Very linear. Very basic. Lot of flicking of switching. Does not stretch your mind or anything at all.

But. As a vibe, man, slithering around as a giant Thing-like monster just chomping on screaming, fleeing human beings is extremely satisfying. There's nothing to the game more than that. I'm feeling like shit, so, honestly, the power fantasy of being the bad guy who is not just free but encouraged to devour people really hit the spot. It's kind of like an extended version of the end of a certain 2016 triple-I indie game. Carrion made me appreciate that game way more. But also I'd rather play this because it's all desert.

not only had I never played Halo before I'd never even taken the slightest interest in the series and bothered to watch any gameplay, so I was completely unaware as to what its appeal was. playing it helped bridge some gaps in my shooter knowledge. i see that it basically sits at the midpoint in the lineage between arena shooters like Doom and Quake and the dour propagandist military shooters like Modern Warfare and Battlefield.

it helps explain, to me at least, how Call of Duty 4 didn't just spring up out of nowhere. that the pivot from WWII shooters starts here, I think: Halo, with its jingoistic portrayal of American Marines. Halo was clearly conceived in the 90s and intended to have the sort of goofy enemies audiences were used to from games like Doom. but the result is this weird feeling of you shooting a mix of innocent-seeming yet very annoying grunt cunts (some times in their shrines while they sleep) who speak a language that's essentially gibberish to you (no subtitles or anything). and then later, in the second half, you're blasting an overwhelming force of zombie bugs.


Halo ends up feeling a bit like a non-satirical Starship Troopers, almost serving as the straight-forward example of how fascists can dehumanise "the enemy" by representing them as stupid annoying bugs. i think something like that is going on here, even if by accident. but it is there.

i mean, the original PC release for Halo: Combat Evolved was less than three weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks. kind of awkward then for so much of the game to vaguely reflect the eventual US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. obviously it's a coincidence but it's an awkward one.

Halo reminded me a bit of Avatar too, which is odd considering that movie came out eight years later. like starship troopers, avatar is another example of a sci-fi movie with a lot of transparent political themes. chiefly, indigenous genocide. i only mention it because sometimes i think game developers assume if they can cherry pick from an assortment of human history for their stories, and then wrap a sci-fi, space bow around it all, then their game can better appear apolitical. call of duty infinite warfare seemed to think so. mass effect, too, to an extent. but when your main army human characters genuinely look like US Marines, your (understandably) biased POV starts to show.

the leeway i'll grant Halo is that it's more clearly influenced by a different James Cameron movie: Aliens. it so wants to be Aliens. there's nothing wrong with being Aliens or having inspiration beholden to b-movie schlock. but Halo is rarely that playful. and its story/lore so thin, there's not much else left for you to cling to. it has such a self-serious tone to it all too that it makes how much of a blast it actually is to play feel like a guilt trip.

a lot of Halo also reminds me of Half-Life 2. when I was playing half life 2, I actually thought the beach scene reminded me of the beach scene in Halo, which was odd, because at that point I'd never played a Halo. i don't know where the association came from. the games do have a lot in common. linear corridor sequences. bug creatures that jump on yo face. shitty vehicle sections. a silent protagonist. the difference being here you're closer to the baddie than a rebel resistance fighter.

i do actually kind of like Master Chief though. he isn't just Gordon Freeman with a badass full face BMX helmet, although alone that is more personality than freeman is ever given. i was surprised Chief actually can talk too, he just seems like he'd rather shut up most of the time. he's a genuine strong, silent type. a real gary cooper. in fact, until he spoke i thought it is an interesting decision to have his female AI friend, Cortana, do all the communicating for him. it's like everyone respects Master Chief on the battlefield, the big bad iconic war hero, but with Cortana doing all the speaking for him, he's almost like the shy son doing whatever his mum says behind closed doors. it's a very different relationship to the one Alyx has with freeman/the player in half life 2. i was also surprised how sassy Cortana is. or not sassy but she's one of the most human AIs i've encountered in a game. i wish the game had a little more of her. i wish she could have been the player character, really. it's weird when the female character is given all the personality but none of the chance to actually be the hero (which Cortana is here, as Master Chief was fooled into ending all life in the universe by a robot).

