I've scarcely felt so undecided on a game, this is genuinely an oddball experience. This is basically a retelling of Evangelion but in game form. The cutscenes and sound have incredible quality, but actually playing it - crazy shit. The first couple of stages set you up to think this is a 3D fighter as you control Eva 01 and fight angels, but just as soon as you get used to that, you're slapped in the face by an 8 second mission where you're fighting with the controls trying to aim a missile. Then you're mashing buttons hard enough to give yourself an aneurysm as you chase down Jet Alone - and then its a fucking rhythm game with Asuka. Your head will be spinning, but not for long, because you can clear this entire thing in like an hour. Is it even fair to call this a game? It feels more like something you'd play with at a museum exhibit

idk, man, it's Diablo 2, what do you want from me. one of the greatest to ever do it. hang Diablo 2's jersey from the rafters. frame it and put it in the louvre. let it retire to a peaceful life in the countryside.

A few years ago I reinstalled Diablo 2 from my battlechest disks and tried playing it and, man, all the quality of life type stuff that all the other ARPGs of the last twenty years is really nice and having zero of that in Diablo 2 was kinda rough because I am a big baby. But also it turns out Act 1 on Normal also just kinda sucks (at least for the classes I tend to play). You level up pretty slowly and it takes so long to really get going. So back in the day that made me put the game down pretty quickly. But not this time! I persevered and also they added just enough nice little QoL things that I truly do not mind the ways in which the game didn't get "updated".

I played all the way through on the updated graphics and they are, largely, fine but they really make me glad there's a quick toggle to swap back to the old graphics because it's so easy to see how artistically inferior the new shit is. Yeah, sure, it's all 3d rendered and got nicer lighting and particle effects and whatever but the vibe is wildly different. The darkness isn't as consuming and oppressive. There is so much more gray and brown. If you are interested in Diablo 2 as a Game To Click On Things then it doesn't really matter much but if you care about Diablo 2 as Art then it extremely matters!!

It's kinda wild to me that they've made balance changes and even added new items and runewords and shit! Somewhere there are people hiding in a basement hoping that the bean counters don't find out about them and ask "wait, you're spending how much time on this? for a game with no battlepass? or microtransactions? from how many years ago?" and I love that for them. It's cool to see it get items with some new mechanics and also they fixed Summoner Druid to be Actually Viable and I appreciate that a lot because I love all my killer puppies and big bear friend and weird forest spirit tentacle creature.

Act 2 was always my favorite act as a stupid teenager. But oh my god duuuude the fucking Maggot Lair!! All-timer for Worst Dungeon. Gotta be one of the worst. Trying to just move around is bad enough but then having to fight shit, too?? And good fuckin' luck if you're a dope like me who likes to play summoning classes. The rest of it is pretty alright. Just gotta watch out for those stupid lightning beetles, y'know.

Diablo 2 Nightmare Difficulty is still the sweetest sweet spot. You've got solid gear and you've got quite a few skills leveled up. You can actually kill shit and not immediately fucking die. It feels so good to play. It's the best part of the game. And then you get to Hell Difficulty. And it is so aptly named. You really gotta do a lot of extra farming for more levels and more loot and it's so miserable. I am simply past my "spending all day farming stuff" days. I got better shit to do. Apologies to socketed items and runewords and high-tier set items, I am simply in a different part of my life now.

Act 3 isn't good and it was never good. Annoying-ass maps with annoying-ass enemies, fuck Durance of Hate, fuck Mephisto, fuck Act 3, all my homies hate Act 3.

Playing this with someone who played the game once many years ago (long enough that this was essentially a fresh experience) was an absolute treat because so much of this game is deeply burned into my brain. Hearing reactions to story beats that I basically didn't remember because I was a hardcore ladder girly who didn't care about the story was fun. The first time we hit some beetles in Act 2 and got wrecked by lightning, they made some noises that were somewhere between a shriek and squeal and it was a delight. I highly recommend this extremely specific experience of playing the game.

The end of Act 4 is so fucking funny, dude. Like, imagine getting Diablo 2 before the expansion and the game just fucking ends there. Modern games could never. Extremely funny.

There's a new thing with "Terrorized" zones and I have no idea what's going on there? Like, the affected area has all the enemies made to be your level +2, so you can use areas you wouldn't normally be revisiting to get level-appropriate XP and loot but I don't fully understand if that's better than just your classic Baal runs or whatever-the-fuck.

Act 5 sure is Some Shit, huh. This time around I really noticed the small changes in things here. How, even back in 2001 or whatever, they were iterating and pushing on what was possible in the game.

