After 50 in-game 'days', I feel like I've run up against my limit with this fascinating thing. There's so much more to it than I was expecting, but ultimately not enough to sustain my interest for the ending that occurs after 365 days.

LSD is great! Abstract, unique, atmospheric, and makes tremendous use of multimedia; Osamu Sato brings his full artistic skillset, utilising filmmaking and compositional skills to craft fascinating short films which are intercut between the regular 'days'. The short film which played on day 2, disquieting and Twin Peaks-esque, was an early indicator that there was more to this game than met the eye.

There's not much to the actual 'game' part, which is a testament to how compelling and surprising LSD's mood and structure are. What feel at first like total nonsense begins to suggest a logic behind where you end up and what you see. The digital artistry is technically dated, but there's a surreal quality to them that feel very specific to the period. LSD is a wonderful thing to pick away at...

...until it isn't! Some people here seem to have managed to stay interested for the entire 365 days, but I feel like I'm not being surprised as often as I'd like. Best to stop here and reflect positively on the time I had rather than wring it dry and become jaded. I definitely recommend giving LSD a try if you're willing to go for something a bit more abstract and less goal oriented than your typical game.

The revisionism around Cyberpunk 2077 and the reception of this DLC makes me feel like I’m going fucking insane. It’s like everyone forgot how bad this game was because a mediocre anime launched on Netflix.

Cyberpunk 2077 had a myriad of foundational and structural issues regarding its world design, writing, quest design, and mission structure that cannot be fixed by making slight edits to the leveling system.

It wanted to be every kind of AAA game simultaneously without succeeding at any single junction (probably because it’s impossible to combine some of these game styles). It wanted to be an open-world RPG with the density of an Immersive Sim and a Grand Theft Auto-style game with bombastic, setpiece-driven missions like Call of Duty.

Phantom Liberty septuples down on the latter pairing in particular. It is a meaningless open-world that buffers what are essentially Call of Duty missions centered around set pieces, complete with walk-and-talk and press F to pay respects segments.

It’s a shame because, for all of the original game’s faults stemming from a hellish development cycle with a lack of a cohesive vision, with multiple rebooted versions of the stacked on top of one another to create a freakish AAA homunculus, Phantom Liberty offered a second chance on a fresh slate.

Instead, it’s just more of the same inharmonious game design, except this time, the characters and writing are even less interesting.

Cyberpunk 2077 was never good, and it can’t be good until CDPR makes a new game. I think people struggle to accept that CDPR dropped a massive fucking turd, and the reception to this DLC and the 2.0 version of the game is just a sunken cost fallacy for the games media hype machine.

Now that the game isn’t in a state where it’s literally falling apart at the seams, it can receive the ecstatic fanfare that people have been edging on for the past three years.

As great as Cyberpunk 2077 looks and sounds, it’s nothing more than a celebration of shallow AAA tropes and bad taste in a hollow open world. Now that the stink of its fraudulent launch has been cleaned up and laundered by an anime, post-launch support, and media fluff pieces, people can hop back to touting CDPR as an industry paragon.

If you already like this game, then Phantom Liberty and the 2.0 update will probably be up your alley. For people like me who didn’t enjoy the original game, they will not change your mind.

It’s also funny that after all of the controversy surrounding the transphobic imagery in this game, they couldn’t be fucked to remove it after three years and a “game changing” update.

Oh, I also ran into a game breaking bug that prevented me from beginning the last mission that made me have to go back two hours and replay multiple missions.

In life, we rarely get a chance to follow an art from its genesis to its conclusion. At the arse-end of history, we're often doomed to look at such things retrospectively - surrealism, rock & roll, postmodernism, the New York School of Poets, wild west movies, whatever - and wonder what it was like to evolve and ultimately ascend to atrophia in tandem with a creative movement.

Titanfall 2 is, therefore, a rare privilege. A game that has, with the retrospective power of its seven-year existence, definitively marked the end of an era that was carved out by Call of Duty thirteen years prior. Halo, Modern Warfare, Bioshock, Borderlands, Wolfenstein, the lot - I feel like it's fair to say that Titanfall 2 encompasses its own movement, the nature of its existence, and all the reasons it could not continue - where do you go beyond time? If you'll forgive the incredibly fucking pretentious analogy, Titanfall 2 is not unlike Let It Be, the final Beatles album that put the cap on a half-century of rock. (You could probably extrapolate this complete nonsense further and suggest that the corporate self-awareness of popstars popping up in Warzone and Fortnite mirrors the ironic MTV garage grunge of Kurt Cobain, but hey! - that would probably sustain an equally stupid Backloggd essay of its own.)

