The quality of the campaign is wildly overblown, fundamentally just a superhero movie in video game form because superhero media has done a fuckin horrific job in translating that kind of power fantasy.

The four stars are exclusively for the multiplayer, who take every mechanic of the call of duty multiplayer loop and replaces them all with ornate and godly hardware. The movement and firepower is the missing link between CoD & Quake. The maps are filled with AI chaff whose threshing gives you a chance to gear up for the robot, but also makes sure there's never too long between action happening. The perks aren't various aircraft but enormous fuckin robots, under player control. You can fight the robots in your own, or in more subtle ways if you don't have your robot. The end of the game is never a freeze frame, always an event of its own. And because it's This World, all this success didn't get even close to rewarded. Modern masterpiece.

I was deep in Half-Life mods still, playing Firearms and DoD and stuff. This was the multiplayer shooter my brother and his friends played. I tried it a few times, and honestly, I don't understand how it took off other than being a Big Franchise. I don't know if a first person shooter's multiplayer experience has ever made me more actively miserable than spawning with the SMG, moving slow and turning slow and firing a peashooter. Cultural forces are the only explanation my young mind could accept for the success of such a bad time.

If you were to try to explain games both as an artform and an industry, I'd start here. Within it, you could teach about how to adapt to a platform's strengths, what a gameplay loop is, using pixel art as reference and what it's referencing, labor, how to handle backlash, derivative design practices, archival efforts, and also the futility of the entire enterprise. It is the least offensive morsel of video game that generated the most vitriolic response possible, and deserves study. Genuinely, the game of its decade, for all stories about that decade in the industry run through Flappy Bird at some point.

We do this every so often, so, as a reminder: my 2 means I Regret Playing This, and in this specific case I mean that I regret playing this when I did and how I did. We got a PS2 and could get one game, so I chose this, not knowing that these games are fucked up hardcore and hard to understand. So, I failed to understand it, and brought it back to Target to get a refund, and we got Dynasty Warriors 2 instead. To be clear: I love the PS2 Dynasty Warriors games. Looking back now from where I am, someone who deeply enjoyed Armored Core VI, I regret that being my first experience with the game and not doing more to stick with it, because I probably would have played the other games if I was able to parse this one. Oh well!

I've talked elsewhere about the joy of sequels that had barely anything to do with the game preceding it and how much I miss that approach. Nintendo in the middle 90s seemed to be huge fans of it given this and calling Yoshi's Island Super Mario World 2. What's funny is the derisive use of "divisive" to describe things like that, like it's verboten for games to change like people don't change, like cells don't divide and that's the main thing they do. Shit, we're living through the world where corporations outlive people, and it's a great picture about how lifespans should have deaths in them, so yeah let change emerge from stability cuz it's what's supposed to happen.