romdocitizen
The Communists tried to create a society based on total equality for all.
In the end, this philosophy proved too much at odds with reality. Outlawed by his government and shunned by the people he'd purported to save, Plekhanov went to his hanging with these final words--
As long as the crux and the cross rule the earth, mankind shall never know peace.
-ittetsu narahara, full metal daemon muramasa
...
"You kill them and you're no better than they are! You just demonstrate your extremist contempt for democracy!"
"What sort of democracy requires the services of scum like these? I'll tell you, Ms. Valetti: a bourgeois democracy, which wears a thin skin of human rights to keep out the cold, but when things hot up, when the rotten plots of the ruling class have failed to silence our demands, when they put half the population on the dole queue, and squeeze the other half dry with wage cuts to keep themselves in profit, when they have run out of promises and you reformists have failed to keep the masses in order for them, and there are riots on the streets, then they shed their skins and they dump you, don't they? Just as they did in Chile, and they set their wildest dogs loose on us all."
"What has the tragedy in Chile got to do with all this?"
"It's a prize example of the failure of the peaceful road to socialism! You know, the absurd idea that bourgeois democracy can be gradually transformed from within."
"Rubbish! Allende's failure proves exactly the opposite! He tried to force the pace of the revolution before the people were fully prepared!"
"YOU MEAN HE DISARMED THE WORKERS TOO FAST. AND LED THEM LIKE THE PIED PIPER INTO SANTIAGO STADIUM. Look at them, Ms. Valetti: the political police armed against the people. You seriously suppose you can disarm them with a ballot box? What the hell do you think they're there for?"
- dario fo (adapted by gavin richards), accidental death of an anarchist
/
"Why do you want this revolution? What good do you think it will do?"
The milk-coffee coloured shoulders tossed back the yellow satin scarf in a shrug.
"What good? None, possibly. One does not await a revolution as one awaits the grocer's van, expecting to be handed packets of sugar and tapioca. My river in spring flood brought dead bodies, a hand or foot dismembered, a clot of entrails. So will this flood, maybe. But for all that it is the spring flood."
- sylvia townsend-warner, summer will show
/
"Peace? Is it peace we’re working to protect?
What has peace meant for this country, for our city, for us?
All the effort and passion Japan put into the war ended in Hiroshima in defeat. Then the Americans came, bringing their nuclear deterrent, their cold war, their Hollywood chewing-gum war. And now all over the world there are bullet wars, civil wars, suffering, misery, death.
We’re a rich country. And what is our wealth built on? The bloody corpses in all these wars. They’re the foundation of our peace. We now put the same effort into indifference that our parents put into war. Other countries comfortably far away pay the price for our prosperous peace. We’ve learned very well how to ignore their suffering."
"No matter how repulsive the peace, it’s still vital to guard it. It may be an immoral peace, maybe an unjust peace, but an unjust peace is still better than a just war."
"I share your revulsion about “just” wars. If there ever was such a thing it was the war against the Nazis - our allies Goto, our allies! But how many millions throughout history have died in the cause of what their lying leaders called 'just' wars?
And yet it seems to me that the line between a just war and an unjust peace is very faint indeed. If the just war is a lie, is the unjust peace less of a lie? We are told there is peace, but we look around us and even if we cannot give it words our lives tell us we cannot believe what we are being told.
In the end every war gives way to peace so-called, and every so-called peace is the dormant seed of war.
So it’s only a matter of time, 'til the hard reality of war sweeps away our illusion that the absence of war is peace. So I ask you again, what are we working to protect?
We enjoy peace on our T.V. screens while just outside the camera shot the war is raging. We forget we’re just a camera angle behind the battlelines. No, we don’t forget–we quite simply refuse to remember. That cannot go on. Sometime, somehow, we will be punished."
"Punished? By who? By God?"
"Anyone in this world can be like God, most in a universe no bigger than their own minds, all-present, all-knowing, and yet impotent outside the confines of their heads. And what God cannot do, men will attempt."
- patlabor 2: the movie (1993, production i.g.) dir. mamoru oshii, script by kazunori ito (adapted by george roubicek for manga entertainment)
/
"I would like to send a message from the frontline to the comrades in Japan. We are hoping to see the fire of revolution burn in the world. Guevara once said he hoped to see the entire world become like Vietnam, and that is the same hope we have. That is why we hope from the bottom of our hearts that by maintaining constant communication between us, as we have learned much from your struggles, you will learn from our experiences and learn the lessons we have learned. With our collective struggle, we can decisively defeat the imperialists who oppress and exploit our people. The will and emotion of people cannot be expressed by newspaper reports, but only by the commencement of armed struggle."
