermine it due to the compromises necessary to create these worlds. All the openness does for your discoveries is let you approach them from a slightly different angle as everyone else.
That is, if you can even claim to have discovered anything in the first place. To call Elden Ring derivative of prior games in this milieu would be a gross understatement. I am far from the first person to note that the game's much-hyped worldbuilding is largely content to regurgitate Souls Tropes with the Proper Nouns replaced with much worse ones, but it goes beyond that - entire questlines, plot beats, character arcs, dungeon designs, enemies, and bosses are lifted wholesale from prior games practically verbatim. More often than not Elden Ring feels closer to a Greatest Hits album than a coherent piece in and of itself, a soulless and cynical repackaging of prior Souls Classics, irrevocably damaged by being torn from the original context from which they belonged. I'm not a fan of Dark Souls III, in part because it too is also a game that leans on repetition of prior games, but at the very least the game was about those repetitions, where yes, old areas and characters would be repeated, but at least it was thematically resonant with what the game was doing. Elden Ring can't even claim that. Whatever this shallow mess of a narrative, easily the worst of the franchise thus far by my reckoning, is going for, it is done no favors by being this stitched-together Frankenstein of Souls.
I was particularly shocked by the sheer ferocity with which the game steals from the fan-favorite Bloodborne. Quick, tell me if you've heard this one before: you encounter a hunched, bestial foe, who fights you with their fists, but once you get their health halfway down, the battle stops, a cutscene plays, where they speak coherently, summon a blade from their past, and stand with their former dignity restored, the music changes, and their name is revealed to be "X the Y Blade". Or what about a hub area, separated in its own liminal space from the rest of the map, that can be discovered in its True Form in the material world? What about when that hub area is wreathed in spectral flame and begins to burn as the final hours of the game is nigh? These are far from the only examples, as there are multiple enemies and ideas throughout the game that are shamelessly lifted from my personal favorite From Software effort, but these stand out as the most noxious of all, as they simply repeat beats that were effective in the game they originated from because the game was able to build to them and have them resonate with the rest of the experience. You cannot just graft things whole cloth from prior work onto a new one and expect it to work as a coherent piece, the very prospect is ridiculous.
When Elden Ring did all this, my jaw about hit the floor from the sheer unmitigated gall. When it chose to conclude itself with a straight-faced Moon Presence reference, complete with an arena that directly evokes the Hunter's Dream, I just had to laugh. The final statement the game made on itself, the bullet point it chose to put on the experience, was "Remember Bloodborne? That was good, wasn't it?" Because in many ways, that really was a perfect conclusion to this game.
While it would be a mistake to claim, as people seem increasingly eager to, that Souls emerged entirely out of the magical ocean that is Hidetaka Miyazaki's unparalleled genius or whatever, as these games have always drawn heavy inspiration from properties like Berserk, Book of the New Sun, and The Legend of Zelda, and were built on top of a framework clearly established by past Fromsoft series King's Field, the reason I think that myself and many others were initially enthralled by the promise of Demon's Souls or Dark Souls was because they were decidedly different. Their esoterica, willingness to buck modern design conventions and hugely evocative online elements were why these games set imaginations alight so strongly, and proved enormously influential for the past decade of game design.
Demon's Souls felt like something new. And while successive games in this series have felt far less fresh, none of them have felt as utterly exhausted as Elden Ring: a final statement from the designers and writers at From Software that they have officially Ran Out of Ideas, that the well has long gone dry, that all they can do is to hastily staple on the modern design trends they once rejected onto a formula that does not gel with them, and that they are wandering without life through a never-ending cycle of their own creation, branded by the Darksign. Perhaps it's no surprise that their least inventive, least consistent, and least creative game since Demon's Souls is also by far their most successful. Once From Software defied conventions and trends, and now, they are consumed by them.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You have died, and the Nexus has trapped your soul."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
This review contains spoilers
i'm of two minds about Sekiro. at times it feels like a great game hiding inside a mediocre one, and sometimes it feels like a mediocre game hiding inside a great one. there are moments where it is a deeply electrifying experience, and there are times where it feels utterly indistinct from the stock AAA formula.
