It's kind of the "Free Bird" of video games. It's thematically thin, but just fatalitic enough to feel poetic. It's a cornerstone of modern American AAA games the way Free Bird is a cornerstone of 70s rock. Both a very much for Your Dad. And its legacy is ultimately tied to its vastness.

Just as Free Bird goes on and on and crescendos with a long guitar solo, so does Red Dead Redemption go on and on and then crescendos spectacularly... although crescendo is the wrong word. This isn't a game that leads to a big, violent set piece, but rather leads a series of quiet domestic chores as you reacclimate to life around the family farm. But in contrast to how loud much of the preceding game is, it feels a bit like a crescendo, like an inverted guitar solo.

I do wish this game wasn't so cartoonish. It feels like a game that could easily bare more of its soul. Red Dead Redemption 2 certainly comes closer to doing that. But here, just about every mission from after you leave Bonnie's ranch until you get back to Blackwater is filled with nonsense comic characters, with a few exceptions (Marshal, Landon, Luisa). Nothing wrong with having a sense of humour but in a game that's attempting to be as sombre and "authentic" as this is, the stereotypes just feel lazy and insecure.

Anyway. Good ending. I liked riding around the old west. And when I first played this I wasn't a very big gamer and it spurred 16 year old me on. I still have a poster of Bonnie on the wall of my old room. I don't know that I'll ever be able to NOT see through all of this game's warts.

i don't even think games like 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand and Metal Gear Rising Revengeance are half as insane as this simply because this actually cost a lot of money. they spent $200m on marketing a game where you massacre civilians in an airport about two hours in; a game where you receive quotes from, among others, Confucius and Dick Cheney on your death screen; a game that climaxes with the protagonist wrenching a knife out of their gut to throw at the bad guy.

replaying this for the first time in maybe a decade and just mouth agape through the whole thing. it's not a good game. but i kinda love it. played the campaign so much as a teenager listening to Metallica's Death Magnetic that the whole thing feels glued to my being. it's a problematic fave. i'll go the grave loving it, knowing full well i am going to hell for doing so.

There's a certain kind of gamebro desire for thee modern open world crime game. One so realstic you can get audited for not doing your taxes, and date in-game e-girls and live the life you feel you're not quite equipped for in the real world. The macho nerd's escapist fantasy.

Playing GTA V for the first time in nine years, I'm more impressed with its recreation of modern Los Angeles than I was at the time of release. It "holds up" remarkably well, still maybe the king of the castle as far as open world games go. The depth of detail is still really impressive. I get lost just walking around looking at the cracks in the footpath, the trash littering the streets, the pedestrian and traffic AI and the way they'll give me the finger if I rev my engine at a stop light. It's in a word, 'impressive'. It's closest gaming has gotten to creating that escapist fantasy. I could feel myself wanting to just live inside the game; drive around a picturesque Los Angeles in a nice car, buy some sick suits, some flashy guns and live the American dream of looking cool and owning destructive property.

And that's ultimately what GTA V is: a game with a pretty setting you're there to destroy (not actually admire or live in); itself a pretty piece of technology made through backbacking labour practices.

It's all kind of a vapid nothing. This is fully emphasised whenever anybody - a main character, side character, or NPC - speaks in this game. Not simply because there's no charming or quietly interesting dialogue (if anything, it is an actively terribly written game - a shame for a game full of long driving-and-talking scenes), or that the voice acting is bad, but because characters are such functioning non-entity cliches. A game written by an AI with the brain of a 14-year-old British boy with only the cultural knowledge of America via Michael Mann movies, The Sopranos and Superbad. It's a pity because I feel like there's a lot of potential with the various intertwining protagonist story structure and the allure of cool action setpieces with all the hesists in the game (most of which are just the same Heat scene told from different angles over and over).

I played this - and only this - for the entire month of August, in a state of depression, while doing a lot of E, listening to Frank Ocean and rewatching Breaking Bad. All in all I found it rather soothing. I'm not going to look back on my time fondly with it but I am kind of sad and at a loss now that it's over. I wish it were a better game. I wish I lived in LA for real.

after spending two months playing mostly ps4/5 games, going back to a blocky, linear, grimey ps3 era game was a real treat.

but i think i gotta divorce myself from the good vibes i get from simply playing this because at heart all i did was feel like dogshit for 4 days mercilessly beating up the poor and insane. batman, it struck me for maybe the first time, is the absolute embodiment of American imperialism. superman is the pretty face and the promised ideal but batman is the guerilla by night; the tightly knit, highly efficient machine with vast resources. if his parents murder is pearl harbour, then he is the atom bomb and the influence after that.

