"Living my life is like playing Call of Duty on easy. I just go around and fuck shit up."

I am not feeling great right now, so the pure escapist power fantasy Michael Bay rip-off elements that are infinitely at play in every Call of Duty game hits me harder right now than the CIA dickling rah-rah pro-American cheerleading equally at play at all times.

This especially felt like several PS3 era shooters (Kane & Lynch, Bulletstorm, Rogue Warrior, Blood Dragon, Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops) all shoved into a billion dollar smoothie. Just fuck it. Sometimes shooting video game characters, even at the digital devil Ronald Reagan's bequest, just feels good.

god of war. bayonetta. devil may cry. batman arkham. spider-man. anthem. control. tomb raider. uncharted. destiny.

there, go play any of those games and watch any of the billion marvel live-action properties in the background and you got yourself the experience of this game. not a single original idea there.

at first, i don't really have the energy to hate it, which is my experience with the marvel monoculture at large. but just thinking those words makes me realise that kind of fatigue is what they want. they've won. so fuck it, one star but i'm gonna play some more dlc and keep watching the movies until i really snap anyway, mostly because i like black widow.


the one thought i had playing this was how if you replaced all the live action movie stars with laminated CGI mannequins you actually lose nothing. these characters are literally walking costumes. the big thing Iron Man does at the end before the final mission is... reveal new badass suits for everyone. the game's entire grind is for new suits, pretty much. these characters don't exist beyond the confines of their dope threads. and even though they're all different costumes the sense of individuality doesn't strike me here as much as a overwhelming sense of conformity that comes anytime you see a cop or a firefighter or a private scool uniform, because the people underneath the costumes in this game barely matter. i like outfits in games. i've grinded for hours for killer fits in equally repetitive games before. i even bought the spider-man DLC so I could wear the extra spidey suits (yeesh) but something about them in this game feels so hollow. iconography and style is cool, i guess, but if Nazis dressed in Hugo Boss maybe our heroes need to have more to define them than a cool suit.

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)/¯

butts.

the first mental note i made playing until dawn was "nice butt". game has some nice butts.

I sort of love the appeal, the concept, of these photorealistic story adventure games. like in theory they're the exact kind of game i'd like to make. perhaps because i'm lame and unimaginative and i need a "serious" game with a "serious" story to look "serious" and therefore real. this is maybe the first non-quantic dream one i've played though. i was partially lead to believe it was the antidote to david cage's ham-fisted narcissism. "it's a campy 80s thriller that doesn't take itself too seriously". but no, not really. it's almost a straight up, lame mid-2000s horror movie; a saw-like torture porn clone with an extra layer of unnecessary meta cheese on top.

i loathed, loathed the first half of this. mechanically clunky and banal to play. almost nothing to actually do or see. the characters all seemed like utterly awful human beings to be around too. smug, mean bullies. the game starts you off blind, as these teens play a prank on a girl that has almost no context behind it, and is not even a prank either really. like, make it a Carrie styled pig's blood act of absolute malevolence or make it a normal romantic rebuff gone awry or something small. it's a weird thing to get hung up on but it was just such a lame way to kick things off. the characters are made worse, too, by how the facial capture technology makes just about every one of their performances look like this in any given moment:
https://frinkiac.com/img/S06E06/379328.jpg

there's whole meta interstitial therapist gimmick in here too that's grating. I could kind of tell immediately which character is in the therapist chair as well. the game has no clever fake outs. it telegraphs every "twist" each step of the way for you. i kept feeling smart for clueing in as to what's going down but only because the game hangs each story beat on a giant glowing hook for you to discover.

things clicked a little more for me in the second half though, mostly because it vaguely cohered into the game i utterly wished it was: like a gossip girl/OC teen romance sim. okay, it never coheres into that, but this game gives the game's central bitch character, Emily, the line "understand the palm of my hand, bitch", and i was just like where has this attitude been all game, i could really use more of this. you isolate all these horny, mean teens in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, i was hoping in between the Scooby Doo of it all that they'd be more personal dynamics and capital-d Drama at play. but despite that being the game's biggest appeal, it winds up more of a dream or promise because the characters are separated for most of the game - first in pairs, and then the central three (Sam, Mike and Emily) by themselves.

some of these isolated sequences i liked quite a bit though. i can't deny i really dug Mike - the big dumb typical video game himbo, just kinda stumbling his way through various cliched horror setups. he gets a wolf companion at one point and i liked that level of unashamed pandering.

