"the bouncer" for ps2 is a game called the Bouncer, in which you play as a bouncer. it is on the ps2.

i was initially drawn to the bouncer because i saw a four second clip of the guy going "the BOUNCEr" at the title screen. which was very funny. but then i saw the flashing, overedited, bloom-overloaded pre-menu cutscene that plays when you boot up the game. and as kitschy as it is, there's certainly something to like about it. so i gave it a try.

and i was delighted to find that the game continues to overindulge in that wonderful excess. aggressive bloom everywhere. awesome and eccentric character designs. awful (just awful), over the top, dogshit, etc. combat. "campy" is what you could call it. that's what i would call it.

tragically it isn't all so wonderful, as there is of course the matter of the combat. which i think i could overlook if it wasnt taking place in the most sauceless environments with terrible colour palettes, and if the enemies weren't complete chumps, and if the music wasnt the most boilerplate dramatic_music dot audio file format stuff. it's laughably balanced too, the protagonist is the weakest character by far; he's outclassed in damage, health and utility by the dude with the tats and the leather vest, so there's literally no reason to ever pick him. or you could just big the big dude with the facial piercings and tank everything, that works too.

mercifully it makes up the minority of the game, as the the Bouncer is short, and gameplay is not actually a focus. and it does still have its moments, like teaming up with the boys to take on a gang of lackeys, or stunlocking bosses with your combined attacks. so there is some fun to be had. overall very funny game i had a good time but i was certainly glad when it was over. the kind of game that probably had really good concept art, but kind of sucks (/ rules actually) in practicality

Heaven Will Be Mine is a flower growing defiantly in the hostile soil of cisheteropatriarchy. A stand against cishetero constructs like “physics” and “human” and “combat.” A rejection of the so-called natural sciences and their domination of metaphysical possibilities. The law of gravity is the law of gender binary and Heaven Will Be Mine rejects it, proposing instead a world where physics are subordinate. This is true science-fiction, science as a starting concept for what could be, because why couldn’t it? How could our fiction be shackled to their science? How could our bodies? A stand against Earth’s cultural authority expressed through its physical gravity, because culture and science have never been distinct concepts. A rejection of bioessentialism through an assault on objectivism. True subjectivism that rewrites ontology backward, to define being rather than allow being to define us. Earth’s inhuman, incontestable military power contested by girls in machines built to not kill. How could this be anything but pure hope?

I’m not familiar with NGE or 2001, I haven’t seen extensive Gundam, I’m a relatively new convert to the mecha genre and sci-fi in general, and I’m not a gender doomer. Maybe those associations are what lead to what I feel are unfair readings of this game. The conceit is obvious: Earth and “humanity” represent the cis world. The greater allegory may be a bit harder to fully accept, perhaps for those unable to identify with the metaphor or mesh with the flavour of sci-fi. “By becoming more human we become less human.” The core thesis of the game is provocative, but not ambiguous. What Saturn and Pluto and Luna-Terra do is right for humans because it’s right for them and they’re human, the most and least human of all. It’s designation they’re fighting, designation is violence, interpellation is violence. To accept their desire to stay separate from Earth is not to accept the incompatibility of the cisgender and transgender worlds, rather it is to accept the transgender world’s right to exist on its own terms, according to its own ontology; to allow humans to be free of the label human and trust it won’t lead to war. To reject this premise is to align with Iapetus, whose function is to “divide and categorize.” It is to condemn the girls to designation according to Earth’s ontological authority, to reject their wishes and thereby their being.