i ultimately wound up vibing with Halo though, way more than I thought I would, or than I even probably should. the level design is very basic but i am a simple man, i love corridors. i love the weird alien architecture. i played this with the original graphics and i loved the minimalist limitations and the sparseness of it all. i loved how vibrant the game was at times, and with how purple and turquoise everything was. i've never played such a purple game. a lot of boomer shooters today take their influence from Doom and Quake and splatter red and various muted, muddy colours everywhere. would love to play more games that look designed off of a 90s Anaheim Ducks jersey. the gunplay was fine. shooters haven't gotten much better 20 years later, imo.

this an instance where maybe the game is the devil but it presents itself in an alluring enough fashion for me not to care. there was a moment when i was shooting one of the sleeping grunts in a shrine, and i thought "this is wrong" but at the same time i blasted away and my thoughts turned to "i can't wait to play Halo 2". it's like, i know candy is bad for me, i wish i had more self control but if something is sweet it's sweet, i don't know what to say. blasting aliens in Halo was sweet. i'd do it again. . ¯\(ツ)/¯

you're just some guy, some free man, if you will, who is trying to impress a hot chick by helping her save her dad, and by doing so you unknowingly become the face of a revolution.

feels less like a game and more like a collection of ideas for what games could be. very minimalist. credits are just white text. diegetic cutscenes. nice physics and graphics, mostly in service of a fairly generic story set in a barren fascist alien nightmare.

yeah it sucks to play as a mute in a game with side characters who are clearly forming bonds and attachments with said character but i kinda feel like that's supposed to be a bit of a joke.

game does feel at odds with itself in terms of being a shooter. i think portal (or at least portal 2, the one i played) feels closer to the kind of game this wants to be, which is basically what it becomes for its final two chapters. saying that, i really dug the shooting and the cold starkness of the level design. you can turn this into a doom-like where you're perpetually hunting down tight corridors with a shotgun blasting everything in sight, even with more unique tools and weapons at your disposal. there are some more open levels, a couple of needlessly long vehicle levels, for example. but i really dug this as a pure corridor shooter.

as an aside, i was surprised how many set pieces were in this game. maybe not a ton but enough to make me go wow this feels like every shooter i've played that has released in 17 years since.

shit feels timeless.

it's a bit like Alien but from an ecological POV.

a very rewarding game if you like checking systems and keeping things in order.

beautiful colour pallette. some really nice descriptive prose that does more than maybe realistic graphics ever could in terms of transporting you into an alien world.

i remember at the end of jurassic ian malcolm was like "humans are so egotistical and stupid for thinking they could end the world. we can end ourselves but not life", and i remember michael crichton feels really contemptuous here. but in other waters is much in love with all forms of life, it's only really down on corporations and capitalism, not human beings, which i think is nice.

himbo: the game

pretty, dumb, thoughtless. has some great pieces to be special, something that's carried over as a series staple, i guess, which is that it's a game about linebacker sized men who pound aliens into the dirt with equally absurdly macho weaponry. presentation is polished to an inch of its life. plays super tight. looks like the real deal. but narratively kind of dead. could have tried to inject some personality somewhere along the line. it's an oddly dour game whose biggest personality and redemptive figure is still a fascist who shot a bunch of protestors (either off screen or in another game, i don't know).

it's good. it's fine. the lightning desert storms are sick. i'll always remember it for where it fits into the timeline of my depression (i would have finished it two weeks sooner if i didn't fall into an unrelated tailspin while playing). but it's ultimately kind of too generic for its own good. it's the first gears game i played. i'll no doubt play some more though.

it's pretty dope. more of a shooter than ep 1.