at one point in this game, batman (and calling him Batman, like that's his name, or could be a name, like on par with Dave or Jake or something, never fails to crack me up) has to get across a large gap. so he calls in for a tool to do the job, and this tool arrives via a remote controlled drone that crashes through the glass ceiling and delivers itself. at that moment i was like Batman absolutely terrifies me.

sucks i'mma have to play three more of these but i am who i am.

the sincere hyper stylisation makes for a sharper criticism of the ps3/360 era middle-eastern shooter than Spec Ops the Line's preachiness. additionally, blood on the sand's maximalism serves as a send up of its combat inspiration, Gears of War, by simply not being as dreary to look at. it also sort of feels like the underside of the rock that is Uncharted. Uncharted, a series that presents itself as a sparking gem to everyone who passes by, but if you stopped to lift it over, you'd see an ugliness that is basically blood in the sand.

this is the kind of game they don't make any more. licensed AAA shooting games starring rappers, for one. this kind of trashy hyper stylisation and linear gaminess is maybe really only seen in Devil May Cry and Bayonetta today too. it kind of reminded me of famed music video director, Hype Williams' lone feature film, Belly. I am waiting to see contemporary cinema and hip hop culture to converge in such a spectacular fashion again but it seems like it promises never to be. blood on the sand, likewise, feels like a once a lifetime piece of culture.

there are parts that feel stolen right out of uncharted and the last of us that i thought really rocked and worked for a call of duty game.

and then there are parts that were lifted and remixed from old call of duties that felt staid and boring.

by the end i felt exactly as entertained as i felt bored. there is a futurama episode where bender meets God and God exclaims, "if you do something right no one will think you've done anything at all" and that's kind of what this game feels like.

felt actually like an amalgamation of several different mindsets at play to the point it loses all identity. it wants to be zero dark thirty and sicario but it's a game where the cover character wears a skull mask in every setting. it's a game that's like "we can't do anything with the villain because of laws" and then throws them out the window later on hoping you've forgotten that. i've written a review like this before where i've said, as an expert in being a dumb person and a bad writer, i can spot dumb, lazy writing a mile away, modern warfare ii has all the hallmarks that. it's the equivalent of that horse drawing meme that starts of super realistic and in each installment becomes sloppier and sloppier until it resembles a blind child's depiction of a horse. you could extrapolate some political takeaways from this but at this point it'd be in vain because it contradicts itself through its sheer contempt for basic coherent consistently.

ultimately i think despite looking like a billion dollars it just doesn't play any better than any other call of duty. and i think it's disappointing it fails to really remember what made the first modern warfare 2 so good - the commitment to michael bay levels of balls to the wall action (it gets there in spurts but it's almost more of a reboot of the 2010 medal of honor game than the og mw2).

feels like the rough draft for a failed revolution.

the platforming and sign-posting is smooth for the most part. the rough edges around the parkour gameplay that are there feel like they were intended to be fixed in forthcoming sequels that unfortunately never eventuated.

the story feels glued on, or in this case, crudely animated and inserted in. the game didn't really need a plot or heavy characterisation. what's left feels like a half-thought idea scribbled on a napkin.

and that's the frustrating problem with mirror's edge. everything feels half thought out; half fleshed out. or like every idea was walked back to make it more marketable in a post Modern Warfare shooter market. nothing other than parkour movement and maybe the bold primary colour palette feels particularly cared for or loved and laboured over.

a lot of mirror's edge leaves me saying "what if?". what if this game had a more fleshed out lore or setting or characters. what if had a more engaging plot. what if the combat were a little smoother to match your movements, instead of this precision, time-based crap. what if there no guns or shooting. faith doesn't feel like a murderer. the guns have no hud elements; no ammo counts. they are designed to encumber your movement and your ledge-grabbing. there's clearly some conscious element at play regarding gun violence and typical video game combat. what if i didn't make this game, or someone like me, because everything about reminds me of every poorly thought idea i've had, and the lack of connective tissue between concept and execution made me sit up and point at my tv several times like the rick dalton once upon a time in hollywood meme, like, "hey i recognise this kind of creative failure!"

anyway. the colours are cool, and when you find the game's flow state (which is often less than you'd like) and moving and jumping without flaw, the game shines as bright as any action game i've played. it's a shame it's a formula that wasn't sanded down to perfection and we never got the holy grail (or Casino Royale) of free-running games. maybe one day. because this a great template for a more pacifist form of video game action/violence. instead now we get a battlefield every few years.

