Played while sick as something easily digestible and non-intimidating to engage with. The older I get the more intrigued I am by the artistic call for a non-insignificant portion of this games musical DNA to be staked on the stylistic signifyers of acoustic American Blues. When you think racing game, specifically racing game from Japan, you think Jazz Fusion. This is just the nature of the beast. You play a racing game, it has jazz fusion playing in it. Or jazzy breakbeats, or hard rock with fusiony solos. Same difference. There's an interesting history to that in it of itself, what with Japanese racing broadcasts being soundtracked by the fusion band T-Square for decades, essentially codifying the aesthetic association of racing = jazz fusion. But the music in Double Dash? It's a lot of like, synthesized emulations of acoustic folk and R&B styles. There's some funk, a weirdly recurring amount of Ska, some Caribbean folk, but you'd look at the music in Mario Kart Double Dash and assume it was created in an alternate timeline where Rock & Roll never existed. And it's basically just this game that this stylistic oddity occurs, Mario Kart 64 had jazz fusion, Mario Kart DS might as well be the genre of jazz fusion cursed into the form of a handheld video game, it's just this game that shifts into this alternate reality. And like, i guess I get it, this whole game is the opposite smooth and slick, it's a brash and uncontrolled chaotic mess to play. The karts feel like they are barely holding onto the road, controlling them isn't immediately obvious or intuitive and kinda requires you to adjust your brain to the games specific feeling and mode of interaction. The item balance is mostly unhinged cause every character gets access to a unique overpowered nonsense item, the character switching mechanic leading to a lot more strategy required of the player beyond "know what item is most useful to have at any given time". As maybe the third video game i'd ever played, it's weird quirks all feel natural to me, but looking at it, it's a whole mess of weird systems both low level and upper level. It's definitely not as impressive or grandiose as what Mario Kart 8 achieves, it seems to have it's priorities basically set to the complete opposite of that game, but it feels so distinct and engaging to control and interact with, and the genuinely chaotic hard to predict nature of the game makes it feel really wholly new to come back to every time. It's such a weird little one off game both mechanically and aesthetically that it ends up being so much more interesting as a singular artistic statements than the successive titles, which feel like they picked an artistic direction and have just been successively refining to the point of crystaline lab grown perfection. This game is not that, it's a trash fire racing along at max speed. So it's probably the best mario kart maybe.

listened to while playing: Nickelback The Offspring, Breaking Benjamin, Smashing Pumpkins, Hum, Silverchair, Linkin Park (you cannot convince me Kara wouldn't listen to literally all of these bands)

One of those concepts so obviously good it's kinda shocking there aren't already a few exponents more of this kind of game. Frenetic trick skating movement shooting set in a battle arena that's also a massive skate park, genius. Roller Drome is a game that lives and dies by its momentum. By design, both the shooting and skating feel really good to in an unbroken combo, continually building up speed and picking off one enemy after another genuinely reaches transcendental levels of Cool at times. That coolness is all the more enhanced by the pseudo-comic book artstyle, which in combination with the increasingly frantic and overwhelming fights can make for some really nice visual moments. But as a direct result of this focus on momentum, any major failure in the moment is made all the more punishing by it's shutting down of that momentum. This makes this a Very fun game to be doing good at, and a pretty annoying game to be having any difficulty with. This is mostly okay cause as a natural curve you are going to mostly get better faster than the game gets harder, in my experience at least.

Another distinct aspect of the game I noticed was how, fucking complicated it can be. If you play this game with a standard controller, literally every single button on that controller is mapped to a thing you have to Regularly use and intuitively have at the ready for the right situation. This can be kinda dizzying at first, it's a very easy game to stumble around with the controls in its learning process. It is extremely satisfying to have all figured out though. I do wonder how much of that could have been simplified? The complexities of the trick system rarely if ever served to enhance Any of the core gameplay for me. I kinda just, ignored it for anything other than "hold down the flip and grab buttons when I need to reload" and instead focused on refining my abilities with the combat systems in the game. The core of combat and movement feel good enough on their own that I'm actually not really sure what end the implementation of a semi-complex trick system actually serves? Regardless.

