BORN TO DUCT TAPE
WORLD IS A THIRD-RATE TALE
検出 Kill Em All 1986
I am intellectual rapist
410,757,864,530 DEAD WITCHES

i can't say i anticipated enjoying this as much as i do but sometimes my tastes skew far more plain than i posture them. DRG is really charming. in my eyes it's the first cooperative game since L4D2 to really match that game's quickfire energy with accessible yet layered strategizing; the four available classes are idiosyncratic to such an extent that you might feel naked in any given operation without even one of their toolkits. it smartly pairs lite-monster hunter mission variability & team synergization with 2010's procgen & terrain destructibility to create these delicious scenarios where blue-collar panic is the norm as you shuffle and squirm in pitch-black subterranean sprawl. it's you and your dwarven brothers against hordes of starship troopers bugs, a wealth of toxic environs, and really all manners of cave fauna...as well as plenty of other surprises (both the extent of enemy and mission variability were genuine delights to me). i have a fondness for these kinds of titles - one where environment is integral to engagement, not just as a means of circumnavigation but as something that can be excavated, twisted, molded, and manipulated to create opportunity. the missions where you have to construct labyrinthine pipelines (and then RAIL GRIND ON THEM) or clumsily build connections to power machinery throughout convoluted geometry that has been torn apart by explosive combat, awkward digs, or meteor intervention set my brain alight. no more words only rock and stone.

Back in my child days there were only four channels on cable TV that I cared about:

28 - Nickelodeon
46 - Animal Planet (RIP Steve Irwin)
50 - Cartoon Network
51- Comedy Central

....and of course, whatever channel WWE Raw or Smackdown was on.

Why is this relevant? Well for whatever reason Comedy Central, a station that I watched for South Park and overnight standup comedy was airing this. Remote controlled little gladiators fighting to the death. It was one of the first shows I remember trying to catch new episodes as they were airing, just like Dragon Ball Z or Powerpuff Girls. Unfortunately, a lot of the Comedy Central era Battlebots episodes are lost and not everything is on Youtube. Many clips are in terrible quality, like this one. There's a better one, but I refuse to link it. It's oddly endearing to see these ancient uploads still kicking to this day, I'm not sure what would happen if they got taken down aside from my heart breaking.

I caught a glimpse of the GBA game in of all things a scholastic book catalog, which sometimes had little sections for video games to buy from them. I'm assuming Battlebots was there because it encouraged an interest in engineering? Anywho, I kinda always wanted to play it due to the raw power of licensing.

I'm not sure if it's quite as bittersweet as the Rocko game on SNES, but the GBA game is unfortunately very repetitive and is basically a one-button isometric fighter. Twisted Metal if it were dumbed down to machine guns and ramming essentially, but even that feels insanely generous. It's hard to judge how I would've enjoyed this back then, but something tells me that I would've been like "Oh I'm playing as Ziggo!!!" and ignored the fact that it was a 4/10 game at best. I feel at that point I would've had a better head on my shoulders though, but it definitely wouldn't have done long-term damage like Spyro Orange could've done.

The most interesting/detestable thing about this and the sequel game though, is that I went to boot up Design & Destroy only to find out that it was the exact same game as Beyond the Battlebox! No, I did not accidentally grab a PAL game with a different subtitle. This is actually the apparent "sequel" to the first GBA game! Same exact menus, same exact roster of Battlebots, same arenas, etc. Just the thought of a kid asking for this for their birthday and finding out it was the same game makes me sick to my stomach. For shame on Majesco Entertainment or whoever was responsible! Wikipedia actually makes a suggestion that it was released to siphon sales off people thinking it was related to Robot Arena 2: Design & Destroy!

Despicable, fuck'em. Goddamn Cooking Mama people, glad they're dead. Thankfully, Battlebots itself ain't dead. Long live robot fighting!

Sorry for both nostalgia-posting and Chomp-posting, I'll be awaiting my tar and feathering later after my three hour Battlebots Youtube session.

what does it mean to "feel like Spider-Man"? after all, that's the refrain we heard time and time again upon the release of Spider-Man for the PS4, and it's the question that I couldn't get out of my head every time I thought about this game.

looking at the mechanics of the game doesn't really answer that question for me, mostly because a shocking amount of the experience of this game is simply lifted wholesale from the Batman Arkham games with precious little alteration. the combat, the surprisingly present stealth sections that involve isolating a group of enemies with a chronic neck injury that prevents them from looking even slightly Up, "detective" segments that entirely involve looking for a yellow line to follow, even an omnipresent voice in your ear feeding you constant info, it's all as it was all the way back in 2009's Arkham Asylum, mostly unaltered. indeed, these games themselves were lauded at the time for "making you feel like Batman" but not nearly to the same hyperbolic memetic extent as marvel's sony's kevin feige's ike perlmutter's spider-man does for the ultimate arachnid-boy. generally speaking I would not consider Spider-Man and Batman to be characters that share an enormous deal in common outside of the very basic concept of fighting criminals in an urban environment, and in many ways there is an argument to be made that spider-man is batman's antithesis. and yet, somehow, essentially the same mechanics that created an experience that made you Feel Like Batman has made a great many people Feel Like Spider-Man.

