nothing embodies this experience better than the 1-2 punch of the loopy arthouse perfume commercial intro followed almost directly by the mcdonalds ass "595839122 deaths served worldwide" advert in majula

on one hand we got a game with the foresight of a haruspex that envisions the ever-escalating arms race the series would find itself in and tries to preempt it with radical mechanical changes, and on the other we got a game that thinks Rat With a Mohawk is a really sick idea for a boss

this thing is the living end; the result of a wild disregard for anything fans consider sacred and a critical eye that found dark souls' core pillars wanting. given the chance to do a remix/remaster they chose to ignore all feedback, double down on all the bullshit, and name it SCHOLAR OF THE FIRST SIN like it's a terrence malick movie. the haters never had a prayer against this kind of power

oscillates between achingly beautiful and sandy petersen's work on doom II. presents characters as haunting as vendrick and lucatiel then goes and reskins dark souls' most emotionally resonant encounter as ripper roo. both modern fromsoft's most melancholic, human game, and the only one where you're forced to play as an absolute mutant

I'm at the point where I'm glad the lighting got downgraded before it came out. it should be fucked, it needs to feel sickly and eroded and wrong. iron keep has to be something you can't understand, and the transition from shaded woods to drangleic castle has to be as disorienting as possible. every time you question the earthen peak elevator I only grow stronger and more insufferable

this is the response to a call no one made. it's gotchas behind gotchas behind gotchas, noble failures, bandai namco PTDE marketing quotes, and fromsoft's most indulgently experimental design since demon's souls. it's the bondage gimp door, the gender swap coffin, npc invaders modeled after the most dickhead player behaviour possible, and the cumulative psychic damage of the frigid outskirts

it's fighting the rotten four times to skip half the game, becoming drangleic's next top model, and having NAMELESS CHAD kill you while you idle in iron keep. it's backstep iframes, powerstancing demon hammers, unbelievably good pvp, and yui tanimura's masterful turn as director of the dlc trilogy

talk all the shit you want:

a lie will remain a lie

fans love to make erroneous arguments about how detractors dislike the game cos it's different, but the problem has always been that those differences amount to nothing of substance. if they're not completely insignificant they're fakeouts or walked back, if they're not fakeouts or walked back they're jj abrams mystery box bullshit to keep the online dustcloud with arms and legs kicking and howling about The Implications for another four years. this is a game more concerned with how to capture will they/won't they Engagement than its own thematic core; an impressively meticulous effort moored in goopy fanservice and speculation bait

control freak energy from top to bottom, sanitized to an extent that you'd think square report directly to the health department, and guided by one of the medium's most overbearing directorial hands. all slick and shiny bombast and spectacle, perfect skin, compilation pilled navel gazing, and endlessly wrested control. thirty long hours of red light green light meandering thru kidzbop cover acts of familiar events and environments before shunting all responsibility for unpacking anything it might have to say onto the next game

big win for folks who wanted tifa to be a noodle armed simp and sephiroth to have the presence of yakuza kiwami majima

gaslighting's everest. megafreaks convincing me this was the series peak had me telling everyone I knew how bad mega man sucked for two decades. I've already done more damage to the mega man brand than inafune ever could, and I was primed to do even more before I tried some of the other ones

sure, the robot master stages are mostly solid, but you'd need the most hexed, jinxed, and cursed grey matter on the planet to convince yourself normal people want to experience wily's castle in any capacity. the creases in your brain need to have been carved by unnaturally odious forces to sit there recommending this with a grin on your face while knowing sniper armours exist

boobeam comes up in conversation and MM2 guys go silent at the dinner table, start pushing their peas around the plate, and ask to be excused

if you love it so much then why don't you marry it

FFXV's a ghost game, a haunting. the immaterial remnants of Versus XIII's blighted development history in conflict with the internal nightmare dialectics that inform modern final fantasy. from the weightless combat and absent storytelling to the lifeless world and characters, this is a game defined by nothing. a game that says nothing. a game that does nothing. a thousand ideas, all equally formless and unsatisfying outside of those brief moments before first contact

it's in the dead landscapes dotted with little more than gas stations and rest stops where nameless, faceless motorists drive endlessly from nowhere to nowhere. it's in the way we're told of rich, meaningful bonds without ever seeing them firsthand. it's in the way virtually every interaction prioritizes presentation over active involvement. enormous vacancy disguised by ostentatious pageantry; simulacrum within simulacrum, every moving part uncanny and ersatz. the plot, the road trip, the party, the relationships, the core mechanics — nothing coheres, nothing is substantiated, and nothing feels real. this software isn't real. it doesn't exist

by the midpoint even the pretense of wholeness or congruency erodes entirely. hours and hours of empty spectacle and collapsing narrative slip away and in the unearned pathos of its closing moments you're left with one final display of pure artifice: an ending to a game that never really occurred

