"The future is uncertain. All we have can be lost... But it doesn't have to be that way! We can change the world! For the first time in human history, we have limitless intelligence potential at our finger tips. Technology can save us! And.... Entertain us!"

Is this that Doom Eternal that everyone was yelling about?

This might be the first time I played a game where I didn't really like anything but the core gameplay.

I don't really care about the retro 90s look. I don't think I ever did in my life. But I can at least admire the work they put into their artstyle. It clearly comes from passion/interest into the era/genre. Yet it's very aware of how commercialized and repurposed this genre is. It's glamorized and everywhere. Like plastic. Yeah. It's plastic.

The core gameplay just works for me. It's simple, punchy, and fast. The movement is nice and responsive, I quite like the dash kicks. There's a decent variety of weapons in the game but I have a few problems with it. One being that I just found myself only using the handgun most of the time. The other weapons can be fun (like the sword or shotgun) but the handgun always ended up feeling the most optimal to me. Most if not all the levels have you running a straight line. With the handgun, it has good enough distance and accuracy that it's adaptable to any challenge this game throws at you. There are two enemies that make it difficult but that can be solved with a dash kick, something you always have. I really struggled to find any use with the rifles in this game (rail and plasma). They have awkward crosshairs, slow rate of fire and pushback when firing, in a game all about speed and momentum. Sounds like it goes against the premise, doesn't it?

I haven't even mentioned the fact that headshots give you an extra second. In harder difficulties that's the difference between life and death. What makes headshots easy? The damn handgun!

I can't comment much on the music because I heard the first four notes that played in the main menu, instantly noticed it's generic "retro" music and said no this won't do. I will say I've been enjoying playing the game, running through the levels, popping heads with the handgun while listening to artists like Nicolas Jaar, Ben Frost, Car Bomb, The Armed, Skee Mask, and Gazelle Twin.

Anyways.

Let's talk about Irony! It sure works when it's funny! I won't say this game is not funny at all. It's just not funny most of the time. It has its moments. When Mad Jack says "Learn to say no!" at the start of a level, I'll admit- it got a laugh out of me. I don't know... I enjoy sharp bitter writing more than anyone I know. But the story just left me wishing there was more going on here. It has it's implications that it does but it just ends? What's going on behind the irony poisoned mask? I think there could've been more moments of sincerity. Show me the weird gooner that's behind Mad Jack! For a story that focuses on themes of humanity, technology, and consumption, it doesn't really leave enough time to fully explore this. It lacks imagination. Which is a shame.

It's a decent FPS that's got a lot of what I look for in a shooter of its genre. I find myself enjoying endless mode until the anime girl goes on about slave to adrenaline, endless cycle this and that. Yeah, alright- you're right. I got better things to do. I'll practice my free will and ALT+F4 the shit and do something else.

sucks the pen as hard as i can like i know how to*

fuck rusty, marry iguazu, kill walter

i'll fucking kill you

For many years, if you asked me what my favorite game series was, I probably would've said Splinter Cell. This is like you sent a team of scientists to develop the polar opposite game.

It is unabashedly loud, stylish and raucous. There is no stealth, because you are a fuck-huge monkey. You are given no tools but your hands and the speed to run at them, because you are a big, fuck-off monkey. The tutorial is three button prompts. There's music to accompany you on your quest for freedom, battling with you to see who can best embody this frenetic energy. You don't need more.

Sometimes people want to be a part of the thing. Particularly, people want to be a part of the the BIG thing. Even MORE specifically, people want to be part of the CURRENT BIG thing. It is some sort of vital ingrained compulsion that those connected to the internet or larger social circles through whatever vector develop innately. A lot of people call this compulsion FOMO, but I think it's worse than that. I think it's a human colonial impulse to want to stake some kind of ownership on the act of being- to say "this moment in time is mine and I exist. No one can take away this moment that everyone experienced and since this moment is at least partially mine, I am important and relevant and wanted. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be on the same page as your friends or whatever, but I'm talking about something else.