the one meaningful mechanic which differentiates this from Arkham (though, maybe not as much as it perhaps should given the zip-to-point mechanic is again lifted completely wholesale from Arkham City) is the web-swinging, and it's a useful point in elucidating what the mechanical experience of this game does. web-swinging in this game is pleasing, stunningly well-animated, highly responsive, and also completely effortless. it's a struggle to even call it a mechanic: it is almost completely on auto-pilot, with nothing more involved than successive presses of R2 seeing Miles swing, leap, run on walls, the navigational experience of Spider-Man swinging through a painfully detailed recreation of Manhattan reduced to a single button. much like Assassin's Creed's automated free-running that clearly inspired the rhythms of play here, web swinging in this game looks fantastic - especially on a twitter clip captured with the patented SonyTM PlayStationTM ShareTM ButtonTM - but mechanically vacuous to the point of non-existence.

comparisons to Spider-Man 2's (the 2004 game, not this, the second instalment of the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise, nor the upcoming Marvel's Spider-Man 2, the third game in the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise) much lauded web swinging are passé, I know, but indulge me for just a moment: web-swinging in that game was beloved because it was a system. It had depth, it had a skill ceiling, it had moves that were difficult to pull off and a learning curve that required familiarity with the mechanic. it was enough to make a game in and of itself, and indeed it largely did because the rest of Spider-Man 2 ranges from unremarkable to poor. i don't know if i would go as far to say that this system "made me feel like spider-man" but it was, at the very least, a systemisation of this aspect of the character in such a way that it made for a compelling gameplay experience.

spider-man PS4 has none of this. it's mechanics are intentionally stripped down to the point that essentially the entire game is about pressing buttons at the right time in response to on-screen stimuli, and I know all video games can be boiled down to that, but Marvel's Spider-Man comes pre-boiled: the illusion it creates is so wafer thin that even a minute of thought reveals the 4K smoke and mirrors for what they really are. contrary to the appeals to the fraught concept of immersion the phrase "makes you feel like spider-man" evokes, I've scarcely felt more painfully aware that I am a person sitting on a sofa, holding a controller, than when playing this. when your entire game is frictionless, there's nothing to hang onto, either.

there is one sense in which the gameplay experience of Marvel's Miles Morales succeeds in capturing the spirit of the character, and that's in how his new powers frequently dissolve tension in the gameplay, with his invisibility offering you a fast charging get-out-of-jail-free card if you mess up the stealth (if being the operative word here) and the way almost every fight will end with an overpowered Venom Blast.

indeed, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales often does feel like a Spider-Man comic, but rarely in ways I enjoy. After tremendous backlash from vocal fans at the time to "The Night Gwen Stacy Died" issue of Spider-Man, Stan Lee (who at this point was increasingly disconnected from the actual goings-on of the universe he helped create to the point that he only knew Gwen was dead when someone at a con asked if she would come back to life) decreed that Marvel Comics should avoid meaningful change, change that might alienate longtime fans or, more importantly, those who wished to turn marvel characters into lunchboxes and action figures and cartoons and movies, and instead only offer the illusion of change. while the obvious response to this is that Peter Parker could only be replaced by his clone, Ben Reily, for a short period of time before the gravity of the status quo would pull Peter Parker back into the starring role, it also had something of a side-effect, which is that as a universe where meaningful change is resisted and avoided, Marvel Comics as a whole has a reactionary and conservative worldview that gravitates towards it's baked-in assumptions and the presumed goodness of those assumptions.

in 2004's Civil War, Marvel Comics sided with the PATRIOT act. In 2008's Secret Invasion, Marvel Comics used evil religious extremist shapeshifting Skrulls who hide among us and could be friends, co-workers, countrymen plotting the destruction of earth as an analogy for islamic terrorism. In 2012's Avengers VS X-Men, five heroes empowered by a cosmic force change the world for the better, curing diseases, ending world hunger, only to have those changes be rejected as unnatural, and eventually are consumed by said cosmic power. In 2019's House of X/Powers of X, the X-Men founded a nationalistic ethnostate for mutants that is an explicit parallel for the apartheid state of Israel and sees this as a good thing.