The core gameplay loop and aesthetic elements here are so plainly strong it would be hard for me Not to love this game, but, I have a couple key hang-ups. One being, for a game this much about movement, these fights are like, kinda static. Almost none of the enemies in the game move at all. Which like, sure, aiming is a little awkward in the context of a fast pace skating game you're supposed to play with a controller, adding a slew of moving targets on top of that is just gonna make that even weirder. But this leads to me ask, is the arena format really the best suited structure for this combat system? I can't help but imagine this same synthesis of movement/combat systems in the structure of like, a series of linear Sonic the Hedgehog style stages, that feels all the more natural with frenetic momentum based movement gameplay this game seeks to prioritize. The combination of the closed in arena environments and static enemy types can make the game feel a tad, restrictive and empty, at times at least. When you are shredding ass during some of the more chaotic stages, you don't really notice it. My other big issue is a lot more direct: The progression system is kinda stupid and counter to any of the games Actual strengths. Each stage has a set of 10 achievements for specific actions you can take during the stage, and at the end of each leg of the tournament you have to complete a certain number of these in order to progress. Let me tell you, in a game that lives and dies by its momentum: this is a terrible idea. Forcing me to stop in my tracks and complete a bunch random specific nonsense tasks in order to move forward in the game is the most efficient way to kill any built up player momentum from match to match. And to be completely clear, I'm not even entirely opposed to the premise of making me go back to the previously completed stages to do better on them in order to progress. I actually had a lot of fun specifically doing any achievement that was just, "get this certain high score", "get a combo this high", those were awesome, Those work because they reinforce and encourage the player to build momentum and become more efficient and effective at the core systems in the game, the things that are fun to do anyway. What I don't enjoy are the tasks that are like, "do this specific trick at this part of the map!" or "kill this tough enemy using just your pistols" cause all those serve to do is completely and entirely halt you in order to do some overly pedantic nonsense in some part of the map. These eventually just become chores. Since you aren't required to complete a match in order for them to count (i'd be even more annoyed if they did), you just end up loading into the match, ignoring everything else in order to do this One specific thing in order to get enough Good Boy points to move on to the next part of the game you actually want to play. I get this was done to pad out the games length some, but I woulda just chucked this shit wholesale tbh. Just make it so I have to beat specific highscores to progress if you really want to have a system like this in place, force me to do the fun stuff in the game plz.

Hiccups aside, this is game where doing the most Basic shit is fun enough it'd be ridiculous of me not to have had a good time while playing it. Good Shit.

The quiet comfort and faint familiar warmth of endless oblivion. A game about a long dead almost entirely empty world dragging on long past it's own time. There are only 2 inhabitants of this world who aren't the player character, they both have problems you need to solve, one of them seems kinda impossible and the other wants some special colored fish. You start helping one assuming it will eventually lead to you being able to help the other.

A game of half formed systems and places that creates a simultaneous sense of unknowable dread and a hazy yet familiar feeling of comfort. Like half-remembering a strange uneasy dream you had as an extremely young child. Probably a little odd as a comparison, but I'm reminded of the original Quake in it's atmosphere. A world of abandoned concepts, none of which are fully formed enough to feel like a dominantly voiced aesthetic, and instead form together to create a uniquely moody and muted sense of gloom and emptiness I don't think is achievable otherwise.

Also like the original Quake, this games strongest asset in that aesthetic is it's sound. The sound design in this game absolutely wrecks me, it ties together the whole of this world as something that once brimmed with life, as something worth holding dear, that was left lifeless and barren long long ago. It's the sound of a million save files for a dozens dozen 90s adventure and RPG games, all left untouched for years to come. Worlds left static and dead. You do platforming and collecting, but it feels like empty husks of worlds designed for these systems that no longer serve their intended purpose. You can fall off, but cannot die, you simply reappear where you started. The few systems at play here are so slow and archaic they don't really allow for their seemingly intended gamification of the world to ever amount to anything other than a hushed suggestion of a game that used to be, but no longer is.