Breath of the Wild felt manufactured with the intent to create vapid marvel movie spectacle and crossbreed it with this "of-the-moment" impermanent obsession; it became a hybridized experiencesociety chimera. You can see this in a lot of the marketing for Tears of the Kingdom: tweets asking "are you ready to join all your friends and play more Tears of the Kingdom after a day away?" posted on a monday morning after the game's weekend release run. They do the thing all too-big-to-fail mega titles do where they put up a screengrab of the world map, the sheer amount of game in the game, and say "here we stand, towering over everything else. Look at all these 10/10s. We are beloved. Come be with us in our belovedness."

Which is all not a criticism of the game as much as it is a consequence of what the market generates. They want you to want them, like Fiona Apple wants you to love her on that one song where she starts making sounds like a gibbon. The difference is that Fiona Apple is a particular human being and BotW is a product and Link doesn't make funny gibbon sounds.

This game does initially feel magical and mystical, widescreen and arresting. It then quickly descends into a directionless IRS collection call job, running the world and ripping up its stones for your precious prizes with no real purpose other than the vague sense of seeing the number go up. Which is my main point of criticism for this game: it is an idle game that requires fantastic amounts of input. The gameplay loop is shallow and one dimensional, recycled challenges ad nauseum with nearly no shift in basic theming or even challenge. Everything is about as hard as everything else, the dungeons are footnotes at best, and the story borders on non-existent. None of these things are damning on their own, but combining them with the now ubiquitous presence of mechanic imitators and the virulent breathless exaltation of the game atop every possible "cool thing" list, and the fact that it seems to have earned this status for simply being unobtrusive, inoffensive and obscenely expansive in its vanilla nothingvoid- it makes me start to wonder if a lot of this weird culture was a deliberately induced by nintendo.

Maybe that's nuts. Maybe it's crazy to assume that Nintendo is happily creating a culture of expensive and time-consuming mediocrity to bring in the largest audience, to create some sort of universal group think that makes the property unassailable and infinitely valuable. Maybe that's nuts.

I think Link should be a girl

One of the black sheep of the 2D Super Mario games. Super Mario Land was one of the first video games I ever completed, and I'd still say it's one of the best titles for the original Gameboy. But does it hold its own with Super Mario Bros 3 or Super Mario World or even New Super Mario Bros? No. That's not to say there isn't a fun time to be had here. The music is fantastic, the visuals are top notch for its platform and it marks the first appearance of fan favorite character Wario! But SML2's biggest hurdle is being compared to other games in its own series, both ones that came before it and afterwards. I would put this game ahead of Super Mario Bros and Super Mario Land, but that's it. It doesn't have the speed and tight controls that are the series hallmarks. If I'm sounding excessively negative, I still think the game is worth playing if you have easy access to it. The game is VERY short, you can knock it out in an afternoon and it's currently on the Nintendo Switch Online Service. But I do think the Wario Land series that spun-off of this game are all much more worthwhile.

TV Companion

Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse (2013) is an ambitious platform mascot remake of a 1990 Sega Genesis release by the same name. In principle, this sort of title should be absolutely unlikable for me. You play as an over confidant and commercially monolithic protagonist who has too much corporate mascot baggage to be relatable. You have this constant narration saying ultimately redundant things. You have the dissonance between the bosses being a touch too difficult and the platforming being a touch too easy, making it feel less satisfying for its supposed target audience, kids. An admittedly sexist dowry mission motivation where you have to save the damsel in distress Minnie from an evil witch trying to steal her beauty. On top of all of that, its also a remake, and as a bit of an art purist I tend to find these fanfiction reanimations of the original work to be disappointing. Yet, as I've grown older I've learned that this automatic repulsion of licensed games and simple narratives is not doing anybody any favors.