Heaven Will Be Mine is a surrealist piece that demands engagement on surrealist terms, but I’ll attempt to address it more concretely. Its prose is beautiful, poetic yet direct. It may be difficult to engage with for those unfamiliar with surrealist fiction, but don’t confuse this with confusing writing—it is intensely readable. Conflict and romance are written with chemistry and inertia, driving readers through scenes at a breakneck pace and punctuating kisses and combat with immense kinetic power. The game drops us into an established world but doesn’t expect us to immediately understand its jargon and lore, only to absorb the atmosphere; let the feeling of it envelop you, by the final playthrough it will all make sense. The characters are organic and realistic, queer down to their foundation but never superficially or ornamentally so. I’ve seen Heaven Will Be Mine compared to fanfiction, yet the prose is on par with that of professionally authored novels. Are we so afraid to legitimize works that tell our stories in our vernacular? Should our art not be grounded in our experience? This game shows that our right to exist is proven in our metrics of communication, our relationships, our community. It gives us recognizable characters with clear interiority and shows us how they clash and change each other, how they reshape through connection the same but different, a billionth at first then a hundredth, until it’s enough to live free of the Earth, to change the Earth’s gravity, to escape Earth’s designation.

Heaven Will Be Mine has no true ending. All of the endings are the true ending. None of them are. Who decides which ending is bad or good or true? “We don't need a true ending. We can make a true ending out of any ending. We can make it without the true end. We can make it out of the best ending, or the second best ending, or a bad ending. Beyond the part where there’s an ending. Until it’s something else.” Heaven Will Be Mine is pure hope. It announces a future where we can be whatever we are and not be held back by what already is. “When we let our children develop in the lightness of space, they chose their bodies, genders, souls, hearts of their own volition.” It is not a rejection of our compatibility with Earth and the cisgender world. It is a wish on a trinary constellation that Earth can become space, that its gravity can change, that the cisgender world can become ours too. You can hear this in the soundtrack, in Silly Game especially. It is art that could have only been born from our community with all of our hopes and dreams behind it. Heaven Will Be Mine is pure hope, hope for our future and our being and our humanity. “The human part isn’t the ear, but the hole in the lobes for your earrings, lipstick is real, lips are not, and we see humanity defined in its own gravitational output.” Heaven Will Be Mine is the pure hope that our gravitational output is enough to guarantee our existence no matter what obstacle may stand in our way. It’s right there in the title—we will achieve heaven, everything we want and deserve, to be free of 9.8 m/s^2 forever.

Let me tell you about a fly I once nicknamed Buzz. Two flies, as a matter of fact, because I couldn't tell them apart. Here I am, lying down on the couch of a moving RV. The thing's definitely a bit of an old spirit: the seatbelts tucked beneath, which I've chosen to neglect, are what you find on school buses across America. Old-fashioned, down to the way the logo on the buckle has been scratched off and spat on time over time. Now, if you lie down above the drivers, you get a glimpse of the world as it passes you by: gravestones in the middle of who knows, rocky nowheres, and once the West Coast has flown past you, great American dustbowls punctuated only by the wind passing through the small screen in front of you and the car radio down below. But, of course, you don't get that on the couch. For the price of comfort, I would argue, you get the ceiling. Only if you lean forward in a way you're really not supposed to does the world reveal itself in broader strokes. The problem with the ceiling is that it can't compete with your phone, and the problem with your phone is that there's only a finite amount of social media you can scroll through and music you can listen to before all of your senses go numb. In come two flies, almost innocuous in their immediate presence, willed into existence somewhere in a parking lot we stopped at, never at ease with themselves. I struggle to come up with ways you could keep a house fly as a pet since it'd always find holes in the cage you put it in. But more damning than that, you can't have more than one of them. You can have two black cats but never two flies. At which point does the second fly steal the name of the first? At any point in time you decide to notice them.

I left that trip short of the two flies I had acquainted myself with while staring at the ceiling. Not pets, not nuisances, just things that were there and made me feel... I don't know, relieved?

I don't see how the average experience of going to feed the ducks in your local park is all too different. There are more of them, they're larger, much slower, and less malicious in intent. But the reality is that you always leave the park having acknowledged the adorable creatures beneath you as little more than a temporary relief from day-to-day ennui and stress.

Plastic ducks don't fare the same way. They're a good middleground between flies and ducks: they're small and, in many cases, indistinct enough for you to impose your imagination on something that is decidedly real, and yet they float. They're slow and graceful, and best of all, they stick around. Down to the aggressively yellow color they sport, there's an undeniably charming sense of artifice to them that, expressions be damned, brings a smile to my face.