Emily, who until her sequence, spent most of the game shitting on others, stumbles her own way alone through a lame direct-to-DVD Descent movie, which i also have to admit i liked. it's shallow characterisation, the tortured femme who has to fight her solitary way though adversity, like the story is her trial. but i think that stuff works the same way bread and butter work as a snack.

and there's sam who spends 20 or 30 mins running through the lodge in only a towel, the closest to what my expectations for this game here were. i must confess i do find playing as female characters in games maybe the most freeing, so i'd be lying if i said i didn't enjoy playing as Sam in a towel 😔.

i think back to my initial mental note: butts. and i think part of the appeal of photorealistic graphics for me is the allure of equally realistic scenarios. but, until dawn, like all of quantic dreams' games, still couches itself in fantasy and video game make believe nonsense. these characters look real, they may even behave realistically and give the illusion of having real emotions but their still written into a set of very limiting video game constraints.

until dawn, for instance, is a game that has some of the most realistic, foul-looking gore but god forbid any of these characters get down and do something more common and real and bone. i am might not saying i necessarily want an awkward QTE sex scene or a gratuitous boob shot but i think it's a shame games are still more afraid of sex than violence (kind of funny for a game that's using a slasher motif that normally demonises sex) and that they don't/can't use these kinds of graphics to explore more, equally realistic acts of humanity.

i mean, it's a bit of tease to get behind the steering wheel and take control of some of the most realistic digital human avatars and instead of being able to explore what that means and feels like in any depth, you're stuck in a bad slasher movie.

anyway. i think on what games that look like until dawn could be versus what they actually are leaves a lot to be desired. i'd take even a proper catty drama, confines that these characters work well within. i am not even mentioning the breadth of choices games like this could present you with that could go beyond that of "save x or y or none".

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.

it took me 51 runs over 9 months to escape just once.

it was my most monumental gaming accomplishment since defeating Isshin in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

that's enough for me for the moment. i'd love to see out more of the story. every character in this game is hot and interesting. sucks huge amounts of shit that i, a massive gaming loser, have to navigate a roguelike to experience it all though. it reminds me of the one big shitty thing about all games: they'll never be as accessible as a book or a movie. want to fast forward to your fave part? sorry loser, fuck off. this is games, baby. 😑😑😑

it's got some nice deserts. the game never really takes you there though. it's almost afraid to guide you across its map, an issue Odyssey and Valhalla wouldn't have. feels like a huge waste of space.

i can see how the game wanted you to explore because you it really requires you to grind up enough levels to actually complete it. this is a non-issue if you wind up with an XP boost, however, which I ended up using because I found the combat so tedious and utterly unrewarding. of course this also winds up turning the game into a sluggish equally unrewarding linear experience. so like, even though this only took me 20 hours to finish, it was spread out over two years and i had maybe 2 hours of fun with the whole thing. not a great sign when I am left yearning for Valhalla's endlessness.

Bayek and Aya make an interesting couple, maybe one of gaming's most compelling, realistic romances. very rare i think to find a couple in a game who genuinely feel like friends. theirs is a strained relationship. they reminded me of my parent in a weird way: two people, who've known each other since childhood, destined to have been together on one hand, but also destined to be separated. it's a shame their relationship takes a massive backseat to an Assassin's Creed plot and the game rarely if ever finds a way to actually intertwine the two in a gameplay in meaningful ways.

i guess what's most interesting about AC Origins is still its setting. the whole series is built on iconography that's practically begging for pyramids and tombs. the whole Isu stuff feels particularly Egyptian. I remember when one of the games ended with a CGI scene of ancient Adam and Eve escaping some area and the whole thing felt like a hype trailer for an inevitable Egypt game down the road. that this is their ancient Egypt game feels like a downer to me, though. like that's it? i guess. it's cool to get a AAA game completely set in Africa though. i remember being disappointed that there was no Ancient Rome AC game but I guess i appreciate ubisoft's one run at being less Eurocentric for once and taking Egypt over Rome (even if maybe you get the sense it's just because the Egyptian mythology is more of a standout than Roman mythology esp considering the Greek pantheon was coming right after). wish they just did more with Egypt: the politics, the people, the land. it's all just AC window dressing and the whole game feels like a test run for Odyssey (which in comparison is the more well--rounded experience).


the best thing this game accomplishes is making me want to pick up a history textbook.

thinking about how hard it is sometimes to convince people that certain movies - especially blockbusters - are, in fact, actually high art. like Mad Max: Fury Road, or Titanic. people are so conditioned to view certain genres through particular critical lenses. i run into a lot of people whose "movie of the year" has to be something pristine and traditionally dramatic. there's a similiar phenomenon with pop music. of course, with pop music it's often more a sort of friction that comes from mn who views themselves as macho trying to consider what enjoying music that's typically deemed feminine means. i'll see guys admit they like Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" but only by first allowing it "guilty pleasure" status.