What makes Titanfall 2 rarer still is that it’s an ending to a now-lost artform that began with the same creator years prior. Infinity Ward may have respawned, but they were, at this conclusive point in time, the same unit of creation from 2003. Impressionism was started by guys like Claude Monet, but was drawn (painted?) to a close by Van Gogh, a conscious will that passed down a century, their art thankfully/tragically unaccelerated by lack of commercial interest. They say an artwork is never finished, but fortunately for us the future is far more financial than we originally projected - artistic movements can now be efficiently condensed into a decade of fiscal quarters. We can watch an artform rise and fall upon the plateau in the time it takes to finish a high school diploma, and that's neither a good thing nor a bad thing; just a thing that happens now. Let it be.

Sure, other militaristic first-person dual-weapon wall-running action shooters with automatic health recovery have come after Titanfall 2, but they're essentially invalid imitations, impressionist postcards that we pick up in the lobby of the Van Gogh Museum. They're the consequences of something that's gone for good. Never to return, for better and for worse.

Nearly 20 years of being an F-Zero fan and feeding on scraps like Captain Falcon being in Smash Bros or Captain Falcon's Twister Race being in Nintendo Land but at last, after all that waiting, after all that suffering, Nintendo has brought F-Zero out of retirement with F-Zero 99, seemingly plotting the best path possible to properly revive the series in the future.

F-Zero 99 marries the two concepts of SNES F-Zero (where every lap you must finish above a certain number of people or you're eliminated) with the 99 series of games (where 99 real people online battle it out to be number 1 like in Tetris 99 or Pac-Man 99).
So F-Zero 99 at its core is built on the foundation of the SNES game where it looks like how you would remember the SNES game only now in HD with various track elements like ramps and mines now built in 3D. You have the same four vehicles of the SNES game along with the tracks all being from that game as well but a few elements have been taken from later entries in the series to help make it play a little closer to F-Zero X and GX. The boost mechanic works exactly like those games where your health is your boost. Boosting requires a portion of your health to be activated and this core mechanic is exactly why I love the F-Zero series so much. When you can lose health from crashing into walls or being attacked by other vehicles, this mechanic brings a huge level of risk vs reward to every race, particularly towards the end of a race when everybody is going gung ho and the slightest tap could eliminate a number of people. To further add to this mechanic, if you knock out another player, you not only refill you own health but also increase your health allowing you to boost even more giving you an advantage over other racers. This is what peak F-Zero is, a thrilling race between life or death where the more aggressive you play the more you are rewarded. Being over zealous comes with the risk of being eliminated early but playing your cards right can lead to the sweetest of victories.

To help with aggressive plays, the other mechanic brought in from X and GX is the spin attack. As the name suggests, this allows you to spin and attack other racers, damaging them while protecting yourself. To accommodate for having 99 players on the track, vehicles are now less slippery than they were in other F-Zero games meaning the spin attack doesn't quite knock people flying and pinballing around like it used to, instead it does a better job at repelling racers around you who are trying to nudge you off course. Unfortunately the side attack hasn't been brought back where double tapping the drift buttons would jerk your vehicle to the left or right to knock other racers flying, but there is a new mechanic introduced that is tied to the spin attack to help pull those further back in the race up the pack a little.

Now many F-Zero fans are probably thinking "a comeback mechanic? In a game all about rewarding skill and punishing mistakes? Why have they Mario Kart'd my F-Zero?" Well that's where you're wrong because this new mechanic has also been designed around F-Zero's incredible risk/reward pull. By spin attacking other vehicles, these little yellow orbs land on the course called sparks. Collecting these fill up a meter that allows you to use a Super Boost which takes you up to a new part of every course called the Skyway. The Skyway is full of boost pads and corner cutting allowing you to fly above the rest of the racers and catch up. This boost lasts longer the further back you are and will not drop you off on a corner or an area where there is no track underneath so more smart thinking players will use it in the most optimal of places but that also comes with the detriment with not being able to use your regular boost so you can end up missing out on the most optimal place to use that boost while waiting for the most optimal place to use the Skyway.

Even with the Skyway catch up mechanic, it still takes skill to actually finish first in a race. The further up in the pack you are the more likely you are to find cpu machines designed to hinder you. Grey vehicles that bump you much further than usual and red vehicles that explode upon contact taking a large chunk of your health away truly test if you deserve to be leading the race or not. There's also blue player controlled vehicles for people who crash out early to cause mayhem for around 30 seconds with spin attacks before blowing up and people further back in the race can find a golden vehicle that fill up a good portion of your super boost meter when collided with. There's a lot of reaction skill needed to navigate these obstacles and they help separate the best from the rest.