Placid Plastic Duck Simulator sits at ease in that artificial middleground as a piece of digital artwork, calm with the fact that you cannot feed its ducks more than your own politics and personality if you so choose. What going digital with this experience means is that the well-worn rules of what is both natural and artificial are discarded entirely. Through the use of save games, your ducks are as they were, rather than a natural byproduct of the environment they're in. No longer do two or three Buzzs' pass you by in the span of an afternoon.

But then, what do you achieve when you can no longer let go? What is the value of holding dearly onto something so obviously impersonal? What do you gain from it?

Quack.

Destrega strikes me as very ambitious, especially for its time.

To start with: some people say that fighting game story modes make no sense and are just an excuse to get people to beat each other up. This is not something that can be applied to Destrega. The story mode is quite well-done, with a tropey but effective premise that feels more like it belongs in a JRPG. While it's pretty entertaining watching the characters ham it up in early-voice-acting-era glory, I have some issues with the story mode. There are way too many 'filler' fights against generic enemies at the beginning, something like 80% of it is taken up by cutscenes with very long load times, and there are strange 'scripted' fights where you are supposed to lose.

The meat of the gameplay is also ambitious, taking place in large 3D arenas with both short and long-distance fighting (projectiles featuring a rock-paper-scissors system). Close combat isn't very deep, but the long-range fights are quite interesting - every projectile has a split-second charge time, and characters call out the name of their attack (speed, power or spread) while charging, which means experienced players can respond to audio cues and counter with moves of their own that are effective against the incoming attack. The mechanics are solid enough, though the characters end up feeling rather samey and it's often possible to beat all but the best opponents with button mashing.

Criticisms aside, I largely had fun playing the game. It did a lot of things differently from other games of its time and deserves credit for it, even if the execution wasn't always the best.

A mess of a trilogy closer, downgraded on every front from its progenitors, unable to meet its high ambitions. It's not without merit, but it's extremely hit or miss. Its approach to chronologically ambiguous storytelling is maybe its only unmarred highlight. Its character beats, puzzles, and twists (of which there are many) peak at "not as well done in the previous two games" and bottom out unfathomably low.

Its attempt to tell a much more harrowing tale than the previous two games is seriously undercut by its mawkish writing, awkward character animations, and stiff voice acting (which reeks of poor direction, not a slight on the VA's talent). Because of these, it often ends up as a farce - comic when it grasps for tragedy, and something to laugh at when it asks the player to laugh with it.

I held hope that Zero Time Dilemma would reward enduring until the end. I wanted to know how ZTD would try to justify the time spent playing it. Unfortunately, that desire was left unfulfilled. No puzzle left a deep, lasting sense of satisfaction. No character development or plot arc gave any kind of meaningful insight. No twist or mystery electrified my mind racing with excitement or fascination. All that it left was a beleaguered shrug of exhaustion: "Well, I guess that happened."

Life is simply unfair, don't you think?

Above all, I just want a story, not a barrel of jokes of varying quality. The rest written below is just a heartfelt polemic of me saying more of the same however it applies as much to this one as any other 'joke metagame' you could pull to. The only reason I'm speaking on this one in particular is in fact because it's so short and universal that such a fact in itself may be a great meditation point for which to consider these aspects.

There is plenty of interesting observations throughout its 10 minute runtime on the labor exploitation riddled in profit driven AAA design and how it can create a system of control and suffering. Its cushioned by taking its own world lightly and picking fun at its own existence. This mixture of comedy and labor concerns may on the surface seem like a great form of messaging especially considering the natural aversion people are going to have to 'serious' or 'dark' depictions of the world of Pokemon after the PETA satires Pokémon Black and White (2012) and Pokémon Red, White, and Blue (2013). Not to mention the manufacturing of Game Theory type videos that depict the world as more malicious for free clicks. Or even the no doubt multitude of poorly written ROM Hacks that often try and fail to convey 'dark' depictions. As a result, regardless of the authors own probable bias for prop jokes and dad humor, there is an argument to be made that treating the world of Pokemon and its production with any degree of desperation is in itself poor form.

