i know john milius was involved but it feels like red dawn - and subsequently michael bay's the rock for some reason - was an influence but only after it was filtered through from the references modern warfare 2 made to the material two years prior. everything about this feels like modern warfare 2 but traced over. or like modern warfare 2 gave the homefront kid its homework to copy and said but make it look like your own. homefront was like sure and then forgot.

definitely going to give this game points for trying. there are real world references to banal American institutes such as White Castle and Hooters. the game openly references hillary clinton and kim jong il (and kim jong un). i think it's neat considering how out of their way games go to make up their own in-universe parallels so it's refreshing to see a game trying to actually "be real".

not worth a lot by the end though. game is very shallow and its premise is like every american conservative's victimisation wet dream. "finally, we're being oppressed and have a reason to fight back". give me a break. maybe more interesting if it were set in canada or australia.

nice shooting though.

A lot of good deaths in this game. It's a game about a drug that turns people in to bros. Bro soldiers. Dudes who love killing the enemy and high fiving one another. And it's about revealing the subsequent horror of the reality both to
the player and the character. And I think it delivers that message most thoroughly by making you bare witness to these incredibly overly dramatic and yet relatively genuine feeling moments of these men as they gasp and cry and die. The big villain's final words are don't tell my mum what I did which reflects a boyish innocence hidden beneath. It's kinda corny but also a kinda rarity for me to see in a war shooter and also something I felt was genuine.

Didn't love that the game decides in its dying breath to completely undercut its anti capitalist underpinnings to paint the south american "rebel" leader as yet another sneaky opportunist instead of maybe someone who is also genuine in their desires. Seems like a "gotcha" moment for the sake of a one, a symptom of the post south park "anyone who believes in anything is a dumbass and all sides suck" mantra that was (and still is) popular to peddle to teenagers and the idiots game publishers think every gamer is.

Glad I read ed smith's essay on it in Shooter. Forever wrote it off as that game no one player whose cover was everyone's avatar in the early ps3 lifecycle days. Think it deserves a better legacy than that.

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.

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.

utterly boring and hollow. i am fascinated with its depiction of a future London, however. compare it to something like cyberpunk's fictional night city and there is something thoroughly more interesting about a real city in a game. real places, real history. only problem with a game like Legion is its complete lack of culture and humanity. you can play as anyone, and as such you're basically no one. you can hack everyone but you can't really talk to anyone. the whole game is about systematic oppression but there's no personal stories about anyone of it. they can't call out the police. there are signs that down with "violent" cops. game is so cowardly.

quite nicely marries the mythology of the old west with the unreality of video game action. what transpires between cutscenes is not exactly real. the stories silas tells are not exactly real. never quite goes all the way to illustrate how mundane silas' activities may have truly been but then it's still silas telling a story so he's always a video game esque one-man army. it's a cute narrative device that most games don't take advantage of.

overall, nice music. nice pulpy, meaty shooting and violence. has a really nice writerly quality just with the narration that kept me hooked. a very singular experience overall.

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.

leaner and meaner than DOOM. more straight-faced and self-serious than DOOM. replacing that sort of cheeky Evil Dead II esque homemade colourful splatter horror/thrash metal aesthetic with one of thee most drab aesthetics for any shooter. nothing but browns and steel greys with the odd sliver of red here or there, all under a rarely sighted dark purple sky. Having Trent Reznor of nine inch nails score the game is the icing on the industrial metal cake.

but hey, the game is fast. it feels as fast as the doom games of 2016 and 2020. quake is a blast to play. if DOOM is dark souls, this is bloodborne... just with far inferior story. you know though, while the evolution to full 3D is cool, the actual level design doesn't feel as revolutionary as the tech. i had to replay episode 1 to unlock the final boss and i went through it in maybe 10 minutes. sure, the levels get more complex, especially episode 4, but it doesn't seem like anyone was thinking of levels beyond corridors for shooting. i guess it was still 1996 after all.

I feel like homer Simpson looking at the back of the box at a perfectly constructed grill and then looking up his real much more real much messier less put together grill.

Like I'm not American nor do l live in a small town but yes this game's depiction of economic anxiety, broken futures and unfulfilled lives is speaking right to me. But then I look at my life and I'm like wow where is my charming, quirky idealistically supportive friendship group?

