letshugbro
2020
Having Jill pick up boltcutters and go "these could be used to cut the chains on a door..." while looking straight ahead at a bolted door sets the tone early on, but critiquing the game for this would be treading too closely on its father's hallowed ground; almost everything dumb and gung about this RE3 was present in that RE4 too, so let RE who is without sin cast the first stone.
With the bar set low, there's an unsurprising consistency to how every subsequent puzzle operates precisely one rung below what would be considered an entertaingly 'clever' solution. You'll often pick up an item and think "Aha! So if I just take this to...", only to find the game is all but making it unavoidable that you and your Clown Key will see the Clown Door on your way down the only unbarricaded corridor in a dozen-block radius. It's merely an Imagine Babiez simulation of the Resident Evil mansion-crawler, but nonetheless an enjoyable one. To unload 125 bullets into a zombie and still have enough rounds to glibly massacre twelve more feels positively philistinic when coming straight off the train from Resident Evil 2, but I think this is an admirably different experience - especially given they're in the same engine. RE3 is impressive in its own way - I could actually feel the old Mercenaries DNA bubbling up to the surface during the hospital holdout, and that made me really glad I finally gave up a few hours to play through it. Good times.
I remember borrowing a friend's copy of this game midway through 2020, but ultimately decided against inserting the disc. Something instinctive told me that this game would be Too Much during a pandemic, and I'm sad-glad to learn my gut was right. As I alluded to way back when, 2020 was the first and hopefully last time in my life I'll watch a real human body in a plastic bag be dropped into a makeshift grave, and this game was full to the brim with that same image. Just surreal to think about April 2020 again, isn't it? That unpleasant memory mingled with the game's, giving those opening street sections a unique morbidity that zombie movies never used to have for me; something formerly cartoonish is now psychologically horrific, closing the gap between survival horror as it exists in reality and in fiction. Kinda funny that I was thinking about all of it, again, in a computer game where someone shouts "suck on this, bitch!" while unloading a railgun into a giant tentacle monster. But that's exactly what I wanted to do to the killer virus too.
With the bar set low, there's an unsurprising consistency to how every subsequent puzzle operates precisely one rung below what would be considered an entertaingly 'clever' solution. You'll often pick up an item and think "Aha! So if I just take this to...", only to find the game is all but making it unavoidable that you and your Clown Key will see the Clown Door on your way down the only unbarricaded corridor in a dozen-block radius. It's merely an Imagine Babiez simulation of the Resident Evil mansion-crawler, but nonetheless an enjoyable one. To unload 125 bullets into a zombie and still have enough rounds to glibly massacre twelve more feels positively philistinic when coming straight off the train from Resident Evil 2, but I think this is an admirably different experience - especially given they're in the same engine. RE3 is impressive in its own way - I could actually feel the old Mercenaries DNA bubbling up to the surface during the hospital holdout, and that made me really glad I finally gave up a few hours to play through it. Good times.
I remember borrowing a friend's copy of this game midway through 2020, but ultimately decided against inserting the disc. Something instinctive told me that this game would be Too Much during a pandemic, and I'm sad-glad to learn my gut was right. As I alluded to way back when, 2020 was the first and hopefully last time in my life I'll watch a real human body in a plastic bag be dropped into a makeshift grave, and this game was full to the brim with that same image. Just surreal to think about April 2020 again, isn't it? That unpleasant memory mingled with the game's, giving those opening street sections a unique morbidity that zombie movies never used to have for me; something formerly cartoonish is now psychologically horrific, closing the gap between survival horror as it exists in reality and in fiction. Kinda funny that I was thinking about all of it, again, in a computer game where someone shouts "suck on this, bitch!" while unloading a railgun into a giant tentacle monster. But that's exactly what I wanted to do to the killer virus too.
2019
"๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ฒ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐'๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ข, "๐ฝ๐ด๐๐" โ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ฒ๐๐๐ข'๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐.
๐ท๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐ ๐๐ ๐ฝ๐ด๐๐, ๐ป๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ข, ๐๐๐ ๐ถ-๐ ๐๐๐๐.
๐ป๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐, ๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐."
I had the pleasure of watching Speed for the first time earlier this year, and I enjoyed it very much. My favourite thing about the film was Keanu Reeves, who played the role of the hero, Jack Traven. Jack is a naively good-spirited cop who talks down crazed gunmen via the appeal of "c'mon, we're just dudes... chillin' out together...", an honest babyfaced fella who is more concerned with saving old ladies in wheelchairs at the side of the road than he is with blowing off the heads of terrorists from lands far away. While deification of the great Keanu is obviously one of the most overplayed bits in the history of the internet, every cliche has to come from somewhere - and it's easy to see why we worship a guy who has the talent to make a cop so damn likable.
It goes without saying that no police officer is innocent, but I don't think that means mean every person behind a badge is irredeemable. Perhaps a contentious statement, but I find it too hard to believe - too hard to reckon with, even - that there isn't a naive subset of the force who got into the job because they genuinely wanted to protect goodness in this world. This is a theme that Resident Evil 2 deals with in surprising nuance for a game about a big zombie in a fedora who can walk through walls. Coming hot off a replay of the Stallonesque Resident Evil 4, the most fascinating thing about Resident Evil 2 to me now is how the game puts discernible effort into its First Blood, (re)building Leon S. Kennedy as a person who begins adult life as nothing more than a Saved By The Bell extra in a windbreaker, a cherubic little have-a-go himbo hero who is transposed through capitalist-realist circumstance into a vengeful terminator who ends up clenching his kevlar-gloved fists in the R.P.D.'s suit of armour as he comes to realise that even a global viral outbreak won't change the system.
๐ป๐๐๐: ๐ธ๐โ๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐ต๐ฑ๐ธ.
๐ฐ๐๐๐๐๐๐: ...๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐?
As Shinji Mikami alluded to in an interview, Capcom has gradually tightened the bolts that govern how the goofiness and scariness of these games interact and intermingle with each new entry in the franchise. In this installment, I think that's best exemplified in Leon's relationship with Ada. She begins the story in distant sunglasses that eye-roll deadpan disbelief at some of Leon's worst witticisms and navietes, but is ultimately charmed by his earnest nature, granting him the status of co-conspirator (at least in some matters) in a way that kinda reminds me how the uptight local antiheroes of One Piece arcs often end up dancing to the beat of Monkey D. Luffy's revolutionary drum once they come to appreciate just how stupidly heroic he really is. Ada is a New Game++ life-player who's seen the world's garbage at its most toxic, but even the most cynical of gaming veterans can't resist pumping their fists when Leon tries an unconvincing "Chew on that, you overgrown son of a bitch!" after stuffing an alligator's mouth full of explosive gas canisters. It's a relatively small thing in the grand scheme of a Resident Evil's world, but I think it goes a long way towards making the player feel like a character's protector and guide - which is important in a game that is explicitly about the horror of survival.
Mechanically I don't have a whole lot to say about how Resident Evil 2 plays because minusforever already wrote the book on this game in 2021, so lemme just call out a small detail I really appreciated here in comparison to Silent Hill 2, which I was playing at the exact same time - it's called the "triple trip". Like a foolhardy teenager trying to carry all his mother's shopping back from the car in one journey, one of my favourite things about the way this game's puzzle box unfolds is the constant opportunities to score three or more objectives in a single movement, executing on a well-laid plan like a chess master strapped with a desert eagle. For years I've abhorred survival horror and adventure games that force the player to go Point A<->Point B<->Point A<->Point B with individual key items, and it seems the designers of Resident Evil 2 have too. Almost every pairing of item and item-hole can be compressed into discrete sequences that call to mind the simplification of an algebra equation (if algebra was intermittently disrupted by a cancerous demon wrapping its tendrils around your neck), and the way the game enables these condensements - by showing you as much of the map as possible before handing over the first piece that will enable you to master a series of unlockings - is nothing short of masterful. Gonna be replaying this game for a while to come.
๐ท๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐ ๐๐ ๐ฝ๐ด๐๐, ๐ป๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ข, ๐๐๐ ๐ถ-๐ ๐๐๐๐.
๐ป๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐, ๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐."
I had the pleasure of watching Speed for the first time earlier this year, and I enjoyed it very much. My favourite thing about the film was Keanu Reeves, who played the role of the hero, Jack Traven. Jack is a naively good-spirited cop who talks down crazed gunmen via the appeal of "c'mon, we're just dudes... chillin' out together...", an honest babyfaced fella who is more concerned with saving old ladies in wheelchairs at the side of the road than he is with blowing off the heads of terrorists from lands far away. While deification of the great Keanu is obviously one of the most overplayed bits in the history of the internet, every cliche has to come from somewhere - and it's easy to see why we worship a guy who has the talent to make a cop so damn likable.
It goes without saying that no police officer is innocent, but I don't think that means mean every person behind a badge is irredeemable. Perhaps a contentious statement, but I find it too hard to believe - too hard to reckon with, even - that there isn't a naive subset of the force who got into the job because they genuinely wanted to protect goodness in this world. This is a theme that Resident Evil 2 deals with in surprising nuance for a game about a big zombie in a fedora who can walk through walls. Coming hot off a replay of the Stallonesque Resident Evil 4, the most fascinating thing about Resident Evil 2 to me now is how the game puts discernible effort into its First Blood, (re)building Leon S. Kennedy as a person who begins adult life as nothing more than a Saved By The Bell extra in a windbreaker, a cherubic little have-a-go himbo hero who is transposed through capitalist-realist circumstance into a vengeful terminator who ends up clenching his kevlar-gloved fists in the R.P.D.'s suit of armour as he comes to realise that even a global viral outbreak won't change the system.
๐ป๐๐๐: ๐ธ๐โ๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐ต๐ฑ๐ธ.
๐ฐ๐๐๐๐๐๐: ...๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐?
As Shinji Mikami alluded to in an interview, Capcom has gradually tightened the bolts that govern how the goofiness and scariness of these games interact and intermingle with each new entry in the franchise. In this installment, I think that's best exemplified in Leon's relationship with Ada. She begins the story in distant sunglasses that eye-roll deadpan disbelief at some of Leon's worst witticisms and navietes, but is ultimately charmed by his earnest nature, granting him the status of co-conspirator (at least in some matters) in a way that kinda reminds me how the uptight local antiheroes of One Piece arcs often end up dancing to the beat of Monkey D. Luffy's revolutionary drum once they come to appreciate just how stupidly heroic he really is. Ada is a New Game++ life-player who's seen the world's garbage at its most toxic, but even the most cynical of gaming veterans can't resist pumping their fists when Leon tries an unconvincing "Chew on that, you overgrown son of a bitch!" after stuffing an alligator's mouth full of explosive gas canisters. It's a relatively small thing in the grand scheme of a Resident Evil's world, but I think it goes a long way towards making the player feel like a character's protector and guide - which is important in a game that is explicitly about the horror of survival.
Mechanically I don't have a whole lot to say about how Resident Evil 2 plays because minusforever already wrote the book on this game in 2021, so lemme just call out a small detail I really appreciated here in comparison to Silent Hill 2, which I was playing at the exact same time - it's called the "triple trip". Like a foolhardy teenager trying to carry all his mother's shopping back from the car in one journey, one of my favourite things about the way this game's puzzle box unfolds is the constant opportunities to score three or more objectives in a single movement, executing on a well-laid plan like a chess master strapped with a desert eagle. For years I've abhorred survival horror and adventure games that force the player to go Point A<->Point B<->Point A<->Point B with individual key items, and it seems the designers of Resident Evil 2 have too. Almost every pairing of item and item-hole can be compressed into discrete sequences that call to mind the simplification of an algebra equation (if algebra was intermittently disrupted by a cancerous demon wrapping its tendrils around your neck), and the way the game enables these condensements - by showing you as much of the map as possible before handing over the first piece that will enable you to master a series of unlockings - is nothing short of masterful. Gonna be replaying this game for a while to come.
