With Street Fighter VI on its way around the corner, if the corner wasn’t agonizingly miles away holy shit, I feel really compelled to talk about SFV for a bit. To an extent I’m doing it against some of my best interest because I don’t play a Lot of SFV, and I’ve only recently hit the degree of what I call “competency” in its style of play. I neither have hundreds of hours nor have I hit much of a decently high rank on the ladder, but I have had a lot of conversations with friends who have that amount of time and a great degree of background on dissecting fighting games that I can, cough, parrot some of their takes here. As well as just re-picking it up plenty of times myself to experience the progression of the game over time. So, enjoy my moderately knowledgeable rambling.

Want to speak past the initial release real quickly, as I don’t have much experience there, and it’s the most covered and trounced area of the game. It was trash, especially aesthetically with everything from banana hair to noodle hair and just a milquetoast palette to backgrounds and even music. When I did play though I didn’t think it was like, the worst, which isn’t really a shocking take but in general SFV’s fundies were pretty decent. It’s yet another spin on SF2 that at the start of the first season was much too linear, but it had a good amount of potential in terms of footsies being the play-to game that received a genuine focus without spending too much time in the lab.

From there recovery was very gradual, and while the experience was plagued with issues from input lag to its netcode to being way too offensive-based without a lot of options that wasn’t built around spectator hype, each season did have a generally positive attitude that things were getting better. The biggest shake-up in my experience would happen in 2020, when Ono would leave the management chair of the game and then months later, V-shift arrived. Along with it were massive changes to v-trigger, and then significant amounts of refinement. Up to its final patch it also received some of its most interesting character additions, with everywhere from Dan’s reverse beat to Luke’s faux-drive gauge v-trigger. Pretty much most pros, bar salty Urien players who lost their invuln reversal, were super positive about the end result. Besides being strikingly well balanced, SFV ended with a great amount of foosies options per character both offensively and defensively without much in terms of major pain points.

And they’re so right, the game is incredibly great now. So finally time to break down what SFV is, currently, at its core. Street Fighter V takes a very slow but concrete fighting style, with clear options to respond to your enemy’s control for space at any moment. It’s easy to pick up, with not a lot of obstacles (past early cheesing of frame data) to get in the zone, and then once you do everything is very unambiguous. This has the downside of nothing in SFV being particularly crazy or insane as an option, but it’s genuinely one of if not the best beginner’s fighting games to learn neutral, because everything focuses so strongly around it. It’s also no longer linear, and I’m going to take Ryu as an example. When vying for space, Ryu generally has a lot of options outside of his standard normals. Defensively, if an opponent closes in and I feel like I want to avoid being trapped in a blockstring I can v-reversal for a good chunk of v-meter, or I can call out a close normal by v-shifting for a strong punish or not acting out of that v-shift dodge and just resetting back to neutral. Offensively I can try to take the upper hand, provided I have the v-meter for it, by activating v-trigger and using say, denjin ryu’s option to blow up an enemy’s guard by playing baseball at mid-range to even full screen. Baseball being the best analog because it’s simply a matter of charging up my ball and playing mindgames with the opponent on whether I’m going to release it early to catch their jump and attempt to punish, or hold it all the way to blow up their guard and go for a powerful blow-up. Within normals though it’s still great walk-up/risky-jump-in/fireball neutral. This is ultimately where SFV shines, the immense versatility to the standard fighting game tug-of-war has genuine depth and power behind it that is insanely refined here.

The game currently still has its drawbacks here though. While balance is incredibly strong to where everyone is viable, very few options have the sort of crazy and interesting power you see in fighters like melty or 3s. In other words, the highs of SFV aren’t going to hit something that’s nearly as sick as third strike parrying a super or breaking your opponent through the abuse of melty nanaya stance. Pressure game is also incredibly linear, when you get in successfully SFV wants you to take rewards immediately for winning neutral, so your options on the enemy’s guard are literally just rock paper scissors. It’s sort of where the hype leaves, even if it’s still fun to call out an opponent’s throw with a reversal super. Also about when you get to the mid-game level you run across the big wall of magic numbers on pressure because there’s so little pushback, big frame-data plus/minus that you have to run to the lab on to understand every character. Know your +2, -2, -5, -7, and then you have characters like honda literally built around breaking your expectations on those numbers by making spacing traps that you can’t visually read from the get go. This is unfortunately and literally statistically abusive, figure out what you can do after blocking a special because you don’t know what its magic number is and you’ll have to learn it by heart. This wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t run counter to being a beginner-friendly game in the first place, so it’s very much an invisible wall you smack right into. Granted, SFV does have some of the best tutorial and mission mode stuff on offer with Under Night being the only thing I can think of that beats it. And also to give SFV more coping credit, the vast majority of optimal combos are actually within mission mode and they’re way easier combos than most fighters.