There is unquestionably a lot here to like. Each of the 5 levels are creative and constantly have you moving between 3D micromanagement platforming, and satisfyingly 2D jump sections. Each of the levels are totally unique. You have the enchanted forest of confusion, the library with books and letters coming alive, and an absolutely gorgeous candy world. Making it feel like the famous Thru the Mirror (1936) episode come to life. The game overall is short enough you could beat over an hours cup of tea but has a teaming amount of variety for how you interact with each level that it never feels monotnous. In my minds eye I was thinking of games like Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (2000) and Klonoa (1997) where the world is 3D and you have to often deal with attacks coming in from the background, there is some of that here with the Library section where you have to avoid the books protruding in from the background and the general variety for how the boss engagements are all attacking from different angles.1 However this is one order of magnitude even more impressive as it seamlessly moves the entire gameplay to 3D as well. If you remember those pipe sections from Super Mario Odyssey (2017) imagine if those were longer and not actually segmented via pipes, imagine instead that you just got to a point in the stage and the camera switch to you allowing to walk away. This is most felt at the beginning of the game when you walk into the castle and during a boss fight against a candy dragon where you have to jump between platforms.

The reason I feel compelled to talk about this is that I feel like by admitting that this game is fun and has a lot of variety I'm betraying something by admitting for instance that I'd much rather replay this over something like Cuphead. The lack of monotonous play is something that I believe this game successfully taps into, and admittedly something that the early Fantasia (1940) era cartoons tapped into as well. You'd never know if when you put an early disney cartoon on if it was going to be a tornado storm like The Little Whirlwind (1941) or a car breaking down like in Tire Trouble (1943) but you knew that when you watched it you were never going to be bored due to the fact you were watching honed in and unique animations in action. That's what Castle taps into, and as a game the trust of the experience works better in terms of this variety power fantasy for making me want to improve. By allowing for the game to be ultimately quite short, it builds into itself a much firmer desire to improve and replay the experience which works far better for Mickey because his whole deal is just barely avoiding being hit. I much prefer this to the high octane performance expectations of a difficult SHMUP or Cuphead. This is the design approach that I believe you can find in kirby games, where the power fantasy is being able to experience the dream again with better immunity. The point of Sakurai's early Kirby titles like Kirby's Dream Land (1992) is that the world is constantly changing yet keeping the game is short enough that you can try to play it through taking less damage. The cartoon approach to game creation. Unfortunately later Kirby games would bloat with powerups that trivialize the boss encounters and mandatorially long play times to satisfying the player, which is why I think its important not to just throw this game away out of hand. If you were to ask me I think this creative flavour is nessecary in order to keep a platformer to feel satisfying, and I think that how short is it is a strength and rather than a weakness.

There's actually only a few nuanced spots where I think Castle drops the ball. The main one is the narrator. They did a great job of making sure the narrators vocal intrusions are not annnoying by making the voice actor yawn out the lines like a lion, but especially after you beat a boss you can actually cut his delivery off. Outside of that, the score meter in this game has a problem, for one I don't think it needed to be there at all to begin with since my ideal way of scoring better is by being hit less times and losing less lives, but even aside from that its a mandatory inclusion at the center top of the screen with an extra couple digits added to the scoreboard so that you will always see zeros next to whatever your score is, implicitly telling the player they are not doing well enough. My ideal way to do this would be to hide those extra digits until you hit that next numbers place entirely (ie going from 000099990 -> 000100000 being worse than 99990 -> 100000), as I think push everything towards 'scoreboards' is why we've ended up now with the rather unfortunate situation of 'ranking' the players performance by in game metrics rather than letting those metrics speak for themselves like in DOOM or even allowing the player to even count them themselves like personally tallying how many times you fell off the stage in Spyro. I feel like suppressing and reorienting the players urges like this is similar to bolding, all capsing, or highlighting words in a post. I hope you've noticed that I try to do italicizations and these other various touch ups very rarely in my posts because I think it just calls too much attention to itself and creates a sense of artifice that commands too much the takeaway to the player. Just as repeating your statements too much in an essay comes off as redundant and insecure, I think there's an argument to be made that we could view stuff like score upon a similar formal line.