2018
In Arkady and Boris Strugatskyโs philosophical science fiction novel Roadside Picnic, scavengers investigate hazardous zones that exist outwith linear space-time in order to steal extraterrestrial artefacts for profit. The scavengers - known as stalkers - develop seemingly illogical and nonsensical methods of navigating these zones: throwing wing nuts into streams; lying face-first in grass; whistling at rocks. Paratopic emulates Stalker in many ways, but allusions to the film and its source novel are most immediately felt when attempting to move around the gameโs most paranormal environments. Certain sections require a divine sense of the invisible and immobile in order to be navigated smoothly, and knee-high ledges frequently kneecap progression. This isnโt the first time an interactive arthouse experience has irritated me in this way, but Iโm coming up blank when considering methods of guiding a player that donโt literally or figuratively involve train tracks. The game developer, acting as a stalker for tourists on a gameside picnic, has an impossible task in attempting to build a controlled environment that doesnโt violate the laws of nature with leading green drapes or obstructively instructive red exit lights. In its best moments, Paratopic evades this problem by timeboxing activities and strictly limiting the scope of interactivity, but when you want the player to explore open forest, itโs easy for trees to obscure the woods. Perhaps impatience was at play for me here - like the lady in the apartment, I was hungry to consume another juicy videotape and got lost in the zone, another tainted soul with a wish left ungranted. The irony of this game being a constant feature among the piles of Nintendo eShop ยฃ0.89 shovelware is not lost on me.
Been playing through Silent Hill 2 on my PS2, but popped this in last night for a brief reprieve. Really amusing to find that the two games have the same control scheme, right down to the L1/R1 strafing and turning options - which made me realise that you could probably make a great DOOM/Quake survival horror wad by disabling autorun and mouse input. Someone should make that!
Otherwise an unremarkable port of Quake III to consoles (the campaign is just a series of deathmatches with frag limits), but there's a novelty to seeing the EA Games logo transition into id Software's. A dark timeline where EA lootboxed and battle passed Quake... Scary to think about!
Otherwise an unremarkable port of Quake III to consoles (the campaign is just a series of deathmatches with frag limits), but there's a novelty to seeing the EA Games logo transition into id Software's. A dark timeline where EA lootboxed and battle passed Quake... Scary to think about!
๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐! ๐๐๐๐๐! ๐๐ก๐ ๐ฐ๐จ๐ซ๐ฅ๐ ๐ก๐๐ฌ ๐ก๐๐๐ซ๐ ๐๐ง๐จ๐ญ๐ก๐๐ซ ๐ฆ๐ฒ๐ฌ๐ญ๐๐ซ๐ข๐จ๐ฎ๐ฌ ๐๐ซ๐จ๐๐๐๐๐ฌ๐ญ, ๐๐ง๐จ๐ญ๐ก๐๐ซ ๐ญ๐ก๐ซ๐๐๐ญ ๐จ๐ ๐ซ๐๐ฏ๐๐ง๐ ๐ ๐ข๐ง ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐ฌ๐ข๐ง๐ข๐ฌ๐ญ๐๐ซ ๐ฏ๐จ๐ข๐๐ ๐จ๐ ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐ฅ๐๐ญ๐, ๐ฅ๐๐ญ๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐.
๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐ฐ๐ข๐ญ๐ก ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐ซ๐๐ญ๐ฎ๐ซ๐ง ๐จ๐ ๐จ๐ง๐ ๐จ๐ ๐ก๐ฎ๐ฆ๐๐ง๐ข๐ญ๐ฒ'๐ฌ ๐ ๐ซ๐๐๐ญ๐๐ฌ๐ญ ๐ญ๐ก๐ซ๐๐๐ญ๐ฌ ๐๐จ๐ซ ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐ฌ๐๐๐จ๐ง๐ ๐ฒ๐๐๐ซ ๐ซ๐ฎ๐ง๐ง๐ข๐ง๐ , ๐ฒ๐จ๐ฎ ๐ก๐๐ฏ๐ ๐ง๐จ ๐๐ก๐จ๐ข๐๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ญ ๐ญ๐จ ๐ซ๐๐ญ๐ฎ๐ซ๐ง ๐ญ๐จ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐:
๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐
๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐
๐๐ง๐ ๐ซ๐๐ข๐ง๐ฏ๐๐ฌ๐ญ๐ข๐ ๐๐ญ๐ ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐ฎ๐ง๐๐๐ซ๐ฐ๐จ๐ซ๐ฅ๐ ๐๐จ๐ซ๐ญ๐ซ๐๐ฌ๐ฌ ๐ง๐จ๐ฐ ๐ค๐ง๐จ๐ฐ๐ง ๐๐ฌ...
๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐'๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐: ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐
------------------------------------
September 24th, 2021: About an hour after THATCHER'S TECHBASE is shared with the world, I'm filled with an overwhelming urge to never think about it again. I go out for a pint of Tennent's Lager at the pub.
September 25th, 2021: Despite my best efforts to pretend I don't care at all, I spend most of the day fixing all the bugs people found in THATCHER'S TECHBASE. There are a lot of them, but I'm buoyed by the fact that there is something really funny about debugging a joke.
September 27th, 2021: A representative from Channel 4 calls me up and suggests that THATCHER'S TECHBASE be included as a challenge in a reboot of the classic British gameshow GamesMaster. The smart part of my brain that thinks it sounds like Channel 4 are looking for someone to do a bunch of free work for them in exchange for exposure is immediately overridden by the mental image of famous British people shooting Margaret Thatcher in the face on television. I agree to make some stuff for the show.
September 28th, 2021: I have a surprisingly terse conversation with someone on Twitter who tells me that the Thatcher's Graveyard section of THATCHER'S TECHBASE is not optimised for four-player co-op play and that I should consider redoing that entire section of the wad for all the people out there who are playing THATCHER'S TECHBASE in 4-player co-op. I swallow the surreality of the situation and give in to plain old spite by making some of the corridors in that section a little narrower, immediately pushing a v1.3 to production.
October 15th, 2021: Conservative MP David Amess is stabbed multiple times at a constituency meeting in Leigh-on-Sea and later dies at the scene from his injuries. Ali Harbi Ali, a 25-year-old man, is arrested at the scene.
October 21st, 2021: Ali Harbi Ali is charged with murder and preparing terrorist acts.
October 22nd, 2021: Another representative from Channel 4 calls me up to say they are now considering whether THATCHER'S TECHBASE is a "right fit" for GamesMaster. They stop responding to emails shortly after.
November 1st, 2021: Putting faith in the great professional relationshop we had previously established, I apply for a ยฃ5000 creative funding grant from the Tennent's Lager Grassroots Arts & Culture Project, explaining my intention to make [REDACTED], a new game about [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] in the [REDACTED].
November 3rd, 2021: My application for a ยฃ5000 creative funding grant from the Tennent's Lager Grassroots Arts & Culture Project is rejected for "cultural" reasons.
November 11th, 2021: During his day job as a community organiser in an assisted living facility, my dad finds out one of his elderly residents has watched the trailer for THATCHER'S TECHBASE via a Hillsborough Justice advocacy group on Facebook. This is the kinda shit that just makes me smile and feel glad that I went insane making a DOOM wad lol, idk
November 17th, 2021: EDGE publish their Christmas 2021 issue, which contains an article about THATCHER'S TECHBASE entitled "How Doom mod Thatcher's Techbase became the most talked-about videogame satire of 2021". Therein, I sheepishly admit that Tim Rogers baited me into making a DOOM wad by doing an incredibly affecting video about how great DOOM is and Tim responds in kind, closing the loop on a year-long project that was inspired by an off-hand YouTube comment. I am happy that I convinced Chris Schilling to print some of the Irish Republican Army's most famous attack lines in his computer game magazine.
December 5th, 2021: THATCHER'S TECHBASE finally appears on Channel 4's GamesMaster, much to my surprise. Because of the game's content, it is shown from very far away, blurred down to a small assemblage of black and white pixels that kinda look like maybe it was maybe Doomguy punching something for a second? Who knows. The Scottish professional wrestler Grado claims he killed Margaret Thatcher with a chainsaw, but players of THATCHER'S TECHBASE know that you can't use the chainsaw in THATCHER'S TECHBASE. The chainsaw has been replaced with a stream of piss.
December 7th, 2021: The GamesMaster reboot is cancelled after three episodes.
December 8th, 2021: Margaret Thatcher wins the coveted "Best Demon" award at Esquire magazine's 2021 Esquire Gaming Awards.
December 24th, 2021: Following three months of surprisingly involved legal back-and-forth with the law firm representing Tennent's Lager, the company finally acquieses to my nervous demands and donates ยฃ500 each to Stonewall UK, The Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation, and the Hillsborough Justice Campaign. Realising they have no further legal obligation to reply to my emails, the company ignores my queries about donations for the other organisations on the THATCHER'S TECHBASE website.
January 1st, 2022: I start a new job; one that doesn't involve banking or banks or people having full-scale meltdowns about share prices.
March 18th, 2022: The Scottish government declares an end to all mandatory coronavirus measures across the country.
May 18th, 2022: After a long break from thinking about Margaret Thatcher, Hell and THATCHER'S TECHBASE, I return to the Tenth Circle of Hell once more when the wad is exhibited at the Southside Games Festival in Glasgow and I am invited to attend and do a Q&A panel. Expecting questions like "do you like doom lol" and "who is margaret thatcher??" I am completely utterly blindsided when actual, real, not-pretend game developers start asking me questions about political theory and its applications in game design. I don't remember the things I said because my brain was too busy suppressing the urge to piss and didn't have enough free CPU cycles to record memories, but I do know that one dude asked "So what's the deal with all the timewasting elevators?" and then nodded in a satisfied way when I told him I really liked that one part of The 25th Ward where you have to solve the toilet maze and knock on 100 apartment doors - the TECHBASE lifts are meant to be sort of like that. Thank you, Backloggd, for allowing me to get away with being a little bit pretentious in front of people who make real art games. To the guy who nodded - I know you totally have a Backloggd dude, drop the @ in the comments below.
July 7th, 2022: REUTERS, BREAKING (via CNN): "U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned Thursday, bringing an acrimonious end to a nearly three-year premiership that has been beset by controversy and scandal."
August 3rd, 2022: As part of his election campaign, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak promises that people who vilify Britain will be treated as extremists and referred to the Governmentโs deradicalization "Prevent" programme.
August 18th, 2022: The build team from The World Transformed, a political festival that takes place at the same time as the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, ask me if they can turn THATCHER'S TECHBASE into an arcade machine that will support Living Rent, a Scottish tenants union who are struggling against record rent increases and ruthless landlord action.
August 19th, 2022: I try to explain to the build team from The World Transformed that a DOOM wad won't translate to a pleasant arcade cabinet experience, but my protests are finally suppressed by the part of my brain that is yelling "THEY ARE MAKING AN ARCADE MACHINE OF THE WAD YOU MADE". I give sincerely cheerful thumbs-ups when the design plans for the cabinet are waved in front of my eyes, irresistibly activating the huge clusters of "VIDEO GAME" neurons in my hippocampus.
August 20th, 2022: I get to work on making a version of THATCHER'S TECHBASE that's more suited for an arcade experience. This mostly involves unlocking all the doors and pumping the player full of ammo and milk.
August 28th, 2022: I realise that even Capcom puts a little bit more effort into their Arcade Editions than this, and decide to put out feelers for an artist who can help me add some new enemies to the game because I am not living through a coronavirus lockdown any more and cannot spend five hours a day dragging little blue suits onto cyberdemons. By pure luck, the guy who originally helped me make the CyberThatcher sprites - Rafael Batista de Lima - responds to my advert without even realising it's the same project, a moment of serendipity that I have no choice but to recognise as divine intervention from Satan himself.
August 30th, 2022: Keeping proud design traditions from the original game alive, I start dragging Thatcher wigs onto the Archvile and other baddies and share the designs with Rafael.
September 2nd, 2021: Upon finding out what the project is, a workshop in Liverpool offers to provide and work on materials for THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION free of charge. This, in essence, means that the game will be making a "net profit" for Living Rent from the moment it comes online.
September 5th, 2022: Liz Truss becomes prime minister of the Tenth Circle of Hell.
September 10th, 2022: Despite making a strong case for her inclusion, I ultimately reject the invitation from TWT to make Liz Truss one of the new enemies in THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION, fearing that someone may be pictured performing violence upon a standing Member of Parliament.
September 20th, 2022: Development work is completed on THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION.
September 22nd, 2022: Development work on THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION is no longer completed, because my artist legend friend Rafael comes in clutch at the last minute with some more incredible sprites. The final art and polish is applied, and development work is completed on THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION. For real this time.