Whatever form it may take, whatever illusions of change may, however briefly, be affected, Marvel Comics are bound to a reflection of our status quo that is essentially desirable, and a huge amount of Superhero comics are about reinforcing their own status quos as well as our own, with high-profile stories such as DC's Doomsday Clock ultimately being nothing more than desperate appeals to the supposed self-evident relevance and importance of the unchanging status of these characters. All of this does not even mention the aggressive copaganda of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, to the point where Captain Marvel was reproduced unaltered as propaganda for the US Air Force. Mainstream superheroes are always enforcers of the status quo, for good or for ill, but it's when the enforcement of that status quo comes up against depictions and discussions of the injustices of the real world that this becomes most uncomfortable.

There's a bit in this game, once you finish a side quest, where the camera pans up to a Black Lives Matter mural painted on the side of a building, and lingers there for just long enough to feel awkward. I don't object to the presence of this mural at all, but the direction decision here smacks as performative. It's not enough that the building is placed very prominently to ensure you can't miss it, but the game cranes itself to show you the image again, and the feeling of this can only really be described as the cinematography equivalent of "You know, I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could." It's desperate to demonstrate that it knows, it supports Black Lives Matter, but the functional reality of the rest of the game is aggressively at odds with what that movement is materially about.

I knew that the original 2018 Marvel's Spider-Man was in love with The Police but I can't describe how unprepared I still was for how aggressively conservative this game is. The story revolves around Miles Morales, while Peter Parker is on holiday to Generic Eastern Europeaistan, fighting against The Tinkerer and their evil plot to...destroy a product of an Evil Corporation that is giving people cancer. While at the eleventh hour they do contrive a reason why The Tinkerer's plan is #GoingTooFar, for most of the game there's actually no material reason for her to be in the wrong, and Miles Morales - and by extension, the game - is completely incapable of coming up with a single argument against her plan, simply resorting to "it's wrong! blowing things up is against the law!" or the classic "it's too risky! if even one person gets hurt that is too much!" said while Miles gives a Goon a severe concussion.

When I think of what Spider-Man means to me, what it is About, I think I'd describe it as the struggle to live up to an ideal of being our best selves, of always doing the right thing, in a world that makes that incredibly difficult to actually achieve, with our own personal failings and our endless conflicting responsibilities. In that sense, the Tinkerer, instrumentalized into meaningful action against an evil corporation by the death of a loved one, and struggling with how that affects her personal life and the relationships she has, is far more of a Spider-Man than Miles Morales in this game could ever be, given that his job is one of endless praise and assumed goodness facilitated by a hilarious uncritical depiction of the gig economy that sees the responsibility of Spider-Man morphed into a Deliveroo hustle grindset that always makes sure to respect Our Boys In Blue. How can something that loves the Police and hates direct action this much possibly claim to believe that Black Lives Matter?

In attempting to provide an "All-New, All-Different" up-to-date Spider-Man without making any effort to change the underlying assumptions it has about the world in which it lives, all this game does is expose how out of touch and outdated this whole concept is when the illusion of change fades away. Everything about this game is completely surface-level, all a well-presented illusion of Being Spider-Man that breaks the instant you think about it in any way, and you find yourself sitting your sofa, with your expensive toy for privileged people, pressing buttons to make the copaganda continue to play out in front of you.

I finished Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I had a perfectly ok time. I was rarely frustrated and occasionally found it charming and visually enthralling. I liked stuff with Miles' uncle. It also made me feel like everything about this style of game and this type of story had hit an evolutionary dead-end and had nowhere to go but running on the same treadmill, forever.

So, yes. It made me feel like Spider-ManTM.

There's a weird stigma around mobile games, or games designed for phones to begin with. I can't think of many games made for touchscreen smartphones that were ported over to modern consoles being received relatively well, actual quality be damned. Angry Birds did fine I guess, it was Angry Birds. Square Enix's miniature GO series seemed to adapt to button presses fairly well. The Nintendo Switch in particular has been the go-to for most of these ports since taking away the Joycons makes it a big fat iPad anyway.

Then came Easy Come Easy Golf, a Definitive Edition-styled migration of a mobile golf game with a bit of speculative history, one I am particularly intrigued with. The original game, Clap Hanz Golf, released in 2021 onto Apple Arcade, 2 days into the same month their developer's collaborators Japan Studio was dissolved and subsidized into other dev teams, followed not long after by the termination of all online services for their previous title, Everybody's Golf (which is also the twelfth game in their long-running series). I admittedly don't have much to say or speculate. The dissolution of Japan Studio amidst a half-decade silence in what seemed to be steady release flow of solid golf titles, only to be broken by a rapid announcement of subsidization, cancellation of online play crucial to their latest game's functionality, effectively killing it, and then this series leaving its home series of consoles for the first time in 20 years all seems to occur a bit too close together to not warrant the slightest bit of speculation. I also want to disclaim that Japan Studio did not fully develop Everybody's Golf 2017, nor did they have any previous involvement in series installments prior, but it seemed to me that the joint operation in Everybody's Golf 2017 seemed to be crucial to the series' remaining heartbeat.