Regardless of that Castle is similar to early Kirby or my recent post on Bowser's Fury in the sense that this focus on the shortness of the length allows the player to feel more satisfied than a compulsorily large amount of content. It's the power fantasy I seek for in a platformer. This title excellently hones in on the feeling of constant spectacle and variation in those early cartoons. If I want to feel powerful and cool and a drive to get even better while being refreshed by the initial experience, this is the type of platformer I prefer. It's a shame that the sexist narrative and the occasional blip in the performance prevents it from standing out, but I think this is the basepoint for what I expect and want from a platformer, all aspects accounted for.

When you are committed to a mental hospital in the USA, you generally have to consent verbally to surrendering your agency, or someone has to do it for you. You have to do this for the hospital to be able to treat you as "legally insane" so they can lock you up in a room and treat you like a prisoner or an enemy or some kind of other thing. Nurses then work hard to ignore you, doctors that see you for five minutes attempt to either belittle you or goad you into some kind of behavior that confirms their suspicions that you are an unstable and suicidal person that is a danger to yourself and to others. They keep you locked up for a week and make you take pills that make you puke and you aren't allowed to sleep when you want to and you have to pace a circular hall shaped like a fucking panopticon with a nurse's desk in the middle. You will never want to die more than right there.

Why do people want to kill themselves? Because they're depressed? Sure. Depression, usually, means that your brain is chemically deprived of serotonin or other hormones responsible for a healthy internal world. It makes things you like feel less meaningful, makes things you're afraid of more scary, makes things you don't want to do into the heaviest weights imaginable. It's easy to look at this and just say, yes, we need antidepressants, we need therapy, we need whatever other number of things to treat this fucked up serotonin vacuum.

So you get therapy and antidepressants and you give them an honest try and you end up in the psych ward anyway. You open your eyes again and it's a frustratingly familiar sterile white fiber board ceiling. A man one room over screams about how he wants to kill his bitch of a wife, how he wants to strangle himself. You will never want to die more than right there.

Why do we never ask what has led people to these states of serotonin drought? Is it because you are just designated "legally insane," that there is some integral piece of you that was made broken that must be rectified by the sparkling techno-brilliance of modern medicine? Is it because you are simply a lazy whiner that has had it too easy and the reason you are falling to pieces is the shattering weight of your own malaise?

Or is it maybe that there's not a solution so simple. Maybe the very fiber of what we've come to understand as living is fucked. Maybe it's the fact that the ambulance ride that took you to the hospital costs you several thousands of dollars. Maybe it's that you couldn't even afford to see the therapist they recommended you in the first place. Maybe it's that you can't hold down a steady job because they demand so much for so little and your hands shake when your manager raises their voice. Maybe it's because when you were young felt some kind of sting on your skin or in your mind and you couldn't even begin to imagine how long that sting would stay. Maybe it feels like you are shouldering the weight of something at all times, and it is invisible. You can't point to anything to say:

"Look now, doctor. Look at my burden. Look what I am coming apart under. Please, help me. Please, I want to be free of this. Lay poppies by my bedside if you must. Please."

What you actually say to the doctor isn't that. You say "sometimes I think about killing myself," and that's all it takes for the shape in the doctor's mind to be something broken, bruised and insane. You are wrong, no matter how much it feels to you like the world has been wrong. All you've wanted to do is explore it, to have some answers. You don't get that. You're stuck here. You can't even kill yourself. They tell you this hell is your own making. You believe them.

Small edit:
I recommend beating this game in a single sitting without stopping. The PC optimization is terrible though, fair warning.

AN ELEVATED MEET N FUCK

"but a machine of pure metal is a luxury."

"most often reserved for facades; to insulate the squeamish from uncomfortable realities."


As I am writing this, I am having a very stressful day. So let's destress by chatting about EROSTASIS for a little while.

It’s exactly what it says on the tin, AN ELEVATED MEET N FUCK. So you must be wondering, what is an elevated meet n fuck? What does such elevated meet n fuck entail?

