In the 1983 film A Christmas Story, the main character's father receives a large package in the mail as a prize for solving crossword puzzles. The giant crate contains a lamp in the shape of a larger-than-life-size leg wearing a fishnet stocking. His wife hates it, eventually destroying it. He tries to put it back together. It might seem obvious but it's important to emphasize that while the film's narrator sees it as a primal signifier of sex, the father surely must know how tacky and shameful it is to display it in the window for all to see. He doesn't like it because it's good, he likes it because it's his, because he won it, because it's a symbol of his accomplishment. It's a matter of pride.

"It is the first American-produced visual novel"

For the first several years of my adulthood, I worked in a retail store. Christmas came and went, and every year we stocked a variety of holiday novelties and trinkets, including cheap reproductions of recognizable objects from a number of Christmas movies. Every year we got the leg lamp. We got it in different sizes. They sold, they sold out, and once it was sold out people would still come in asking if we had it.

"They sold this. To people. For money."

Plumbers Don't Wear Ties has no redeeming qualities. It isn't a good game, it isn't a good piece of software, it isn't a good video or PowerPoint presentation or whatever. James Rolfe could have told you that, and he did, and that's the only reason anyone knows what this is, and the people publishing the remaster know this. The original is a piece of shit from top to bottom, beginning to end, from concept to production to release, and it is a piece of shit in earnest. There is no reason to go back to it, it deserves no legacy.

Yet it's being re-released for purchase and play on modern systems, under the pretense of historical significance or preservation. It will be bought out of irony, to share in some arms-length observation, a gross curiosity. From tip to tail the cultural object that is Plumbers Don't Wear Ties has been transformed from something honestly and irredeemably bad, to a completely disingenuous empty spectacle.

I haven't played it. You haven't played it. Nobody should play it. Nobody can play it, because it isn't a game. It shouldn't be here, it shouldn't be on the Switch or the PlayStation or the Xbox, it shouldn't be in your library, it shouldn't be in your thoughts. Let it fade away.

Pros:
-Got misty-eyed revising Wii Rainbow Road again after maybe 13 or 14 years. I blinked at the last turn, on the last lap, and saw myself 11 years old again. I blinked again, and I was back to my normal, current self, obviously haven flown off the track and regaining speed to cross the finish line. I still finished 1st. My muscle memory, as honed as it was, yet tucked away in my memories, was still sharp as ever, but that brief moment of glimmering nostalgia - a bullet to the heart, lodging itself deep into a place long forgotten, was enough to stun me.

-At 96 tracks, Mario Kart 8 finally ends its run at a gargantuan, unbeatable size; it makes me wonder what could possibly become of the franchise's future. What started off as a title I was initially unimpressed with back in its Wii U days became a kart-racer I've since learned to love profusely, enough to have me bawling tears when the Booster Course Pass was announced two years ago.

-The celebratory lap is over, and Mario Kart's richest and most engaging title ends doubly as much. I've no doubt that we'll see another Mario Kart in the future, as the sprinkled-in original courses (which are all great) seem to peek into a Mario Kart yet to come, but the question begs.. Or rather, many questions beg. Many. With so much of the series' history represented here, the possibilities of what yields ahead seem infinite. I do hope to see the Booster Course Pass format persist in future installments; not just to add longevity, as I'm sure many people still have their course picks unfulfilled, but also as an immortalized testament and celebration of those memories, of which I and thousands, millions of others have.

Cons:
-Rosalina's Ice World

I see you whining about the Master Collection. "Oh, poo. Where's my 4K Snake Eater? Wah wah wah." The real intelligentsia among you have little interest in how modern technology can warp and twist games that were very intentionally built for specific, old hardware with all their limitations. No, we're in it for convenient access to the dregs of the series.

No man alive will ever bother their arse replaying VR Missions on a PS1. If anyone was going to, it would be me, and I very much fucking am fucking not going to do that, thank you very much. But as I played Splatoon 2's Octo Expansion, chased higher ranks in Resident Evil 4's Mercenaries mode and witnessed how much the console's pick-up-and-play nature benefitted my patience for twitchy eShop trash like REKT and Marble It Up, the game has remained in the back of my mind, and the bottom of my Switch port wishlist. Being able to pick up the console and put it to sleep whenever the mood suited me got me through some of the biggest pains in the arse that videogames could throw at me.

Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions, or Metal Gear Solid: Special Missions, or Metal Gear Solid: Integral - Disc 3 (it doesn't matter what you call it, as they're all present as separate, barely distinct ISOs in the Master Collection), is a very annoying game with little modern relevance. It was a little side-project put together in an alarmingly short amount of time by the software specialists at KCEJ, while the ideas guys were busy drawing up plans for MGS2. I've got a lot of respect for the no-name devs who put my favourite game together, and I'm empathetic to the notion that its mechanics could be explored in interesting ways outside the constraints of a story-based campaign. This game is my punishment for that trust.

Metal Gear Solid is mechanically rich. There's all sorts of unique weapons, items and enemy characteristics that don't get much play in a typical run through the campaign. When do you ever find a reason to plant a Claymore? Is that seriously your Vulcan Raven technique? It's often pretty fun to see these things explored with more direct intent. There's some interesting stuff with footstep noise, the cardboard box and infrared motion sensors. Interesting, but not often fun. The missions can often feel like internal tests, or technical showcases, not intended to be consumed by a paying audience. Some are so finicky, that you have to stop on exactly the right pixel before the intended solution plays out. Some require so much crawling that you start looking for tricks to complete the missions that the designers never intended. It doesn't help that so much of the 300 Missions list is padded out with both PRACTICE and TIME ATTACK variants of the same levels. The game is presenting you with horseshit, and having you obediently wade through it.

MGS1's controls and mechanics serve its main campaign well. Outside of that context, you really bump up against their quirks and restrictions. It's not a game that makes great use of analogue control, with movement restricted to eight directions, and no control over speed or momentum. It makes first-person weapons like the Stinger missile launcher and PSG-1 sniper rifle incredibly finicky to control. Shifting your aim is always at a pre-defined speed that you have little influence over, and chasing moving targets or attempting to pinpoint an angle can be infuriating. Again, it works well enough in the main campaign, where its utility is mainly limited to a couple of boss fights with complementary design. In big challenge arenas, with targets shifting behind cover in every direction, they're torture. Alzheimer's patients may want to use this game to help the public understand how debilitating it can be to live with their disease.

There is fun in VR Missions. Some of the more explosive weapons tests can feel quite gratifying after a series of fiddly stealth missions and physics challenges that require you to play them with robotic accuracy. I've perhaps focused on the frustration in the handful of surgically strict missions a little too much, here. The majority of missions are simple and underwhelming. Quite often, I'll finish a late-game level and think "Oh, was that it?" when I'm told I completed it in record time. It's kind of fun to see these tools get used more than the original game ever asked you to. C4 is particularly fun to play around with, strategically placing each explosive and detonating at the precise moment they're lined-up to do the most damage. Not something you'd allow yourself to do too often in MGS1, where alert phases and limited rations are more of a concern, but pocketed off to consequence-free missions, they're a fun tool. Western fans were relieved they wouldn't be asked to buy MGS1 again to experience this content, but I think they make most sense as a bonus disc in an expanded release of the original game. They're kind of a neat bonus for hardcore fans, but have extremely limited appeal outside of that audience. Like the soundtrack CDs or art books. It's merchandise. I'm siding with Substance's approach on this one.

If you make it all the way to 85% completion, you'll unlock the NINJA missions, allowing you to play as Gray Fox, with big jumps and twirling sword manoeuvres. Back in 1999, this was the shit, and understandably a big feature the game advertised prominently, but I don't know if it retains much of its original thrill in a post-Metal Gear Rising world. I think his animations and poses are still really cool, running down corridors brandishing his HF Blade out the bottom of his fist like a killer's dagger, and it's definitely the part of the package I was most nostalgic for, but it's clear the MGS1 engine is buckling under the pressure of trying to present fluid gameplay. I love games with restrictive, predictable movement, but it's best suited for situations where you can get a good view of your environment and make plans before attempting them. With something faster and more fluid, you're constantly running into enemies, missing shots and overshooting jumps. As much as I advocate for a more consistent approach to controls, I think it's clear why Mario 64's style had more influence in fast-paced action games than Tomb Raider did. The final of the 3 NINJA missions is an assassination mission, with you avoiding detection as you seek your target. It's my favourite of the bunch, as you take the time to scout your target and dodge patrolling guards, but it's set in the same room as the other two, and it's twenty seconds long. I'd have loved to have seen more of that kind of thing, but I imagine KCEJ exploded a few PS1 devkits attempting it.

