The thing about NMH1 is that it's only a "game about games" insofar as it's a game about labor (specifically wage labor) and the relationship between labor and gaming both materially and representationally. It's effectively a work of games crit aimed at the then-contemporary conventions of "open-world" game design as codified by Grand Theft Auto as a means of examining how thoroughly the medium of video games and the imaginations of the people who play them have been colonized by wage labor and "the grind" to the extent that even our supposed forms of play have taken on the form of work - the minigames are kind of odious and stupid because wage labor is odious and stupid, and gig work especially so. That so little has changed in the intervening 15 years and NMH1 still has just as much bite to it now as then is depressing to contemplate lol.

In addition, Travis Touchdown himself functioned there as a critique of a very particular kind of person/audience - specifically the "nerd" or "otaku" as a consumer, first and foremost, and chauvinist secondly. By extension, it's also a game with a more sharply defined notion of class than I usually see discussed - with the notable exception of Holly Summers, all of the game's characters are split into the very clearly delineated camps of "depraved wealthy freaks" and "working class/poor", with Travis, Shinobu, Speed Buster, Bad Girl (debatably), and Jeane being the only people in the latter camp (Letz Shake is a joke not-boss whose sole purpose is to establish Henry and thus isn't counted). Travis is a neet living in a shitty motel, drifting from gig to gig and paycheck to paycheck, with no family (that he knows of) and the closest thing to a friend being the guy who runs the video store down the street, and deals with this first by embedding himself in otaku consumerism and secondly by purchasing his beam katana online and attempting to get in on "the grind" via the assassin rankings. NMH1 has a keen awareness of the otaku/nerd as a consumer identity and byproduct of capitalism, while simultaneously not losing sight of how people like Travis nevertheless benefit from the spoils of empire and capitalist exploitation - the public beach of Santa Destroy having been overrun by the U.S. mitary invokes the U.S. occupation of both Iraq and Okinawa, for instance.

I could expand on this further but this is ostensibly a NMH3 review so I'll just make one further point regarding the roles Jeane and Henry play in NMH1 in opposition to Travis. Henry serves as a parallel to Travis, rather than his opposite number - where Travis is an isolated subculture-obsessed drop out, Henry is the ostensible dream end product of "the grind": wealthy, cultured, married with a kid and a white picket fence, and gainfully employed full-time. He's the symbol of capitalist assimilation whom Travis both loathes and envies in equal measure, whom he wishes both to destroy and replace. It's fitting the game ends with their battle undecided, for their conflict is not dialectic - they both pursue the same ultimate goal of success but merely start from different points; they are parallel lines that can never truly cross.

Jeane, on the other hand, is different - she represents an existential threat to everything Travis pursues and benefits from without realizing it. Her story and Travis' are practically identical - like him, she "sold her body" for the funding required to train herself into a weapon, only she did so through sex work where Travis does so through gig work, though Travis of course cannot recognize how those two things are fundamentally the same. She murders her rapist, their father, and both destroys and rejects the nuclear family as a system, shattering Travis' hazily idealized memories of his own "happy family." Finally, she fights Travis one-on-one with no tricks and no gimmicks (save for a slowly shrinking boss arena) and, canonically, wins, and would have succeeded in killing Travis were it not for Shinobu interceding and sealing all of their fates. All potential for the shattering of systemic patriarchal violence and the destruction of the family, the possibility for change, is snuffed out with her; the past lives, still.

This is a very scattered and un-thoroughly cataloged collection of Thoughts that I've had percolating while playing NMH3 after having replayed NMH1 and 2 earlier this past year, and having just finished it today I feel reasonably confident in saying it fails to carry through any of what makes NMH1 interesting in ways equally as frustrating as NMH2 and TSA. Combat at least has been refined to a nice sheen and it stands out compared to the rest of the series on that front - the area of effect on QTE killing blows has been radically reduced to the point that it will only take maybe a couple pips off the health of surrounding enemies, but this is compensated for by your Death Glove abilities acting as invaluable crowd control and ranged tools. The Dark Step has been blessedly revised from an unintuitive stick waggle to a dedicated dodge button, and strikes a nice balance between not being quite as overpowered as in NMH1 nor nerfed into irrelevance as in NMH2. Enemy variety has also been greatly expanded with the new alien combatants and their unique gimmicks, and the various combinations each match up introduces keeps things reasonably engaging.