You already know that I cannot answer this without indulging in the opportunity to talk about the Meet n Fuck games. You know, those point n click erotic dating sims that infested Newgrounds back in the mid 2000s? Those games that were completely jury rigged with stolen hentai art, and random assets found on the internet (like the moans from porn videos in 144p). Anyways, there are two things worth noting from these games. One, is obviously the poorly written dialogue that always has a typo, and two, the foreplay. The foreplay is the “challenge”, it is the wall in your way to getting your dick wet. How can it be done, boys? Well, it’s simple. You rub her left thigh first, DON’T DO THE RIGHT, FIRST! That’s a rookie mistake. It's the left thigh, then the right thigh. Then the hips- LEFT SIDE OF HIP FIRST- THEN RIGHT. Never touch the arms, always touch the cunt last, folks. This is the order, this is Meet n Fuck Lady’s way, and you will follow her way. You will serve the Meet n Fuck Lady! You think she’s servicing you? Bitch, if she doesn’t like your vibes, you ain’t getting in! You are constantly comforting her needs, at all times! You think you’re swooning her with the stupid shit you say? No, she loves desperate clowns that humiliate themselves to get her to smile. She responds to your bullshit with incomprehensible shit because she's not really listening to you, she's just thinking about eating you in one bite. Why’d ya think when ya cum, the game fades to black with a “The End” title card? Because she just ripped your head off like a prey mantis. You died, to sustain her desire, and you will be born again to service her at a later time.

Some people reading this is going to have the audacity to think “that isn’t Meet n Fuck at all.”. What are you going to do? Play them to prove me wrong? No, go ahead, go serve the Meet n Fuck Lady then come back, so I as well can put you in your place. I will choke you out like a rattlesnake, you fucking freak.

Ready to talk about EROSTASIS?

Actually, I know what’s best for you. No, I don’t think you are ready to talk about EROSTASIS. Let me just get this out of the way. This play is grotesque, with some vile, intense, and hysterical imagery of all sorts of perversions. Along with tone piercing sonic sounds that fit just beautifully with it. But obviously, this is not for everyone and I will talk more in depth about it (because that’s more fun for me.). If it does not sound like your thing then move on or keep reading so I save you the trouble. IF this does interest you. Then you will stop reading right now and play it. You will come back after playing it.

OBSERVE, PERCEIVE, AND CONTEMPLATE.

Erostasis begins by double tapping the BEGIN CYCLE. button, then your ears are immediately sonically challenged with this sickening high squeal of frequencies. Black waves swarm the screen, bordered by abyssal metal. The second button you double tap is SURVIVE..

You are then punched into consciousness! First thing you see is an open chest cavity with its beating heart, with all sorts of scrap metal and tubes lingering beside it. BWONG, BWONG, BWONG, BING!

“DO NOT
ATTEMPT
TO SPEAK.

IN FACT,
DO NOT ATTEMPT
ANYTHING
AT
ALL.

YOUR ROLE IS
TO OBSERVE. o”

Third button you double tap is OBSERVE..

At this point, you understand what you’re doing here. You’ve done a great job following instructions. You clicked three buttons already!

This entity that’s speaking to you is in full control of your body. You are only really blessed with the perception of it all. As it says best.

“YOU WILL WATCH
AS YOU
SERVICE
THE SHIP. o”

So it’s pretty obvious here. You aren’t a person, you aren’t Paul The Private Detective that’s trying to fuck every woman he sees to find a birthmark on their ass, nor are you some guy fucking your friend at a BDSM club. There are no Charlies or Veronicas here. Just organs, as the ship is nothing but a body of organs, and you are just one of them. So like any organ, it’s got a function that needs to be done for survival. What is your function? It’s simple, because it already told you. Your function is to service. You must cater to the other organs’ “exotic demands.”. You observe, perceive, and contemplate. What does that entail though? Where do I even start?

There’s seven accessible areas on this ship. The play begins in fabrication, duh. Then you must go through five other areas before entering the COMPUTER CORE! Starting at the top is HAEMOPONICS.