September 23rd, 2022: I arrive in Liverpool. After spending some time looking at things that have been built to look like The Beatles and having a few surprisingly cheap pints, I head to the community centre where The World Transformed is being hosted. A little buzzed, I enter the basement of TWT's venue for the weekend and see a giant vinyl sticker of the CyberThatcher lying on the floor in front of me; it's probably the beers, but I suddenly have to suppress the urge to be sick. I feel like I'm in a weird dream, sort-of-a David Lynch dream, one of those intense dreams where you're interacting with things that had only ever existed in your mind as if they were/are real, tangible actors in meatspace - playing tulpa Tetris with real bricks from on high, going ice-skating with Sonic the Hedgehog, getting freaky with some 32-bit polygonal video game hero you found sexy when you were thirteen... That sort of thing. It shouldn't exist, but there isn't much time to contemplate this concept further because suddenly I am knee-deep in adhesive paste and wood shavings, a Glaswegian dwarf at a forge of MDF and gorilla glue, trying to create a convincing simulacra of a machine that existed in a forgotten age so that I can put my political parody satire game-mod-wad thing inside it and ask people to pay money to piss on graves and fight the ghosts in the shell, those nasty little demon dudes wearing Margaret Thatcher wigs. I also end up painting protest signs and hanging lights somehow - can you believe they gave the drunk video game guy a hammer?! - while a local school teacher uses his arts & crafts kit to give the cabinet its beautiful finishing touches. At 1am or thereabouts, the owner of the venue insists we cease our demonic rituals and go home for the night. He is thoroughly creeped out by this B&Q obelisk.
September 24th, 2022: Having failed to actually install the computer and PCBs the night before, most of the morning is spent rotating source ports and virtual machines to try and get the split-screen experience going - to no convincing avail. While I'm in the middle of looking up the best ways to emulate a local DOOM multiplayer server, a woman asks me what the fuck I'm doing in the basement's basement, a little sweaty goblin tapping away on a giant arcade machine with Margaret Thatcher's face down the side of it. I try to explain my deeds in a number of ways, but she rightly cuts through the bullshit with a hot, shameful knife of "I don't have a clue what you're on about". The woman encourages me to K.I.S.S. and get something, anything out on the floor - especially if it's for a charity. About half an hour later, the experience has been simplified down to just the single player campaign, the second stick and buttons functioning as a cool little Geometry Wars/Steel Battallion/whatever dual-stick aiming system. I try explaining the absence of multiplayer and the new control scheme to people who try playing the game on the conference floor, but I'm quite rightly drowned out by people going "you can punch her? coooool" and "have you seen the shooting game where you can go into wetherspoons". I eventually stick an Xbox controller on the front of the arcade machine because there is no fucking way people are getting past the first area of THATCHER'S TECHBASE without being able to turn and shoot at the same time. It bothers me a lot less than I thought it would.
September 25th, 2022: Nothing of interest happens. I go do some sleep-deprived disassociating at a talk about a student doctor's plan to do post-colonial restructuring of the global pharmaceutical industry through "community action", and some more people play the THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION cabinet, including a few old men who were in town for the Labour Party Conference. I go home and play with my cat for a bit.
September 26th, 2022: The Independent, a UK newspaper, publishes an article: "Jeremy Corbyn played a version of Doom that lets you 'kill Thatcher'". About an hour later, my phone is turned off and thrown into the back of my desk.
September 27th, 2022: I find out about Denis Through The Drinking Glass, a 1984 title for the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro where you play as Denis Thatcher and have to try and escape from Maggie's lair in No. 10 while maintaining a certain blood-alcohol level. I think it's kinda funny that despite hours of research on the original THATCHER'S TECHBASE, I never found this game. Life is crazy like that!
September 28th, 2022: I do an interview with a newspaper journalist where I'm just filled with this overwhelming urge to just, I dunno, keep apologising for how ridiculous every story I'm telling sounds. This can't actually have happened, can it?
September 29th, 2022: After doing some "ideological trolling" with a very tired and exasperated BBC intern, I sign over the rights for THATCHER'S TECHBASE to be used as material on Friday night's """political comedy""" panel shows in exchange for some private donations.
September 30th, 2022: THATCHER'S TECHBASE appears on BBC 1 panel show Have I Got News For You, wherein British newspaper editor and satirist Ian Hislop compares CyberThatcher to the current prime minister, Liz Truss. On Twitter, I jokingly claim this is yet another example of the BBC's left-wing bias and a woman from Basingstoke sends me a DM to accuse me of being a traitor to the nation of Great Britain because I "only think about the 1%". Whoops!
October 1st, 2022: I discover that there is a mod for DOOM II called Pinochestein 3D. The final boss of the wad is a giant robotic Pinochet. I've never heard of this one before either. Pretty cool!
October 2nd, 2022: THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION is released to the general public.
October 3rd, 2022: Jeremy Corbyn plays THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION in Duke Nukem 3D mod Duke Smoochem 3D.
October 4th, 2022: Conceding to pressure from the Scottish Greens, Living Rent and other tenants' unions, the Scottish Government institutes an immediate rent freeze for six months and makes it illegal for tenants to be evicted during this time.
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There isn't much to say about THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION that isn't covered by the events above. If you've ever "finished" making something - an essay, a presentation, a drawing, a song, a game - you'll probably know the feeling of wanting as little to do with your work as possible once it's done. We all know the Picasso quote about paintings never being complete. It's not necessarily a feeling of shame or dislike for what you've created, but when you finally hit 'Save' on a _๐ ๐๐๐๐_๐ ๐๐๐๐_๐ ๐๐๐๐.๐ฉ๐ซ๐จ๐ฃ once and for all, there's always this sense of a weight being lifted - a job done, a book closed, an era's ending. A past confronted, hopefully, by your idea, and now captured in some media that lies external to your self.
As I spoke about in the original review for THATCHER'S TECHBASE, there was an overwhelming sense during this project that I'd kicked out a stone of a joke and caused it - sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally - to gather more and more moss of meaning, rolling downhill at such speed that I couldn't really contain it. By the end of 2021 I thought it was all finally, mercifully, over, but somehow the stone managed to roll back up a bigger hill and start the nightmare all over again, with me reluctantly chasing behind it.
The funny thing about THATCHER'S TECHBASE is that I spent a lot of the intervening year haunting myself with the ghost of its imperfections as a mechanical device. I was ultimately nonplussed by its crass political implications, and the gamer within bubbled over to fuss about gameplay. Dumb, I know; but for some reason, people messaging me about bugs, puzzle problems and balance fuckups concerned me far more than the people who wanted to report the WAD to the police for unthink. I spent a lot of time in my own head about such a trivial issue, grappling over whether I should go back and fix layouts and redo encounters and hand over more ammo to players who were SOL an hour into the WAD, my own little welfare state in the battle against Thatcher. Fortunately, a good friend of mine shook me back to reality by pointing out how fucking annoying it was when George Lucas went in and changed Han Solo shooting Greedo in the Star Wars movies. I didn't wanna be like Kanye West patching The Life of Pablo or some shit, did I? I'm glad I put the stupidity behind me and moved on with my life, leaving that Save button untouched for good, accepting that I'd made what I'd made.
... For a while, lol. Just when I thought I was out, they etc. etc. etc. Oh, go on then.
If there was something that was going to draw me back to THATCHER'S TECHBASE, it was always the chance to rectify the failures of the project that lay beyond just correcting linedefs and spawn triggers. While I was delighted that Tennent's Lager made good on their promise to donate money to charity in exchange for me compromising my perfectly legal right to express myself in a satirical work, I was still pissed off that they chose not to associate themselves with some of the more "contentious" organisations on my list. Partnering with Living Rent on ARCADE EDITION was the resurrection of a dying dream come true once more for a useless bohemian layabout like me, a spindly little computer guy who looks at tenant action movements and picket lines up and down the country and feels like he can't do jack shit but spectate and hold a placard up the back.
You read about what's going on in the world in newspapers and on Twitter; you see the results of government policy in your bills, your loans and the rising cost of milk and bread at the supermarket; somehow, it still feels abstract, remote, and far away. But actually going to a "hard left extremist fringe event" (per the Daily Mail article on THATCHER'S TECHBASE, September 26th, 2022) makes a lot of this evil become real to you in a sense it hasn't been before: You see people planning military-like operations to keep soup kitchens and food banks running; you see collections that will keep picket lines fed and watered for weeks at a time; you see people teaching other how to get out of handcuffs; and then you look over at the little MDF box with its game controller hanging over some Margaret Thatcher stickers and feel like you didn't really do jack shit but make jokes and crack wise about the end of the world. I was stewing in this feeling for a lot of that Saturday at The World Transformed, a combination of sleep deprivation and day-drinking becoming an ironic feeling of self-involvement at a festival of collective action. Oh poor me and my selfish little video game toy. What have I actually done here?
That night, however, I attended a rally in support of the striking dock workers in Liverpool, who were standing in the rain only a few miles down the road from the festival. Many hard-working people spoke passionately about their unfair treatment and burning desire to address the injustice of neoliberal wealth distribution, but there was one speech in particular that has stuck to my mind. A union leader from the Port of Baltimore told the crowd about the 2013 longshore workers strike, and how the 2000 members of the International Longshoremen's Association had stepped up across the world to defend the rights of their friends in the United States by threatening strikes and collective action of their own, no matter how small or large the organisation - including the men and women who were now picketing the Liverpool Docks at this very moment. He spoke of a lodge banner that's brought out for special occasions like these. Itโs almost a hundred years old. A simple symbol - two hands, joined together in a union. Thatโs what the labour movement means. You support me and I support you. Whoever you are. Wherever you come from. Whatever you can do. Shoulder to shoulder. Hand to hand.
If youโre one of the people whoโs supported us by putting money into buckets - the literal one lurking within the innards of THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION's flimsy wooden hide, the virtual one at the other end of the QR code on its display panel, or in the real/virtual buckets of any other charity that's come to your attention because of the wad - thank you. Because what youโve given the people who made THATCHER'S TECHBASE is more than money. Itโs friendship. And when youโre in a fight as bitter and as important as this one, against an enemy - like the CyberThatcher and her minions - who is so much bigger, so much stronger than you... Well, to find out that you have a friend you never knew existed - itโs the best thing in the world. So thank you. ๐
๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐ฐ๐ข๐ญ๐ก ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐ซ๐๐ญ๐ฎ๐ซ๐ง ๐จ๐ ๐จ๐ง๐ ๐จ๐ ๐ก๐ฎ๐ฆ๐๐ง๐ข๐ญ๐ฒ'๐ฌ ๐ ๐ซ๐๐๐ญ๐๐ฌ๐ญ ๐ญ๐ก๐ซ๐๐๐ญ๐ฌ ๐๐จ๐ซ ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐ฌ๐๐๐จ๐ง๐ ๐ฒ๐๐๐ซ ๐ซ๐ฎ๐ง๐ง๐ข๐ง๐ , ๐ฒ๐จ๐ฎ ๐ก๐๐ฏ๐ ๐ง๐จ ๐๐ก๐จ๐ข๐๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ญ ๐ญ๐จ ๐ซ๐๐ญ๐ฎ๐ซ๐ง ๐ญ๐จ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐:
๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐
๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐
๐๐ง๐ ๐ซ๐๐ข๐ง๐ฏ๐๐ฌ๐ญ๐ข๐ ๐๐ญ๐ ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐ฎ๐ง๐๐๐ซ๐ฐ๐จ๐ซ๐ฅ๐ ๐๐จ๐ซ๐ญ๐ซ๐๐ฌ๐ฌ ๐ง๐จ๐ฐ ๐ค๐ง๐จ๐ฐ๐ง ๐๐ฌ...
๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐'๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐: ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐
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September 24th, 2021: About an hour after THATCHER'S TECHBASE is shared with the world, I'm filled with an overwhelming urge to never think about it again. I go out for a pint of Tennent's Lager at the pub.
September 25th, 2021: Despite my best efforts to pretend I don't care at all, I spend most of the day fixing all the bugs people found in THATCHER'S TECHBASE. There are a lot of them, but I'm buoyed by the fact that there is something really funny about debugging a joke.
September 27th, 2021: A representative from Channel 4 calls me up and suggests that THATCHER'S TECHBASE be included as a challenge in a reboot of the classic British gameshow GamesMaster. The smart part of my brain that thinks it sounds like Channel 4 are looking for someone to do a bunch of free work for them in exchange for exposure is immediately overridden by the mental image of famous British people shooting Margaret Thatcher in the face on television. I agree to make some stuff for the show.