But what about Everybody’s Golf’s real father, not their life support nurse? While Camelot Software were admittedly the original creators, developing the very first title in 1999 that would spawn the franchise, the cards fall onto Clap Hanz studio’s lap, who have been the sole developer of the Everybody’s Golf series from its second title all the way to 2017. Somehow they seemed to have made it out of the fire, or Apple’s graciously-timed development funds were there to save their skins, because Clap Hanz Golf released on Apple Arcade like a cool action movie guy walking away from an explosion. And I did not play it because I don’t have an iPhone.

What I DID play, though, was its Nintendo Switch port that came a year later, something I have been eyeballing hard from its announcement up to its release. This was to come after its initial year-long exclusivity run, with all the content and updates made in one package, mobile game progression systems removed and unlockables streamlined into a full experience.

Aside from its large finger-button UI that remains intact for optional touchscreen use, I think the casual uninformed golf gamer probably wouldn’t even assume this was made for phones. Content in ECEG unlocks naturally. You start with two 18-hole courses, split into four 9-hole cups. Play those, unlock a boss match. Win the boss match, unlock the character, unlock two more courses. Repeat ad-infinitum, with optional random events popping up day by day presenting opportunities to unlock alternate costumes for every character, some of which are actually kind of cool and had me willingly play through every one that popped up. I have no clue how many characters are unlockable and how many costumes are in the game; not much of the game is documented but considering that I have unlocked 10 characters still in the “Novice” category and plenty of costumes for each after 20 hours of play, I’m going to assume there’s a lot more. I wouldn’t call it grindy, either, as things unlock at a steady, incredibly constant pace. Customization in general is nowhere near the outfit piece selecting Everybody’s Golf has become synonymous with, but being a full version of a phone game with a year’s worth of consistent content updates truly, genuinely justifies the asking price. The initial feeling of missing true character customization is swept away by the sheer amount of character and costume options you’re given. It’s a good compromise.

But the golf! What about the golf? The actual golfing, the golf that you play and golf in Clap Hanz Golf? It’s very good. Your number of control options coming off of Everybody’s Golf is admittedly a downgrade, as your only options this time around are a 3-button press swing meter and a touch screen variant of the same thing, the latter I never bothered with. It’s as responsive as you’d expect, and I never had any problem with it. It’s functional, good ol’ golf.

The real flourish in Easy Come Easy Golf, however, is its presentation. Good God, what a fun game this is to look at. The most shocking thing about this game to me is how, even as a budget title, none of Everybody’s Golf’s synonymous style is compromised in the least. Multiple characters with designs and bios so varied and individualistic I can still remember their names and likes and dislikes from their character sheets off the top of my head, even after not having played in a few months. Not only are the characters themselves diverse and still easily recognizable, but they’re animated with such peerless finesse it puts other AAA golf (and otherwise) games to shame. Characters squatch and stretch with all unique, random exaggerated movements in reaction to pars, bogeys, eagles, hole-in-ones, and somehow there’s multiple animations for each. Particular character models are crafted with such detail that immerses themselves in the world, it’s simply astounding. It’s not just character hair that flows in the same direction and velocity with the wind, it’s the hoods on the back of their clothes, wads of cash stuffed inside expensive polo shirt pockets, and even the dangling charms on their phones in the back of their jean pockets. Other iconic imagery from Everybody’s Golf persists here as well, whether it’s the cutscenes of your caddy helping you line up shots, the spectators running away from incoming balls, or the rapid pitter-patter of your character scooting across the field at 20x speed to their next shot. I’m always a sucker for details and ECEG comes in spades, with all the animation and detail quality going far beyond what could be expected from a 20 dollar game. Nothing has been compromised from its predecessor’s addictive style.

The only real quirks that keep ECEG from freeing itself from the shackles of mobile game jank would be its optimization. Onfield is usually stable, and I’ve never noticed any performance drop in the middle of play. Running through the menus is a different story, as every option select is accompanied with a delay and a stutter, and rapidly flipping through selections and screens is out of the question. I’ve had one instance where it completely crashed to the Switch menu mid-game as I tried to brute force some gameplay settings too fast by button mashing. Thankfully progress is saved in between every hole, which is probably what the game is doing during its relentless cavalcade of loading screens sandwiched between every menu and hole transition. Double thankfully, none of them are that long and last more than 5-10 seconds. None of this ever detracts from the experience in my opinion, because I think it’s very obvious any Switch owner has put up with much worse, but I still felt to mention it because I assume mileage may vary.