Been playing this bit by bit slowly for a month now. Played it high, drunk, stoned and burgeoning on a k-hole at times. Still haven't finished it. But fuck it. I just wanna diary my thoughts.

I think that it's as good as a good as a game like this could ever hope to be. It is a thematically empty experience. It is not as nuanced narratively or emotionally as it thinks it is. It is all aesthetic. It is a grim, brooding Dad game for people who love violent video games. All of its maturity is mechanical and physical. It is at almost every turn always a video game first. There are skill points and weapon upgrades. All sorts of video game narrative bullshit and conveniences ripple through it. But when you're swaying trying to load a handgun bullet-by-bullet or bashing some guy's teeth into a railing or machete-ing your 500th nameless post apocalyptic goon, all under some really intentionally well mood lit areas, you feel something. It loses impact the more you play, the game is way too long. But you see the rare instance of what happens when a AAA game developer gets an unlimited budget to heavily fetishise brutal violence. It's sick. I love it. I wish it wasn't coated in so much sentimentality and artstation lustre. But I think it's the most expensive murder simulatior ever made and it's stands as almost a novelty in my mind. The only other game like is maybe Max Payne 3 (and TLOU2, which I feel identical about but just as a sequel feel lesser).

it's like dirtbag james bond. you start every level in stealth mode and get a few free passes to eliminate your enemies quietly. but in rogue warrior stealth kills mean stabbing a man in the head or spine while mickey rourke calls them a cocksucker or something.

it's very short. profane in a way that's more depressing than amusing. i bought it on a whim and as a joke, but i kind of dug it? the narrow level design, the minimalist art direction coupled with the very basic aim and shoot gameplay reminded me a lot of universal soldier day of reckoning. it's nowhere near as artistically ambitious or stunning. but i don't know, it worked for me in a weird way.

mickey rourke raps (or his voice dialogue is remixed into a rap) over the end credits too. wicked game.

it's fine. it's cute. it kind of has no idea what kind of game it wants to be. there's one too many AAA elements lumped in almost as if they couldn't say no when someone asked "what about stealth?", "what about combat?", "what about a hub world?", "what about collectibles?", "what about side quests and a inventory?". it could have just been a Limbo or Ico esque minimalist linear journey but I guess you can remove the developers from Ubisoft but the Ubisoft from the developers.

I am also just a little sad that it's a game about robots. why feature robots if you're going to humanise them. just use humans. the "lore" just feels childish to me. a lot of Stray reminded me of Kentucky Route Act V, where you're also a cat, roaming around listening to - and soaking in - the lives of everybody in this town. it's very written first, gameplay-orientated second. whereas Stray feels like "okay we got a game where you're a cat, now let's fill in the rest quickly". but hey, they nailed the cat stuff. so good on em. i wish it were in service of something more though.

DOOM owns.

i am tempted to say it rips. that, it rips and tears. but i think what makes DOOM own is less the adolescent hell-ish ultra violence that it peddles on the surface and more the artisan tech pulsing underneath, its supersonic gameplay and the increasingly complex, Escherian level design.

i don't think i've ever been wowed by a game on a technical level like this before. after the first shareware episode (i played all three episodes plus thy flesh consumed and then Romero's Sigil wad) i ended up turning God Mode on so I could vibe with the game and take in everything DOOM had to offer beyond killing demons because the levels, children. my god - the levels. the ones where the lights flicker on and off? mmmMmmm. i played this because it's a shooter but its charms lie just as much in exploration and puzzles and there is as much satisfaction finding your path forward as there is in blasting an imp with a shotgun (i turned on the give me everything cheat too and played the 90% of the game with the shotgun, maybe gaming's ultimate weapon?). i was expecting to find DNA in DOOM linking to future FPSs but playing DOOM is like seeing behind the curtain of every modern video game and glimpsing the super secret code behind there that's running every single one of them. there's halo, call of duty and fortnite in there. but also GTA and resident evil and some half-life and metal gear solid and A LOT of dark souls. in fact it's basically just dark souls with guns. if i were playing without cheats i could see the same tension at play in Souls where not only do you have to register how to defeat and bypass each enemy but you're also marrying that to the other side of your brain that's trying to memorise and map complex levels and the way out/forward.