HAEMOPONICS

“the human body is a remarkable machine.

self-constructing, self repairing, highly adaptable.


it is by far the most economical form of automation"

I don’t have anything really smart to say about this quote. It’s self explanatory, really. The fuck machine ship is just spitting. Anyways, you’re going to approach this fleshy motherly figure. It’s the heart. What does the heart need? The heart wants maternal intimacy, you are going to embrace the heart and feed from it. Blood is a fuel of life, so is breast milk.(duh) The maternal relationship between mother and the baby in her womb explains the ‘self-constructing’ part of the beginning quote. A baby is constructed inside a human’s body, they share the same blood. She never gets to hold her damn kids. You really are doing this bitch a service.

VENTILATION

“I didn't dare go far
Saving oxygen
For Modern Business Hymns
Before the Warp Guard”

The lungs are dicks. Just because we don’t like to think/be self aware of our breathing, that means the lungs feel we’re entitled. Honestly, everything that happens here is just what it feels like to be sick. The times where your lungs are weak but forces you on your knees, begging for air.

“a desire for power is always a fantasy for the weak.”

Let’s just hope we won’t be needing portable oxygen tanks in our lifetime. Don’t forget to breathe.

NAVIGATION

“The pain, the pain
The pain, the pain
Relief, again, the pain
The pain, the pain
The pain, the pain
The pain, the pain”

The nerves are here and they need something beyond pleasure. Make them base, human, and animal, for a moment. Make them feel pain.

DOUBLE CLICK FUCK.

We made it boys, the service top representation that we’ve been demanding!!!! This is the real meet n fuck experience, right here. You click the word fuck, you click the word hurt, then you hear the aaahs and oooooofs. Then you leave! It’s over in that section! Like a real meet n fuck!

“30 seconds left
In a golden light”

BIOREMEDIATION

I got canceled after jerking off during Sir James Corden’s show, and now I work in the piss and shit factory. I sit in shit and piss and theres fucking ghosts in the waste and want my body. Anyways I’m trying to destroy them. This isn’t even just relief, I’m out right destroying these fuckers with my body. I guess that can count as relief, you’re letting these ghosts, waste spirits(?), move on instead of sitting in shit. Anyways, they get overwhelmed by being in my body and implode. Bioremediation. Worst part of this play? It does nothing for me. I don’t even have an edgy theory for this. Maybe it’s about people who watch porn but don’t even jerk off, they love the audio for it and they just death grip their dick the entire time, eventually cumming, maybe.

WEAPONS

This is the best part of the fucking play, right here. It does EVERYTHING FOR ME. Weapons on this ship are basically obsolete, they never use them! It makes these fuckers desperate! So what do we gotta do? Well, we gotta remind them that these weapons are nothing without us. So what I’m about to describe here, is possibly the most hysterical thing about this play. I sure hope that if you made it this far reading this, that I hope you played it so you know what I mean here. To people who haven’t. This is YOUR SECOND CHANCE! If you continue reading you are about to be robbed of an experience that’s seeing this shit with your own eyes. Okay so immediately you see a woman getting her gaping asshole filled with a TORPEDO, and of course it's making her belly stretch and inflate. These weapons are literally begging you to fill them, bro. They are so empty! What are you gonna do? Not fill them? Let them die? Of course not! Let’s load a round!

“I’ll kill and explode and explode until everything’s broken and i can suck it all in to fill me.”

Cool, I’m convinced.

LOAD TORPEDO

Bitch get loaded, it’s pleased but it wants to be fired. But it needs our permission. Are we? Gross, no fucking way.

DENY.

“you’re so cruel, my tormentor. thank you.”

There’s a world where Suda was making shit like this if he wasn’t so held back and repressed all the time.

COMPUTER CORE

Alright, relief has been given to every organ on the ship. Well, until we learn that this AI has something that needs to be fulfilled as well. Although this AI and its ship is purely amoral, there’s a simmering thirst of sadism that needs to be quenched. Luckily we’re an organ that’s very adaptable to the kinks of other organs in this post reproduction world, meaning we’re absolutely perfect for the job. It’s going to make us discharge, obliterating us completely. We’ve reached erotic apoptosis, folks. That’s right, it’s a cellular system that happens everyday, billions of times, and will happen again. Do you need relief? You got something that needs to be sedated?

Begin Cycle.