Not even counting the additional modes I haven’t even touched like randomized holes and weather tournaments, local and online play, I played a lot of ECEG in such a short time because there was so much to enjoy at every waking moment. I’m not even halfway through unlocking everything and I feel like I’ve already experienced more than what other AAA sports games offer at this time. My praise for ECEG might partially have been due to my low expectations, because, well, this WAS a mobile game. I’m starting to feel as though I should rethink my outlook on mobile games and console ports of such, seeing as when done right, the results can be rewarding, and nothing about ECEG’s quality would ever come close to its final result if Clap Hanz hadn’t been so passionate about golf. Whether developing a fully-priced console entry or, now proven, even just a mobile spiritual successor of sorts, it’s clear that Clap Hanz’ love of the sport weathers through any conditions; rain, shine, windy, fair, rough, or bunker.

Also note: I get why there's two entries for this game because one is for mobile and one is for Switch, except both have "Nintendo Switch" as their platform and have the same title, despite the mobile game being named Clap Hanz Golf. And assuming this is the correct entry for the game, this one has the lamer box art. I don't know how IGDB works but someone plz fix

" What if I made a fantasy world where all fantasy races lived in peace "
Me: 🙂🙂🙂

" And then you had a comfy coffee shop with a diverse cast of costumers "
Me: 😄😄😄

" But the world was filled with prejudice and xenophobia "
Me: 😓😓😓

" And they used memes to describe structural racism "
Me: 😞😞😞

" And orcs are like... black people! "
Me: 😔😔😔

J. Jonah Jameson was right.

(Heavy spoilers follow)

What would be nothing more and nothing less than a derivative bare minimum ubigame is brought low by its gross mishandling of its story and many of its characters.

To begin with, this is a reality in which Peter Parker has been Spiderman for well over ten years (putting him around the 27 years of age mark) but somehow he still has the trappings of a teenager and his only enemies have been Kingpin, Shocker, Electro, Rhino, Scorpion, Lizard and Vulture. No Doc Ock (though he is introduced in this game), no Venom and, most egregiously, no Goblin: his defining nemesis, key in his formation as a superhero, and he's not in the story for a whole decade of spider business. Yes, this game does provide the soil for the green villain's genesis but it's simply absurd to not make him instrumental in Peter's growth.

No Goblin then, and no Gwen Stacy either, whose existence (and more importantly: her death) is conspicuously absent from the backstory, which begs the question of exactly what drama has Peter lived through to mold his character as a self-sacrificing hero. At least Uncle ben is still dead, though off-screen, long ago and never really explored or even mentioned beyond a few weightless musings here and there. The game reads like yet another origin story, but it premises itself as anything but, with lots and lots of baggage and history between characters already, resulting in a very jarring narration.

Aunt May's character has been nothing short of vandalized: she has now been rewritten as some kind of no-nonsense charity CEO, which sorely detracts from the kind, fragile motherly figure Peter feels responsible towards; this May doesn't need anyone's help, and this once again knocks items off Spiderman's superproblems list. Furthermore, not only does Peter almost never refer to her as "aunt", bafflingly preferring to call her "May" (which surely must have confused newcomers as to who exactly she is to him) but the fact the ending reveals that she was all along aware of the fact that Peter was Spiderman, and that she admired him for it, is simply absurd: the original Aunt May's distaste for his secret identity was an essential point in deepening Peter's cognitive dissonance regarding his double life, the removal of which damages his characters almost irreparably. There is no conflict in Peter's life, no hardship coming from his secret identity beyond maybe trying to reconcile with his ex girlfriend Mary Jane. There is some compelling drama with Doc Ock near the end of the game, but it doesn't account for the missing decade of, well... nothing.

Much like with Aunt May, the writers' fretful insecurity about not knowing what to do with the character of Mary Jane shines through, how they had no idea on how to present her as a pivotal, meaningful, emancipated character. Their solution was to rewrite her from a successul fashion model (which evidently just won't fly as a Disney age aspirational profession) into a crack investigative journalist always on the edge of a felony arrest ("Hey girls, fuck the rules, live dangerously!" -Walt Disney 2018). This of course wasn't enough to exorcise any possible spectre of controversy about female empowerment, so they have her directly partake in the violence, making her sneak around criminal lairs and high security compounds like Sam Fisher, silently zapping trained paramilitary commandos in the back with a taser gun in one of her many, many interludes serving to break up the monotony of Spiderman's gameplay. In short, they turned Mary jane into Lois Lane from the movie Man of Steel: she even looks exactly like a young Amy Adams, down to the vestiary and hairdo she wore in the film.