let's start with the good: the one-on-one swordplay in this game is a delight. on a very fundamental level, it's not too dissimilar from the Batman Arkham combat that took 2010s AAA game design by storm: you have dodges and parries that you use in response to specific diagetic and non-diagetic (glowing swords, markers over people's heads) tells, and maintaining a consistent rhythm of combat builds up a meter that you can use to defeat enemies in one hit. sekiro is much more difficult than it's contemporaries in this style in a way that may obscure this similarity, but it is very much there, and it works brilliantly. sekiro has some of the best one-on-one swordfights in the medium, battles of constant aggression where backing off for even a moment to heal gives your opponent time to recover their posture, where a single mistake on your part changes the game, and where perfection is tantalizingly within grasp once you adjust to the game's rhythms. designers Masaru Yamamura and Yuki Fukuda and their design team - along with the game's fantastic audio and animations - are to be applauded for making a game that is experientally not a thousand times removed from a Batman Arkham/Punch-Out!! hybrid feel utterly fresh and unique. the game's combat admittedly loses something when you aren't up against human opponents: the all-too-frequent times you are up against animals strip away the core loop of perfect parries and well-timed dodges into a much less elegant game of hammering the dodge button to get away from unparseable flails of limbs, but even then it rarely devolves so much that the core enjoyment of the combat is no longer present. it's only once you slink away from a duel, back into the shadows, that the flaws begin to show in the game's technique.
the stealth...exists. i hesitate to call it bad but it's certainly not remarkable: if you've played any AAA open world game made in the past few years you know what you're getting here: hiding in tall grass or on branches and rooftops from patrolling enemies that you can kill in one hit by sneaking up behind them, and some distraction items and moves that you'll rarely if ever use because it's much more effective to just stab them in the back. stealth rarely feels like it is the cornerstone of an engaging encounter - only the sniper miniboss in Ashina Depths really felt like something that I had to make careful and considered use of stealth in order to make it through, and that may just be because I got there far too early - and usually either falls into thinning out a couple of enemies before a fight, or slowly picking them off one-by-one Arkham style. the one interesting thing Sekiro brings to the table is that you can take off one of a bosses (usually two) health bars by getting the drop on them, but this has a knock-on effect for the design of those bosses where if you don't get a drop on them, you just have to fight them twice, with only major bosses having different moves and patterns for different phases. technically speaking this rewards the stealth but I'm very tired of the go-to reward for this kind of AAA game being the ability to skip repetitious content. ultimately, like a modern Assassin's Creed or Horizon: Zero Dawn the stealth here would be unable to carry a full game, and just barely meets the boundaries of acceptability for what increasingly seems like an element these games simply must have.
this feeling of weary obligation manifests narratively as well. thematically, I dig what it is doing. this story about how clinging to life after one's time has passed produces a sickness of the soul that mutilates the self and destroys the world around you to sustain yourself is often resonant and occasionally powerful, but it's the moment-to-moment writing that really lets it down: characters are routinely flat and one-dimensional (the character of Owl is notably ill-served, being absent for almost the entire game before making a bizarre cartoonish turn to evil), the game is too eager to show you it's mysteries to really make the environmental storytelling sing (the monastery is theoretically my favorite narrative arc here but because The Deal is unveiled almost immediately there's no real escalation of information: you learn almost immediately that these guys made themselves into undying monsters through these freaky worms and there's precious little left to discover in the course of your adventure), and the game's refreshingly restrained storytelling for a big AAA game ultimately dooms this narrative to fade from the mind as quickly as it passes through the body. perhaps this could have been solved with more dialogue, but given that attempting to explore the narrative further "rewards" the player with a "true" ending that is total MCU sequel hook rubbish compared to the poignant normal endings, I'm not sure this is a quick fix. I do think the storytelling here is ultimately too slight, as the lack of space given to characters like Genichiro or places like Ashina to be understood as characters who have a coherent belief system or culture or context they are clinging to robs the game of a lot of the resonance it could potentially bring out by boiling things down to the point that the metaphors struggle to be gleamed through the Proper Nouns, but I think the wider problem is this game is far, far too long.