As the game goes on you come to realize the only two inhabitants of this world represent equally opposing and incompatible perspectives on it's own existence. It came off to be a game about two different conceptualizations of hopelessness. One voices a want to find beauty, comfort, and familiar joys in a world long devoid of any such things. Content to float out into infinity as an empty husk so long as there are things to remind you of the way things once were, and taking solace that the world itself, despite being an empty facsimile of what it used to be, will always be familiar enough to be beautiful in it's own way. The other voices a more direct want, to cut hopelessness at the source, even if it costs everything. If there is nothing left for this world, letting it drift on sparsely alive for an eternity is a far crueler existence than letting it die with finality.

Despite being a game of emptiness, of half formed systems, a game of quiet dread, I grew a strange fondness and comfort existing in it. It convinces you this really was a world of beauty and meaning a long long time ago. But all that's left of it is a shell. Quietly drifting off into oblivion.

I only really started loving this game when I started listening to Ryoji Ikeda and speedy acid trance while playing it.

Deceptively repetitious, in that it gradually shifted from a game of endless grinding into something of a hypnotic trance state in the form of a game play loop. The effect of fully learning the initial flow of the game really lent to the unease I felt when in its late stages, it all of the sudden starts introducing new alien elements and stages and visuals. There is a striking effect to playing the same handful of stages over and over again thinking you've seen what the game has to offer, and then suddenly finding yourself in an entirely unfamiliar setting.

Considering that one biggest strengths of the first games was it's tightly controlled level flow, you would think that a game entirely about generative randomization would kinda ruin what made that game work as well as it did. But, despite individual levels having less impact, there is something to be said about the cumulative effect of being forced to improvise and adapt on a level to level basis. It becomes less about the specific design of the levels and more about the textural experience the game creates over time. You won't remember any specific encounter as you might in the first game, but it leaves an undeniable abstract impression in its flow.

The special abilities feel a little underwhelming at first, until you've collected so many of them that you've power creeped your way into absurdly effective and satisfying combinations (getting the shot flow + ricochet powerups at the same time really did a lot to make this part of the game click to a borderline obsessive degree for me). The final stinger the game pulls makes this system all the more impactful. Genuinely unforgettable ending.

MCD is an odd game in that it kinda ditches a lot of what made the first game work at all in favor of doing a completely new thing that somehow works even better. It's no longer a game about acting out memorable action movie set pieces as carefully paced logic puzzles, it's now taking the emotional impression of these set pieces and deconstructing them into a repeated mantra of cycling improvised-yet-familiar puzzle tasks. It's more interested in creating an abstract emotional impression than any of the tightly recognizable beats of the original. It keeps the incredibly simple baseline movement and weapon system unchanged, but creates complexity in unexpected ways with it's new systems. It took the skeleton of the original game, and instead of saying "what if we did this, but more and better?" it finds a distinct new expressionist space to explore.


why the fuck do I die instantly when I bodyswap with a spawning enemy though that shit is so stupid nothing makes me rage quit faster than when that happens like wtf

Fascinating that by giving the player complete control over the pacing of chaotic shoot-outs, it turns what is fully mechanically an action game into something closer to a tactical spatial puzzle (the minimalist DOS demake of the game you can play in MCD basically fully confirmed this intuition for me that Superhot was, and always had been, a logic puzzle game first and foremost).

Undeniably effective as both a mechanical skeleton and visual showcase of the distinct art style of these games. The more I played of these games the more I felt their strongest asset was their clinically striking red against pure white pallets and tendency towards framing unexpectedly striking images (both intentional and incidental through player interaction). However, despite it's obvious strengths its hard to feel like this is anything other than a skeleton for something potentially greater. For a game entirely about making decisions about how you move, this is a shockingly limiting movement system for a first person shooter. There's not even a crouch button. But a game like this is just, begging for like a slide move or a dive or something. There were numerous occasions where I found myself in situations of assured death that would have been easily avoided were my little man capable of ducking under a goddamn bullet.

I'd be curious as to why the game made the call to limit player movement in such a way. Not having a crouch button feels too specific to have been an oversight, and I can imagine there's a good faith reason to have done so. But as it stands, parts of the game just feel, stiff and overly simple. The limited movement does force the player to think more critically about how and where to move, yes, but it also severely reduces the ability for the player to reactively solve problems in an intuitive way.