All that aside though, this is the most afterthought of an open world setting in maybe any game I've ever played, to no end that I can discern. The replacement of assassination missions and their varying levels of difficulty and rulesets with "defense missions" where you fight generic waves of different enemy types kinda sucks, as they're just way less fun and interesting. Likewise the removal of pre-boss combat levels where you make your way through an area to their stage, which guts a lot of the personality of the new alien antagonists (at least half of whom get killed by new or returning characters before you can fight or learn much about them anyhow), though Midori Midorikawa and Velvet Chair Girl are imho absolutely series highlights, even if not quite as challenging as I'd like.

Speaking of the aliens, the much-hyped superhero angle goes absolutely nowhere and isn't explored in the slightest, nor do any other potentially interesting thematic threads from the rest of the series. Henry gets a godawful redesign and shows up mostly out of obligation, while Jeane is reduced once again to her namesake being a pet and the biological child of Travis and Sylvia, a depressing legacy. The game likewise makes a big show of bringing back Shinobu and Bad Girl only to have them sidelined for pretty much the entire game for no reason? Idk man I really don't know why I still get expectations for games Goichi Suda is directly involved in (especially the ones he writes himself) given I'm always disappointed to varying extents, but this one in particular really does feel like a hugely wasted opportunity. Granted Suda reportedly sold 80% of his share in NMH to Marvelous!, who thus now exercise far greater discretion over what goes into them, but still! All told I enjoyed Suda's (genuinely cogent and entertaining) digressions on Takashi Miike more than I did pretty much any other element of this game. Unless you're like me and have an abiding affinity for this series, wait til this one is on sale and go watch Andromedia instead; actually just got watch Andromedia regardless it's a masterpiece.

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.

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.

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

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.

"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

Playing this really drove home that I was right about Dark Souls being the almost note-perfect translation of the search action template into 3D that people wanted from the 3D Castlevanias, only it refuses to compromise or accommodate in certain areas (save and warp point placement most obviously, but also enemy mob rooms that are never as lacking in any actual strategic options for dealing with them nor as frustrating by just knocking the player around, albeit with negligible damage) where SOTN practically bends over backward to such an extent that it terminally borks the game's difficulty curve after the first few hours and renders the entire inverted castle as effectively just busywork, especially with its weapon damage scaling (e.g. some of SOTN's game-breakingly OP special weapon abilities such as Shield Rod + Alucard Shield). From an aesthetic and production design standpoint it absolutely deserves its reputation as a masterpiece, and Alucard feels luxuriously satisfying to play (ridiculous knockback when damaged aside) but as a game it feels - whilst highly enjoyable - surprisingly three quarters baked and at once a bit too eager to avoid alienating anyone for its own good while simultaneously demanding a level of bullshit pixel-hunting obssessiveness to actually fully complete the map that I cannot conceive how people did it without guides. I'm glad I finally gave this a fair shake but I can see how the slavish devotion to the formula established here would go on to frustrate people down the line. Still, looking forward to jamming Aria of Sorrow next to see how they refined it further.

"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.

I have been thoroughly allergic to fighting games for literally the entirety of my engagement with video games, but a partner of mine who loves them has slowly been wearing me down and, after receiving a snack box micro from my parents as a Christmas gift, we finally properly sat down for her to start schooling me in SFIII, one of her all-time favorites, and folks I'll tell ya - after her coaching me through various fighters I took Chun-Li for a spin and the tumblers finally, resoundingly, started clicking.

I'll save further thoughts for another time when I have a better handle on this, but: I think I could, in fact, learn to love fighting games after all.