again, this is something sekiro very much has in common with it's contemporaries in the AAA space. Sekiro took me just over 30 hours to finish - with at least 4 hours dedicated to Final Boss Attempts alone because Good God - and I think you could have halved that and it would have twice the impact. i'm not really interested in speculating on what a hypothetical half-long Sekiro would look like, or Sek if you will, but certainly the game as it is empties it's bag of shinobi tricks (generously) about two thirds before the end, and relies on quite a few palette swapped enemies and bosses (it is a crime that the Chained Ogre is in here at all, let alone twice) as well as some truly sloppy designs (Demon of Hatred, Headless Ape) that don't gel at all with the experience the game is aiming for. somewhere in the imagination there exists a 12-15 hour Sekiro that excises the bosses that Just Don't Work, and focuses on the supremely polished, rock-hard core of the game that is consistently electrifying, but instead we have this bloated, confused, game that gets messier the more you step away from that ironclad heart.
inevitably, I am brought back to the question that dominates all my thoughts about sekiro: why? why is Sekiro like this? why did it feel the need to be 30 hours long? most linear action games without Open Worlds tend to clock in at either half of or a third of that length, so why does this have the length of an RPG? speaking of RPGs, why are the countless vestigial elements of currency, upgrades, that do little to enhance the core design here as well? why is this game riddled with unnecessary elements that either do not help it or actively undermine it? i'd almost say that it feels trapped in the poisonous swamp of some other, predecessor franchise from which many of these vestigial design elements originate from, the fanbase of which would expect a game with certain features and considerations and of a certain length, a fandom that would give tremendous benefit to this game by only viewing it through the narrow lens of the other games in this series rather than the wider industry design trends that it is clearly in conversation with, and that Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice ultimately wounded itself in order to accommodate a formula set down by these prior games that the developers are tragically wedded to despite said formula not truly fitting with the core design of this fundamentally distinct experience...but I couldn't possibly think of what that might be. i'm pretty sure from software didn't develop The Surge, after all.
perhaps we should count our blessings: at least it didn't try to infect itself with an Open World.
let's start with the good: the one-on-one swordplay in this game is a delight. on a very fundamental level, it's not too dissimilar from the Batman Arkham combat that took 2010s AAA game design by storm: you have dodges and parries that you use in response to specific diagetic and non-diagetic (glowing swords, markers over people's heads) tells, and maintaining a consistent rhythm of combat builds up a meter that you can use to defeat enemies in one hit. sekiro is much more difficult than it's contemporaries in this style in a way that may obscure this similarity, but it is very much there, and it works brilliantly. sekiro has some of the best one-on-one swordfights in the medium, battles of constant aggression where backing off for even a moment to heal gives your opponent time to recover their posture, where a single mistake on your part changes the game, and where perfection is tantalizingly within grasp once you adjust to the game's rhythms. designers Masaru Yamamura and Yuki Fukuda and their design team - along with the game's fantastic audio and animations - are to be applauded for making a game that is experientally not a thousand times removed from a Batman Arkham/Punch-Out!! hybrid feel utterly fresh and unique. the game's combat admittedly loses something when you aren't up against human opponents: the all-too-frequent times you are up against animals strip away the core loop of perfect parries and well-timed dodges into a much less elegant game of hammering the dodge button to get away from unparseable flails of limbs, but even then it rarely devolves so much that the core enjoyment of the combat is no longer present. it's only once you slink away from a duel, back into the shadows, that the flaws begin to show in the game's technique.
the stealth...exists. i hesitate to call it bad but it's certainly not remarkable: if you've played any AAA open world game made in the past few years you know what you're getting here: hiding in tall grass or on branches and rooftops from patrolling enemies that you can kill in one hit by sneaking up behind them, and some distraction items and moves that you'll rarely if ever use because it's much more effective to just stab them in the back. stealth rarely feels like it is the cornerstone of an engaging encounter - only the sniper miniboss in Ashina Depths really felt like something that I had to make careful and considered use of stealth in order to make it through, and that may just be because I got there far too early - and usually either falls into thinning out a couple of enemies before a fight, or slowly picking them off one-by-one Arkham style. the one interesting thing Sekiro brings to the table is that you can take off one of a bosses (usually two) health bars by getting the drop on them, but this has a knock-on effect for the design of those bosses where if you don't get a drop on them, you just have to fight them twice, with only major bosses having different moves and patterns for different phases. technically speaking this rewards the stealth but I'm very tired of the go-to reward for this kind of AAA game being the ability to skip repetitious content. ultimately, like a modern Assassin's Creed or Horizon: Zero Dawn the stealth here would be unable to carry a full game, and just barely meets the boundaries of acceptability for what increasingly seems like an element these games simply must have.