Buuuuut, despite my frustrations with the games simplicity, it has an undeniable knack for pacing it's encounters. There's a feeling of air-tightness for the unique layout of each encounter. Despite the simplicity of it all, the game does a good job of making sure every encounter feels unique and intentional. Each level space uses it's environmental layout and enemy placement to a specific end, to intentionally create unique situations the player has to think carefully about. But this also makes it all the more frustrating that literally just as the game starts introducing more complex and interesting systems to build off of, it just ends. When all is said and done, I feel like I've played an extremely impressive demo for what should be a longer and more fleshed out game to better explore this concept.

Also the narrative stuff would be a lot more interesting if they just, dropped the silly meta-text stuff? You had a cooler story without that, stop trying so hard to be clever on purpose, this is a game that lives and dies by its atmosphere.

Still largely unmatched in terms of receptive feedback to player action. It's genuinely a novel sensation to play a game where I set out before hand to play in a specific way, and actually be accommodated accordingly for that play style, even among other Immersive Sims I've played thus far, none have really successfully integrated that level of freedom. I think this is largely due to the game prioritizing being a good RPG first and being an action game second.

Warren Spector's game design roots go back primarily to table top RPGs. He's said on multiple occasions his whole career has been him attempting to capture the feeling he had when playing Dungeons and Dragons for the first time in the 70s, and you can tell, especially on Deus Ex. There exists a specific relation between player, to DM, to systemic gameplay that is, as of now, still entirely unique to table top games. It is currently literally physically impossible to create this relationship in a video game directly, and any attempts at actually creating it are very much in their infancy, look at AI Dungeon for the most direct attempt, a great game/tool to use if you wanna have a laugh and partake in a dreamlike nonsense space, and completely useless if you want to play an actual coherent narrative gaming experience. That being said, people have been trying to approximate this relationship in video games for decades. You could argue that Immersive Sims, as a genre, are an attempt to synthesize the player freedom allotted by this kind of system, with the goal oriented mission based structure of action games. This is a game seeking to combine the role of DM and game system into one entity, and let you the player interface with it, and it feels so fucking good, I'm not sure literally anyone has done it better. The sensation of in real time working out how you want to go about solving problems, being forced to carefully consider your approach and being rewarded for that forethought, every combat encounter feeling like a puzzle where you need to consider the unique enemy placement, environmental shape, abilities and equipment on hand in order to solve, it's just such a good texture of interactivity. The game is balanced around making your character slow and bad at everything by default, until you put skill puts or use augmentations to become Not Terrible at those things, gradually. This makes even simple things, like shooting one enemy, into things you need to carefully consider and plan ahead at first, and put a lot of time and skill points into if you want to be able to do them effectively and more intuitively later on. This makes both the early game, where you need to be very careful and intentional about every move you make, and the late game, where you've built a character entirely unique to your play-style and can efficiently utilize your unique set of abilities, extremely interesting in distinctive ways. It makes progress and exploration much more rewarding than it would be otherwise, it makes solving problems that can't be solved by your specific skill-sets more challenging and interesting, while making problems that can all the more satisfying. It's a dynamic feedback loop of carefully crafted systems that are more effective the more you put time and thought into them.

It's hard to overstate how immaculately crafted this game is, even though its such an over discussed game already. But it's so easy to keep talking about I think cause Deus Ex is literally a different video game for everyone who plays it. Hell, it's gonna be a different video game every time You play it. It's a game that feels almost, collaborative with the player in its construction, in a way open-world or sandbox games are kinda incapable of being. So until I get to fulfill my newfound dream of playing a D&D campaign led by Warren Spector as DM, it is probably the best RPG ever made.