If you can get past that though, you have the currently ultimate end of defensive/footsie based neutral. A genuine bastion of that sort of SF2 idealized design that still gives you a great amount to play with outside of that focus. I might upload more thoughts once I climb high enough in the ladder, and there’s still a lot to delve into speculation wise in terms of… how involved Ono was and how that may have impacted things here (it is very increasingly clear that his batting average sucks and SFVI is likely going to be really great for his absence). But I just wanted to take some time to talk about how,,, SFV is pretty great honestly go play it with me :3

this was my first exposure to the W40K mythos, and my overarching impression based on what little i know is that it probably functions a bit better in RTS or tabletop form. that permeating sense of hostility and indifference afforded by all those mechanical abstractions as you make callous tactical and strategic decisions with the lives of your units, in theory, would go a long way in selling just how brutish and expendable life in this ultrafascist universe is.

having said that, there's merit in a straightlaced and threadbare third person shooter campaign in this world too, precisely because it instead operates on a starship troopers-esque wavelength. space marine isn't nearly as subversive or seductive as it could be - certainly failing to reach true verhoeven heights - but by so warmly embracing form (both that of the archetypal 7th gen corridor shooter and the 6th gen hack and slash power fantasy), and so doggedly committing to its faux-noble glorification of brotherhood, combat, and military service, space marine inadvertently slots itself a few notches above spec ops: the line with regards to relative intelligence. its simplistic suite of mechanics, familarized through genre convention and repetition, only underlines how effortless it is to embody the psychologically stunted role of the space marine, whose subservience to a 'greater' cause, emotionless affect, and death-drive fueled tenacity makes for a suitable one-man-army. the vistas you reach and the environments you inhabit all carry symbolic value, with architectural achievements (and their subsequent destruction/'defilement' post-invasion) frequently serving as justification for further escalation of bloodshed. each and every imperial guard is beyond awestruck by your mere presence, as if to further drive home the hopelessness of this conflict without intrepid intervenors such as yourself. it's a game constantly striving for a catharsis that never really comes.

naturally, divergences from scripture and codex are punished in the religious ultranationalist imperial cult W40K depicts, so it's only fitting that by the campaign's end tidus (and by association, the player) is castigated and incarcerated precisely for the 'valor' that singlehandedly thwarted the hostile takeover of an entire arms manufacturing planet. glory to the machine god, i guess.

I really really enjoy S3&K level design, it's incredibly good just in terms of level density and smart use of building up momentum and utilizing downtime. The 2D Sonic games really find their rhythm here, ironing out the issues like enemies within the pathway that you have to outright memorize to not take hits and making sure the downtime where you're not speeding through is effective.

The speedruns of the game elegantly show how strong the levels get, and the exploration element to find the chaos emeralds is pretty fun this time around too. The minigame to get it itself is still ok at best but at this point I've come to expect it. The bosses this time around are also pretty strong, and not much needs to be said on the game's excellent soundtrack.

It's great, everything from Mushroom Hill to IceCap to Sky Sanctuary is strong and consistent. Sure, you do have a couple stinker levels and the platforming in of itself doesn't get to anywhere where I'd call it amazing, but I definitely enjoyed my time through the whole thing.

Still thinking a lot about how much Black Mesa's Xen feels like a complete disgusting counter to everything it's supposed to represent. How it feels much more like a portfolio-driven set of levels in terms of design rather than anything cohesive. How, despite being on a completely alien majestic world, the way you actually interact with said world is obscenely familiar, trivial. You do the same sort of puzzles you did in stuff like Office Complex or earlier. Even in space, you cannot escape 30+ minutes of connect power cord, walk to area, shoot 2-3 enemies, connect power cord. Xen is not Alien. It isn't an apotheosis either. You are empowered to enact a simulacra of other games instead, like later half-life games with the elevator and chase sequence. I do not hold Xen in HL1 in the highest regard possible (nor do I for HL1 much in general anymore, honestly :/), but it was at its core a fervent 'betrayal' of the familiar. It's reviled for this decision but it is altogether fitting, how platforming is a disgusting poor feeling challenge because, well, this planet was not built for the likes of you. You're simply fighting through a world that was never expecting you to be here. But in Black Mesa it doesn't even bother to truly be dangerous. Granted, that's true of Black Mesa in general the more I mull over it. There's a lot to dissect on how Marines function both as an aesthetic issue and a mechanical one here vs all of the other HL's enemies. In a way, Black Mesa is a betrayal in of itself to me because it seeks not to conserve any spirit of what it's remaking as much as it pushes it through a meat grinder (albeit, with soft hands working the parts, I won't say crowbar's effort was exactly soulless) of HL2 and later design. And to that it breaks down most of those foundations until you have something almost unrecognizable for those who played HL1 and Opposing Force in terms of feel and play and understanding. The aesthetic, on a technical and story lens, is conserved to some degree, in grander majesty. But at what cost?