Further pushing this as a skill based game is how you start a race. Rather than hope for a good starting point in a traditional racing starting line up, instead all 99 players a lined up across a super wide piece of track that narrows down as you drive along before jumping across to the start line of the actual course itself, meaning if you want to start the race in a good position you have to earn it by forcing your way to the front of the pack yourself. Another cool thing about these portions of the course is that they're sometimes changed up a little bit. Sand Ocean usually starts with two separate courses that cross over each other before merging into one for the jump but sometimes you'll get one that is a bit simpler and ends with a massive strip of boost pads.

In terms of game modes your main mode is the 99 mode itself where 99 racers compete to earn first place. A few racers are ranked out every lap and the course is voted on before a race via the two options given, currently selected from Mute City 1, Big Blue, Sand Ocean and Death Wind. It works for the most part but unfortunately people do tend to gravitate towards Mute City or Big Blue meaning track variety can be an issue in this mode depending on your luck from the choices given. In the 99 mode you're given 4 rivals based on your current level and rank and if you manage to beat any of them you will increase your rank slightly. It's a great expansion of the rank system in X/GX and it manages to give you some satisfaction even if you're struggling to compete for a 1st place finish. Doing well in the 99 mode will earn you tickets which can be used in the prixs.
The other modes rotate in and out and these include a team battle mode where you're put into one of two teams and your team earns points based on position, damaging opponents with spin attacks, destroying opponents, etc and at the end you get a Splatoon style totting up of the points to see if your team's bar makes it across the halfway point for victory. It's a nice side mode to dip into every now and then. There's pro tracks which currently includes White Land and Port Town II from the Queen and King leagues for players to test themselves on in a 99 race. These courses are included as possible finales for the mini prix mode in which you race across 3 courses earning points based on where you finish in a somewhat more traditional style F-Zero grand prix. Ranking out or blowing up eliminates you from the competition entirely so there's a test of skill to see if you can even finish the prix as it cuts down its racers to 60 and then 40 for the end. The rivals system changes a little here where your rivals become the two racers above and below you in the rankings, increasing the tension even further as beating rivals will most likely mean you're moving up the rankings table. Mini prixs cost 1 ticket and are a ton of fun to compete in but the main attraction for me is the mode that is always in a countdown on the main menu…
The grand prix currently cycles in once every hour or on weekends every half hour and currently takes the 5 Knight League courses from the SNES game and has racers compete to earn first place. It works exactly like the mini prix mode but costs 3 tickets and with 2 more races, the number of racers is eventually cut down to 20 for the final race where you start more like a traditional race with each player placed on the starting grid in terms of their table ranking with 20th at the front and 1st at the back. The grand prix is a true test of your abilities as even just making it through all 5 races is a challenge in and of itself. Any extra health you've picked up from destroying vehicles carries over throughout the prix allowing you to boost more and adding an element of strategy. Do you want to spend the first race building up your resources by hanging back a bit and picking off weakened vehicles or do you want to try and race normally, hoping you defeat vehicles along the way. It's thrilling stuff and you can really feel the pressure on yourself after having a good start and sitting near the top of the table. Winning the grand prix is the ultimate test of skill and what I would call the crowning glory of the game.

On top of all this, by completing challenges with each vehicle in the game such as winning a race or making it through a race without bumping off a wall, you can earn cosmetics to change up the look of your vehicle and decorate your user card. It's nice having a few options to give each vehicle your own identity. It is a bit of a shame that there are only 4 vehicles currently. It's hard to say if they'll add any more or not but they do have plenty of options from other 2D F-Zero games like Maximum Velocity and GP Legend on the GBA. Course wise all the SNES courses will be added eventually, which will be great. Seeing how many people who actually make it to the end of Fire Field will be a lot of fun. I think it would be wise to add in GBA courses as well, especially if we're just keeping easier courses in the main 99 mode. It would add more options and avoid the current predicament of the same courses being picked over and over again.

F-Zero 99 expands upon what makes traditional F-Zero so great, essentially feeling like what an online mode of F-Zero would have felt like. In its current form it does lack depth in vehicle and course options but aside from those drawbacks, this is the most thrilling, competitive, addictive, and true to its core series from the 99 style games released so far. It has given me optimism for the future of F-Zero and finally satisfied the craving I've had for a new F-Zero for nearly 20 years.