not that blockbuster movies or pop music don't receive their fair dues. Titanic was the highest grossing movie of all time for a while and won like 11 oscars. Taylor Swift dominates the Grammy awards and is maybe the most popular recording artist in the world right now. but often what's "popular" isn't what's considered cool or critically lauded. it's easy to dismiss what's popular as shallow. and sometimes that's absolutely true, some popular things are shallow (see: the MCU or the music of Ed Sheeran). sometimes what's actually popular tho is genuine spectacle.

i think of the Uncharted games in these terms - as the definitive 'pop games'. they basically exist to ship playstation consoles so just about anyone with a ps3 or ps4 has played an Uncharted game. they also review extremely well. uncharted 2, in particular, won a ton of (relatively meaningless) GOTY awards and is the third highest reviewed ps3 game on Metacritic (for what little that's worth). but at the same time, i always get the feeling these games are considered lame by the cool crowd. or even by their own fans. uncharted 2 is lauded, sure, but i rarely see people exalting the blockbuster virtues of Uncharted 3 even though it's like the exact same game (it just can't compete in the shadow of Uncharted 2's train set piece - a stunt that burrowed into gaming folklore first).

after replaying all three mainline Uncharted sequels this year, I can't help but feel the series 1) remains somewhat underrated and 2) get better as it goes. sure, uncharted 4 hinges somewhat on the foundation (and your familiarity with) the ps3 trilogy, but i don't think you need to have strong emotional ties to Nathan and Elena's relationship to appreciate the best A Thief's End has to offer - which is balls-to-the-walls action and the best blockbuster setpieces this side of Hollywood (or Bollywood). if this were a movie, I'd enjoy it no less than I enjoy Fury Road or the recent Mission: Impossible movies or Casino Royale or the work of Steven Spielberg. which at the end of the day is what Uncharted wants to be. it wants to be interactive Indiana Jones. it wants to be James Bond. it wants to be a Michael Bay walking simulator. and the game absolutely is that.

i read an article on Vice from former games critic Ed Smith, written around the release of Uncharted 4, and using a Nathan Drake thumbnail, about how games can't truly be cinematic. the main thrust of this argument was how crucial editing is to the essence of cinema and how games can't -- or certainly "cinematic" AAA games (like Uncharted) don't -- use editing techniques in gameplay. and i think i agree and calling games like Uncharted 4 cinematic would be a bit silly. but i don't think they have to be cinematic to be blockbusters. and i think the Uncharted series has completely nailed the gaming blockbuster formula. it's a bit of a narrow, somewhat linear formula. it consists primarily of light platforming, some shooting, some waking and talking sections and occasionally a puzzle. but that's honestly all i want out of a game. i love an on the rails action. when it works, the way it works in Uncharted 4, where you're jumping off falling buildings or being dragged behind a jeep through the mud while simultaneously shooting other vehicles, I feel more alive and exhilarated than I do bashing a wave of enemies with a sword or exploring some random empty rooms farming for resources.

...

random notes.

uncharted 4 is one of the most striking games i've ever played. a level of detail fidelity almost unmatched. pouring one out for the devs who crunched themselves into retirement making this (weird thing to say, idk)

i went into this with the original Amy Hennig pan for the game in my head - a game where Nathan's long lost brother would be an antagonist and the game would counter its ludonarrative dissonance criticisms by taking a gun away from Nathan for half the game. as much as i'd love to see Uncharted actually tackle and interrogate what Nathan's violence actually means instead of rewarding you a with a Ludonarrative Dissonance trophy for killing 1,000 enemies, i think this is the first game in the series to really limit your gunplay. there a lot more slower, walking and talking sections here. some uneventful driving sections. maybe 1/3rd of the game you don't actually shoot anyone. it's a step in the right direction. i kind of view those criticisms though as moot when so much of the game's fiction is steeped in hollywood tradition. it feels weird to criticise nathan drake for killing 100 goons when i don't criticise john wick or any harrison ford character for doing the same. and yes it's because nathan is a loveable rogue but, eh, i kind of come out of my replay of this series, with this questions in my mind, thinking it ultimately doesn't matter even if i wish they could do a better job at addressing in general.

i also appreciate Sam Drake's conceptualisation as the assohle loser brother more than the evil vengeful type too. he's a deadbeat loser, he's nathan if he didn't have an Elena.

zen and the art of running zombies over with your motorcycle

...wait that doesn't sound right. huh.