i am reading masters of doom and i don't think i really needed to to understand that DOOM was a game made by people who subsisted off pizza, soda and various Metallica and Dokken cassette tapes. the game just oozes that vibe. but reading that book enlightens me to the idea that john romero and john carmack were the doomguy for real. their shotguns were computers and their demons were innovation. id software basically invented the modern video game. the question, "what's the citizen kane of games?" is such a stupid and useless one but the answer is def DOOM, because like citizen kane DOOM is a modern technical marvel made by some brash dudes in their early 20s that most people today are sick of hearing about. but here we are. DOOM owns.

in which max payne is really horny

i love how domestic and urban the arenas are in max payne 2. you fight in numerous apartment buildings, and one mansion. a hospital. a police station. a warehouse. a funhouse. a club under renovation. and a construction site. some of them are abandoned but not all. there aren't any real civilians but you always feel right in the heart of a beating city. there's no apocalypse. no supernatural element. each arena does feel like a centrepiece stage for a movie scene but simultaneously it feels like real life. its hard boiled noir aesthetic is laid thick and yet the game feels grounded to real life n ways i can't think too many shooters since have.

i also think most of the environments look rad, super nice art direction, and because they're mostly empty, they're very cacophonous. my kind of shooter.

at its best, when sparks are flying and the audio fills with sounds of crashing metal and fiery explosions, mad max is, for a moment, the perfect snapshot of any of Fury Road's breathtaking action scenes.

that memed "this licensed game really makes you feel like that licensed character" critique is sincerely relevant here because this does make you feel like you're inside a mad max action scene. i feel like the game even goes to great lengths to paint each equally barren but distinct desert biome with a colour grading fitting each and any of the four mad max movies (there are areas where the desert looks more desaturated and akin to the early mad max movies, to areas that are as proudly and vibrantly orange as fury road). it's a beautiful and very unique game world where with the addition of random brutal car combat encounters creates a thrilling tension of disorganised chaos. any simple trip from point a to point b in mad max can turn into a spectacle potentially worthy of its own scene in fury road.

where the game really falls flat on its arse is in how tied all this natural freedom and chaos is to such a banal and ubiquitous modern open world game formula. the actual game is never truly as untethered and unbounded as it appears. it locks a lot of story progression behind level systems and upgrade paths that are like concrete to breakthrough. the map is littered with junk (literal junk, that you collect as currency). i can see a argument for how this is reinforcing theme, e.g. this is a game set in a harsh, cruel, unapologetically post-apocalyptic environment where survival is not a given, it's something each and every occupant of mad max world is fighting for 24/7. but at a certain point the game where you crash a car fitted with flamethrowers and spikes into other cars, trucks and through gates and steel structures at high speeds should feel like more than work, and after only just a few hours they really manage to turn a mad max game into work. and it's not like this is an RPG that's demanding you think your place in these environment, the whole game is designed to be a simulated mad max playground. it just kinda sucks it isn't more fun to actually progress. i ended up putting this down for two years for this reason.

and maybe i don't rewatch the early mad max films as much as fury road, but i also think it's disappointing that for a game released seemingly in unison with 2015's fury road - a movie famously celebrated for the feminist themes underpinning its entire narrative - that this is would be game seemingly written in a room with "women?" circled around it on a whiteboard. forgetting how rote and tiresome "save this damsel in distress" is as a plot device, where it ultimately goes with it (and it's only major female character) is so lazy and thoughtless it's like a cold slap in the face. the ending of this game is only somewhat redeemable to my eyes because for how ultimately committed it is to Max's nihilistic surrender to living in the past and how dreamlike the whole game is.

enough colour and personality in the world and gameplay here shines through for it to be a nicer alternative to any number of similarly boring modern games, imo.

I wish I had something more substantial to say about Max Payne. It's been a week since i finished it. I don't think it was my fave in the series. But as the original, I gotta give it a lot of love. This bizarre pop culture stew, made from chunks of The Matrix, Raymond Chandler, Twin Peaks, John Woo and bad New York accents. It's a combo only Remedy still solely provide. But I think what's been lost over the years is the palpable atmosphere the series has when it's trading in street level crime. The alleys and dirty hallways of dilapidated apartment buildings and hotels. That sense that the snow you're stepping in is covered in piss. The Max Payne games always tend to escalated upwards, until you're having manic shootouts in expensive, lavish high rise buildings, fighting mercenary goons. But few games ever capture and relish in the dirt the way Max Payne games do. Video games so desperately lack Raymond Chandler and John Woo inspirations nowadays too. Max Payne is a reminder that not every game with a gun has to be about aliens or shooting people of colour in various warzones. Shame the memo didn't go out.