this feeling of weary obligation manifests narratively as well. thematically, I dig what it is doing. this story about how clinging to life after one's time has passed produces a sickness of the soul that mutilates the self and destroys the world around you to sustain yourself is often resonant and occasionally powerful, but it's the moment-to-moment writing that really lets it down: characters are routinely flat and one-dimensional (the character of Owl is notably ill-served, being absent for almost the entire game before making a bizarre cartoonish turn to evil), the game is too eager to show you it's mysteries to really make the environmental storytelling sing (the monastery is theoretically my favorite narrative arc here but because The Deal is unveiled almost immediately there's no real escalation of information: you learn almost immediately that these guys made themselves into undying monsters through these freaky worms and there's precious little left to discover in the course of your adventure), and the game's refreshingly restrained storytelling for a big AAA game ultimately dooms this narrative to fade from the mind as quickly as it passes through the body. perhaps this could have been solved with more dialogue, but given that attempting to explore the narrative further "rewards" the player with a "true" ending that is total MCU sequel hook rubbish compared to the poignant normal endings, I'm not sure this is a quick fix. I do think the storytelling here is ultimately too slight, as the lack of space given to characters like Genichiro or places like Ashina to be understood as characters who have a coherent belief system or culture or context they are clinging to robs the game of a lot of the resonance it could potentially bring out by boiling things down to the point that the metaphors struggle to be gleamed through the Proper Nouns, but I think the wider problem is this game is far, far too long.
again, this is something sekiro very much has in common with it's contemporaries in the AAA space. Sekiro took me just over 30 hours to finish - with at least 4 hours dedicated to Final Boss Attempts alone because Good God - and I think you could have halved that and it would have twice the impact. i'm not really interested in speculating on what a hypothetical half-long Sekiro would look like, or Sek if you will, but certainly the game as it is empties it's bag of shinobi tricks (generously) about two thirds before the end, and relies on quite a few palette swapped enemies and bosses (it is a crime that the Chained Ogre is in here at all, let alone twice) as well as some truly sloppy designs (Demon of Hatred, Headless Ape) that don't gel at all with the experience the game is aiming for. somewhere in the imagination there exists a 12-15 hour Sekiro that excises the bosses that Just Don't Work, and focuses on the supremely polished, rock-hard core of the game that is consistently electrifying, but instead we have this bloated, confused, game that gets messier the more you step away from that ironclad heart.
inevitably, I am brought back to the question that dominates all my thoughts about sekiro: why? why is Sekiro like this? why did it feel the need to be 30 hours long? most linear action games without Open Worlds tend to clock in at either half of or a third of that length, so why does this have the length of an RPG? speaking of RPGs, why are the countless vestigial elements of currency, upgrades, that do little to enhance the core design here as well? why is this game riddled with unnecessary elements that either do not help it or actively undermine it? i'd almost say that it feels trapped in the poisonous swamp of some other, predecessor franchise from which many of these vestigial design elements originate from, the fanbase of which would expect a game with certain features and considerations and of a certain length, a fandom that would give tremendous benefit to this game by only viewing it through the narrow lens of the other games in this series rather than the wider industry design trends that it is clearly in conversation with, and that Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice ultimately wounded itself in order to accommodate a formula set down by these prior games that the developers are tragically wedded to despite said formula not truly fitting with the core design of this fundamentally distinct experience...but I couldn't possibly think of what that might be. i'm pretty sure from software didn't develop The Surge, after all.
perhaps we should count our blessings: at least it didn't try to infect itself with an Open World.