While web slinging around the city you will hear a number of broadcasts by J. Jonah Jameson (here a radio pundit) in which he comments on recent events and expresses his contempt for Spiderman. Whereas in any other piece of Spiderman fiction it always was impossible to relate to JJJ, patently wrong as he has always been written, blaming Spidey for things that were not his fault, here it's difficult to listen to his monologues (which the game lets you toggle off, assuming you'd find them irritating) and not find yourself nodding here and there when he points out the damage that Spiderman does to the city on a regular basis either via clumsiness or cavalier overconfidence.

The ludonarrative dissonance this commentary spotlights is pretty glaring: in one particular mission, Spiderman is trying to catch the leader of a terrorist cell as they rob one of Kingpin's weapon stashes inside of a Manhattan highrise. Once he is spotted, the baddies attempt to flee by helicopter, at which point Spiderman webs the chopper (in itself a dangerous action since there is a busy street underneath) and this quickly escalates to a rocket knocking down a giant construction crane, which demolishes several nearby buildings before being webbed into inertness. A piece of it gets stuck on the web attached to the helicopter, which causes a wrecking ball effect, causing further destruction (and likely victims) around the city. Result: more damage than 9/11, when sticking a spider tracker on the fuselage of the helicopter would have sufficed, but since the game needs an Uncharted-style set piece, here we are, and JJJ is proven correct, since this happens every other mission.

Thing is, such setpieces are necessary, since the core of the gameplay is as bland and monotonous as they come: no effort was made to come up with anything original to freshen up a formula that had been tired and overdone for a decade by the time of the game's release. Move around Manhattan in a manner lifted straight from 2009's Prototype (incidentally also set in Manhattan) repeating ad nauseam a loop of activating towers with a minigame pilfered from Batman Arkham City to reveal the map, running into crime incidents to resolve (a couple different types at most) and bagging a myriad of different collectables clearly marked on the map and none of which is any fun to get. Do they at least reward you with anything good? Not really. You use them to upgrade gear you don't really need and unlock suits that serve little purpose aside from sheer cosmetic appeal. A few sidequests appear here and there but they are hardly worth the time.

Particularly hilarious are the backpacks that Spiderman has apparently left around the city years before. Not only are these still stuck to the wall without the web having dissolved, but they contain mementos from Peter's private life, sometimes going as far as his ID card or student pass bearing his name and photo. Imagine being a construction worker refurbishing a rooftop and finding a backpack clearly belonging to Spiderman (the web, the web!) with his secret identity revealed by the items within. They couldn't come up with less nonsensical ideas for collectibles? Silly!

Story missions are the highlight of the package, with a genuinely good character arc for Doc Ock and a suitable amount of visual spectacle. However, it's hard to shake the feeling that the game sits there spinning its wheels for the better part of the first and second acts, wasting the player's time with pointless minigames (hey look, it's Pipemania again!) and tedious missions in between the decent ones. The rogue gallery of villains is uninteresting to say the least. Kingpin and Shocker show up for one boss fight each and are never seen again, and the aforementioned Rhino, Scorpion, Electro and Vulture are hardly the most compelling villains, as is Mr Negative, whose arc is passable, but not given any interesting conclusion before or after the credits roll. These Sinister Six are more like the Spiritless Six.

Combat is, once again, stolen straight out of the Arkham series. Now, I was never a fan of Batman's X,X,Y,X,X style of automatic combat, but at least there it was done properly. Here, trying to vault over or slide under one of the many enemies that are impervious from the front is a proper chore that will fail far too often for its own good. Encounters boil down to interminable waves of identical enemies to dispatch the same way, with easy and repetitive boss fights peppered throughout, all boiling down to the same soup of "dodge dodge until the boss gets tired, then press triangle and button mash. Rinse and repeat". the final encounter of the game has you sit through the exact same five second dodge, punch and slam loop for a good three minutes.

You will want to avoid the tedious combat as often as possible, which brings us to yet another thing lifted from (you guessed it) the Arkham franchise: the stealth. Spiderman can zip up to rafters and flagpoles and use them as perches to stealth takedown enemies the same way that Batman can, though in a much more simplified manner: there are no floor grates or vents and there is no crouching, so any ground level action is discouraged, only leaving perch takedowns and web tripmines (whatever they are). It's simplistic and doesn't even work properly: sometimes you will have an enemy right below you, having made sure nobody can see him being taken down, and the prompt to do so just will not appear, forcing you to move to another position hoping the game will like it more. Fiddly and frustrating.

Even the web slinging itself has problems. while it's generally fit for purpose in simulating Spiderman's trademark mobility, it sometimes just won't respond to commands. Whereas previous Spiderman games tended to fudge the web slinging by letting Spidey attach himself to things off screen that may or may not have been there, this game chooses to be a stickler for realism: if an object isn't there, you won't be able to hook on to it, meaning you will plummet face first to the ground. this is not a massive problem in practice, since there is no fall damage whatsoever, but when the game arbitrarily decides that the floor is lava (like in a particularly dreadful dream sequence) you will find yourself missing a swing and dying, ever so more noticeable when the absence of consequences is removed.