feel like this game fundamentally misunderstands its biggest virtue: the zen of riding a motorcycle through picturesque Oregon wilderness. it sort of loses all its charm when you encounter a zombie -- or a "freaker". just sort of reminds me of how tiresome zombies are, especially in a post-apocalyptic setting. ever seen Mad Max? ever read the Road? ever lived through a pandemic? all stuff that evokes the end of the world, none feature zombies.

zombie stories can be fine, i guess, but usually when you're telling a mostly end of the world serious human drama the way this game is, the zombies are simply another faction between the several human ones and the wilderness itself. and this game isn't quite the last of us levels of nature is taking back the planet. this game is set 2 years after the outbreak, not 20. a lot of civilisation still exists in pockets.

i don't know why the zombies really bothered me. at a certain point i did stop noticing them. this isn't resident evil or dying light, they really are just background noise. in fact, for about 25 hours, i didn't even engage this game's big selling point: the hordes. i completely ignored them. and when i had to face them in late-game story missions, i simply failed the missions enough times in order to skip them because i was so not interested. i cleared zero infestation zones as well.

this game really failed to engage me on the zombie front in any meaningful way. it did spark my interest with its human characters tho. at least in act 2. i stopped playing this game for about 2 years because the zombie stuff bored me to tears and the early area characters you encounter are all various degrees of boring and despicable. you really have to push forward to its second act camp - lost lake - until you begin encountering oddly compelling characters like Rikki and Iron Mike, and even antagonist Skizzo.

i say "oddly" compelling because this is a game with characters named Iron Mike and Skizzo. its lead character is a devoted backwards baseball cap wearing former biker named Deacon St. John - one of the most ridiculous and beautiful character names in gaming history. his best friend is Boozer.

i wouldn't say Days Gone gets you to care about any of its characters, not too much. they're not loveable. you're not going to find much sparking fan art of them. but what i like about most of the characters in this game from act 2 onward is how real they're portrayed. in similiar open world games like Horizon Zero Dawn or Ghost of Tsushima or any modern Far Cry or Just Cause, you're going to find a litany of stock archetypes; charmless sidekicks and maybe only slightly more charming but redundant quest givers. Days Gones has limited dramatic ambitions. it's mostly trying its darndest to evoke cable TV shows like Sons of Anarchy and the Walking Dead. but that's a step up from most video games, imo. this game has characters who feel closer to real people than most, and for that i do respect this game. narratively, it does wind up forcing these characters down some really cliched paths, but thems the breaks.

i really wish this game's open world busywork was more character focused. it's such a shame to have these rich vistas, these rich characters, and then litter the game with thankless, mindless empty busywork. clear out these zombies. chase these idiots on bikes. very few scenes of you just riding with a companion and getting to know anyone personally. especially because Deacon is the loner/drifter at heart, who's clearly keeping people out but obviously the game wants to say "but he has a heart of gold". but does he? he does wind up spending most of the game alone, listening to a truther on the radio and then yelling at the radio. so many exchanges he has in this game with another human, he's curt, rude and dismissive. he feels like he was written by two different people. he feels like all his voice lines were re-recorded for cutscenes because in-game he's a real jerk.

part of me wanted to end really positive on this game but it's kind of hard when it ends by kind of walking back on all the goodwill it built just to get its very easy and cheap conflict-centered ending. there's a really interesting moral choice made by Iron Mike about halfway through that the game just winds up using to slap him in the face with that felt incredibly misguided. at the end of the day, it just felt like it wanted to justify all of the libertarian/truther bullshit it had been yelling back at for a majority of the game.

it's a game about the frontier. and frontier justice is rewarded. a lot of this game reminded me of a non-descript western. Deke's bike is his horse. his search for his wife Sarah not too dissimilar for Ethan Edwards search for Debbie in The Searchers. the hordes of zombies are, well... i don't want to say they're Native Americans, but the game does outright link the hordes of zombies to hordes of refugees so it invites this idea of thinking of the zombies in terms of "savages". it has characters lament how the zombie destruction isn't unlike how tourists used to clog up the idyllic Oregon wilderness. calling them Freakers too sounds like tweakers and the game's radio truther has a rant about the government using drugs to weaken (white) Americans. there are some pretty horrible implications going on here but Days Gone isn't nearly introspective enough to really say anything but it certainly winds up feeling like the libertarian's wet dream in game form.

eh. idk. i hated so much of the gameplay here but i wound up enjoying riding my dumb Aloy from HZD-skinned bike around maybe the second best looking video game American wilderness (behind RDR2) and thinking about how this game features one of the better wife characters. it's a rare good wifeguy game.

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.