proud repulsion; the wriggling extremities of capital and hyperneurotic shoot-to-kill police horror viewed thru a queasy dutch angle. the malignant hypnotic wave of the gig economy, conditioned response, consumer slop, microplasticked newborns, get-rich-quick schemes, and salacious newsreel highlights as accelerated further thru nihilistic excess

indebted to bataillean self-laceration and mystic economism; transformative violence, sacrificial hedonism, and refusal of poise undercut by knowingly grotesque laughter. trauma and transgression as freefalling elevators toward the most terrestrial outcomes; absurd monuments erected to the unwell; flickering lighthouses and garbled siren songs drawing shipwreckers into the same crashes again and again until they find an exit

organs spilling out and lining your pockets, stock markets juddering senselessly and pointlessly, bank accounts engorging and deflating. every exchange, every action inherently transactional in nature; shared psychosis hitting fever pitch

work/life balance as infinite on-call uniformity

body as pure reflection of environment

self as perfect corporate weapon

it's a sad day for fighting game fans as katsuhiro harada announced the long-running tekken series would be laid to rest earlier this morning. this comes mere hours after news that competitor under night in-birth II sys:celes sold over one birthillion copies, leaving many to question why bandai namco chose to go head-to-head with the anime juggernaut

chaos later erupted at the funeral when kamone serizawa unexpectedly leapt from the casket mid-eulogy. armed with steel chair he wasted no time incapacitating michael murray before removing his shirt, shotgunning several cans of beer, and climbing back into the mahogany box. witnesses say he refuses to leave, stating it "belongs to [him] now"

virtua fighter creator yu suzuki was seen fleeing the scene and while he declined to comment on recent events, he revealed he's been hard at work trimming down shenmue's story and now expects it to conclude within the next six or seven games

when we return we'll have more breaking news on the dark side of accessorizing, the closure of ed hardy, and why some are calling this an unprecedented golden age for planet earth

stay tuned

you had to be there

when the online wasn't a ghost town it felt like the full experience it quite obviously isn't in any other context. the fashion; the modular create-a-wrestler style movelists; duels. it was delightful, if insanely obtuse in ways it never should've been allowed to be. absolver is a dreamer's game, made with the impractical grandeur of idealists

the dark souls veneer followed by the realization that the single player content was a total wasteland certainly turned some folks off, and it's not tough to figure out why. uncover this shortcut, now fight this boss, now calibrate the north western stance in your cardinal direction combo deck. regular people turned to goop when this shit hit; folks were disintegrated for thinking it's another R1 bonanza. this is a fighting game, baby, or at least the corpse of one

revisiting it now is a bummer. just doesn't hit the same way without player interaction. an extended tutorial devised to usher you toward a wider community that's dead and gone. bones long turned to dust. the fallout 1 death screen where you're slumped in the desert repeating for eternity

ppl talk about when mmos lose their communities, but there's something extra sad about this space + time for me. reaching for the moon, designing a combat system so heavy and nuanced, and then having it relegated to fighting hollows in the undead burg forever. purgatory shit. gustave dore woodcuts depicted this exact scenario and we should've learned from them

true marvel of ungoverned spirit. these kinds of indie games rarely felt so brazen and optimistic as in those ten minutes in time

[ROOM I]
do the movement
do the attack

[ROOM II]
do the advanced movement
do the advanced attack

[ROOM III]
kara cancel the yojimbo scram hustle
bravely default the zapruter film into majestic donovan dippy

[ROOM IV]
🙾🛠🏠 🚭 👽 🕸 🗘
🖃 🌨 🐕 🌶 🏭 🟈🗠

simply love this kinda working class industrial horror. starts off tonka souls then pulls the rug out and goes all in on daedalic technomazes, gloomy maintenance tunnels, and the kind of homogeneity that makes for the best kinda fevered n fraught navigation. very reminiscent of early 90s pc dungeon crawling, and very much a product of outsized ambitions and design choices; the kind of thing that punches well above its weight and isn't shy about bringing new ideas to the table. we should be thrilled that a developer best known for sludge like lords of the fallen was capable of this much growth in a three year span. that's fuckin sick dude, good on them

it's a shame no one seems to want to engage with it on its own terms, but the pitfall of wearing the mask of a clone is that you'll naturally be treated like one. there's a question of who's at fault here and to what extent, but the response seems especially heightened when it comes to the souls games. nearly every deviation here is done with deliberate intent, for better and worse, yet nearly all of them are treated as if deck13 misunderstands fromsoft, rather than granting even the faintest possibility that fromsoft's fanbase misunderstands deck13

iframes were reduced to bring a greater sense of dimension and purpose to spacing and positioning. limb targeting and its balance between armoured + unarmoured parts create a risk/reward situation where efficiency and economy are at odds with one another while solving the grind dilemma. guard break and overflow damage penalize poor stamina management. dial-a-combo strings provide situational offensive options and punish mashing. duck/hop reward pattern recognition with stylish defensive maneuvers. fast startups hint to get the fuck out of kissing range. and the list goes on. attempting to untangle the R1/O meta isn't easy (tanimura found that out too) but it's evident most of these choices draw directly from fighting games / 3D brawlers and try to shift the dynamic to one where the entire toolbox is equally utile and necessary. these aren't boneheaded mistakes, they're a conscious uprooting of the established verbset