One last mention for the music: the composer sure was proud of the five notes of the main theme, as you hear them on a constant loop in one form or another the entire game. The worst offender is the traversal music that flares up whenever you are not with your feet planted firmly on the ground, which is 90% of the time. You will become nauseated by the constant repetition of the (awfully generic) jingle, which is paradoxically so forgettable that you will not manage to recall what it sounds like even after being drilled with it non-stop for 20 hours. Thankfully the third act of the game features a far more somber tone, including a much more lowkey score, meaning you will actually be able to hear yourself think for a change.

Marvel's Spiderman is a derivative, unimaginative affair, ridden with inconsistencies, a plot that makes no sense due to the careless changes made to established lore and gameplay that fails to impress in any way, having been done often and better before.

It’s important that you treat Pentiment with the same scrutiny and scepticism that you (hopefully) do with any other historical source. Most media, not just videogames, are, politely put, atrocious at dealing in good faith with the settings and themes that Pentiment tackles, to the point where it’s probably reasonable to call it one of the most authentic games ever made in this regard. The flip side of this is that it makes the things Pentiment gets wrong feel more conspicuous than they would be otherwise.

If that last part has your guard up, you can safely lower it, because Pentiment’s small handful of inaccuracies are pretty minor in that they don't affect the plot overmuch. I won’t say what they are specifically, because this is the type of game where any and all details ought to be discovered yourself, but among other things, they include at least two cultural events which are unambiguously Christian being misattributed to Alpine paganism of some description, as well as one figure who was (to my knowledge) neither pre-Christian nor worshipped as a goddess being described as a pre-Christian goddess.

There are a couple of reasons why these don’t overly strain Pentiment’s believability and for which it deserves to be given the benefit of the doubt. For starters, relative to the vast majority of media set during the early modern period and (in this case, just after the) Middle Ages, Pentiment’s immensely tactful to the point where I'm (almost but not quite) inclined to think these kinds of mistakes were intentionally included, on the part of its characters rather than its writers; that it avoids the common error of misattributing the origins of Christian saints to pagan figures further suggests this. More broadly, it’s unreasonable to expect anything to be perfect in terms of accuracy and – on exceedingly rare occasions, in exceptionally talented hands – inaccuracies can be advantageous. Excalibur’s a more visually distinctive and symbolic film for featuring armour which is about 1000 years too advanced for the 5th/6th century AD. Shadow of Rome’s a more memorable game for making you fight a ~15ft tall Germanic barbarian whose weapon of choice is a marble pillar. Likewise, in a meta sort of way, Pentiment’s central idea of historiographical truth being difficult to pinpoint is arguably strengthened by its own shortcomings in this respect. Ideally, this’ll encourage players to be more wary of any historically-themed media they engage with, including Pentiment itself.

Any such grievances are further obscured by the mostly impressive weight Pentiment lends to your decisions. I had the fortune of playing through Pentiment concurrently with my brother, and when we’d walk in on each other playing it, we’d do mutual double takes as one of us was in the middle of story events that the other didn’t even consider would be possible. Speech checks being affected by past dialogue choices encourages you to constantly, properly pay attention to and think about what you’re saying in a way I personally haven’t seen done since the isometric Fallouts or Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. Although its time limits (while appreciated) aren’t implemented as organically as Fallout 1’s, an advantage Pentiment has over even those titans is that it also autosaves after every single action you take, lending everything a degree of permanence that few other RPGs can offer. If you were feeling particularly cheeky, you could go as far as to say that Pentiment can be counted alongside the campaign of Black Ops 2 in the pantheon of games which actually are what everyone pretends New Vegas is.

I call it only mostly impressive because Pentiment’s key weakness is the linearity of its third and final act, which even if you’re being charitable can only really be called overbearing. Not to bang on the choices-don’t-matter drum too hard, because nobody can ever seem to agree what choices mattering in a game really looks like, but you’re much more likely to wish you were able to say or do something other than the options you’re given in the last act than in the preceding two. Potential twists and turns you might hope to direct this chapter’s plot towards are often snuffed out by blurted out variations of “actually, I was only pretending to want to do that” that you rarely have any control over. This isn’t to suggest that Pentiment ends on a sour note – the ending itself’s quite lovely – but from a decision making standpoint, the whole last stretch’s noticeably more limiting.