2022
playing the demo for babylon's fall is a bit like watching the slow-motion death of video games occurring before your eyes. this miserable game, limping onto store shelves covered in the wounds of a visibly disastrous development cycle, is only able to offer a substantially slower, less responsive version of the combat system of a game from 2017, deliberately stripped back and wounded in order to accommodate a miserly loot grind that actively makes the game worse in order to sell to you a season pass, a battle pass, and a daily treadmill running endlessly towards a carrot labelled "the prospect that this game might eventually be fun" kept forever out of reach. it's not just a bad videogame, it's a game deliberately made worse, stripped of all potential to be good, in order to try to sucker more money and time out of you.
this is the kind of game that platinum's ceo wants to be making rather than the by-most-accounts very good Sol Cresta. what the actual fuck is going on at this company. someday there's going to be a tell-all documentary about what was going on behind the scenes at Platinum in the past decade or so and it will be one billion times more entertaining than this dreck
this is the kind of game that platinum's ceo wants to be making rather than the by-most-accounts very good Sol Cresta. what the actual fuck is going on at this company. someday there's going to be a tell-all documentary about what was going on behind the scenes at Platinum in the past decade or so and it will be one billion times more entertaining than this dreck
1992
Attempting to characterize a website with a diverse community is always something of a fool's errand, as by definition you are making a broad generalization about a very large group of people, which is usually not a good thing to do. However, I don't think it would be remiss of me to observe that, at least among the writers I follow routinely putting out wonderful pieces, there is an interest in examining friction in game design, games that push back against a player rather than yield to them. It's a subject I've been interested in for years, and in my time on Backloggd, I've been absolutely feasting on these perspectives.
Which is not to say I always agree with them. One game I was disappointed to find myself somewhat let down by was perennial backloggdcore crown jewel Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days, which was a game I found to honestly be a little trite and vapid. As an aesthetic achievement it's wonderful, and I have nothing but praise for that side of the equation, but I found myself really disappointed by how ultimately unadventurous I found it's play. It reminded me of Spec Ops: The Line, another game that has much I find praiseworthy in it's presentation, but kinesthetically unsatisfying because of how the game's presentational and narrative ideas failed to transfer over to the play experience.
Despite the claims of many purveyors of the most profoundly annoying and vacuous "critique" ever made of a game, Spec Ops doesn't think you are evil for playing it, and it does want you to finish it, to see the end, which is partly why it remains an interesting but unsatisfying game for me. The same is true of Kane & Lynch 2: while I don't think that game wants you to finish it, exactly, as the basically nonexistent narrative has no direction or payoff and neither does the gameplay design, it doesn't really resist you either, beyond the initial culture shock that comes from trying to get to grips with this presentation. The thing that let me down about K&L2 is that I simply learned to deal with it, and play it like I would Spec Ops or Binary Domain. I think it's a fine game, but I don't really find it terribly remarkable in the same way that I don't get a lot out of A Serbian Film. It's an important step in the development of video games as an art-form, in that it's one of the first mainstream video games to successfully make me shrug and move on the same way I do at a lot of empty transgressive art.
While I am sure there are some artists who are able to derive fulfillment from the act of creation alone and have no need for an audience, I imagine that most artists are like myself, in that they need an audience for their work to come alive. Certainly, when I was making (excruciatingly bad) games more regularly, I wanted people to play them, wanted people to see the end, even when I wrote awful dialogue about how, actually, by playing this game you have fallen into some nebulously defined trap and how you should have simply stopped playing, blah blah blah. If I didn't need other people to see my work, to share my thoughts and ideas, then they would remain in my own head, where my words are immune to the cold gaze of time and the imperfect translation process of thought to word. Most of us make games because we want people to play them. It may be harder to work out why, exactly, we want people to play them, but I know that we do. And those of us who write and post do so because we want people to read what we have to say.
None of this is written with a shred of condemnation. It's natural, and good. But it presents a problem when it comes to making truly frictional art, games that actively do not want you to finish them, games that do not push back a little but eventually relent, because ultimately, most people care about their art, and most of those people want people to see it.
What then, would a truly repellant game look like? A game that truly did not want the player to finish it, to see it through to the end, a game that, in every aspect of it's construction, repelled enjoyment? Let me introduce you all to Taz-Mania: friction embodied, and the ultimate Backloggdcore video game.