September 28th, 2021: I have a surprisingly terse conversation with someone on Twitter who tells me that the Thatcher's Graveyard section of THATCHER'S TECHBASE is not optimised for four-player co-op play and that I should consider redoing that entire section of the wad for all the people out there who are playing THATCHER'S TECHBASE in 4-player co-op. I swallow the surreality of the situation and give in to plain old spite by making some of the corridors in that section a little narrower, immediately pushing a v1.3 to production.
October 15th, 2021: Conservative MP David Amess is stabbed multiple times at a constituency meeting in Leigh-on-Sea and later dies at the scene from his injuries. Ali Harbi Ali, a 25-year-old man, is arrested at the scene.
October 21st, 2021: Ali Harbi Ali is charged with murder and preparing terrorist acts.
October 22nd, 2021: Another representative from Channel 4 calls me up to say they are now considering whether THATCHER'S TECHBASE is a "right fit" for GamesMaster. They stop responding to emails shortly after.
November 1st, 2021: Putting faith in the great professional relationshop we had previously established, I apply for a ยฃ5000 creative funding grant from the Tennent's Lager Grassroots Arts & Culture Project, explaining my intention to make [REDACTED], a new game about [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] in the [REDACTED].
November 3rd, 2021: My application for a ยฃ5000 creative funding grant from the Tennent's Lager Grassroots Arts & Culture Project is rejected for "cultural" reasons.
November 11th, 2021: During his day job as a community organiser in an assisted living facility, my dad finds out one of his elderly residents has watched the trailer for THATCHER'S TECHBASE via a Hillsborough Justice advocacy group on Facebook. This is the kinda shit that just makes me smile and feel glad that I went insane making a DOOM wad lol, idk
November 17th, 2021: EDGE publish their Christmas 2021 issue, which contains an article about THATCHER'S TECHBASE entitled "How Doom mod Thatcher's Techbase became the most talked-about videogame satire of 2021". Therein, I sheepishly admit that Tim Rogers baited me into making a DOOM wad by doing an incredibly affecting video about how great DOOM is and Tim responds in kind, closing the loop on a year-long project that was inspired by an off-hand YouTube comment. I am happy that I convinced Chris Schilling to print some of the Irish Republican Army's most famous attack lines in his computer game magazine.
December 5th, 2021: THATCHER'S TECHBASE finally appears on Channel 4's GamesMaster, much to my surprise. Because of the game's content, it is shown from very far away, blurred down to a small assemblage of black and white pixels that kinda look like maybe it was maybe Doomguy punching something for a second? Who knows. The Scottish professional wrestler Grado claims he killed Margaret Thatcher with a chainsaw, but players of THATCHER'S TECHBASE know that you can't use the chainsaw in THATCHER'S TECHBASE. The chainsaw has been replaced with a stream of piss.
December 7th, 2021: The GamesMaster reboot is cancelled after three episodes.
December 8th, 2021: Margaret Thatcher wins the coveted "Best Demon" award at Esquire magazine's 2021 Esquire Gaming Awards.
December 24th, 2021: Following three months of surprisingly involved legal back-and-forth with the law firm representing Tennent's Lager, the company finally acquieses to my nervous demands and donates ยฃ500 each to Stonewall UK, The Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation, and the Hillsborough Justice Campaign. Realising they have no further legal obligation to reply to my emails, the company ignores my queries about donations for the other organisations on the THATCHER'S TECHBASE website.
January 1st, 2022: I start a new job; one that doesn't involve banking or banks or people having full-scale meltdowns about share prices.
March 18th, 2022: The Scottish government declares an end to all mandatory coronavirus measures across the country.
May 18th, 2022: After a long break from thinking about Margaret Thatcher, Hell and THATCHER'S TECHBASE, I return to the Tenth Circle of Hell once more when the wad is exhibited at the Southside Games Festival in Glasgow and I am invited to attend and do a Q&A panel. Expecting questions like "do you like doom lol" and "who is margaret thatcher??" I am completely utterly blindsided when actual, real, not-pretend game developers start asking me questions about political theory and its applications in game design. I don't remember the things I said because my brain was too busy suppressing the urge to piss and didn't have enough free CPU cycles to record memories, but I do know that one dude asked "So what's the deal with all the timewasting elevators?" and then nodded in a satisfied way when I told him I really liked that one part of The 25th Ward where you have to solve the toilet maze and knock on 100 apartment doors - the TECHBASE lifts are meant to be sort of like that. Thank you, Backloggd, for allowing me to get away with being a little bit pretentious in front of people who make real art games. To the guy who nodded - I know you totally have a Backloggd dude, drop the @ in the comments below.
July 7th, 2022: REUTERS, BREAKING (via CNN): "U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned Thursday, bringing an acrimonious end to a nearly three-year premiership that has been beset by controversy and scandal."
August 3rd, 2022: As part of his election campaign, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak promises that people who vilify Britain will be treated as extremists and referred to the Governmentโs deradicalization "Prevent" programme.
August 18th, 2022: The build team from The World Transformed, a political festival that takes place at the same time as the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, ask me if they can turn THATCHER'S TECHBASE into an arcade machine that will support Living Rent, a Scottish tenants union who are struggling against record rent increases and ruthless landlord action.
August 19th, 2022: I try to explain to the build team from The World Transformed that a DOOM wad won't translate to a pleasant arcade cabinet experience, but my protests are finally suppressed by the part of my brain that is yelling "THEY ARE MAKING AN ARCADE MACHINE OF THE WAD YOU MADE". I give sincerely cheerful thumbs-ups when the design plans for the cabinet are waved in front of my eyes, irresistibly activating the huge clusters of "VIDEO GAME" neurons in my hippocampus.
August 20th, 2022: I get to work on making a version of THATCHER'S TECHBASE that's more suited for an arcade experience. This mostly involves unlocking all the doors and pumping the player full of ammo and milk.
August 28th, 2022: I realise that even Capcom puts a little bit more effort into their Arcade Editions than this, and decide to put out feelers for an artist who can help me add some new enemies to the game because I am not living through a coronavirus lockdown any more and cannot spend five hours a day dragging little blue suits onto cyberdemons. By pure luck, the guy who originally helped me make the CyberThatcher sprites - Rafael Batista de Lima - responds to my advert without even realising it's the same project, a moment of serendipity that I have no choice but to recognise as divine intervention from Satan himself.
August 30th, 2022: Keeping proud design traditions from the original game alive, I start dragging Thatcher wigs onto the Archvile and other baddies and share the designs with Rafael.
September 2nd, 2021: Upon finding out what the project is, a workshop in Liverpool offers to provide and work on materials for THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION free of charge. This, in essence, means that the game will be making a "net profit" for Living Rent from the moment it comes online.
September 5th, 2022: Liz Truss becomes prime minister of the Tenth Circle of Hell.
September 10th, 2022: Despite making a strong case for her inclusion, I ultimately reject the invitation from TWT to make Liz Truss one of the new enemies in THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION, fearing that someone may be pictured performing violence upon a standing Member of Parliament.
September 20th, 2022: Development work is completed on THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION.
September 22nd, 2022: Development work on THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION is no longer completed, because my artist legend friend Rafael comes in clutch at the last minute with some more incredible sprites. The final art and polish is applied, and development work is completed on THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION. For real this time.
September 23rd, 2022: I arrive in Liverpool. After spending some time looking at things that have been built to look like The Beatles and having a few surprisingly cheap pints, I head to the community centre where The World Transformed is being hosted. A little buzzed, I enter the basement of TWT's venue for the weekend and see a giant vinyl sticker of the CyberThatcher lying on the floor in front of me; it's probably the beers, but I suddenly have to suppress the urge to be sick. I feel like I'm in a weird dream, sort-of-a David Lynch dream, one of those intense dreams where you're interacting with things that had only ever existed in your mind as if they were/are real, tangible actors in meatspace - playing tulpa Tetris with real bricks from on high, going ice-skating with Sonic the Hedgehog, getting freaky with some 32-bit polygonal video game hero you found sexy when you were thirteen... That sort of thing. It shouldn't exist, but there isn't much time to contemplate this concept further because suddenly I am knee-deep in adhesive paste and wood shavings, a Glaswegian dwarf at a forge of MDF and gorilla glue, trying to create a convincing simulacra of a machine that existed in a forgotten age so that I can put my political parody satire game-mod-wad thing inside it and ask people to pay money to piss on graves and fight the ghosts in the shell, those nasty little demon dudes wearing Margaret Thatcher wigs. I also end up painting protest signs and hanging lights somehow - can you believe they gave the drunk video game guy a hammer?! - while a local school teacher uses his arts & crafts kit to give the cabinet its beautiful finishing touches. At 1am or thereabouts, the owner of the venue insists we cease our demonic rituals and go home for the night. He is thoroughly creeped out by this B&Q obelisk.
September 24th, 2022: Having failed to actually install the computer and PCBs the night before, most of the morning is spent rotating source ports and virtual machines to try and get the split-screen experience going - to no convincing avail. While I'm in the middle of looking up the best ways to emulate a local DOOM multiplayer server, a woman asks me what the fuck I'm doing in the basement's basement, a little sweaty goblin tapping away on a giant arcade machine with Margaret Thatcher's face down the side of it. I try to explain my deeds in a number of ways, but she rightly cuts through the bullshit with a hot, shameful knife of "I don't have a clue what you're on about". The woman encourages me to K.I.S.S. and get something, anything out on the floor - especially if it's for a charity. About half an hour later, the experience has been simplified down to just the single player campaign, the second stick and buttons functioning as a cool little Geometry Wars/Steel Battallion/whatever dual-stick aiming system. I try explaining the absence of multiplayer and the new control scheme to people who try playing the game on the conference floor, but I'm quite rightly drowned out by people going "you can punch her? coooool" and "have you seen the shooting game where you can go into wetherspoons". I eventually stick an Xbox controller on the front of the arcade machine because there is no fucking way people are getting past the first area of THATCHER'S TECHBASE without being able to turn and shoot at the same time. It bothers me a lot less than I thought it would.
September 25th, 2022: Nothing of interest happens. I go do some sleep-deprived disassociating at a talk about a student doctor's plan to do post-colonial restructuring of the global pharmaceutical industry through "community action", and some more people play the THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION cabinet, including a few old men who were in town for the Labour Party Conference. I go home and play with my cat for a bit.
September 26th, 2022: The Independent, a UK newspaper, publishes an article: "Jeremy Corbyn played a version of Doom that lets you 'kill Thatcher'". About an hour later, my phone is turned off and thrown into the back of my desk.
September 27th, 2022: I find out about Denis Through The Drinking Glass, a 1984 title for the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro where you play as Denis Thatcher and have to try and escape from Maggie's lair in No. 10 while maintaining a certain blood-alcohol level. I think it's kinda funny that despite hours of research on the original THATCHER'S TECHBASE, I never found this game. Life is crazy like that!
September 28th, 2022: I do an interview with a newspaper journalist where I'm just filled with this overwhelming urge to just, I dunno, keep apologising for how ridiculous every story I'm telling sounds. This can't actually have happened, can it?
September 29th, 2022: After doing some "ideological trolling" with a very tired and exasperated BBC intern, I sign over the rights for THATCHER'S TECHBASE to be used as material on Friday night's """political comedy""" panel shows in exchange for some private donations.
September 30th, 2022: THATCHER'S TECHBASE appears on BBC 1 panel show Have I Got News For You, wherein British newspaper editor and satirist Ian Hislop compares CyberThatcher to the current prime minister, Liz Truss. On Twitter, I jokingly claim this is yet another example of the BBC's left-wing bias and a woman from Basingstoke sends me a DM to accuse me of being a traitor to the nation of Great Britain because I "only think about the 1%". Whoops!
October 1st, 2022: I discover that there is a mod for DOOM II called Pinochestein 3D. The final boss of the wad is a giant robotic Pinochet. I've never heard of this one before either. Pretty cool!
October 2nd, 2022: THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION is released to the general public.
October 3rd, 2022: Jeremy Corbyn plays THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION in Duke Nukem 3D mod Duke Smoochem 3D.
October 4th, 2022: Conceding to pressure from the Scottish Greens, Living Rent and other tenants' unions, the Scottish Government institutes an immediate rent freeze for six months and makes it illegal for tenants to be evicted during this time.