However close it comes, this is never enough to distract from Pentiment’s visual splendour. Jan van Eyck paintings and The Tragedy of Man are the only other media I can think of which incorporate so many different historical art styles into one cohesive package and so skilfully. Sebhat being drawn in the style of Ethiopian Coptic Orthodox art’s a particularly inspired touch, but in general it’s no wonder that the art director and animators are the first names to pop up on the opening credits, because it’s like a playable manuscript. Rarely do you come across a game where you can legitimately say that the visuals are a selling point in and of themselves.

There should be more games like Pentiment. It represents two things we need more of – big developers putting out more niche, experimental titles, and historical media which isn’t riddled with self-congratulatory 21st century arrogance that spits on the memory of everyone who happened to be born before an arbitrary point in time, in which characters actually believe what they say and aren’t one-dimensional caricatures of the past. Be thankful it exists, whatever its issues.

I think what generally strikes me first about Ruina, when reflecting, is scale and balance. Most of it comes from sheer awe, jumping from LobCorp this whole work has a stark amount of awareness of the ramifications of LobCorp, while also choosing to make an ambitious goal to balance so so so much more on top. And yet, the scales do not tip over, the further I mulled over and dived into things, the more everything seems awfully well set. Lot of flowery words to say that Project Moon has read a significant amount of literature between games and has an incredible amount more to say AND manages to integrate it perfectly, stretching my use of the word 'ludonarrative' to its absolute limit.

Ruina runs out the gate dismantling the 'hero' of the prior story, burning its idea of redemption into beautiful flame before trying to work beyond him. It keeps the hands of librarians that followed him, resolute in their ways, alongside villains seeking vengeance, joining together against the systems that have confined them, constructing a tower of babel built upon lives hoisted out of the city, justified in the name of 'fairness'. Watch along with them as the city moves in clockwork, these gears set by hypercapitalist systems that turn along people until they are crushed under the metal and spat out as ground together puppets. Reprieve only in the hopes of the little bits of light that people cling to to try to change, sometimes ending up with distorted selves trying desperately to conduct their own symphony, until all of us self realize, progressing beyond the means by which defines human, gender, creed into something more. Full Self-Actualization, Manifestation, capture your E.G.O. to build your future.

It's all explored in intense clashes! Use cards you pull from the light you take, then spread them out into tactics that run an intense ebb and flow on the battlefield. As you stack the shelves with every story you face and people you brutalize, the potential of your use of this knowledge flies sky-high, until you've made 'decks' that swallow the next set of fights with pinpoint precision. Even if you were a master deckbuilder you still have to adapt though. Solve the puzzle that matches each new patron's pscyhe, or be forced to retool from the pushed over house of cards. Every level jump in reputation brings in a whole area of complexity that gives you more immense freedom, with the caveat that the game pulls not a single punch for you to learn it. You'll be walled over and over until fundamentals are rock solid, pushed into an understanding of the ways of the city.

The leftover roots of the corporation that stand in ashes beneath the spine of the library throw you into even stronger, more complex puzzles, boss fights that adopt the abnormalities' story directly into turn by turn gameplay. Then reaching further, becoming thorough contextualization for the characters, then RE contextualizing across central theming. The Kabbalah's Sephirot and christian allegory returns with a much more complicated and personal base that transcends the story into touching on the baseline recognition of compassion and empathy, down to fighting anthromorphized struggles. Finish off by fighting demonic reflections of each lesson you've learned, until you're once again back at the base of the light, trying to look upon that all too familiar completely hopeless massive scope of depressing systems that oppress life, and going, This Can Change. Even those with the darkest masks over them can decide to break the cycle and seek to dismantle the machine. We can keep going while everything around us is 'distorted', and

Become Star of the City, Facing the Past, and Building the Future.

The journey's a long one but not one step is misplaced, not a moment wasted. You might have cause to grind to backfill your mistakes but the progression is always continuous. If you've got the head for it, you might even break it faster under your feet. The City is not without its weaknesses, after all!

But really, this is a rocketing experience, practically irreplaceable after much time to think over it. If you're not at least considering getting it what are you doing hereeee.

I almost died while playing this game because the cutscenes where so unbearably bad that I started picking my nose out of boredom and hit a nerve or a vein or something like that and blood started POURING out of my cavity. It got so bad I lost consciousness because I fucked it up really bad, and with already bad capilars inside my nose the blood flowed for like 4 hours. I filled a small bucket with both blood, tissue papers, tears and a tshirt I broke because I was like 15 and tought I could stop it with some cloth (was too scared to use a handkerchief).
Anyways after that I started seeing everything in a purple tint and hit my head on the floor. Woke up in the hospital with an IV and my pants peed. Ended up missing school which was cool I guess.
Now I get dizzy when I try to play it and my brain inmediatly represses the cutscenes and replaces them with scenes from Shrek forever after for some fucking reason but at least I don't have to experiment them again.
The upgrade system is fucking stupid.