I'll save you the trouble of regurgitating in detail the ways in which this game sucks, partly because it would be identical to a list of things that are in this game, but mostly because every other review for Taz-Mania have accomplished that task better than I ever could. Instead, I'd like to draw your attention to the GDQ run of this game where one of the co-commentators claims to unironically love this game. Before I sat down and actually tried to play this, I thought this was just hyperbole, but now...I think I'm with them. I think I love Taz-Mania too.
Preemptive apologies for the navel-gazing that is to follow here, but I've been thinking a lot lately about writing, about why I do it, and specifically why I write about video games and how they tell stories. Professionals in the industry are exhausted individuals who lead thankless jobs and who inevitably try to seek succor elsewhere in the industry or beyond it rather than continue to write guides for Horizon Two Dawn or whatever for GamerCum Dot Com. Why do I aspire to this? Why do I aspire to write my own games, when all around me people who write and talk about games assert wholeheartedly that games are just bad at telling stories compared to films? What worth is to be found here?
What is it for? Who is it for? Is it for me? Is it for you? I don't know. I genuinely don't know. Sometimes I fucking hate this place. Believe me, I have often wondered if I would be happier if I hadn't posted a stupid mean Xenoblade 2 review last year. But it's also given me a lot of joy. Sometimes I want to pack it in. Sometimes I want to write more. Sometimes I feel proud of what I've written, and sometimes I feel deeply embarrassed about it. And sometimes I feel all of these things, at once.
I thought about all of this as I tried to play Taz-Mania. Why was I here? Why was I pushing myself forward through a game that was hurting my eyes and was actively miserable to play? For the sake of a joke? For the sake of a meme?
But I kept going. For a good bit, anyway. Sadly, Taz-Mania defeated me because it just became too frustrating to master. But still, for a good while, I persevered. Partly because I went to the trouble to find a Master System/Game Gear emulator, something I was sure I would never use again, but also because, well, someone wanted to know what I thought about this game, and no matter how much of a joke that was, no matter how serious or why they did that, they still did it. And others did the same and wrote reviews I got great enjoyment out of reading. In this barren wasteland of thought, these people found meaning. They made something out of nothing.
Taz-Mania is not just backloggdcore, Taz-Mania is video games. It is amateurish, barely functioning, and devoid of the qualities that prescriptivists about "quality of art" extol in other mediums. And yet it lives, lives in the words and in the minds of others, breathing life into a collection of pixels held together by tape and code and hope. More repulsive than Kane & Lynch, and providing a truer test of the meaning and worth of video games than Ending E of Nier: Automata could ever muster.
To a certain extent, I do agree with many of those why say that video games struggle to reach the narrative heights of other mediums, but I also acknowledge that those heights are there because we put them there: regardless of the theory and thought behind it, sound as they may be, ultimately things are considered good because we like them, and great literature and great filmmaking and great game design is considered such because we've, consciously or unconsciously, come to some kind of a general agreement over factors that are desirable in a work of art. And to be sure, Taz-Mania doesn't meet any of those factors. But I like it anyway. Because I choose to. Because that's really all it comes down to, isn't it?
Why do I write? Because I want to. Why do we like and care about video games? Because we do. Why do we find profound meaning in Kane & Lynch, in Paper Mario, in Ocarina of Time, in Persona 4 or Kingdom Hearts? Because in play, in investing in these dumb things wholeheartedly and earnestly, we create that meaning. And Taz-Mania is here - will always be here - to remind us that that deep down, no matter what else we might say, this is the truth at the heart of it. Video games are stupid, broken, vacuous, often ugly and repellant. But we love them anyway, and because we love them, they come to life.
Now and forever, we're gaming.
Thanks for the recommendation, LetsHugBro!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Life does not have inherent meaning; to say that our lives are pointless and our achievements meaningless is to state the obvious. No matter how grand our achievements or how broad their scope, time turns all to dust and death destroys all memory. But that does not mean we cannot ascribe our own meaning to what we do. It is because nothing has meaning unto itself that we are free to create meaning, to make metaphor, and in doing so reflect on ourselves and our world.
Leveling to 99 in the first reactor is pointless and meaningless. So why do I do it? I do it to express my hatred, and more importantly my disdain, for Dick Tree. I do it to express the camaraderie I feel for those of us who have followed this topic for years only to be disappointed by Dick Tree. I do it to prove to myself that I can persevere. The act is meaningless; I give it meaning.”