Past that, the final rewards in the game mainly concern the PHOTOGRAPHING mode, where high-poly models of Dr Naomi Hunter and (after a bit of effort on the Sneaking Mode times) Mei Ling, sit in the middle of a VR arena, slowly playing out subtle, bored animations, and you're given the opportunity to dedicate two memory card slots to a highly-compressed photo of whatever you manage to capture within the time limit. This was always weird, and I feel like I'm exorcising long-held trauma by explicitly addressing it. The camera in MGS1 was a bit of a technical achievement, but they didn't give it a real purpose within the campaign, so it became something of an easter egg for those willing to go all the way back to the B-2 armoury after they acquired a LEVEL 6 PAN card. The devs who worked on it likely wanted to give it more of a showcase, which lead to capturing illicit details of Metal Gear RAY in MGS2, but their first answer was to take pictures of a lady, as objectifyingly as possible. They're not posing like supermodels, invested in their own image and making decisions on how to come across well in picture. They act unaware of your presence, and it feels really uncomfortable. There's no purpose to this mode. It exists outside of the main set of missions, and there's no reward for playing them. It's not even titillating, with Naomi and Mei Ling dressed in their office uniforms, just kind of standing there. Their models are fairly impressive for the PS1 though, and you can see the direct lineage from them to the characters in MGS2. Maybe the tech demo angle is the best justification for its inclusion. Maybe some folk really get off on this kind of thing, and it's good they can restrict their activities to a stupid PS1 game. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather play with the Demo One T-Rex.

Mind you, this is the impertinent scrutiny of a 2023 videogame player. Someone who could just as easily access the wizz pop bang thrills of a Grand Theft Auto V or broadband internet we can browse on our telephones. We didn't even have DVD collections to turn to when this came out. We were just sitting in our bedrooms with the promise of a PlayStation 2 future, and a hypothetical continuation of the Metal Gear story. Gnawing away at this diverting chewtoy made sense to devoted MGS fans in 1999. Would I recommend anyone try to get through it today? God no. You've probably got some new emails to read or something. This game was made for people whose wildest dream was 24 hour access to bored.com

If you're a Time Crisis fan, you've likely been curious about this strange 2001 PS1 "sequel". Arriving a mere six months before Time Crisis 2's PS2 conversion, it's one of the most baffling games I've encountered.

Project Titan comes to us from Flying Tiger Entertainment, who are mainly a porting house. The only other original titles I can source to them appear to be No Rules: Get Phat for the GBA and the PC King of the Hill CD-ROM "game". After over a decade occupied solely with mobile games, they have recently been tasked with porting Data East arcade games to the Switch eShop, where they're stretched to widescreen and presented with mandatory pixel smoothing. Look, I know the games industry is a harsh and often unfulfilling place, and anyone who decides to make games for us to enjoy ought to have our encouragement, but I'm just trying to present an accurate picture of who these people are, and why it's so bizarre that Namco would offer them the rights to one of their headline franchises at its peak. This is like if they gave Tekken 3 to Titus Interactive.

Rest assured, Project Titan is far and away the best thing Flying Tiger have ever made. Yes, reader, this is weak praise.

I really don't know how or why this game happened. My best guess is that Namco had produced too many G-Con 45s, and weren't confident that they could rely on Rescue Shot and Ghoul Panic to shift units. Project Titan does try to disguise itself as a proper Time Crisis game. We're still playing as Richard Miller, and both Wild Dog and the console-only villain, Kantaris, both return to antagonise us. Character models appear to be higher poly than TC1, with more detailed textures, but still end up looking a little cruder, lacking the original artists' skill and insight. They're post-2000 American PS1 characters cosplaying as classic Namco characters. The game's tone attempts something goofier than the more earnest original, but lacks the charm to make it palatable. The first mid-level sub-boss is an outrageous French chef who throws butcher knives at you. Standard enemies now appear in Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts. The original game's brilliant sunset framing device is gone, and the pressing nature of this "time crisis" takes a backseat as Richard indulges in international flights and hails a taxi. You don't even get a shoot-out in the taxi either, as this team clearly isn't up to the task of presenting a 3D highway chase.