(THE BEST FORM OF PROPAGANDA IS ARMED STRUGGLE)
- red army - p.f.l.p: declaration of world war (1971) dir. masao adachi & koji wakamatsu
...
"Peace is the noblest pursuit!"
...well, sure, but what peace and whose?
one of the most simultaneously deeply serious and terminally unserious works of fiction i've ever encountered, a closed circle of violence entrapping a group of people pathologically incapable of resolving the dialectical tensions with which they are faced and all hope of escape for anyone foreclosed from the jump. it's not necessarily wise to read muramasa (the work) as fully sharing or endorsing the ideological zealotry of kageaki's utterly moronic dril wise man tweet philosophy, one born of a quintessentially chuuni disconnect from material social reality in favor of a totalizing system that obliterates nuance or meaningful historical analysis - muramasa is such a formidably coherent piece of genre fiction that the dissonance this produces lends itself to an interpretation that doesn't take the law of balance as read, even if none of the cast are ever able to find a means of escape. it's still a reactionary work in many respects, as well as racist in ways that work against what it's attempting to do and misogynistic in ways that (surprisingly) do actually dovetail with its thematic concerns effective/interesting ways whilst still making for largely wholly uninteresting pornography (kanae and the first muramasa sex scenes being the only remotely good ones), but...still absolutely 100% peak, even if not quite enough to dethrone fatomoru for me. need me some ginseigo and avenger kits expeditiously!!!
In the end, this philosophy proved too much at odds with reality. Outlawed by his government and shunned by the people he'd purported to save, Plekhanov went to his hanging with these final words--
As long as the crux and the cross rule the earth, mankind shall never know peace.
-ittetsu narahara, full metal daemon muramasa
...
"You kill them and you're no better than they are! You just demonstrate your extremist contempt for democracy!"
"What sort of democracy requires the services of scum like these? I'll tell you, Ms. Valetti: a bourgeois democracy, which wears a thin skin of human rights to keep out the cold, but when things hot up, when the rotten plots of the ruling class have failed to silence our demands, when they put half the population on the dole queue, and squeeze the other half dry with wage cuts to keep themselves in profit, when they have run out of promises and you reformists have failed to keep the masses in order for them, and there are riots on the streets, then they shed their skins and they dump you, don't they? Just as they did in Chile, and they set their wildest dogs loose on us all."
"What has the tragedy in Chile got to do with all this?"
"It's a prize example of the failure of the peaceful road to socialism! You know, the absurd idea that bourgeois democracy can be gradually transformed from within."
"Rubbish! Allende's failure proves exactly the opposite! He tried to force the pace of the revolution before the people were fully prepared!"
"YOU MEAN HE DISARMED THE WORKERS TOO FAST. AND LED THEM LIKE THE PIED PIPER INTO SANTIAGO STADIUM. Look at them, Ms. Valetti: the political police armed against the people. You seriously suppose you can disarm them with a ballot box? What the hell do you think they're there for?"
- dario fo (adapted by gavin richards), accidental death of an anarchist
/
"Why do you want this revolution? What good do you think it will do?"
The milk-coffee coloured shoulders tossed back the yellow satin scarf in a shrug.
"What good? None, possibly. One does not await a revolution as one awaits the grocer's van, expecting to be handed packets of sugar and tapioca. My river in spring flood brought dead bodies, a hand or foot dismembered, a clot of entrails. So will this flood, maybe. But for all that it is the spring flood."
- sylvia townsend-warner, summer will show
/
"Peace? Is it peace we’re working to protect?
What has peace meant for this country, for our city, for us?
All the effort and passion Japan put into the war ended in Hiroshima in defeat. Then the Americans came, bringing their nuclear deterrent, their cold war, their Hollywood chewing-gum war. And now all over the world there are bullet wars, civil wars, suffering, misery, death.
We’re a rich country. And what is our wealth built on? The bloody corpses in all these wars. They’re the foundation of our peace. We now put the same effort into indifference that our parents put into war. Other countries comfortably far away pay the price for our prosperous peace. We’ve learned very well how to ignore their suffering."
"No matter how repulsive the peace, it’s still vital to guard it. It may be an immoral peace, maybe an unjust peace, but an unjust peace is still better than a just war."