now that doesn't mean you have to like any of it. you don't!! this isn't even really about whether the game's good or not but the strange refusal to consider other modes of exploring a similar foundation. browsing all the long winded steam reviews started to make me dizzy; all this time and all these words dedicated to an almost intentional misunderstanding of what was in front of them. I have infinitely more respect for the guy who says "naw this feels bad" than the guy who puts on their souls veteran uniform and postures as authority like a hall monitor

starting to wonder if any of these games will please an audience that doesn't particularly want to be pleased. it's very telling that Lies Of P's the standout fan favourite because it's the only one where if you close your eyes you could pretend it was miyazaki; a body pillow for ppl whose most formative life experience was beating the capra demon. even dark souls 2 gets berated for experimenting indulgently and drawing more from fromsoft's naotoshi zin era, so pretty much no one's safe. I don't envy anyone working in this space; you either make Demon's Souls 6 or you have to deal with immovably uncharitable weirdos with literally no interest in making adjustments outside their comfort zone

I guess it makes sense, souls fans always struggled with adaptability

showing up to the bank with a note that reads

"darksiders is my favourite 3D zelda"

aghast, the teller knows I can't be reasoned with and Sir Robert Bordens flood my sack

there's something particularly grimy about this one that wasn't present in the others. something instigating and coarse and spiteful and reactionary. "language as a virus" as interpreted in the most corrosive way possible. characterized by emptiness; overwhelmingly pro-nothing

HC2 was positioned like an anaglyph where the heightened elements were layered just askew of the seen&felt "human" elements despite their differences, and when paired they were able to speak earnestly to lived experience. HC3 bristles at the very thought; too suspicious and cynical to allow anything to resonate so cleanly; too preoccupied with how earned it is; too uncomfortable with its own audience; too busy wagging its finger at ghosts

this is a work defined by unpleasant, uncharitable metacommentary; the shock of gore, body fluids, and pointlessly cruel backstories amounting to little more than a yawning (bored, boring) void. violent death of the author offered the instant every page's been torn to confetti. one last mean little joke from a particularly mean little game

a neurotic stormcloud reckoning with creation and voyeurism and expectations and consumption. the reclaiming of catharsis thru punishingly overcorrective countermeasure. a last gasp chance to weaponize itself against that what came prior, itself, and the "puppeteer". denouement as calculated sabotage that can't be walked back

rpg maker's BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea - Episode 2 (2014)

for all its messy sci-fi tangles and caustic irony and sprawling mythologizing this felt raw and tender in a way that kind of really hurt. doubles down on the eminently alien as a ruse to make its naked human ugliness more potent when the time comes, presenting a scenario where the essence of all stress, tension, and threat is mundanely, terribly, crushingly adolescent at heart

a wealth of increased design hospitality baits a hostility that draws from acrid power dynamics, self-destructive altruism, loss of autonomy, strained health, and the uniquely miserable feeling of being a fucked up teenager. that its concluding act leads with its most insincere, grating posturing only to directly pivot into end times earnestness makes for one of the most convincing tonal portrayals of angst and isolation I can think of

instant teencore classic (deeply affectionate)

there's a divine sickness here

kaleidostepping thru wormholes and slipgates as glass contortionist. future ghosts looming in red silhouettes. shapeless forms ticking down toward birth. a remote viewer orbiting above a shrinking planet. a killing field itinerary. liquid gold warping into sinister geometries as you try to claw sand back into a broken hourglass

so thoroughly enveloping as to be transportive; the exit back to common sensation being as disorienting as the ominous entrance. delayed anxiety and nausea upon release from cruel hypnosis. rewriting neural pathways with everything you don't want in your brain

long live the new flesh

glass syrup, moon tears, and primordial soup: the lunar restaurant in forever stasis. chit chat turns to noble chit chat turns to desperate chit chat as hours slip past by the dozens, hundreds, and thousands

melancholy gives way to a peculiar sort of idealism. not the sort where everything works out swimmingly and all outcomes are optimized to perfect mathematical parameters, but a more material state where the possibility for more and better is present and included; the swells of grief, guilt, regret, loss, and forgetting existing in purgatorial space where they can be unwound and untied and unfurled and worked out. where given enough time, anything can find adequate closure and resolution — a mirror placed in opposition to eternity's ability to persist in unfettered rack and ruin

hopeful and kind and unassumingly warm. peculiar and off balance and stark in its duo toned sketches and sheepishly brief musical loops and soft little jokes and heartfelt excavations of personhood and unpersonhood and everything in between

time unspooled as radiant promise and mending touch