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There isn't much to say about THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION that isn't covered by the events above. If you've ever "finished" making something - an essay, a presentation, a drawing, a song, a game - you'll probably know the feeling of wanting as little to do with your work as possible once it's done. We all know the Picasso quote about paintings never being complete. It's not necessarily a feeling of shame or dislike for what you've created, but when you finally hit 'Save' on a _๐ ๐๐๐๐_๐ ๐๐๐๐_๐ ๐๐๐๐.๐ฉ๐ซ๐จ๐ฃ once and for all, there's always this sense of a weight being lifted - a job done, a book closed, an era's ending. A past confronted, hopefully, by your idea, and now captured in some media that lies external to your self.
As I spoke about in the original review for THATCHER'S TECHBASE, there was an overwhelming sense during this project that I'd kicked out a stone of a joke and caused it - sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally - to gather more and more moss of meaning, rolling downhill at such speed that I couldn't really contain it. By the end of 2021 I thought it was all finally, mercifully, over, but somehow the stone managed to roll back up a bigger hill and start the nightmare all over again, with me reluctantly chasing behind it.
The funny thing about THATCHER'S TECHBASE is that I spent a lot of the intervening year haunting myself with the ghost of its imperfections as a mechanical device. I was ultimately nonplussed by its crass political implications, and the gamer within bubbled over to fuss about gameplay. Dumb, I know; but for some reason, people messaging me about bugs, puzzle problems and balance fuckups concerned me far more than the people who wanted to report the WAD to the police for unthink. I spent a lot of time in my own head about such a trivial issue, grappling over whether I should go back and fix layouts and redo encounters and hand over more ammo to players who were SOL an hour into the WAD, my own little welfare state in the battle against Thatcher. Fortunately, a good friend of mine shook me back to reality by pointing out how fucking annoying it was when George Lucas went in and changed Han Solo shooting Greedo in the Star Wars movies. I didn't wanna be like Kanye West patching The Life of Pablo or some shit, did I? I'm glad I put the stupidity behind me and moved on with my life, leaving that Save button untouched for good, accepting that I'd made what I'd made.
... For a while, lol. Just when I thought I was out, they etc. etc. etc. Oh, go on then.
If there was something that was going to draw me back to THATCHER'S TECHBASE, it was always the chance to rectify the failures of the project that lay beyond just correcting linedefs and spawn triggers. While I was delighted that Tennent's Lager made good on their promise to donate money to charity in exchange for me compromising my perfectly legal right to express myself in a satirical work, I was still pissed off that they chose not to associate themselves with some of the more "contentious" organisations on my list. Partnering with Living Rent on ARCADE EDITION was the resurrection of a dying dream come true once more for a useless bohemian layabout like me, a spindly little computer guy who looks at tenant action movements and picket lines up and down the country and feels like he can't do jack shit but spectate and hold a placard up the back.
You read about what's going on in the world in newspapers and on Twitter; you see the results of government policy in your bills, your loans and the rising cost of milk and bread at the supermarket; somehow, it still feels abstract, remote, and far away. But actually going to a "hard left extremist fringe event" (per the Daily Mail article on THATCHER'S TECHBASE, September 26th, 2022) makes a lot of this evil become real to you in a sense it hasn't been before: You see people planning military-like operations to keep soup kitchens and food banks running; you see collections that will keep picket lines fed and watered for weeks at a time; you see people teaching other how to get out of handcuffs; and then you look over at the little MDF box with its game controller hanging over some Margaret Thatcher stickers and feel like you didn't really do jack shit but make jokes and crack wise about the end of the world. I was stewing in this feeling for a lot of that Saturday at The World Transformed, a combination of sleep deprivation and day-drinking becoming an ironic feeling of self-involvement at a festival of collective action. Oh poor me and my selfish little video game toy. What have I actually done here?
That night, however, I attended a rally in support of the striking dock workers in Liverpool, who were standing in the rain only a few miles down the road from the festival. Many hard-working people spoke passionately about their unfair treatment and burning desire to address the injustice of neoliberal wealth distribution, but there was one speech in particular that has stuck to my mind. A union leader from the Port of Baltimore told the crowd about the 2013 longshore workers strike, and how the 2000 members of the International Longshoremen's Association had stepped up across the world to defend the rights of their friends in the United States by threatening strikes and collective action of their own, no matter how small or large the organisation - including the men and women who were now picketing the Liverpool Docks at this very moment. He spoke of a lodge banner that's brought out for special occasions like these. Itโs almost a hundred years old. A simple symbol - two hands, joined together in a union. Thatโs what the labour movement means. You support me and I support you. Whoever you are. Wherever you come from. Whatever you can do. Shoulder to shoulder. Hand to hand.
If youโre one of the people whoโs supported us by putting money into buckets - the literal one lurking within the innards of THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION's flimsy wooden hide, the virtual one at the other end of the QR code on its display panel, or in the real/virtual buckets of any other charity that's come to your attention because of the wad - thank you. Because what youโve given the people who made THATCHER'S TECHBASE is more than money. Itโs friendship. And when youโre in a fight as bitter and as important as this one, against an enemy - like the CyberThatcher and her minions - who is so much bigger, so much stronger than you... Well, to find out that you have a friend you never knew existed - itโs the best thing in the world. So thank you. ๐
2022
Works about voyeurism that directly confront the viewer for participating are nothing new (Rear Window, Blow-Up, The Truman Show, Finding Frances, etc.), but I do think there's sincere eternal beauty-genius in the idea that everything we see through a lens - whether fact or fiction, consensual or non-consensual - constitutes a perverse one-way violation of the natural world in pursuit of wicked desires that we can never fully suppress, layers of cultural coercion that build like a coastal shelf of pressure upon everyone who participates with a camera from any direction.
Immortality is at its best when it's gleefully reveling in this idea, a sort of hypersexxxual Day For Night that permits and often encourages luxuriation in watching beautiful people be flirty and sexy and funny on, off, and mid-camera, poring over a grand archive of film footage that successfully evokes a variety of eras without putting tie-dye lampshades on them. The game could be accused of titillation, but the aforementioned genius of works like this is that the word "voyeur" acts as a creative shield behind which the footage can justifiably hide, cheekily asking its critics if they'd like to see one more clip of someone with their boobs or dick out. It's unlikely you'll say no - you're part of the problem, after all.
The ideas here aren't particularly original to anyone who's watched a "movie about movies"-type movie (it made me think of Boogie Nights a lot), but that doesn't mean they aren't worth exploring in a new mode of interaction - disjointed narratives in film can be a real pain when executed poorly because of their reliance on the audience "jigsawing" data-points together in real-time, but Immortality gives viewers the patient pleasure of being able to tap and spin the film reels (via a very satisfying interaction metaphor) at their own pace, bolstered by a helpful "find {noun}" match-cut feature that makes digging through each character/actor/person's tapes much more enjoyable than trying to piece a picture from Momentos in perpetual movie motion. At a dozen-or-so hours long, it's easy to spend a whole evening just silently researching a single participant in the puzzle, naively feeling yourself like Jack Terry in Brian DePalma's Blow Out.
It's unfortunate, then, that Immortality simply can't resist telling a video game story. Without spoiling too much: about two-thirds of the way in, all the psychosexual intrigue dissolves away to make space on the cutting room floor for a plot that is so corny and clunky that I think even the writers of Star Trek: Voyager would have passed it up in favour of another episode about that planet of Scottish ghosts. There's an unintentional sadness in seeing Charlotta Mohlin, a professional actress and beautiful interpretive dancer, gradually be reduced from an ephemeral alien to a static exposition device who speaks in the pronouns of Cromp and Wenbembo. When you're dealing with desire and bodies and valise of inner selves, why do you need to bring the fucking Chongo into it? What a shame.
Regardless, this is still absolutely worth your time if you, like me, like to write big pretentious essays on Letterboxd about all the ways dialectical Freudian analysis can be applied to Solo: A Star Wars Story or whatever. Haters and intermediary filmbros will claim the plot of Marissa's last picture, Two of Everything, is an almost point-for-point remake of Mulholland Drive, but true kinophiles know it's an homage to The Lizzie McGuire Movie.
Immortality is at its best when it's gleefully reveling in this idea, a sort of hypersexxxual Day For Night that permits and often encourages luxuriation in watching beautiful people be flirty and sexy and funny on, off, and mid-camera, poring over a grand archive of film footage that successfully evokes a variety of eras without putting tie-dye lampshades on them. The game could be accused of titillation, but the aforementioned genius of works like this is that the word "voyeur" acts as a creative shield behind which the footage can justifiably hide, cheekily asking its critics if they'd like to see one more clip of someone with their boobs or dick out. It's unlikely you'll say no - you're part of the problem, after all.
The ideas here aren't particularly original to anyone who's watched a "movie about movies"-type movie (it made me think of Boogie Nights a lot), but that doesn't mean they aren't worth exploring in a new mode of interaction - disjointed narratives in film can be a real pain when executed poorly because of their reliance on the audience "jigsawing" data-points together in real-time, but Immortality gives viewers the patient pleasure of being able to tap and spin the film reels (via a very satisfying interaction metaphor) at their own pace, bolstered by a helpful "find {noun}" match-cut feature that makes digging through each character/actor/person's tapes much more enjoyable than trying to piece a picture from Momentos in perpetual movie motion. At a dozen-or-so hours long, it's easy to spend a whole evening just silently researching a single participant in the puzzle, naively feeling yourself like Jack Terry in Brian DePalma's Blow Out.
It's unfortunate, then, that Immortality simply can't resist telling a video game story. Without spoiling too much: about two-thirds of the way in, all the psychosexual intrigue dissolves away to make space on the cutting room floor for a plot that is so corny and clunky that I think even the writers of Star Trek: Voyager would have passed it up in favour of another episode about that planet of Scottish ghosts. There's an unintentional sadness in seeing Charlotta Mohlin, a professional actress and beautiful interpretive dancer, gradually be reduced from an ephemeral alien to a static exposition device who speaks in the pronouns of Cromp and Wenbembo. When you're dealing with desire and bodies and valise of inner selves, why do you need to bring the fucking Chongo into it? What a shame.
Regardless, this is still absolutely worth your time if you, like me, like to write big pretentious essays on Letterboxd about all the ways dialectical Freudian analysis can be applied to Solo: A Star Wars Story or whatever. Haters and intermediary filmbros will claim the plot of Marissa's last picture, Two of Everything, is an almost point-for-point remake of Mulholland Drive, but true kinophiles know it's an homage to The Lizzie McGuire Movie.
Fascinatingly vibeless... The complete absence of a presentation layer exposes it to much harsher criticism than Marvel vs Capcom 2 and Capcom vs SNK 2, two similarly patchwork fighting games that were shielded by beautifully out-there post-millennium aesthetics, belovedly bonkers narration and gameplay so broken that it ultimately freed fighting game players from the shackles of balance. There's no announcer here rambling about the fact he Knows You'll Be Back To The Battle For Survival, and the music is so lifeless that there's nothing the beat can do to distract you from the fact that sprites from 1992 and 2002 are rubbing up against promotional key-art that's been cut out of an old Electronic Gaming Monthly's back pages with rusty scissors. This is NOT true love makinโ.
I'm not gonna pretend I know what the balance issues with this game are - nor do I really care to find out - but I gotta admit I do fuck with the core 2v2 concept, which as far as I know is unique to the esteemed Capcom Fighting series: you pick two characters, but there's no obligation to use both - you can keep one as a backup or counter-pick on the second round of a fight, or simply wield them as an empty threat to stop your opponent from choosing one of their own duo. While this is hardly an electrifying concept in a fighting game starring Anakaris and some guy from Red Earth, it could in theory accommodate the appearance of up to eight characters in a classic best-2-of-3 tournament match, which imo is a great enabler of the old fighting game adage that the mind games begin as soon as the character select screen loads. Capcom should think about bringing this back for Street Fighter 6 or some other fighting game where they remembered to crop the versus screen portraits correctly.
As far as the actual fighting goes, it's worth emphasising how much characters handle like the game they belong in - you can straight-up play 3rd Strike Chun in this game with almost zero adaptation of the gameplan you've been sleepwalking with since 2006, but apparently I don't know shit because she's in F-tier along with Zangief (what's new lol) and Yun (whaaaaat?!) here. Apparently being able to parry all of Demitri's firebullshit doesn't count for much. It's funny that she even makes the exact same noises when you mash out bHP! It's almost as if these characters were dragged and dropped directly into the game without any real balance consideratio - no... it couldn't be... C-C-Crapcpom... lazily bashing together... a versus fighting game... to capitalise on a sales t-trend... n-noo... never...