"I share your revulsion about “just” wars. If there ever was such a thing it was the war against the Nazis - our allies Goto, our allies! But how many millions throughout history have died in the cause of what their lying leaders called 'just' wars?
And yet it seems to me that the line between a just war and an unjust peace is very faint indeed. If the just war is a lie, is the unjust peace less of a lie? We are told there is peace, but we look around us and even if we cannot give it words our lives tell us we cannot believe what we are being told.
In the end every war gives way to peace so-called, and every so-called peace is the dormant seed of war.
So it’s only a matter of time, 'til the hard reality of war sweeps away our illusion that the absence of war is peace. So I ask you again, what are we working to protect?
We enjoy peace on our T.V. screens while just outside the camera shot the war is raging. We forget we’re just a camera angle behind the battlelines. No, we don’t forget–we quite simply refuse to remember. That cannot go on. Sometime, somehow, we will be punished."
"Punished? By who? By God?"
"Anyone in this world can be like God, most in a universe no bigger than their own minds, all-present, all-knowing, and yet impotent outside the confines of their heads. And what God cannot do, men will attempt."
- patlabor 2: the movie (1993, production i.g.) dir. mamoru oshii, script by kazunori ito (adapted by george roubicek for manga entertainment)
/
"I would like to send a message from the frontline to the comrades in Japan. We are hoping to see the fire of revolution burn in the world. Guevara once said he hoped to see the entire world become like Vietnam, and that is the same hope we have. That is why we hope from the bottom of our hearts that by maintaining constant communication between us, as we have learned much from your struggles, you will learn from our experiences and learn the lessons we have learned. With our collective struggle, we can decisively defeat the imperialists who oppress and exploit our people. The will and emotion of people cannot be expressed by newspaper reports, but only by the commencement of armed struggle."
(THE BEST FORM OF PROPAGANDA IS ARMED STRUGGLE)
- red army - p.f.l.p: declaration of world war (1971) dir. masao adachi & koji wakamatsu
...
"Peace is the noblest pursuit!"
...well, sure, but what peace and whose?
one of the most simultaneously deeply serious and terminally unserious works of fiction i've ever encountered, a closed circle of violence entrapping a group of people pathologically incapable of resolving the dialectical tensions with which they are faced and all hope of escape for anyone foreclosed from the jump. it's not necessarily wise to read muramasa (the work) as fully sharing or endorsing the ideological zealotry of kageaki's utterly moronic dril wise man tweet philosophy, one born of a quintessentially chuuni disconnect from material social reality in favor of a totalizing system that obliterates nuance or meaningful historical analysis - muramasa is such a formidably coherent piece of genre fiction that the dissonance this produces lends itself to an interpretation that doesn't take the law of balance as read, even if none of the cast are ever able to find a means of escape. it's still a reactionary work in many respects, as well as racist in ways that work against what it's attempting to do and misogynistic in ways that (surprisingly) do actually dovetail with its thematic concerns effective/interesting ways whilst still making for largely wholly uninteresting pornography (kanae and the first muramasa sex scenes being the only remotely good ones), but...still absolutely 100% peak, even if not quite enough to dethrone fatomoru for me. need me some ginseigo and avenger kits expeditiously!!!
2023
ignore the haters this shit is tight, iori one of the best type-moon boys
2003
barely scratched the surface of this but it's really fucking cool and deserves to be pulled from obscurity - bit finicky to play with a controller but there might be a way to tweak that [bgm selection - "pure (energy)" by g.t.o.]
2000
"contest not with monsters lest ye become a monster, and if you spot long a white woman, the white woman spots also."
- frederick neetchah
the parts of this that really hit do so to such an extent that I was both genuinely moved and got that someone-walking-over-my-grave adjacent sensation of "oh this would have Done Shit to me as a teenager" but everything else really just gave me a new appreciation for fatomoru as a group of people looking at this and saying "hold my beer I can hurt you way worse and more gay-ly and with none of the gratuitously ill-considered sexual assault as gratification."
Arc and Hisui/Kohaku routes the obvious standouts and the opening and closing segments with Aoko put a perfect lil' bow on the thing, so bring on witch on the holy night I'm sold lol
- frederick neetchah
the parts of this that really hit do so to such an extent that I was both genuinely moved and got that someone-walking-over-my-grave adjacent sensation of "oh this would have Done Shit to me as a teenager" but everything else really just gave me a new appreciation for fatomoru as a group of people looking at this and saying "hold my beer I can hurt you way worse and more gay-ly and with none of the gratuitously ill-considered sexual assault as gratification."