The game walks right up to the line with real things to say but then pulls back, warms itself in the comforts of a charming twee mystery game instead. the game gets real at certain moments. The argument between Mae and her mum. Bea's breakdown at the college party. Greg after the knife fight. Angus under the stars. But just as the game is ready for Mae to have more serious talks it ends. It ends kinda of where it should start. The problems it recognises with the way things are very obvious but it has no solutions. It ends with diversions of songs and pizza. Very comforting but not very confronting.

Anyway. Germ rules.

Repetitive, sure, but then, what game isn't. And what Ryse Son of Rome lacks in variety it makes up for by being thirft and no nonsense. It is personal taste thing that I happen to adore linear on the rails action games. I like games that can be opened and closed in one sitting like a book or a film and don't jerk you around too much with side activities or cruft.

How a game goes about its repetitive actions is important too. The core loop is bloodthirsty and exciting and I never tire of seeing the same five execution animations especially the one where you cut a man's arm off. The game also has a one shot camera thing going on quietly between cutscenes that, perhaps highlighted by the camera movements during executions, I thought was neat and made feel like the game is on par with games like Hellblade and God of War.

I also adore the setting. More games set in Rome, thanks. More historical settings in general. So many games are made by people who want to escape to medieval or sci fi fantasy settings but I'd like to see more games explore Earth and human history. That shouldn't exclusively be Assassin's Creed's domain.

Ryse Son of Rome's biggest downfall though is that it doesn't do much with the setting. It could be Rome or Spartacus instead it's a big bowl of nothing. It sort becomes Michael Bay's Rome at times, giving you a glimpse at the the proposed Call of Duty Ancient Rome game might have been. But it's just very charmless and lacking in character. I played 80% of it one sitting and less than a day later I can't remember what the inciting incident for Marius' betrayal is. It's not necessarily a poorly written game, more underwritten to the point where the writing feels nonexistent.

I will say the lack of narrative ambition does, in a Doom, id Software kind of way, reinforce how nice and lean the gameplay is (even if the level design is more shiny and nice to gaze at than complex and interesting to play through). I will add the game finishes on a sequence that I think is better on the rails than it would be otherwise. You really feel the crushing weight of the game coming to an end with a very weary QTE sequence.

It's a short, nasty dope as hell looking AAA game. It's not extraordinary but it should have been the template for story driven AAA games for the last console generation instead of something derided as a tech demo and forgotten.

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.

A lot of this game bridged together Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and his daughter, Sofia's Somewhere in my mind.

So much of this game on the surface is Apocalypse Now, the third act blatantly so (trophies are direct references to the movie and Heart of Darkness). It's a violent war game, after all. And yet Apocalypse Now is still more meditative than the average war movie. It's more Thin Red Line than Rambo 2, which is a shame when this game's big third act level is more Rambo and Predator than Apocalypse Now. You gun down a lot of combatants, sure. But none quite so systematically and forcefully as you do at the end. And I think it's a shame because so much of the game between missions is Somewhere - a more quiet, introspection piece on boredom and ennui.

In between taking missions for either side of an armed conflict in a foreign land that resents you and that you too, couldn't care less about personally, you're mostly just roaming a sparse, open environment, trying to starve off malaria and other mercenaries who shoot and practically hunt you on sight. There's nothing to do at any one time other other one of two basic functions: kill or try to stay alive and live. And it's that aimless meandering and sparseness that remind me so much of Somewhere. A movie celebrity and game. Far Cry 2 - a game about mercenaries and death. But both about depression too.

This game reminds me of my day to day life, where I am bored out of my mind, working for the weekend, just getting by, placed in circumstances that I feel I had less control over than I would have liked, doing my best but also doing nothing ultimately constructive or rewarding.

I love how much in general this game hates you as a character but not necessarily as a player. The world resents your presence. Your character has to pop malaria pills that they can run out of, and the guns jam. But it all works wonderfully into the nihilism and theme of decay that permeates through the game. And none of it is too much. It's still mostly a gun-toting romp. It just doesn't feed your power fantasy. It's a very intentionally deigned game, but I think it ultimately is also has an unintended effect of weeding out particular types of gamers. I'm struggling to articulate what I mean by this so I'll be blunt: either you're cool and you like this game or you're not cool and you don't. :p Eleven years later Death Stranding would sort of be the same game all over again.

This slapped, fucked and ripped.