This game is just good not great, but I will never ever EVER forget it. Picture this, I'm old as hell and on my deathbed, the light in my eyes is growing dim, and all my family and friends are gathered around me to share my last moments on earth:

"Come quick everyone, it's almost time! Grampa wants to say something. What is it, grampa? Go on, take your time..."

Me: "...so what was going on with Illusion of Gaia, anyway? There's a part where one of your friends just turns into a sea monster, and he's like bye now, I'm off to be a sea monster. You meet a bunch of starving people and your pet pig suddenly gains sentience and decides to throw itself on a bonfire so they can eat him. His name is Hamlet, and one of the characters says "to eat or not to eat" while he's watching this beloved pig of theirs roast to death. There's a minor antagonist you never meet until the end, and when he tries to fuck with you, you burn him alive. You spend a good minute and a half watching this guy crawl toward you in agony as the fire just renders him down to a pile of ash and boiling body fat. I mean, what the fuck?"

And then I die.

One of my things about this game is when you get a new object and it's unclear what exactly it is. You need to organize is somewhere, so you come up with your best guess as to what it is and sort it accordingly. Maybe you see a white triangle with some yellow on one side and go "Well, I guess I'll call this a tent and put it with the outdoors objects, next to the trees and mountains." But then you talk to a friend or see a stream of someone playing and they get that same item and go "Ah! This is a block of cheese, I will sort it with the food objects" A food? That's not a food, it's a tent! You can't eat a tent! But then you see someone else get that same yellow and white triangle item and they say "I Do Not Care about the thing itself, it is a yellow background and so it goes with the other yellow background items." How could they do that?? Putting a tent next to rings and hiking boots and dinosaurs. How will they ever find anything with a sorting system like that!? And yet these are all viable ways to play Wilmot's Warehouse because it's ultimately about whatever system works best for you. There is no "optimal" way to play like there is in most games because the most "optimal" way is for you to play in whatever way makes the most sense to you and I think that's beautiful.

When you read a piece of fanfiction you are not enjoying the piece of work it was based on, however it is both at once pulling from, often relying on, that original work, and also in turn can serve to inform how you relate to the original work furthering your appreciation for what was already there or shining light on interpretations that were not always obvious.

This kind of mindset can be applied to fan-content as a whole; the number of times I've seen fanart that helps bring out the emotions of the original work, emotions that were always there but just needed that new perspective for me to truly feel them, is many, and then you return to that original work and there's now just no other way for you to see it. In this way art and fanart exists in a reciprocal relationship of sorts, the latter only existing because of the former, the former gaining new depth in light of the latter.

Game modding is an instance where this all starts to get very weird. It's not hard to think of game mods as fanart that you engage with in parallel to engaging with the original work. This pushes the reciprocal relationship mentioned earlier to whole new levels, but is also really weird as, beyond a point and with enough mods applied, you start Ship of Theseusing the original work to the point where it's hard to say what it actually is you're enjoying. Is someone who is enjoying Skyrim, loaded up with a hundred different mods, enjoying Skyrim, enjoying exploring fan-content, or enjoying some whole new thing, perhaps a thing that has never actually existed before if this is the first time that exact list of mods has been applied all at once? Is this Ship still the one that Bethesda largely made, or something that lies outside the realm of any kind of clear authorial intent?

Despite enjoying many other kinds of fan-content I don't really engage with mods very much. I like my first playthrough of a game to best match the original author's intent, and I seldom replay games which means I rarely get opportunity to experiment beyond this point. Beat Saber is thus the first game that I've ever heavily messed around with mods for, and why this subject has been so on my mind since first engaging with it.

The base-game of Beat Saber is...fine. A nice spin on the rhythm game genre that takes great advantage of VR but that is really held back by its limited and uninspiring selection of songs and that has a scoring system that I don't really get on with. The moment you start modding it though the game opens up so much, endlessly replayable with the sheer variety of songs, the creativity with what is possible within the beat-maps both being thrilling in and of itself but also giving you a better appreciation of the game and songs that these mods are built upon.

Consider this rating very arbitrary then, some strange mid-point between what I think of the base-game (good-but-not-great) and the amount of joy that modded Beat Saber has given me. I can't say that my experience with whatever it is I've been playing isn't one that I had with Beat Saber exactly, but I can't say it wholly is either. Ship of Beat Saber, or something like that.

A legendary parody of Metal Gear Solid that surely ranks up there as one of the funniest games ever made. Few games have communicated comedy through their gameplay mechanics as effectively as killing Revolver Ocelot in about 5 seconds by just going into first person mode and shooting him.

Yeah, obviously it's not the way you should play Metal Gear Solid, because it isn't Metal Gear Solid. It's The Twin Snakes. And it's hysterical.

The cutscenes especially are absolutely incredible. If you complain about Snake surfing on a missile you are factually a loser I'm sorry to be the one to break it to you