I love it formally and mechanically. It's like Dear Esther meets God of War, which is pretty cool. It's all light combat, environmental puzzles and straight up story (almost entirely voiceover). In a lot of ways it's my ideal game set up.

It's weird though because what it reminds me most of is the movie, The Revenant, which I hated. A lot of long takes. A lot of staring down the lens. A lot of mud and blood and shit. A lot of "harrowing anguish". And I don't know what it means for me that when a game does something a movie I hated did, I actually dig it (The Last of Us 1 and 2 kind of similiar). My only guess is because games are steeped in certain (very teen-friendly) aesthetics and tropes that when something kind of breaks through those barriers I get carried away.

Like this is sort of the inverse of God of War. God of War presents on the face a very literal fantasy world, where mythology is vibrant and alive. But all the gore and violence is still cartoonish. None of the characters feel like real people. Even in 2018's God of War, it's basically just an R-rated MCU movie. And the stakes... aren't there because it feels so fake.

Whereas Hellblade's reality is our reality. It's all mud and sticks and fire and blood and burnt, gored bodies strewn up all over the world like Christmas decorations. It's more natural and rustic. And the Norse mythology that runs through the game is filtered through dreamscapes/psychosis; it's a formalist unreality that God of War only kind of gets into at the end of III. And Senua is not Kratos. She's vulnerable and alone, and (initially (sigh at an upcoming sequel)) not a console mascot whose fate is kind of predictable. She's more human and relatable.

Where this game falls down for me is... well I don't know if it falls down but what I don't like about it is how it uses mental illness/psychosis as a device to obfuscate backstory. And it doesn't only use it for that. But I couldn't help but feel this game would be better if it were blunter. If Senua's backstory wasn't a puzzle to be revealed over time. If Senua's mental health didn't also skirt into "is she crazy or a genuine soothsayer". Part of this game feels designed to make you google "what was REALLY happening" afterwards.

I don't know, despite -- or maybe because of -- the immediate and showy mental health advisor credit that opens the game, it seems like "mental health" is something they stuck on as a gimmick, like someone's pitch was "what if you play as a crazy person" and it sprang from there. And I don't know if that's the case a all but it's the impression they leave by opening the game that way. And I don't know how much research they did and how much care they put in, but the portrayal was so extra and overwrought and lacking in subtlety it doesn't wind up feeling all that delicate. That credits winds up feeling like insurance.

Despite all that I liked how hopeful the game kind of felt by the end. How much the game recognised your mental health is something that isn't conquered but how equilibrium is learning to live through it and with it.

Part of me wishes this could have just been as scaled down narratively/thematically as it was mechanically. Been more Valhalla Rising, less The Revenant.

i often wonder where the AA/AAA games about motherhood are. and while technically this is a game about siblings, the way both Amicia's brother, Hugo, and also occasionally young budding alchemist, Lucas, huddle around her during certain sections where she has to illuminate a path through a plague of rats with a torch felt really maternal to me. it's also really rare for a game with a female protagonist to be so devoid of paternal/male figures too. i think that's what makes playing feel so fresh to me (even if it's not the freshest concept outside of games).

i really fell for this game's emotional tricks. the way it throws you into a bleak, terrifying world and then - like a flower blooming in the mud, blood and shit of a corpse-ridden battlefield - gives way to these really relieving moments of young teen characters bonding as they clutch onto each other (figuratively and literally) through the hell of it all. i think the game really nails those little quiet moments between stealthing passed inquisition guards and piles of swarming carnivorous rats, there's often a real personality to them (sometimes they offer levity, sometimes, as wit Melie, you can feel a genuine tension that exists beyond merely being your new BFF).

odd note: but i appreciate that i didn't have to collect any journals (i don't know why that stood out to me). but the "environment storytelling" is mostly the actual environment, a few npcs maybe, but there's like no like walls of text or little notes left lying around. made the game feel more in the moment, more urgent and the world by extension less artificially constructed (even if by the end what it's doing with the waves of rats is some insane out of this world shit... game kind of goes too far there i think but oh well).

also appreciate that murder in this game - while painted as a necessary evil via lines like "there was no other way" - isn't completely written off as just another wanton act of regular video game violence. the first two men you kill feels genuinely harrowing. likewise there are moments where you have a "choice" to kill/let someone die and while there's no morality system characters may remark upon it and in those moments you can feel Amicia grappling with her actions. it made me wish the game put more thought into non-violent combat and scaled back the amount of encounters where you 100% have to brain a guard with a rock/sic rats on them (and by the end the game feels like it just said fuck it, kill everyone). a missed opportunity but possibly because of how considered it felt at other times.