Arc and Hisui/Kohaku routes the obvious standouts and the opening and closing segments with Aoko put a perfect lil' bow on the thing, so bring on witch on the holy night I'm sold lol
2022
a quintessential 4 star 3.5 star (or 3.5 star 4 star?) "hey remember this thing you liked well here's More Of It" indie videoed game experience. loved the first and third chapters, kinda really disliked the second. aforementioned first and third chapters are generally excellent old-school Resi save box run-plotting goodness, but the unrelentingly slavish adherence to its influences throughout (e.g. the distressingly literal deployment of Silent Hill's otherworld aesthetic sensibility - capitalism is a literal meat grinder, geddit??) really makes me wish Rose Engine took some actual real swings of their own rather than just quoting power chords from their idols - also like, it's 2022 your survival horror game does not need boss fights and if you choose to do them anyway they don't need to be mid at best! also the narrative's signal to noise ratio is just enough to move my poor lesbian heart but one does kinda start to detect the tang of deliberate obscurantism for want of anything of substance to say with this material.
anyway this probably comes off more negative than I actually felt abt it, which is not dissimilar to how I felt about Norco earlier this year - this is Very Good but could have been Great, and I'm v excited to see what this team makes next! thumbs up, gets a rec, will def replay at some point for the secret/true ending.
anyway this probably comes off more negative than I actually felt abt it, which is not dissimilar to how I felt about Norco earlier this year - this is Very Good but could have been Great, and I'm v excited to see what this team makes next! thumbs up, gets a rec, will def replay at some point for the secret/true ending.
2008
"Whereupon to Finian Lynch, who most certainly came from somewhere in Mayo, I wanted to say, 'No, Finian, Love is not just a miserable lie, although prevarication, if you know anything, does come into it. No, it's not a lie just because you feel cheated. Love is not much to do, after all, with how you feel - with whether Eddie Mars let's you win on red and then gets his goon to hold you up in the parking lot. It's none of that - prearranged or no. All that is sentimental - or, as the girl said in her cups, Thass sediment. It's still less to do with what you have to say about what you feel, either in or out of your transports - which can be gay - but is like the flower growing out of the girl's ass in The Garden of Earthly Delights in the Prado in Madrid - where I didn’t go this trip, but its a detail I've never forgotten. Or like the worm in Caravaggio's still life at the Pinacoteca Brera in Milan. The flower growing out of the girl's ass is fascinating, but you'd hesitate to pick it and put it in a vase. . . . No, Finian, love is what you do - and what you don't - what you put up with, and why. That's all love is. Now go with God.'"
-James McCourt, Time Remaining
EDIT: I experienced issues with missing chipsets and a yellow screen on the second screen of the game (the one immediately after Granny's Pistol Shop) while playing this with the default Easy RPG Player included in the itch.io download, neither of which rendered the game unplayable but did require me to refer to a YT walkthrough in order to initiate the final area of the game - @MendelPalace pointed out to me on tumblr that these can be fixed by downloading and installing the run time package for RPG Maker 2000.
-James McCourt, Time Remaining
EDIT: I experienced issues with missing chipsets and a yellow screen on the second screen of the game (the one immediately after Granny's Pistol Shop) while playing this with the default Easy RPG Player included in the itch.io download, neither of which rendered the game unplayable but did require me to refer to a YT walkthrough in order to initiate the final area of the game - @MendelPalace pointed out to me on tumblr that these can be fixed by downloading and installing the run time package for RPG Maker 2000.
2022
Devil Daggers but take it to the club - feels positively blissed out in comparison! Ludicrously addictive from the get go, few other games in recent memory come to mind with movement this satisfying and I've barely scratched the surface of the tech on offer. The dynamic leaderboard where you watch your name scroll up the list with every new personal best score is exactly the kind of feedback I wish more games provided as reward for performance too...anyway get in on the ground floor this is GOTY material easy.
Almost 1cc'd Super Easy Mode while my gf was watching but had to continue once at Evacaneer Doom lol. Anyway game fucks and is basically perfect, def gonna get that SEM 1cc next time.
Sadly mid as hell despite the strength of the premise and gestures in more interesting directions - feels oddly undercooked for something with around 2-3years development time so far as I can gather. Carried along by the strength of the presentation (shout out Hiro Kiyahara for some v cool but not overworked character designs and Izanagi Games for genuinely impressive spritework), performances of the voice cast (Yu Kobayashi giving it 200% as Binko the easy MVP), and G.Rev, but the VN mystery/death game portion feels like a minimal effort first draft and the shmup segments, while occasionally gorgeous for the least interesting segments, are solid but unexceptional. Would be interested to see a sequel that develops some of the ideas here further tbh.