David Szymanski is clearly good at a lot of things, but I think his sharpest strength is his impeccable sense for pacing and timing (Iron Lung as a game is basically just a continuous raising of tension and dread for one perfectly timed payoff). Yes, the level design here is brilliant, it's dynamic and fluid while also being narratively rich and evocative. Yes, shooting is crunchy and satisfying, you're given a hefty arsenal and all the weapons feel good to fire (more of these neo-retro-shooters should have sniper rifles and swords, and this game is proof of such). But all of that is just the basis for the game to expertly thread it's building of tension and release. This careful attention to pacing is what I think really sets Dusk apart from other speedy retro shooters of it's kind. Where in a game like Quake, or Doom, or Dusk's New Blood sister game, Ultrakill, the player is made to feel ultra powerful and constantly in control, Dusk heavily leans into it's horror aspects to carefully switch between making the player feel completely helpless, and giving them the catharsis of the moments where they fell completely unstoppable and take out a whole room full of dudes. The parts of the game where you get to be the ultimate killing machine and rip and tear through hordes of assholes are made all the more meaningful by the parts where you're genuinely afraid of turning the next corner cause you can hear something crawling around in the dark, but can't see it yet. Dusk being genuinely scary at times makes it so much more intensely cathartic as an action experience. And it's the near flawless pacing that allows this to work so well.

In addition, the everything about the music and the visual presentation of the game serves to reinforce the rhythm of this pacing. The soundtrack dynamically shifting allows the big action parts to feel bigger and more intense, the way the game uses splashes of intense color to show the tone and environmental shifts is so well done, especially in later levels. Speaking of which, the last chapter of this game is just a successive series of some of the best FPS levels I've ever played? It's kinda fucked up how good they are. In general, levels where the game let's itself get more abstract and dreamlike are usually stunning highlights (Escher Labs and Homecoming are unforgettable for this reason). But broadly speaking, David's sense for striking visuals is almost equal in strength to his masterful weaving of pace and flow.

Of the many many many, many many many games Quake has been clear inspiration for over the years, this is one of the only ones I've seen that understands and successfully captures the expressive and tonal aspects of the game in addition to it's mechanical ones. It takes the singularly gloomy, often dread inducing visual and aesthetic language of the original Quake, and fleshes it out into something almost, vibrant. It creates the same synthesis of abstract expressionist early CG horror with razor sharp ultra fluid mechanics, and then shifts and adds worlds of color and the dynamic pacing to compliment it. Even among the current wave of 90s revival shooters made in this games wake, Dusk strikes me as very unique in what it achieves for this reason.

Also the boss fights are mostly bad. Except for Big John, I like Big John. He's funny.

First off, thank you to the options menu and the kind people who developed the 1.3 patch for making this game playable so that the AI were functional and also I didn't have to play with the inane save gems mechanic. Anyway.
Kinda the inverse of Quake. Where Quake is very stripped back and minimal and purely focused on making its mechanics feel razor sharp, Daikatana is a very slow burn game where there's a whole mess of systems that all have to slowly come together before the game really clicked for me. It does not help that the game opens with it's two worst levels, and then for some reason follows it up with it's 3 hardest levels. But once you've started leveling up your abilities, and once you've actually had your team mates cover you in a fight successfully a couple times (assuming u installed the 1.3 patch lol), and once you start to get a feel for the weird non-standard obscenely bloated arsenal, every now and then it all just comes together and you can see the genuinely great video game hidden behind all the broken half finished parts. The shooting here is not at all as fast nor as perfected as Quake, in fact fights are often held in awkwardly shaped cramped rooms. But weirdly enough that flavor of combat gradually grew on me as an acquired taste. A lot of fights in Daikatana force you to think critically about and utilize the restrictive environments. The best parts of the game are in the 2nd and 3rd episodes, where they experiment most with the time travel premise as a way to play into different styles and gameplay approaches in a genuinely really cool way. The dramatic shifts in tone as well as the complete overhaul of your arsenal every episode make me think that John Romero and co. wanted to make a game that felt like 4 whole different games with each episode, and for those first 3 episodes I think they genuinely succeeded. That being said, the forth episode is hard to describe as anything other than halfhearted, with most of the more unique designs of the earlier levels being absent, and it just feeling like one corridor with easy enemies after another. Another big problem is that most of the puzzles in the game are basically "figure out which indistinct object the level designer decided you can interact with/shoot to interact with this time", which were never fun to get stuck on. But like, despite All That, I still found myself having a pretty dang good time playing Daikatana, somehow? I don't know there's something about the odd shape of the gameplay loop formed by the RPG elements combined with the constant shift in tone and jagged level design that I found oddly difficult to pull away from. It's not gonna be one of my but favorite games anytime soon, but I mean, I guess he made me his bitch after all.