- CirclMstr
Which is not to say I always agree with them. One game I was disappointed to find myself somewhat let down by was perennial backloggdcore crown jewel Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days, which was a game I found to honestly be a little trite and vapid. As an aesthetic achievement it's wonderful, and I have nothing but praise for that side of the equation, but I found myself really disappointed by how ultimately unadventurous I found it's play. It reminded me of Spec Ops: The Line, another game that has much I find praiseworthy in it's presentation, but kinesthetically unsatisfying because of how the game's presentational and narrative ideas failed to transfer over to the play experience.
Despite the claims of many purveyors of the most profoundly annoying and vacuous "critique" ever made of a game, Spec Ops doesn't think you are evil for playing it, and it does want you to finish it, to see the end, which is partly why it remains an interesting but unsatisfying game for me. The same is true of Kane & Lynch 2: while I don't think that game wants you to finish it, exactly, as the basically nonexistent narrative has no direction or payoff and neither does the gameplay design, it doesn't really resist you either, beyond the initial culture shock that comes from trying to get to grips with this presentation. The thing that let me down about K&L2 is that I simply learned to deal with it, and play it like I would Spec Ops or Binary Domain. I think it's a fine game, but I don't really find it terribly remarkable in the same way that I don't get a lot out of A Serbian Film. It's an important step in the development of video games as an art-form, in that it's one of the first mainstream video games to successfully make me shrug and move on the same way I do at a lot of empty transgressive art.
While I am sure there are some artists who are able to derive fulfillment from the act of creation alone and have no need for an audience, I imagine that most artists are like myself, in that they need an audience for their work to come alive. Certainly, when I was making (excruciatingly bad) games more regularly, I wanted people to play them, wanted people to see the end, even when I wrote awful dialogue about how, actually, by playing this game you have fallen into some nebulously defined trap and how you should have simply stopped playing, blah blah blah. If I didn't need other people to see my work, to share my thoughts and ideas, then they would remain in my own head, where my words are immune to the cold gaze of time and the imperfect translation process of thought to word. Most of us make games because we want people to play them. It may be harder to work out why, exactly, we want people to play them, but I know that we do. And those of us who write and post do so because we want people to read what we have to say.
None of this is written with a shred of condemnation. It's natural, and good. But it presents a problem when it comes to making truly frictional art, games that actively do not want you to finish them, games that do not push back a little but eventually relent, because ultimately, most people care about their art, and most of those people want people to see it.
What then, would a truly repellant game look like? A game that truly did not want the player to finish it, to see it through to the end, a game that, in every aspect of it's construction, repelled enjoyment? Let me introduce you all to Taz-Mania: friction embodied, and the ultimate Backloggdcore video game.
I'll save you the trouble of regurgitating in detail the ways in which this game sucks, partly because it would be identical to a list of things that are in this game, but mostly because every other review for Taz-Mania have accomplished that task better than I ever could. Instead, I'd like to draw your attention to the GDQ run of this game where one of the co-commentators claims to unironically love this game. Before I sat down and actually tried to play this, I thought this was just hyperbole, but now...I think I'm with them. I think I love Taz-Mania too.
Preemptive apologies for the navel-gazing that is to follow here, but I've been thinking a lot lately about writing, about why I do it, and specifically why I write about video games and how they tell stories. Professionals in the industry are exhausted individuals who lead thankless jobs and who inevitably try to seek succor elsewhere in the industry or beyond it rather than continue to write guides for Horizon Two Dawn or whatever for GamerCum Dot Com. Why do I aspire to this? Why do I aspire to write my own games, when all around me people who write and talk about games assert wholeheartedly that games are just bad at telling stories compared to films? What worth is to be found here?
What is it for? Who is it for? Is it for me? Is it for you? I don't know. I genuinely don't know. Sometimes I fucking hate this place. Believe me, I have often wondered if I would be happier if I hadn't posted a stupid mean Xenoblade 2 review last year. But it's also given me a lot of joy. Sometimes I want to pack it in. Sometimes I want to write more. Sometimes I feel proud of what I've written, and sometimes I feel deeply embarrassed about it. And sometimes I feel all of these things, at once.