The actual Time Crisising is mostly fair. The original game's design is replicated quite faithfully, with colour coded enemies, moving obstacles and elaborate action on each new potshot position. The game does tend to hang in one spot a little too long, with some mandatory enemies appearing a little too distant. The environments lack the Castle of Cagliostro romanticism of the original, taking place in relatively dour locations like a cruise liner and an airport. The fact that this is so heavily inspired by the original Time Crisis prevents it from doing some of the things I dislike about the sequels, like using bulletsponge enemies and wacky, kinetic chase sequences. There's also an on-screen combo indicator, tracking each time you successfully fired at an enemy without wasting a bullet, and rewarding you with health if you manage an unbroken chain of 30 hits, but that just plainly isn't going to happen without fully memorising this fairly middling game.

The biggest mark against the game is when it tries to be clever. It introduces an original mechanic. Please do not do this, Flying Tiger Entertainment. Data East are waiting for you to make a terrible eShop port of Atomic Runner Chelnov. Go talk to them.

There's a few bosses where Flying Tiger plays their ace card. You have to shift your cover position by shooting a big on-screen arrow while ducking. They'll appear just out of frame, and Richard will need to run through the hail of gunfire to position himself behind a barrier, two feet to the right. It's crap, disjointed, and introduces a bunch of enemies to fire at whatever's in front of them, with little regard over whether there's a target there or not. There's a big tank boss thing, and you have to shoot canisters on either side of it and one on its back. It'll shift depending on which of the five positions you're sitting behind. You have to fake it out by quickly shifting from the rightmost position to the leftmost to reveal its weakpoints. The armour piercing bullets and anti-aircraft cannon doing nothing to Richard as he runs from pillar to pillar. The tank's design is pretty bad, too, and I had to look up a Let's Play to discover it had a weakpoint on its back.

Project Titan isn't terrible, but it isn't Time Crisis either. The game feels thoroughly inauthentic. It's a fangame, stripping voice clips and sound effects from the original, and slotting them within a campaign that doesn't match its tone. You also have to play the whole thing again on Normal Mode if you want to get the last level, and that kind of thing can fuck right off. There's no good reason to play this over Time Crisis 1, 2 or 3 (though you can rightfully call it a day before dipping into 4 or Crisis Zone). I make no apologies for my veneration of Time Crisis 1, but I've attempted to put that to the side as I've presented this game to you as objectively as I can. Privately, I've been calling it Project Shitean.

Far and away the most egregiously misguided attempt at myth-making in games history. This isn't the worst game ever. It's not the weirdest game ever. It is not the 'first American produced visual novel.' Limited Run Games seems content to simply upend truth and provenance to push a valueless narrative. The 'so bad it's good' shtick serves only to lessen the importance of early multimedia CD-ROM software, and drenching it in WordArt and clip art imparts the notion that this digital heritage was low class, low brow, low effort, and altogether primitive.

This repackaging of an overlong workplace sexual harassment/rape joke is altogether uncomfortable at best. Further problematising this, accompanying merch is resplendent with Edward J. Fasulo's bare chest despite him seemingly wanting nothing to do with the project. We've got industry veterans and games historians talking up the importance of digital detritus alongside YouTubers and LRG employees, the latter making the former less credible. We've got a novelisation by Twitter 'comedian' Mike Drucker. We've got skate decks and body pillows and more heaps of plastic garbage for video game 'collectors' to shove on a dusty shelf next to their four colour variants of Jay and Silent Bob Mall Brawl on NES, cum-encrusted Shantae statue, and countless other bits of mass-produced waste that belongs in a landfill. Utterly shameful how we engage with the past.