I disagree with this. GameFreak often takes the franchise itself seriously in small bursts before quietly recapturing them for better sales latter. For example Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness (2005) shows a world of open abuse and genetic mistreatment of pokemon in a much more drab way through 'shadow pokemon', which have had the doors to their heart shut out by messed up science experimentation (think Alphys True Lab experiments if you dont know). Or even earlier, Pokémon: The First Movie (1998), a real tear jerker for many fans for its more dark treatment of genetic sentience along with vengeful mistreatment for Pokemon as a legitimate class. There are at the very least very serious animal testing themes and animal to human bonding stories the world of Pokemon tries to keep serious about. These moments however have been recaptured, Pokemon Go uses the Shadow Pokemon feature but ripped from their initial narrative meaning it both justifies and creates amnesia over the initial reference point. The same goes for MewTwo who in the partial remake film Pokémon the Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution (2020) had much of their musings truncated and turned more into a gruff biped antagonist to be punched.

So if GameFreak is allowed to be serious, I don't think we need to hold back either. In Another Pokemon Game you have a strained 'joke' from one of the workers belaboring why they cant make it in Bitsy and a few people boycotting outside. However the narrative arc does not allow the protagonist to partake in this boycott, nor does it really give room for the possibility that Bitsy should be used as a lot of the jokes in the game reveal an insecurity at its own Bitsy world like the inability to code in Bitsy, the recycling of content, and incorrect sprites. This is because the world is in a tension with its humor and its (meta)narrative design aspects often blurring how the one should or would be with the other.

In that way this 'metahumor' is probably fine for most people in the same way a Mel Brooks film would be. I can't help but this self disparaged referentiality and reliance on easy meme humor (ex. I've fallen and cant get up', She learned it on Mumsnet, etc.) is a disempowerment from the potential of critique. I've felt it as much in Mel Brooks as I have in Stanley Parable or here. Furthermore, I cant help but feel that works as such defang genuine analysis of cultural necrosis within the corporate capture of a franchise. For example when hotelbones discusses the capture of the Muppet franchise in her bitsyessay Man or Muppet (2022) she reflects how

"Then their creator died, their franchise was subsumed by the corporate need to gain capital and they have been swung around carelessly without any understanding for why they existed in the first place on sex joke television shows and life insurance ads"

This is a sincere attempt at grieving over the puppeteering of her favourite characters into corporate husks and how it relates to her life, that's rare. Reflections like Another Pokemon Game as often well crafted as they can be are far more common. Something is preventing us from going all in.

The question for me is ultimately not 'is Another Pokemon Game saying the right things' or 'why are we grieving over our own fictions in the form of jokes'. The issue is moreso why we seem unable to vault over our own sarcasm and laughter to say what's really bugging us. Why can't we ever bring ourselves to be angry and miserable about this stuff and reproduce it in our art and words? Why be so dodgy all the time? It's impossible for me to read Another Pokemon Game as anything other than an intensely repressed work that feeds into a system that there will always be another Pokemon Game and that in a way that should be soothing in itself because at least people are trying. What is there to make of a 'story' that has fatigued its audience over the course of decades? What are we supposed to make of this story via slow time that seems unchanging and unfazed? Maybe this quote from Fisher will aid us here:

"The struggle here is not only over the (historical) direction of time but over different uses of time. Capital demands that we always look busy, even if there’s no work to do. If neoliberalism’s magical voluntarism is to be believed, there are always opportunities to be chased or created; any time not spent hustling and hassling is time wasted. The whole city is forced into a gigantic simulation of activity, a fantacism of productivism in which nothing much is actually produced, an economy made out of hot air and bland delirium." (Ghosts of My Life p. 167)

In order to pull ourselves away from this time force, we should dare to be angry and ferocious in our lives and our memories, my favourite pokemon as a kid was Jigglypuff who was always angry and evasive from everyone trying to pin her down. I want to be a Jigglypuff in life. There should be more mindfulness in the present and I think that reall is found in boycotting the new Pokemon games and films, if for no other reason then escaping nostalgic delirium. It's a road to nowhere, paved in labor crunch and the penman's ash.