i kind of love it as an artifact. the cliffhanger ending, still, infamously, unresolved. gaming's biggest mystery? not, imo. the third episode - or third game - it was setting up seemed pretty straightforward. instead it dovetails in its final moments with this shock event and just sort of... ends. that's it. cut to credits. i think to get any more would actually be harmful. it's like the sopranos of game endings, intentional or otherwise.

i was listening to someone talk about how war games are rarely if every about people but simply warfare. i think half-life with its scarily mute protagonist is almost incapable of seriously dealing with the aftermath of this ending without radically altering that and giving freeman a personality and some lines and maybe more importantly being a game about anything other than shooting faceless trooper goons. half-life feels like a game demo, set upon the world to test the limits of graphics and gameplay, its story almost seems improvisational and made up on the fly. half life 3 exits - i think it's kind of just the leftovers, with gordon and alyx reincarnated as kevin and nora.

idk i am very tired.

all week i have been rewatching the same Conner O'Malley videos on YouTube. in particular, one video compilation from early 2019 named the Howard Schultz tapes. in it, O'Malley appears shirtless, at various active dumpsites (or construction sites). with workers often busy in the background, O'Malley (also wearing a new era Deadpool cap with 'Howard Schultz 2020' graffiti'd across in red marker pen) begins aggressively and manically (and very loudly) pleading to - and demanding Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz to run for president.

O'Malley appears sweaty, unhinged, sometimes in a Master Chief helmet. he screams completely normal things like "we want medicare for dogs" ,"if we put a starbucks to Kabul the war in the Afghan will be over", and "please send me and my family a monthly envelope of pills". he declares himself, in an extremely murderous growl, a "slut for schultz" as he pounds his chest like Marky Mark in Fear. he laughs like a starving hyena. gradually, over the course of the videos, he appears more and more frantic; he becomes dirtier and dirtier. at one point he is covered in medical equipment. various oozing, bleeding/burn wounds start appearing on his face (these get bigger and smaller, change what side of his face they're on before eventually settling to cover 2/3s of his upper face).


it is a harrowing depiction of a deranged persona desperately seeking validation. it is basically just unfiltered social media comments. but O'Malley turns it into performance art.

eventually, his pleas turn more aggressively sexual. he talks about fucking his boomer friends in a Buick Enclave. he's gagging, awaiting these instructions from Howard Schultz that we, the viewer, presume will never come. then they do, through a forced kidnapping by Starbucks employees. they drag him off into a van and the videos escalate and begin to more vividly resemble Guantanamo Bay esque torture vids as they violently deprogram this avid Schultz devotee.

Eventually they dump O'Malley outside a mall, and the final few minutes of the video are of him walking around in a visible haze, trying to convince random mall shoppers that he is, in fact, normal. a nice normal person. he was weird, but Howard made him normal.

i describe this video in detail for this review because basically the complete lack of chill going on there is the exact same lack of chill going on in Dead Space.

you can't go longer than three minutes without triggering a combat encounter in this game, and triggering a combat encounter is always met with music and sounds that signify that this is THE SINGLE MOST DRAMATIC FUCKING THING in the world. every THREE minutes the game is like this. it can't ever just CHILL. well, there are a couple of moments where the gravity is turned off in an area and you're encouraged to maybe solve a puzzle, but even these moments ARE INFILTRATED with enemies. and all the enemies are gross and loud and like screaming in your FACE aarrrGGH.

most of your weapons are industrial tools. they're loud and clanky. my fave weapon, the ripper blades, sounds like broken glass being mixed in a demonic nine inch nails branded blender. every level in this game is some mix of oozing organic tissue, scattered human limbs, sleek sci-fi surfaces and razor sharp jagged metallic textures that make you feel like you'll need a tetanus shot after playing the game. and they're all lit like a halloween scare room. flickering lights and heavy shadows disguising god's abominations in every corner. graffiti is everywhere, over every surface, even though living people are not. you get the feeling you missed all the cool, demonic orgy action.