The '99' games walk a tightrope between being light and breezy and so low stakes that when you fail you just jump into another game within seconds and being the most intense, important and high stakes thing ever when you're in the business end of a match.

With the SNES F-Zero still feeling great to play, this drops in a load of strategy and a load of random chaos, both opposing elements blending in with the '99' formula. Yes, you can sit back in the pack, lead from the front, grab more super boost power if you are running behind and have a clear run if you decide to take first place and push for victory, with every boost you make being real risk/reward but also, your run can be ended quickly if you get bumped into the wall by some random player. Oh well! Just move onto the next one.

The Grand Prix races require tokens to enter, which you get from playing one off 99 races, so you're slowly learning your strats and figuring out what the best approach is while you earn the right to try a run at a Grand Prix. In these, you have to consider whether it is best to risk it all for a higher position or simply qualify and move onto the next race.

It might not be F-Zero X2 or anything like that but it is undeniably fun and it is going to be a real shame when Nintendo inevitably shutter it in a year's time.

I never spent much time playing boomer shooters prior to 2022, but I think you could say I'm pretty well initiated by now. Playing Duke Nukem 3D and PowerSlave nearly back-to-back will do that to you, though Doom - a game I played for the first time last December - has unsurprisingly become the criterion against which I judge other games in the genre. If you asked me a few months ago whether it would be possible for any other boomer shooter to top it, I would've said it was possible but very difficult. Even Doom II, while great, didn't manage to connect with me in the same way as the original, partly due to the uneven nature of its maps, which at times were too labyrinthine and confounding. Sometimes I see Sandy Petersen in my dreams, laughing at me, mocking me.

"Design better levels!" I shout.

"No," he cackles as I dissolve into thousands of cockroaches. I wake up drenched in sweat and tears.

Needless to say, I was not expecting my benchmark to change less than a year after playing Doom, but Doom 64 is good. It's really good.

The switch to fully-3D environments adds so much to the Doom formula. Maps have a greater sense of physicality and scale, and progression feels more complex without ever becoming so obtuse as to require a guide. The puzzle-centric approach of some of Doom II's levels is made more coherent in here, and the ways in which the structure of your surroundings change - whether by pistons beating the ground to open a new path, darts flinging from walls to keep you moving, or the ground dropping out to confine you to a tighter space during a combat encounter - results in levels that are more actively hostile, but never in a way that slaps of being clumsy or mean-spirited.

The rendered nature of these levels also allows for some interesting lighting choices. The desolate UAC facilities that open the game and even Hell itself is characterized by sickly fluorescents and gaudy bright neons, and while Doom 64's lighting effects are of course very rudimentary, it is such a look. The lack of a proper hard rock Doom-ass Doom soundtrack in favor of more ambient music, wails, and demonic groans is another strong choice that helps give Doom 64 a more unique identity. Flipping switches and picking up keys introduces new waves of demons to rooms you and your super shotgun previously made safe just like in the last two games, but the constant growl of demons just beyond your surroundings produces an atmosphere where you know there's always something else out there waiting to throw a fireball at your face.

This version also contains The Lost Levels, which thankfully does not involve replaying the same tight platforming sequences over and over until I scream and get Mad For Real on a voice call. Rather, it's a small set of additional maps that bridges the narrative gap between Doom 64 and 2016's DOOM. If you didn't tell me that and just tacked them onto the end of Doom 64, I probably wouldn't know any better. Their design is so authentic to that of the game they're built off of that it just feels seamless. Romero's bonus episode for the original Doom, Sigil, showed that he clearly still had "the touch" for designing maps, and the same is true of the team that worked on The Lost Levels.

I don't really have anything negative to say about Doom 64. The shotguns could maybe do with like, three or four extra frames of animation, I guess. That's it! This is such an easy 5/5, but at the same time I feel pretty strongly about liking this more than the original Doom, and that's also a 5/5. One way of looking at this is that Id put out some truly impressive games in the 90s. Another is that my entire rating system is fucked and must be thrown out and now I need to relog every single game I have ever played.

