Vulgar / excess
For my own reference. Style and substance are indivisible in play. Combustible games, unreal velocities, game worlds with a sickness that gets under your skin and infects you. Games that send you to hell or otherwise make you see god.
185 Games
There is a pure, uncut ugliness to Grand Theft Auto III that cannot be replicated. Where other titles in the series come automatically aware of their place in pop culture discourse, III is narrative, style, and motivation pared back to reveal an ultraviolent animating force.
The Last of Us Pt II is best greeted as an exploitation work rather than a cinematic one with 'things to say' (it has barely an idea in its head and is poorly told as a story). There is a madness to it that is addictive and horrifying, where level and AI design are deployed to ensure the player only acts in desperation, and resorts to the sloppiest and cruellest measures at the drop of a hat. Where the first game dealt in a procedural heaviness and rewarded planning, this one is about chaos and the speed at which blind adrenaline bypasses ethical thought. Ellie's first encounter with the Seraphites would have made a perfect ending, because it's that forest lit up in blood and fire that lets you know you are already in hell.
Co-op bliss. Admittedly the levels and tasks in this sequel are far more involved than the first TimeSplitters (a ruthlessly pared back shooter that adds just enough exploration to the arcade format that its chaos becomes infectious), but the series' frantic energy actually bursts a bit more in these more conventional environments.
The fourth entry of the series pulls the unthinkable, making the series' self-reflexive badness kind of earnestly charming