although i love that sense of isolation. there are like five speaking characters in this whole game and a handful of suicidal/homicidal NPSs you occasionally encounter. with all this isolation, death and suicide, on top all of JUMP SCARE COMBAT ENCOUNTERS, playing this game alone in my room for four nights (in the middle of a state-wide pandemic lockdown) was a weird trip.

but it's not a bleak game. it's not a power fantasy either. but with all the mining equipment and general atmosphere of feeling like a labourer (every mission is just you taking orders), i found Dead Space captured what my average work week feels like really well. every chapter a new day; every new day met with that cj "aww here we go again" energy (especially heightened by the game's seamlessly directed lack of cuts and cutscenes). isaac's whole existence is to work. he gets no time to chill until the end, and even then, spoilers, not really. the stress and the demons don't just melt away. you get a few minutes to yourself and then plunge right back into the meat grinder.

this one made me appreciate dead space 2 less because this feels like a purer distillation of its core concepts and ideas. would like to play the third one now though, mostly to see if its running theme of women as betrayers is broken, even if I feel dead space'd out and didn't like the combat in the hour of 3 that i played a year ago.

glad I saved this and decided to play it after I finally played Alan Wake, seeing him modernised made me a little giddy. although the real lack of Wake was a little disappointing. I was expecting more, especially post-Twin Peaks The Return I was hoping this to get really Lynchian but it just kind of feels like an extended side mission where you deal with one of Alan Wake's lamer characters. also hoping Jesse would get a flashlight, but alas she's stuck throwing lights at people.

ultimately feels like an ad or a pitch for a modern Alan Wake sequel, but hey, it gave me an excuse to play more Control and i am so down for some more Alan Wake

the cool game time forgot. feels a little undercooked. kind of makes the case that video games are a way cooler medium than prestige TV, possibly by accident but still.

just some basic pros and cons.

pro:
- the shooting in this game is sick and the time powers, once you learn how fully operate in their rhythms, are really fun

con:
- there weren't enough shootouts, and on normal the game is not challenging at all. they could have really experimented more or even implemented some wackier set-pieces (imagine a tenet style reverse shootout or something)

pro and con:
- the above could apply to the platforming too. there's not enough, most of it is cool in concept and while the execution is fine it's mostly too easy and it coulda been way cooler (the part on the bridge was cool)

pro:
- beth wilder rules

con:
- the story doesn't really pick up, imo, until it unveils her reality but by then the game is practically ending and the sudden rush to get to the stop the big, save the world stuff means the game offers her no resolution and by the extension the game itself. it ends on this transparent hook for a sequel that's probably never gonna happen, just feels cheap for anyone playing it way after release.

pro:
- at least remedy made control next, cast courtney hope (beth) again as jesse and gave her a whole game that's mostly more sick af combat. we may never get a quantum break sequel, a more refined version, but at least remedy kind of learned the lessons from here and gave us control.

perfectly average.

hits all the WWII movie beats. but that's all it is - movie beats. movie beats anyone who's seen a single WWII movie could pick up. has no real original soul or identity of its own.

feels really superfluous too, after black ops 3 went back to the battle of the bulge two years earlier in a weird kind of meta commentary the franchise's - and us military's roots. also feels weird to play after infinite warfare which felt like a bit of a breath of fresh air by heading into the future and into the stars so you could robots in space. and then this comes out like call of duty poked its head out for a second and decided it was too scared to evolve or change.

i don't think a WWII shooter should play like a future space warfare game either. like, in the moment, i appreciate the hollywood of it all; the explosions and solid, relatively nice camerawork, but its blend of the historical with the over-theatrical kind of leaves me queasy. watching german soldiers pour out onto your screen like the computer-programmed lemmings they are feels really hollow. game lacks heft and tact too.

i liked the part where you rescue the little girl though.

sweet, funny, and poignant all at the right moments. to me it captures the term visual novel beautifully. the visuals are more than words on a screen, rather they create a positive, relaxing atmosphere for what amounts to a small story to live beyond some pages or a computer app.

it's like textbook definition of what makes a game a game (and not a movie or a book).

also i cried at some nerd kid putting a stick away. gaming!