(S01E01)

The decision to couch what appears to be an examination/critique of evangelical-adjacent/non-denominational Protestant Christian culture/environments in a fictionalized scientology-esque cult is one I'm not entirely convinced doesn't dilute some of what this appears to be attempting to do (or won't in the long run if it sticks with it) but it also doesn't prevent this first episode from hitting a lot of v familiar dynamics with painful accuracy - I had variations of the convo between Twigs and her mom abt associating with non-believers with my own mom growing up and even as a young adult once I started dating lol. Not to reduce this solely to that of course - this a refreshingly ambitious and sharply observed piece of work even if its component parts are all things I've encountered before elsewhere, and the presentation is phenomenal accross the board - terrific soundtrack, character designs that strongly invoke Shigeru Goto's design work on Okage: Shadow King, the believably typo-ridden text itself as expression of its teenage protagonist's processing of the world and her own thoughts (which also reminded me of the writing and speaking style of a very dear friend of mine - if I had to imagine what kind of kid they were at this age Twigs isn't too far off lol), the Anno-esque editing, etc. Also those FMV sequences have a genuine sense of scale and mood sorely lacking in games today, especially on the indie scene, the one capping off episode 1 was genuinely breathtaking. Anyway big fucking vibe, looking forward to seeing how this unfolds!

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.

A marriage of 90s wuxia spectacle and dynamic combat to 00s wuxia graceful weightlessness of movement realized in play with a level of sheer craft and maniacal mechanical tightness unlikely ever to be seen again in any context as accessible to players who are not Fighting Game People (and that includes Smash Bros., which has been a fighting game for longer than it was an arena fighter-cum-party game at this point, to its detriment). As close as any game I've ever played has come to genuine eternal replayability, and one I've been returning to off and on for more than ten years. It's worth your while to get a PSP/Vita in general, but it would absolutely be worth securing one just for this game alone, especially as the closing of the PS3/Vita PSN Store will banish this eternally to the realm of UMD or emulation-only. I've bounced off every Final Fantasy game I've ever attempted save this one (we'll see about FFXII), so I kinda do have to join the chorus of other reviews here in calling this the only good Final Fantasy game lol. Go seek this out if you haven't already, flashy arena fighters genuinely do not get better than this.

What if the US occupation of Afghanistan but the Taliban are aliens who only communicate with grunts/guttural laughter/high-pitched Flea in THE WILD THORNBERRYS gibbering, and Afghanistan itself is the weapon of mass destruction, and it's all of the worst aspects of ALIENS (which is most of ALIENS) and none of the good but with zombies, and we just make everything after "The Silent Cartographer" a beyond tedious grind with copy-pasted corridors so we can shove this thing out the door on time.

tl;dr JockJamz MARATHON, or the BIOSHOCK to that game's SYSTEM SHOCK. Some interesting/compelling production design and gameplay dynamics throughout (hopping in a Warthog with a buddy is all-time and the assault rifle feels great) but otherwise utterly fucking dire even when playing co-op with a friend, not to mention grossly jingoistic and racist without the polish or design muscle to make it worth fucking with. Just skip to the sequel imho.

First Castlevania and search action title generally I've actually played to completion! Technically need to fight the final boss again on Castle A to get actual 100% completion but maybe another time lol. This was fun tho, assorted thoughts follow:

-The Fusion Spell system is p cool albeit in serious need of an option to automatically revert to the normal equipped subweapon when your MP runs out.

-Idk where ppl are coming from dumping on the soundtrack, even the name entry music is a banger.

-Also really like Juste as a protag - his sassy little directional-up action pose, the fact he finds one empty room in a cursed castle and just reacts with an arch "well THIS won't do" and proceeds to make it his pad, he's fun (shout out to twinks-and-femboys-only queen Ayami Kojima for a v slick player character design too).

Think I've finally found my way into enjoying This Sort of Thing after years of bouncing off them maybe, looking forward to trying the others.

EDIT: Forgot to mention I am absolutely tickled by how the general plot can be read as like an anime-Gothic rated T for teen take on Miike's Gozu (man is desperately in love with/wants to fuck his best friend and represses it so hard he manifests a harrowing psycho-spiritual hell for himself with a woman brought in as a fig leaf over/proxy for his tormented homosexual desire to fuck aforementioned best friend until an act of mutual recognition/desire and lots of viscera finally allows him to be honest with himself and the two of them and their unharmed lady friend waltz off happily into the sunset arm-in-arm).