There once was a time, back in the early 2000’s, where first-person shooters were breaking ground and shaking the industry. Deus Ex, Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, Quake, and various other franchises were considered the “Golden Era” of FPS. The Chronicles of Riddick was one of my favorite movies growing up as a kid. Vin Diesel was a mysterious, sinister badass and the movie was oozing with character, atmosphere, and insane dieselpunk sci-fi goodness. When Butcher Bay was released I remember the movie including the Xbox demo from Blockbuster Video and I was so mad I didn’t have an Xbox or PC at the time.

Fast forward 14 years and I have finally experienced this masterpiece from two console generations ago. Riddick was a serious industry shaker at the time not only for its graphical fidelity, but for the rich atmosphere, mature content, and Vin-freakin’-Diesel. The story isn’t exactly fantastic, and it’s a short game, but the experience itself is pretty incredible and there’s no other game like it (except its sequel of course).

You play as John Riddick himself who is captured by bounty hunter Johns and taken to Butcher Bay maximum prison which is on another planet. Hoxxie, the prison warden, is the bad guy here along with creepy creatures and the guards themselves. I love the opening of this game as you are in the max-pop area and get to talk to other prisoners and complete side quests to earn currency for weapons and cigarette packs which unlock concept art. The atmosphere is amazing with dieselpunk structures, dirt, vomit, grime, and nastiness everywhere and the entire complex is dark, looming, claustrophobic, and morbid.

Don’t get too excited about hearing “side-quests” as the area is very small and it’s nothing more than talk to this guy to get that thing and bring it back to that guy so he will talk to you now to give you that thing to bring back to the last guy. There are only two areas where you can do this and it feels a bit off and forced and kind of unnecessary. There’s no character building and none of the prisoners are really fleshed out. I would rather have just walked around, talked to people, and moved on, it really just felt like extra game time tacked on, and not to mention that the quests are kind of tedious.

Once you move past the first area you go around sneaking up to guards, breaking necks, and getting into a lot of shootouts. For someone who likes the dark so much there is a lot of shooting sections and only a few sneaking areas, but those give way to problems as well. The AI can see you no matter how far away they are and it makes learning guard patrols and sneaking around successfully a pain. A lot of time I had to just shoot everyone or run away and come back. The last third of the game you don’t even get weapons and only a tranq gun that stuns guards with a slow reload animation, so this makes sneaking even more difficult.

The game is also ridiculously hard, I died more time than I can count and a lot of it was because of the clumsy shooting and fighting mechanics. Sure, they work and the three guns are cool and have personality, but they are so inaccurate that I had to unload a whole clip per enemy because the spread was so wide. Fighting also poses problems as you can’t really do combos and the AI’s punches are so random and doing parries is hit or miss. It all works and looks good, but it could have been cleaner and tighter.

The story isn’t really all that detailed, and Riddick’s character is barely talked about here. You learn where he gets his night vision and honestly, the whole story is really anticlimactic. There aren’t many cutscenes and I wanted more screen time with Riddick, Johns, and Hoxxie because their characters are great. Even Abbot, voiced by rapper Xzibit, is an awesome character and we stop seeing him about 1/4 through the game.

The game also looks great, and the lighting effects were unreal back in the day. I played the version on Assault on Dark Athena, so it was upgraded to that engine, but the original version needed a beefy PC and pushed the Xbox to its limits. The music kind of sucks and sounds really generic, but the sounds are awesome with fantastic voice acting and ambiance.

Overall, Escape from Butcher Bay is an FPS classic that everyone should play. The game is dark, crude, mature, and oozing with character, but it’s just sad we only get morsels for the story and on-screen time with some great characters.

The systems are fruitless, the construction is tainted, everyone will use these mechanics of 'justice' for their own ends because they have accepted that where one comes shadow they must also come with shadow. But that doesn't mean that light, that 'truth', doesn't exist. To avert your eyes and act like the pursuit of truth and justice is naive and nothing more, is cowardice. Cowardice at the enormity of the issue, the complexity, the sheer size of the web. We must strive "to keep going down the straight and narrow road."