1999
Game fucks but also I'm pretty sure some of these bullet patterns are Actually kinda bullshit, like with e.g. CAVE I can p much always immediately tell how I've fucked up and what I could/should have done instead but here I genuinely cannot discern what actual strategy could possibly be developed in response to some of the shit they throw at you in the later stages. Still fun tho!
Got bored of this real quick and tapped out, gf loved it but honestly.......it's mid the haters missed nothing.
2022
Sheu mynds on than that even a comet
is rived by the weyght o whit hid passes,
an whan hid's fired ootower the starns,
the starns is tirled by thir awn wheel,
an that wheel tirled in anither wheel,
til ivry escaep is anither orbit,
an ivry orbit anither still,
an ivry still aye makkan the promiese
that wi a tirl thoo'll win tae free.
-Deep Wheel Orcadia, Harry Josephine Giles
I thought of Giles' novel in verse often while playing this. It's an easy contender for my best book of 2022 and, like this game, I reached a point where I wished it would never end.
is rived by the weyght o whit hid passes,
an whan hid's fired ootower the starns,
the starns is tirled by thir awn wheel,
an that wheel tirled in anither wheel,
til ivry escaep is anither orbit,
an ivry orbit anither still,
an ivry still aye makkan the promiese
that wi a tirl thoo'll win tae free.
-Deep Wheel Orcadia, Harry Josephine Giles
I thought of Giles' novel in verse often while playing this. It's an easy contender for my best book of 2022 and, like this game, I reached a point where I wished it would never end.
He went over to the map and studied the northern part of the city, with his back to his visitor.
"Being a policeman," said Szluka, "is not a profession. And it's certainly not a vocation either. It's a curse."
A little later, he turned around and said:
"Of course, I don't mean that. Only think it sometimes. Are you married?"
"Yes."
"Then you know."
-The Man Who Went Up In Smoke, Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo
The Name of This Club Is DISCO ELYSIUM
Can't in good conscience give five stars to a work that went out of its way to airlift in the chapo cunts to do ironic/tenuously deniable racist impressions and reserves a special thanks for chrs avll*ne in the end credits, but...did kind of love it nonetheless, in spite of itself - bourgeois indulgences and all.
EDIT: They actually got rid of the chapos and Dasha for the final cut I was wrong, bumped up a half star lol
"Being a policeman," said Szluka, "is not a profession. And it's certainly not a vocation either. It's a curse."
A little later, he turned around and said:
"Of course, I don't mean that. Only think it sometimes. Are you married?"
"Yes."
"Then you know."
-The Man Who Went Up In Smoke, Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo
The Name of This Club Is DISCO ELYSIUM
Can't in good conscience give five stars to a work that went out of its way to airlift in the chapo cunts to do ironic/tenuously deniable racist impressions and reserves a special thanks for chrs avll*ne in the end credits, but...did kind of love it nonetheless, in spite of itself - bourgeois indulgences and all.
EDIT: They actually got rid of the chapos and Dasha for the final cut I was wrong, bumped up a half star lol
2022
Disappointed by how the genuinely impressive specificity of place, atmosphere of dread, and the sharply observed details re: class and encroaching capital are left entirely by the wayside around the halfway point (maybe even earlier?) in favor of it's ok-but-not-revelatory plot, which I found significantly less interesting than the place and context and small glimpses of community around which it initially revolves. Unlike KR0 it is to some extent actually about the region its ostensibly about, at least at first, but also unlike KR0 its formalist and structuralist swings feel...not half-baked but maybe a bit of an afterthought, or at least not consistent enough in implementation to fully land. The 4ch/proud boys/Q analogue stuff is just restrained enough to avoid being embarrassing and is generally p funny but ultimately feels pretty toothless idk.
All that said, the first few hours absolutely transfixed me, and I got more genuine laughs out of the jokes here than I have from any game I can think of in recent memory, and that Thou end credits track fucking shreds so this still gets a rec from me! Extremely keen to see what Geography of Robots do next, they've definitely Got Something here.
All that said, the first few hours absolutely transfixed me, and I got more genuine laughs out of the jokes here than I have from any game I can think of in recent memory, and that Thou end credits track fucking shreds so this still gets a rec from me! Extremely keen to see what Geography of Robots do next, they've definitely Got Something here.