I still haven't ever gotten to level 99. Or fought an Uber Diablo. Or gotten and Annihilus or Hellfire Torch. And I probably never will. And that's okay! But if I ever somehow get that desire, then this is a very solid version of the game to do it in!

In an industry that is so obsessed with franchises and selling you the same shit over and over and loves to do "remakes" that fundamentally change important aspects of games, this is one of the absolute least egregious examples of modern remake-thinking.

"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?

podcast fodder. it occurred to me over the course of playing that for four-player couch co-op like this, the mindlessness is a boon. you're supposed to be catching up with your friends and fucking around, not actually invested in the game.

it pulls surprisingly heavily from the original gauntlet with little variation: destroy generators that endlessly spawn, open chests and gates with keys, use potions as AoEs, destroy walls, open other walls. the only other mechanical changes is some light meter management, where you can activate one of three different special abilities depending on the level of the gauge or siphon some off to use a dash-twirl kinda action. other than weaving those in, you'll just be mashing the shoot/attack button, and with the advent of a 3D world and shifting perspective for the game, they've slathered auto-aim all over your toolkit, so there's almost no engagement other than being there to press the button... and if you're close enough to an enemy you'll auto-attack anyway, so who cares.

the main intrigue instead is the variety of environments and stages, each with their own hazards and puzzles to solve. you might rend an arena asunder by pressing a switch, skewing the two halves apart and exposing new corridors in the process. there's moments where you'll rearrange a set of catwalks by pressing a series of switches (although you never have access to more than one at once) to raise and lower them to match your character's height. in some (many) instances, you must painstakingly root out a breakable wall and enter it to press a switch and open a different wall somewhere else. indeed, most of the game consists of finding switches to press to access a new area; it is not uncommon for there to be chains of three to seven switches that lead to each other in the span of a single room. is what the switches activate occasionally cool, giving you a new path through the often intricate area designs? sure. but expect the whole game to follow virtually the exact same loop throughout: mash attack, press switch.

there's occasional gesturing to more of diablo-like system, the style which would quickly eat this series' lunch by the sixth gen, though it often doesn't land given the game's arcade-focused nature. other than adding a leveling and stats system to the original gauntlet experience, there's also this odd loot/power-up component, some of which is random but others of which are actually specific, often obscure unlockables within particular levels. of course, seeing as there's no permanence regarding items beyond keys/potions, these end up being temporary powerups; the thrill of grinding out skorne 1 so that you can get a piece of his armor set feels quaint when faced with the reality that said item will disappear 90 seconds into the next stage you play. as an aside: per the original game you're intended to replenish your health or revive yourself with extra credits, but seeing as this console version does not have that system, dying will kick you back out to the hub with whatever health you had going in. that might seem fine, but if you actually want to replenish to full health, expect to spend a lot of time grinding the first level for the 400-500 in health pickups that are guaranteed. for my final boss run, where I needed my level 60 max of 7000 health after spending most of the game maintaining about 2000, this was quite a chore.

this sega dreamcast version seems like a hodge-podge of each of the other versions of this game. compared to the playstation and n64 versions, which have a different set of levels and a proper inventory system, the dreamcast version serves as a more direct port of the original's levels and item system. oddly enough, it does have the additional endgame levels and skorne refight from the original home ports. it also carries in certain mechanical changes from the game's incremental sequel dark legacy, such as all of the new character classes and a functionally useless block ability; what the fuck is the point of a block in a mostly ranged game where having attack advantage is always a priority to avoid getting flanked and overwhelmed? probably the most bizarre aspect of the dreamcast version is that it runs like dogshit even with only a single player, and it retains the somewhat hideous look of the original game. not sure why the dc wasn't able to handle a relatively low-poly game built for a 3DFX banshee gpu, but I'm going to assume fault on the part of the developers.

still, a podcast game with some cool level visuals has its own appeal. was unfortunately left curious about dark legacy and the later gameplay revisions in seven sorrows. an arcade-style dungeon crawler does appeal to me in a base way, and I appreciate that this was an early attempt at creating an arcade game with a proper progression system (including rudimentary usernames and passwords!). should probably bring some friends along for the ride if I ever get a wild hair to try again.

Xenogears has one of the best stories in a game I've played, even if it's puzzling at times and surely not helped by a haphazard translation that misrepresents certain plot elements and character motivations. The gameplay side isn't quite as fleshed out, such as elements on moves and combos being worthless. It's serviceable but it feels like something the developers came up with in a few months because this intricately told gnostic alien story needed something to do inbetween the beats. I can't praise how good the story of Xenogears is enough. I actually can't, because it's like a complex work of art that I'm still in the process of digesting and learning more about as the months pass since my initial playthrough. Such an interesting and unforgettable experience.