The politics are all simplified, but I couldn't help but have it hit me within a current situation that has me viscerally frustrated both in my ability to speak and others' ability to speak. In the modern world the idea of acquittal is a self made one in that the players of power and in power will do everything to keep control of the exploits they've crafted to stamp on my rights, so even if one untouchable person was brought down, nothing would change. In a sense, Resolve, asks for some hope in the people to find their way. The comparison is trite if I try to make it any more tangible, it's simply a feeling I had while trying to keep my positivity afloat amongst the sludge of pain recently. I'm not even in a good enough emotional state to try to conclude the train of thought on what I should be doing, it's radicalizing and disgusting to continue to swallow. So really I don't know where I'm going with this to a very insecure extent. I guess what I'm trying to say is that at the least, GAA2 Resolve offers comfort in a belief that we'll get there together again. I doubt me saying that will offer any solace, and it's of no use to others to oversimplify this shit.

But like at some point you have to confront the message of the work, what the characters believe, if you want to talk about it right? "To fight those who dwell in the darkness requires at least some of us to occupy the darkness ourselves." is wrong, that's wrong. It doesn't feel good though. Like an hour and a half ago I watched an excruciatingly fucked up 3 minute video of some absolutely infuriating vein-popping preacher openly saying to kill queer people with the only response being applauding and agreement, and to my side my SO is watching a 5 minute news clip of senator's arguments juxtaposed with other real senators full audibly feigning to care about mental illness of a school shooter to then say trans is the problem. If I loaded up any additional social media right now it would be a hilarious juxtaposition to the game I just played because it would be complete doomscrolling. Because like, what else is there to do? they'll say.

I want Sholmes' ray of light. I want to believe.

the establishment fears when a normie instagram explore tab girl and a mentally ill fujo become stalwart allies. let's go ladies!

alright, time for an actual review, albeit low effort. you can't convince me this isn't actually a grasshopper manufacture title in disguise. its lurid and gaudy spin-off premise replete with masafumi takadas acidic electronica, occasionally psychedelic environments, and frequent parodic overtones share much in common with GHM's scuzzier, more mercenary body of work. these segments are incredibly unpolished, but not unenjoyable.

similarly, the half of the narrative that's komaru and the best character from the first game interacting with each other lands well-enough that i consider it better than anything in the first two games! though it's true i don't have any particular love or reverence for either of those, for reasons sharply articulated by my respected peer BlueTigerSide's work. your mileage in this regard is likely to vary.

unfortunately this half of the narrative intersects with the separate half that attempts to be an examination of child abuse, depictions of which range from 'aggressively mediocre and one-dimensional but bearable through gritted teeth' to 'abhorrent and irresponsible with not even a semblance of anchoring in a story as unserious and fickle as this'. this half is markedly worse than anything in the first two games. the sudden explication of abuse in kotokos chapter particularly is like having an anvil fall on you. not attempting to be reductive here with regards to menial discussions of responsible depiction but this is a case where the story actively cannot handle the sheer weight of its inclusion, and doesn't even try to (instead opting to continue undeterred with the usual generalized insincerity), which to me at least scans as repugnant and honestly vile. nothing more to say about this one really, i mean what they're posturing at here is more or less in-line with what the rest of the series is about but it just comes across as tasteless and i think the narrative spending the first two chapters being mostly breezy is the primary facilitator of this extreme whiplash. would have been fairly manageable to just change some things around and have something a bit more solid.

ABSURDLY nostalgic game for me. Defined my music taste when i was like 10, never managed to clear it on Expert and only skated by on Hard. Coming back to this and destroying it on Expert is as satisfying as it is vaguely introspective on how far I've grown/changed since then.

But omg it's still SO good, amazing setlist to hammer out the tunes of and just listen to. Everything about this aesthetic works, it's totally for rock nerds by rock nerds. I still got a smile on my face seeing their pictures in the credits. On a mechanical level it's greatly mapped too, minus a couple "holy shit really" because hammer-on chords were not a thing here. Or taps. But then again that additional difficulty is crucial for Through the Fire and Flames to make the entirety of my hands agony. I cleared it yes, but at what cost to my soul.

Additional quick notes:
-I like how the drummer still has the dumbest smile lmao it makes my day
-FCPREMIX is the best song ever
-The boss battles are WAY easier coming back to them. They should all follow lou and let the other side go first but even then you can game over lou in two power usages if you're good. This isn't really an issue, i just think it's sick how good i've gotten :3 it's a flex
-it's still a total shame to kid me and now that I can't play the versus songs solo without buying them as dlc (yeesh). I get that is what Clone Hero is for, but wow :/
-The developer videos are like the soul of the bungie vidocs but setting the amp volume to 11 energy. It's great.