I thought about all of this as I tried to play Taz-Mania. Why was I here? Why was I pushing myself forward through a game that was hurting my eyes and was actively miserable to play? For the sake of a joke? For the sake of a meme?
But I kept going. For a good bit, anyway. Sadly, Taz-Mania defeated me because it just became too frustrating to master. But still, for a good while, I persevered. Partly because I went to the trouble to find a Master System/Game Gear emulator, something I was sure I would never use again, but also because, well, someone wanted to know what I thought about this game, and no matter how much of a joke that was, no matter how serious or why they did that, they still did it. And others did the same and wrote reviews I got great enjoyment out of reading. In this barren wasteland of thought, these people found meaning. They made something out of nothing.
Taz-Mania is not just backloggdcore, Taz-Mania is video games. It is amateurish, barely functioning, and devoid of the qualities that prescriptivists about "quality of art" extol in other mediums. And yet it lives, lives in the words and in the minds of others, breathing life into a collection of pixels held together by tape and code and hope. More repulsive than Kane & Lynch, and providing a truer test of the meaning and worth of video games than Ending E of Nier: Automata could ever muster.
To a certain extent, I do agree with many of those why say that video games struggle to reach the narrative heights of other mediums, but I also acknowledge that those heights are there because we put them there: regardless of the theory and thought behind it, sound as they may be, ultimately things are considered good because we like them, and great literature and great filmmaking and great game design is considered such because we've, consciously or unconsciously, come to some kind of a general agreement over factors that are desirable in a work of art. And to be sure, Taz-Mania doesn't meet any of those factors. But I like it anyway. Because I choose to. Because that's really all it comes down to, isn't it?
Why do I write? Because I want to. Why do we like and care about video games? Because we do. Why do we find profound meaning in Kane & Lynch, in Paper Mario, in Ocarina of Time, in Persona 4 or Kingdom Hearts? Because in play, in investing in these dumb things wholeheartedly and earnestly, we create that meaning. And Taz-Mania is here - will always be here - to remind us that that deep down, no matter what else we might say, this is the truth at the heart of it. Video games are stupid, broken, vacuous, often ugly and repellant. But we love them anyway, and because we love them, they come to life.
Now and forever, we're gaming.
Thanks for the recommendation, LetsHugBro!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Life does not have inherent meaning; to say that our lives are pointless and our achievements meaningless is to state the obvious. No matter how grand our achievements or how broad their scope, time turns all to dust and death destroys all memory. But that does not mean we cannot ascribe our own meaning to what we do. It is because nothing has meaning unto itself that we are free to create meaning, to make metaphor, and in doing so reflect on ourselves and our world.
Leveling to 99 in the first reactor is pointless and meaningless. So why do I do it? I do it to express my hatred, and more importantly my disdain, for Dick Tree. I do it to express the camaraderie I feel for those of us who have followed this topic for years only to be disappointed by Dick Tree. I do it to prove to myself that I can persevere. The act is meaningless; I give it meaning.”
- CirclMstr
2020
preparing my finest, largest pair of clownshoes for anyone who tries to use the update that adds new apartments that you'll spend maybe 1 minute in each to make the one millionth attempt to rehabilitate this game. all a stable framerate will do to this game is let you see crystal clear how fucking ugly it is in attitude and design.
please just let this shit, racist, transphobic game made by overworked and abused developers die the death it so richly deserves to. there are so many pieces on this website and elsewhere either going for an infuriatingly smug centrist "both extremes are bad" read or desperately trying to resuscitate CP2077 by putting outrageous effort into finding whatever gold exists in the salted earth of these awful hills and it just isn't worth it on any level. i promise you, every second of that effort would be better served on almost every other game.
please just let this shit, racist, transphobic game made by overworked and abused developers die the death it so richly deserves to. there are so many pieces on this website and elsewhere either going for an infuriatingly smug centrist "both extremes are bad" read or desperately trying to resuscitate CP2077 by putting outrageous effort into finding whatever gold exists in the salted earth of these awful hills and it just isn't worth it on any level. i promise you, every second of that effort would be better served on almost every other game.