I'm not gonna pretend I know what the balance issues with this game are - nor do I really care to find out - but I gotta admit I do fuck with the core 2v2 concept, which as far as I know is unique to the esteemed Capcom Fighting series: you pick two characters, but there's no obligation to use both - you can keep one as a backup or counter-pick on the second round of a fight, or simply wield them as an empty threat to stop your opponent from choosing one of their own duo. While this is hardly an electrifying concept in a fighting game starring Anakaris and some guy from Red Earth, it could in theory accommodate the appearance of up to eight characters in a classic best-2-of-3 tournament match, which imo is a great enabler of the old fighting game adage that the mind games begin as soon as the character select screen loads. Capcom should think about bringing this back for Street Fighter 6 or some other fighting game where they remembered to crop the versus screen portraits correctly.
As far as the actual fighting goes, it's worth emphasising how much characters handle like the game they belong in - you can straight-up play 3rd Strike Chun in this game with almost zero adaptation of the gameplan you've been sleepwalking with since 2006, but apparently I don't know shit because she's in F-tier along with Zangief (what's new lol) and Yun (whaaaaat?!) here. Apparently being able to parry all of Demitri's firebullshit doesn't count for much. It's funny that she even makes the exact same noises when you mash out bHP! It's almost as if these characters were dragged and dropped directly into the game without any real balance consideratio - no... it couldn't be... C-C-Crapcpom... lazily bashing together... a versus fighting game... to capitalise on a sales t-trend... n-noo... never...
2005
An old woman stumbles towards you with a raised pitchfork in her hands. You stab in her in the face, causing her to stagger backwards in pain. This gives you enough distance to pop her kneecap open with a 9mm bullet, and she falls to her knees in agony. The woman's head is now at the perfect height for you to spin-kick it into the piranha-infested waters like a toxic football, separating from shoulders that gush powerful jets of blood. The sheer force of your kick causes her husband to stumble, tripping a landmine in the process. The mine incinerates the dock you're standing on, and the rest of the woman's family with it; they melt away into chicken eggs and pesetas. The threat neutralised, you pick up your phone and tell your operator the name of this Spanish village is an unpronouncable mouthful. Bullets pierce the screen and you're praised for how effectively the family was slain.
You return to Resident Evil 4 for a lot of things, but I think the paragraph above succinctly describes the core loop that we all keep coming back for on the GameCube, the Wii, the PlayStation 2, the PlayStation 3, the PlayStation 4, the PlayStation 5, the Xbox One, the Nintendo Switch, the PC and the Oculus Rift. The scenario might change, the enemies might change, the weapons might change, the graphics might change, but you are always controlling a baying mob in the cleanest, nastiest, most efficient way you possibly can. Bonus points if you can make it look goofy as Hell in the process.
Playing this right after Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, it's plain to see how this game was originally a forking point between the two series - both games are essentially the same implementation of a core idea, but choose to tackle combat from different angles of genre. At their best, the two games emphasise close management of an advancing enemy pool using a fairly limited toolset that flows naturally into the other aspects of itself: Knife to pistol. Pistol to kick. Kick to grenade. Grenade to egg. The movements feel primitive, awkward and unintuitive at first, but soon reveal themselves to be expertly crafted for natural achievement of a precision-flow state, racking up minor-yet-satisfying hits to keep a crowd under control while setting up scenarios where bigger and badder moves can be unleashed at the appropriate time. Put Leon in a red trenchcoat and I bet he could manage at least a few floors of Bloody Palace.
This replay of the game was inspired by a conversation I had with my younger coworkers last week when the topic of the Resident Evil games came up. As someone who spends a lot of time talking shop to people about people like Shinji Mikami and Hideki Kamiya, it's easy to fall into the trap of evaluating these games as beautiful little puzzle boxes to be mechanically solved and understood - but spend ten minutes with someone who likes Resident Evil because they watched all the movies, and you'll discover that there are actually people out there who think Resident Evil 4 (in its current un-remade form) is as much stupid nonsense as your average Carry On film. I hate these people, but I do understand where they'e coming from - when this game originally came out, I bought it for my brother on his 14th birthday despite knowing he was deathly afraid of zombies and spiders and guns and all that; even worse, he was the type of person who said things like "you wouldn't actually say that" when Arnold told him to stick around. Resident Evil 4 was essentially his worsetest nightmare. I was selfishly buying a bowling ball for Marge, but unlike Homer, I never came to regret my heartless decision. Resident Evil 4 really is just that good.
You return to Resident Evil 4 for a lot of things, but I think the paragraph above succinctly describes the core loop that we all keep coming back for on the GameCube, the Wii, the PlayStation 2, the PlayStation 3, the PlayStation 4, the PlayStation 5, the Xbox One, the Nintendo Switch, the PC and the Oculus Rift. The scenario might change, the enemies might change, the weapons might change, the graphics might change, but you are always controlling a baying mob in the cleanest, nastiest, most efficient way you possibly can. Bonus points if you can make it look goofy as Hell in the process.
Playing this right after Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, it's plain to see how this game was originally a forking point between the two series - both games are essentially the same implementation of a core idea, but choose to tackle combat from different angles of genre. At their best, the two games emphasise close management of an advancing enemy pool using a fairly limited toolset that flows naturally into the other aspects of itself: Knife to pistol. Pistol to kick. Kick to grenade. Grenade to egg. The movements feel primitive, awkward and unintuitive at first, but soon reveal themselves to be expertly crafted for natural achievement of a precision-flow state, racking up minor-yet-satisfying hits to keep a crowd under control while setting up scenarios where bigger and badder moves can be unleashed at the appropriate time. Put Leon in a red trenchcoat and I bet he could manage at least a few floors of Bloody Palace.
This replay of the game was inspired by a conversation I had with my younger coworkers last week when the topic of the Resident Evil games came up. As someone who spends a lot of time talking shop to people about people like Shinji Mikami and Hideki Kamiya, it's easy to fall into the trap of evaluating these games as beautiful little puzzle boxes to be mechanically solved and understood - but spend ten minutes with someone who likes Resident Evil because they watched all the movies, and you'll discover that there are actually people out there who think Resident Evil 4 (in its current un-remade form) is as much stupid nonsense as your average Carry On film. I hate these people, but I do understand where they'e coming from - when this game originally came out, I bought it for my brother on his 14th birthday despite knowing he was deathly afraid of zombies and spiders and guns and all that; even worse, he was the type of person who said things like "you wouldn't actually say that" when Arnold told him to stick around. Resident Evil 4 was essentially his worsetest nightmare. I was selfishly buying a bowling ball for Marge, but unlike Homer, I never came to regret my heartless decision. Resident Evil 4 really is just that good.
1996
I just wanna shoutout Keizo Ota for a sec because the water in this game remains truly incredible, resoundingly kicking the shit out of any current games that aren't merely leaning on existing Unreal Engine tech. If you've seen any documentaries about the making of the Ultra 64, you probably know how rudimentary the Silicon Graphics sample projects were - imagine being handed an SDK that could barely render a sphere and then getting tasked with modeling the most amorphous natural body on our planet using a computer that's barely more powerful than your average modern calculator. Jesus Christ. I've been a programmer for 15 years I still sometimes break out in cold sweats when my boss asks me to make a floating dialog box with some text on it and this guy was out there in 1995 pulling off some Genesis 1:6-8 shit with the computational equivalent of a Casio watch. Keizo Ota is a man-machine genius-god and it does not surprise me that this is the mastermind who went on to design the masterpiece that is Nintendo Land for the Wii U.
Not just a graphics gimmick, the beauty of the gameplay here is entirely down to the water too - it creates this satisfying inversion of traditional racing game mechanics where your track is constantly moving out from under you, encouraging acceleration to make tighter, riskier turns and deceleration on straights to get control of the chop, a counterintuitive methodology that ultimately brings to life the idea that you're a driving demigod skimming across the firmament of creation to some of the best music Nintendo's ever done. Don't bother with Hard and Expert Mode if you want to preserve your Godhood, though - that shit is just stupid, vulcanized rubberbanding that makes Mario Kart 64 look merciful. Just turn up the wave conditions to "Wild" and revel in our Lord's wrath and fury.
Not just a graphics gimmick, the beauty of the gameplay here is entirely down to the water too - it creates this satisfying inversion of traditional racing game mechanics where your track is constantly moving out from under you, encouraging acceleration to make tighter, riskier turns and deceleration on straights to get control of the chop, a counterintuitive methodology that ultimately brings to life the idea that you're a driving demigod skimming across the firmament of creation to some of the best music Nintendo's ever done. Don't bother with Hard and Expert Mode if you want to preserve your Godhood, though - that shit is just stupid, vulcanized rubberbanding that makes Mario Kart 64 look merciful. Just turn up the wave conditions to "Wild" and revel in our Lord's wrath and fury.
As a casual who only dips into this when they add a funny new skin, Zero Build Mode finally brings the streamlined experience I always wanted from the game: a massive reduction in the number of quiet and confused moments that sat awkwardly among the insanity of an average matchโs moment-to-moment survival. Stripping away the construction materials and mechanics (save for the tactile and tactical satisfaction of demolishing walls and floors) improves the pace of play so much, turning a battle for building materials into a more focused super-arena shooter that spans an entire island and at least three hundred multimedia franchises.
As the number of included IPs continues to balloon-bus exponentially, thereโs really no reason I should be bored on the plains overlooking Tilted Towers, and Epic are happy to provide me with literally any excuse to avoid playing the game properly - itโs an overwrought joke at this point, but just standing around watching Goku hit the griddy is genuine unpretentious whole-hearted all-American entertainment, and Iโm oddly proud of the devs for taking a shitty zombie wave-defense game all the way to this, cultural implications be damned. Thereโs just something about our programming as a species that makes us predisposed towards finding anime mascots doing club dance moves funny and we have to accept that and move on in enlightenment. Drop the vain expectation of good taste and come as you are to this cocaine-insane royal rumble where you can drive-by kamehameha Indiana Jones while heโs listening to Doja Cat on a jukebox shaped like Darth Vaderโs head. It reminds me of Jedi Outcast roleplay servers in the early 2000s, where people would import the Dr. Dre and Doomguy skins from Quake III: Arena and challenge you to lightsaber duels in a map based off that Jim Carrey Grinch movie. If you like Smash Bros. or Multiversus or Gmod or Dante From The Devil May Cry Series, youโve really got no excuses. Itโs all the same thing.
These moments of maximal franchise expression do genuinely seem to lead to something bigger, sometimes, thoughโฆ Today I did a random Duos with a guy dressed as the stonks meme and instead of gunning for glory we just drove a Major Lazer-themed speedboat along the coast while listening to an Eminem song about drug addiction and wanting to kill yourself (PEGI 12+). When the song was done, the radio faded out to a voice clip of Travis Scott telling us that he really believed we had what it takes to get that Victory Royale. Despite his pride, we died unceremoniously on a trampoline moments later. As our corpses bounced up and down with comic timing, the killcam revealed that Vegeta had been in a water tower with an AWP the whole time, watching the shore from a safe distance. What even is this? I genuinely do not believe there is another game out there that is offering these deeply stupid and satisfying emergent experiences.
As the number of included IPs continues to balloon-bus exponentially, thereโs really no reason I should be bored on the plains overlooking Tilted Towers, and Epic are happy to provide me with literally any excuse to avoid playing the game properly - itโs an overwrought joke at this point, but just standing around watching Goku hit the griddy is genuine unpretentious whole-hearted all-American entertainment, and Iโm oddly proud of the devs for taking a shitty zombie wave-defense game all the way to this, cultural implications be damned. Thereโs just something about our programming as a species that makes us predisposed towards finding anime mascots doing club dance moves funny and we have to accept that and move on in enlightenment. Drop the vain expectation of good taste and come as you are to this cocaine-insane royal rumble where you can drive-by kamehameha Indiana Jones while heโs listening to Doja Cat on a jukebox shaped like Darth Vaderโs head. It reminds me of Jedi Outcast roleplay servers in the early 2000s, where people would import the Dr. Dre and Doomguy skins from Quake III: Arena and challenge you to lightsaber duels in a map based off that Jim Carrey Grinch movie. If you like Smash Bros. or Multiversus or Gmod or Dante From The Devil May Cry Series, youโve really got no excuses. Itโs all the same thing.
These moments of maximal franchise expression do genuinely seem to lead to something bigger, sometimes, thoughโฆ Today I did a random Duos with a guy dressed as the stonks meme and instead of gunning for glory we just drove a Major Lazer-themed speedboat along the coast while listening to an Eminem song about drug addiction and wanting to kill yourself (PEGI 12+). When the song was done, the radio faded out to a voice clip of Travis Scott telling us that he really believed we had what it takes to get that Victory Royale. Despite his pride, we died unceremoniously on a trampoline moments later. As our corpses bounced up and down with comic timing, the killcam revealed that Vegeta had been in a water tower with an AWP the whole time, watching the shore from a safe distance. What even is this? I genuinely do not believe there is another game out there that is offering these deeply stupid and satisfying emergent experiences.
I'm unsure if there's a proper term for it... - in German maybe? - that describes a rite of passage through young adulthood that I'm sure everyone on this site has experienced on some level, at some time: finally having the disposable income to obtain something you coveted in childhood and then inevitably finding out that it wasn't everything (or even anything) that the media and advertising you consumed as a child promised you that it would be.
For me, many of these holy capital-cultural artefacts centre on Pokรฉmon. I know it's cliche to refer to yet another Japanese entertainment juggernaut as something analogous to a religion, but it's hard to deny the comparison when your town's priest spent a lot of time between 1997 and the new millennium talking about the Satanic properties of Mr. Mime, Magikarp and Misty. The Catholic Church was afraid of Zubat for a while.
The mysticism of Pokรฉmon was so strong in rural Scotland that my school descended into riots over Pokรฉmon not once, but twice. When someone in our class sent a mail order to China for a copy of Pokรฉmon Silver almost a full year before the game even existed in Europe, people handled it with the same practiced reverence they'd use at the church across the road, carrying it faithfully like it was a relic called the Ark of the Crobat or the Holy Granbull; a really cute snapshot through the crack in time that succeeded the rise of global capitalism and Thatcherite deregulation of children's advertising and preceded the advent of the mainstream internet and all that it entailed. We got our cheat codes from a newspaper back then, and the day the MissingNo glitch was revealed sent our schoolyard into rapture. But like all religions I've been involved in, time eventually revealed this false Pokรฉfaith for what it was - a moralless money-making vehicle for paedophiles.
While Pokรฉmon Puzzle League wasn't high on the list of Pokรฉrelics I coveted, it still excited me, I think - the idea of a puzzle game (I already adored Tetris) with Pokรฉmon (I already adored Pokรฉmon) that was faithful to the anime (I already adored Pokรฉmon: The Animated Series) was so exciting to me, but I always ended up choosing classic N64 titles like Earthworm Jim 3D and California Speed whenever I finally scrounged together something for the offertory at Electronics Boutique. Perhaps I wasnโt as committed as I remember myself being. Finally playing through it in 2022, decades removed from the incident at my school where a nine-year-old kid was beaten up for selling fake shiny Charizard cards, I could no longer believe in the utter pish that I'd been drinking back then. I couldn't even muster a smile for a MIDI instrumental cover of the PokรฉRap on the title screen... What's become of me? I guess this is what it means to be an adult.
For me, many of these holy capital-cultural artefacts centre on Pokรฉmon. I know it's cliche to refer to yet another Japanese entertainment juggernaut as something analogous to a religion, but it's hard to deny the comparison when your town's priest spent a lot of time between 1997 and the new millennium talking about the Satanic properties of Mr. Mime, Magikarp and Misty. The Catholic Church was afraid of Zubat for a while.
The mysticism of Pokรฉmon was so strong in rural Scotland that my school descended into riots over Pokรฉmon not once, but twice. When someone in our class sent a mail order to China for a copy of Pokรฉmon Silver almost a full year before the game even existed in Europe, people handled it with the same practiced reverence they'd use at the church across the road, carrying it faithfully like it was a relic called the Ark of the Crobat or the Holy Granbull; a really cute snapshot through the crack in time that succeeded the rise of global capitalism and Thatcherite deregulation of children's advertising and preceded the advent of the mainstream internet and all that it entailed. We got our cheat codes from a newspaper back then, and the day the MissingNo glitch was revealed sent our schoolyard into rapture. But like all religions I've been involved in, time eventually revealed this false Pokรฉfaith for what it was - a moralless money-making vehicle for paedophiles.
While Pokรฉmon Puzzle League wasn't high on the list of Pokรฉrelics I coveted, it still excited me, I think - the idea of a puzzle game (I already adored Tetris) with Pokรฉmon (I already adored Pokรฉmon) that was faithful to the anime (I already adored Pokรฉmon: The Animated Series) was so exciting to me, but I always ended up choosing classic N64 titles like Earthworm Jim 3D and California Speed whenever I finally scrounged together something for the offertory at Electronics Boutique. Perhaps I wasnโt as committed as I remember myself being. Finally playing through it in 2022, decades removed from the incident at my school where a nine-year-old kid was beaten up for selling fake shiny Charizard cards, I could no longer believe in the utter pish that I'd been drinking back then. I couldn't even muster a smile for a MIDI instrumental cover of the PokรฉRap on the title screen... What's become of me? I guess this is what it means to be an adult.
2005
Play any combo-focused fighting game or beat โem up for an extended period of time and youโre bound to catch yourself thinking โDamn, I wish I had a second wall bounce!โ. Thereโs nothing more frustrating than developing a theoretically strong combo in the lab and then discovering in practice that you already used up your OTG allowance 16 hits back. Sure, it might break the game if you could loop that EX move a third time, but it would look so cool, right? You deserve that shit, man! This combo is built different! If only you had unlimited ground-bounds, things would be differentโฆ
Urban Reign is the furled monkey pawโs fulfilment of this wish. Namcoโs spirited attempt at a standalone Tekken Force game is wholly defined by its disrespect for the laws of the known fighting game universe, allowing you to wallsplat, sweep and breaker to your heartโs content - no idea is off-limits here if you have a demented mind that's capable of dreaming in the language of juggling. Lemme tell ya, it feels GOOD to football kick grounded opponents into the wall over and over again until their little polygonal souls leave their body!! Remember when your little brother threw down his PSX pad in a fit of rage because your King combos weren't "letting him play" in Tekken 3? This is a dark resurrection of that feeling writ large and legitimate.
The first dozen or so stages are borderline pornographic in their allowances to smokinโ sick style, making an aggressive argument for why doing damage with a super should allow you to build enough meter for another super than can be cancelled into from the first super. โWhy canโt fighting games be like this all the time?โ is something youโre bound to ask yourself when the second boss battle against the helpless sap Sick Rick ends with you infinitely hammer-tossing him into a pool table; you can practically imagine the little computer inside your PS2 throwing down its proverbial controller because you made it watch your mastubatory Brad Hawk combo video, packing up its shit and telling its mother you cheated at the game by "spamming too many moves".
But the law of equivalent exchange is alive and well here, and every player-positive design decision requires a reactionary advocate for the equality of CPU rights. Ever commented on EventHubs that โthe best way to balance a game is to make all the low tiers as strong as the S-rank characters?โ - well, hereโs a look at what you could have won. Once the ten tutorials are done and the goonsโ gloves come off, this becomes another game entirely. You thought you were safe from all these cheap hands you were throwing out? Youโre built different, right? Pure skill? Shhhhhhhhhhhhhit. Sit down. PT-22 is gonna show you how truly broken this game is.
The mid-game of Urban Reign is a fascinating experiment in fighting game design, built almost entirely around how you think up a combo (both in sequence and circumstance) and how far ahead you can take it - given that some enemies can start chain-killing you with their first flick of their wrist, youโre forced to constantly plot random bullshit infinites out of sheer self-preservation instinct, the desire to "style on em" put aside in favour of hiding behind a shelf with dodgy collision-detection in the supermarket stage.
Strings that involve trash bins, jukeboxes, couches, lampposts and a whole lot of running up/suplexing into walls are only the tip of the iceberg here; you will have to go to the deepest, most depraved depths of your fighting gamer's mind in order to out-cheap the cheapest of the cheap shit. Let up for even a split second and it could all be over, and donโt forget that the CPU has the same rights as you do to do Guilty Gear-style bursts mid-combo - meaning no victory in this street war is ever guaranteed for even a secondโฆ Did I mention that while youโre being thrown by one enemy, other enemies can still kick you in the head? Damn! And there's no wakeup invincibility or reversal options? God DAMN!
Don't Stop until you reach the top and you'll be rewarded with the only language this game knows - more sadistic pain and suffering. After 99 stages of maverick midtown Marvel 2 madness, what could a final boss possibly look like? Well, the answer's hilariously simple - it's a dude with a gun who can kill you in one shot. Another one of gaming's greatest punchlines. Was it worth it? Hard to say, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime game that's worth checking out for a hot sec, even if you never make it past the karate guy in the 7-Eleven parking lot who can kara-cancel off a sneeze.
N.B. Really sad that this game's rough lil excuse-plot was written by the same guy who directed and scripted the Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War story. I refused to skip all the cutscenes and intro text because I was expecting Something Clever would happen at some point but no, this is just the narrative equivalent of a Final Fight game where you munch turkeys and beat up guys called Golem and Mr. Motor who say stuff like "Ow! That hurt!" lol
Urban Reign is the furled monkey pawโs fulfilment of this wish. Namcoโs spirited attempt at a standalone Tekken Force game is wholly defined by its disrespect for the laws of the known fighting game universe, allowing you to wallsplat, sweep and breaker to your heartโs content - no idea is off-limits here if you have a demented mind that's capable of dreaming in the language of juggling. Lemme tell ya, it feels GOOD to football kick grounded opponents into the wall over and over again until their little polygonal souls leave their body!! Remember when your little brother threw down his PSX pad in a fit of rage because your King combos weren't "letting him play" in Tekken 3? This is a dark resurrection of that feeling writ large and legitimate.
The first dozen or so stages are borderline pornographic in their allowances to smokinโ sick style, making an aggressive argument for why doing damage with a super should allow you to build enough meter for another super than can be cancelled into from the first super. โWhy canโt fighting games be like this all the time?โ is something youโre bound to ask yourself when the second boss battle against the helpless sap Sick Rick ends with you infinitely hammer-tossing him into a pool table; you can practically imagine the little computer inside your PS2 throwing down its proverbial controller because you made it watch your mastubatory Brad Hawk combo video, packing up its shit and telling its mother you cheated at the game by "spamming too many moves".
But the law of equivalent exchange is alive and well here, and every player-positive design decision requires a reactionary advocate for the equality of CPU rights. Ever commented on EventHubs that โthe best way to balance a game is to make all the low tiers as strong as the S-rank characters?โ - well, hereโs a look at what you could have won. Once the ten tutorials are done and the goonsโ gloves come off, this becomes another game entirely. You thought you were safe from all these cheap hands you were throwing out? Youโre built different, right? Pure skill? Shhhhhhhhhhhhhit. Sit down. PT-22 is gonna show you how truly broken this game is.
The mid-game of Urban Reign is a fascinating experiment in fighting game design, built almost entirely around how you think up a combo (both in sequence and circumstance) and how far ahead you can take it - given that some enemies can start chain-killing you with their first flick of their wrist, youโre forced to constantly plot random bullshit infinites out of sheer self-preservation instinct, the desire to "style on em" put aside in favour of hiding behind a shelf with dodgy collision-detection in the supermarket stage.
Strings that involve trash bins, jukeboxes, couches, lampposts and a whole lot of running up/suplexing into walls are only the tip of the iceberg here; you will have to go to the deepest, most depraved depths of your fighting gamer's mind in order to out-cheap the cheapest of the cheap shit. Let up for even a split second and it could all be over, and donโt forget that the CPU has the same rights as you do to do Guilty Gear-style bursts mid-combo - meaning no victory in this street war is ever guaranteed for even a secondโฆ Did I mention that while youโre being thrown by one enemy, other enemies can still kick you in the head? Damn! And there's no wakeup invincibility or reversal options? God DAMN!
Don't Stop until you reach the top and you'll be rewarded with the only language this game knows - more sadistic pain and suffering. After 99 stages of maverick midtown Marvel 2 madness, what could a final boss possibly look like? Well, the answer's hilariously simple - it's a dude with a gun who can kill you in one shot. Another one of gaming's greatest punchlines. Was it worth it? Hard to say, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime game that's worth checking out for a hot sec, even if you never make it past the karate guy in the 7-Eleven parking lot who can kara-cancel off a sneeze.
N.B. Really sad that this game's rough lil excuse-plot was written by the same guy who directed and scripted the Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War story. I refused to skip all the cutscenes and intro text because I was expecting Something Clever would happen at some point but no, this is just the narrative equivalent of a Final Fight game where you munch turkeys and beat up guys called Golem and Mr. Motor who say stuff like "Ow! That hurt!" lol
When the โPresented by SEGAโ splash screen gives way to a โPowered by AM2โ logo thereโs a temptation to start rubbing your hands together like a Sicilian uncle being presented with a fresh Pizza Sorbillo, but donโt get it twisted - this is merely Ferrariโs attempt to go solo with its own take on the Gran Turismo spec thatโs every bit as statically sexless as Sonyโs series.
My favourite feature is the race narrator who politely screams โSPEED UPโ at you when your car falls below a certain speed threshold, undoubtedly mandated by a slick-haired Ferrari-Pirelli representative desperate to perpetuate the idea that their vehicles have never been driven at anything less than 60mph. Between this and the โGentlemanly Driving Modeโ, itโs clear this is a functional/atmospherical antithesis to OutRun 2, playable proof that supercar owners are more interested in the status their properties bring than any attempts to to make their girlfriends cum by drifting skilfully between maori heads that mark the road to the Milky Way.
That this gameโs incredibly smooth jazzfunk soundtrack has not even been uploaded to YouTube is a testament to how joyless the package that encloses it isโฆ I would recommend you avoid this game, but I donโt think thereโs any conceivable way you would encounter it in the first place.
My favourite feature is the race narrator who politely screams โSPEED UPโ at you when your car falls below a certain speed threshold, undoubtedly mandated by a slick-haired Ferrari-Pirelli representative desperate to perpetuate the idea that their vehicles have never been driven at anything less than 60mph. Between this and the โGentlemanly Driving Modeโ, itโs clear this is a functional/atmospherical antithesis to OutRun 2, playable proof that supercar owners are more interested in the status their properties bring than any attempts to to make their girlfriends cum by drifting skilfully between maori heads that mark the road to the Milky Way.
That this gameโs incredibly smooth jazzfunk soundtrack has not even been uploaded to YouTube is a testament to how joyless the package that encloses it isโฆ I would recommend you avoid this game, but I donโt think thereโs any conceivable way you would encounter it in the first place.
2001
In the back room of an apartment, I am cut loose from the city. It watches me pass with sharp neon eyes. The sun has gone down with practiced bravado, twilight crawled across the sky and laden with foreboding. The night has gilded the monitor in silver. Every pixel is covered with light. The image of one mean sonnuvabitch called โMax โPayneโ, is repeated over and over. The Drug. The red and yellow of a berettaโs muzzle flashes fiercely on the white screenโs snow.
Something goes clank in the night, and the sound is close enough to remind me Iโm playing Max Payne on a PlayStation 2 with a broken controller. Wanted to give the boys at Backloggd something to joke about.
Except no oneโs laughing now.
The poindexters at IGN explained it to me:
โRemedy ported this PC code to the PS2 pretty quickly, and simply chopped up the levels into smaller bits in order to work around the 32 MBs of PS2 RAM.โ
โThe result is smaller levels, with more loading, slightly rearranged AI placement, but even worse is the heavy disruption to the flow and tension of the story, which tries desperately to feel like a movie, but instead feels like a TV show with hundreds of commercials shunt into it. It nearly ruins the experience.โ
Thirty-two megabytes of RAM.
Poor kid never stood a chance.
Neither did I.
A couple of days ago it had all come crashing down. The bad PS2 games arrived like a winter storm: Monster Hunter 2. Devil May Cry 2. Sonic Heroes. The Bouncer. Iโd been pushed over the edge by a cabal of games junkies who were ready to explode in random acts of senseless posting at any minute.
I found myself in the cold no-man's land between kamige and kusoge, no road signs on a crash course to a 3D Realms rush job with nothing to lose. Iโd died to jank before. I could die to jank again.
A gunshot. My last meeting with Alex before Max found out what his old friendโs brains looked like splattered across a wall. Iโd been writing a review in the style Max Payneโs dialogue while the loading bar crawled across the screen for mercy. Now I was awake, brought to my senses by the rapid fire of an AK alarm clock.
Buckshot pierces through me like a wind of rusted razor blades. Iโm dead. Again. Two more minutes of dead-eyed disc-reading before I see Alexโs brains. Again. A console port purgatory I wouldnโt wish on my own worst enemy.
Drawing from my vape pen like Bogart, I enter the big house once more with the odds stacked against me. Third-person aiming in an early PlayStation 2 game was nigh-on impossible, and the gamepadโs joystick had been busted for a decade or more.
I could relate.
Game like this wouldโve been a pixellated piece of cake in my younger years, a fresh-faced gamer on the sixteen-bit beat. But the strain of sleepless night after sleepless night spent on the graveyard shift with a chain gang of falling tetrominoes had shot my dexterity all the way to Hell. I was no pro gamer now.
My thirteenth gunfight of the night. Unlucky for some, and the way this one started didn't promise anything better than the last dozen. Bullets and bastards coming at my face, an army of dead men with only a few brain cells of artificial intelligence between them holding one-way tickets to the river Styx. I was trying to look for the answers, but every gunshot created a hole with more technical issues leaking out. A spreading labyrinth of questions and QA tickets spreading like a pool of blood on the snow at six frames a second.
Somewhere in the background of the game-goon banter and stock explosion sound effects, I heard the end howling after me. Polygonal hatchet men sped by on fast forward, rooftop water towers disappearing in 240p darkness, a dead forest of antennas and chimneys, all a blur beyond the draw distance. Another level come to a merciful end.
They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation mark to everything that had led to this point. I released my finger from the plastic trigger, and then it was over.
Something goes clank in the night, and the sound is close enough to remind me Iโm playing Max Payne on a PlayStation 2 with a broken controller. Wanted to give the boys at Backloggd something to joke about.
Except no oneโs laughing now.
The poindexters at IGN explained it to me:
โRemedy ported this PC code to the PS2 pretty quickly, and simply chopped up the levels into smaller bits in order to work around the 32 MBs of PS2 RAM.โ
โThe result is smaller levels, with more loading, slightly rearranged AI placement, but even worse is the heavy disruption to the flow and tension of the story, which tries desperately to feel like a movie, but instead feels like a TV show with hundreds of commercials shunt into it. It nearly ruins the experience.โ
Thirty-two megabytes of RAM.
Poor kid never stood a chance.
Neither did I.
A couple of days ago it had all come crashing down. The bad PS2 games arrived like a winter storm: Monster Hunter 2. Devil May Cry 2. Sonic Heroes. The Bouncer. Iโd been pushed over the edge by a cabal of games junkies who were ready to explode in random acts of senseless posting at any minute.
I found myself in the cold no-man's land between kamige and kusoge, no road signs on a crash course to a 3D Realms rush job with nothing to lose. Iโd died to jank before. I could die to jank again.
A gunshot. My last meeting with Alex before Max found out what his old friendโs brains looked like splattered across a wall. Iโd been writing a review in the style Max Payneโs dialogue while the loading bar crawled across the screen for mercy. Now I was awake, brought to my senses by the rapid fire of an AK alarm clock.
Buckshot pierces through me like a wind of rusted razor blades. Iโm dead. Again. Two more minutes of dead-eyed disc-reading before I see Alexโs brains. Again. A console port purgatory I wouldnโt wish on my own worst enemy.
Drawing from my vape pen like Bogart, I enter the big house once more with the odds stacked against me. Third-person aiming in an early PlayStation 2 game was nigh-on impossible, and the gamepadโs joystick had been busted for a decade or more.
I could relate.
Game like this wouldโve been a pixellated piece of cake in my younger years, a fresh-faced gamer on the sixteen-bit beat. But the strain of sleepless night after sleepless night spent on the graveyard shift with a chain gang of falling tetrominoes had shot my dexterity all the way to Hell. I was no pro gamer now.
My thirteenth gunfight of the night. Unlucky for some, and the way this one started didn't promise anything better than the last dozen. Bullets and bastards coming at my face, an army of dead men with only a few brain cells of artificial intelligence between them holding one-way tickets to the river Styx. I was trying to look for the answers, but every gunshot created a hole with more technical issues leaking out. A spreading labyrinth of questions and QA tickets spreading like a pool of blood on the snow at six frames a second.
Somewhere in the background of the game-goon banter and stock explosion sound effects, I heard the end howling after me. Polygonal hatchet men sped by on fast forward, rooftop water towers disappearing in 240p darkness, a dead forest of antennas and chimneys, all a blur beyond the draw distance. Another level come to a merciful end.
They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation mark to everything that had led to this point. I released my finger from the plastic trigger, and then it was over.
As the Ultimate upgrade to Rise there's no real surprises here, but there's something to be said for such consistent franchise quality - Monster Hunter is the most rock-solid brand name in gaming at this point, and an expansion pack to one of the best entries in the series is more than welcome; I'd be more than happy if Capcom just kept using Rise as a bedrock for an MMO-lite every year or two until the Switch finally combusts under the heat their developers have been bringing to the platform. With its sheer depth of customisable content and player expression, this is basically FFXIV for people who don't pee into bottles under their computer desk.
Criticisms can be made of Sunbreak, but they're all short-term annoyances in an expansion that could comfortably push a hundred hours. Like the original, there's an overabundance of pop-ups explaining Lucent Cromp Wenbembo Gems and DX Bugwire Casking+ that you'll never remember (until you finally need them weeks later), but it's a just an awkward signifier of how much gameplay-focused content has been crammed in to an ever-evolving ecosystem that always feels perfect until the next great idea comes along and takes thing to snow-capped heights you never imagined yourself climbing. As a Scot it also kinda pains me to trade out Fake Japan for Fake England as a hunting hub, but Capcom have done a great job of steamlining the beautiful "living menu" system Monhun thrives on even further, making the TTK even shorter than it was already; the new environment and its characters are full of more life than ever, and the follower quests are a fantastic "about damn time" inclusion to the experience that helps form an NPC-bond that goes deeper than the usual "you have a cute idle animation" acknolwedgements.
As a Freedom Unite fan, the updated Jungle brought a pixellated 480x272 tear to my eye (bring back plessy too pls...), but the Citadel is the true star of this show. A masterclass in map design that maximises every advantage of the Rise toolset, it's gotta be one of my favourite Monhun maps of all time - an Akumajo Dracula-type beat that feels like the Magala's true resting place. While I love all the imports from MH4U, there's fewer new monsters than I'd have liked - but the Monster Mash trio are so incredibly well-crafted that it's hard to be annoyed that the roster has been padded out with Really Annoyed Nargacuga and Pissed-Off Pukei-Pukei - when the combat's this good, who doesn't love a bit of repetition anyways?
Like with the original game, it's hard to give a definitive opinion on something that outright acknowledges that it isn't finished - but I have loved every moment on the Rise train so far. I just like having fun with my friends, okay? ๐
Criticisms can be made of Sunbreak, but they're all short-term annoyances in an expansion that could comfortably push a hundred hours. Like the original, there's an overabundance of pop-ups explaining Lucent Cromp Wenbembo Gems and DX Bugwire Casking+ that you'll never remember (until you finally need them weeks later), but it's a just an awkward signifier of how much gameplay-focused content has been crammed in to an ever-evolving ecosystem that always feels perfect until the next great idea comes along and takes thing to snow-capped heights you never imagined yourself climbing. As a Scot it also kinda pains me to trade out Fake Japan for Fake England as a hunting hub, but Capcom have done a great job of steamlining the beautiful "living menu" system Monhun thrives on even further, making the TTK even shorter than it was already; the new environment and its characters are full of more life than ever, and the follower quests are a fantastic "about damn time" inclusion to the experience that helps form an NPC-bond that goes deeper than the usual "you have a cute idle animation" acknolwedgements.
As a Freedom Unite fan, the updated Jungle brought a pixellated 480x272 tear to my eye (bring back plessy too pls...), but the Citadel is the true star of this show. A masterclass in map design that maximises every advantage of the Rise toolset, it's gotta be one of my favourite Monhun maps of all time - an Akumajo Dracula-type beat that feels like the Magala's true resting place. While I love all the imports from MH4U, there's fewer new monsters than I'd have liked - but the Monster Mash trio are so incredibly well-crafted that it's hard to be annoyed that the roster has been padded out with Really Annoyed Nargacuga and Pissed-Off Pukei-Pukei - when the combat's this good, who doesn't love a bit of repetition anyways?
Like with the original game, it's hard to give a definitive opinion on something that outright acknowledges that it isn't finished - but I have loved every moment on the Rise train so far. I just like having fun with my friends, okay? ๐