I considered strongly putting together a long-form critique of this game, but the most damning statement I could possibly make about Final Fantasy XVI is that I truly don't think it's worth it. The ways in which I think this game is bad are not unique or interesting: it is bad in the same way the vast majority of these prestige Sony single-player exclusives are. Its failures are common, predictable, and depressingly endemic. It is bad because it hates women, it is bad because it treats it's subject matter with an aggressive lack of care or interest, it is bad because it's imagination is as narrow and constrained as it's level design. But more than anything else, it is bad because it only wants to be Good.

Oxymoronic a statement as it might appear, this is core to the game's failings to me. People who make games generally want to make good games, of course, but paired with that there is an intent, an interest, an idea that seeks to be communicated, that the eloquence with which it professes its aesthetic, thematic, or mechanical goals will produce the quality it seeks. Final Fantasy XVI may have such goals, but they are supplicant to its desire to be liked, and so, rather than plant a flag of its own, it stitches together one from fabric pillaged from the most immediate eikons of popularity and quality - A Song of Ice and Fire, God of War, Demon Slayer, Devil May Cry - desperately begging to be liked by cloaking itself in what many people already do, needing to be loved in the way those things are, without any of the work or vision of its influences, and without any charisma of its own. Much like the patch and DLC content for Final Fantasy XV, it's a reactionary and cloying work that contorts itself into a shape it thinks people will love, rather than finding a unique self to be.

From the aggressively self-serious tone that embraces wholeheartedly the aesthetics of Prestige Fantasy Television with all its fucks and shits and incest and Grim Darkness to let you know that This Isn't Your Daddy's Final Fantasy, without actually being anywhere near as genuinely Dark, sad, or depressing as something like XV, from combat that borrows the surface-level signifiers of Devil May Cry combat - stingers, devil bringers, enemy step - but without any actual opposition or reaction of that series' diverse and reactive enemy set and thoughtful level design, or the way there's a episode of television-worth of lectures from a character explaining troop movements and map markers that genuinely do not matter in any way in order to make you feel like you're experiencing a well thought-out and materially concerned political Serious Fantasy, Final Fantasy XVI is pure wafer-thin illusion; all the surface from it's myriad influences but none of the depth or nuance, a greatest hits album from a band with no voice to call their own, an algorithmically generated playlist of hits that tunelessly resound with nothing. It looks like Devil May Cry, but it isn't - Devil May Cry would ask more of you than dodging one attack at a time while you perform a particularly flashy MMO rotation. It looks like A Song of Ice and Fire, but it isn't - without Martin's careful historical eye and materialist concerns, the illusion that this comes even within striking distance of that flawed work shatters when you think about the setting for more than a moment.

In fairness, Final Fantasy XVI does bring more than just the surface level into its world: it also brings with it the nastiest and ugliest parts of those works into this one, replicated wholeheartedly as Aesthetic, bereft of whatever semblance of texture and critique may have once been there. Benedikta Harman might be the most disgustingly treated woman in a recent work of fiction, the seemingly uniform AAA Game misogyny of evil mothers and heroic, redeemable fathers is alive and well, 16's version of this now agonizingly tired cliche going farther even than games I've railed against for it in the past, which all culminates in a moment where three men tell the female lead to stay home while they go and fight (despite one of those men being a proven liability to himself and others when doing the same thing he is about to go and do again, while she is not), she immediately acquiesces, and dutifully remains in the proverbial kitchen. Something that thinks so little of women is self-evidently incapable of meaningfully tackling any real-world issue, something Final Fantasy XVI goes on to decisively prove, with its story of systemic evils defeated not with systemic criticism, but with Great, Powerful Men, a particularly tiresome kind of rugged bootstrap individualism that seeks to reduce real-world evils to shonen enemies for the Special Man with Special Powers to defeat on his lonesome. It's an attempt to discuss oppression and racism that would embarrass even the other shonen media it is clearly closer in spirit to than the dark fantasy political epic it wears the skin of. In a world where the power fantasy of the shonen superhero is sacrosanct over all other concerns, it leads to a conclusion as absurd and fundamentally unimaginative as shonen jump's weakest scripts: the only thing that can stop a Bad Guy with an Eikon is a Good Guy with an Eikon.

In borrowing the aesthetics of the dark fantasy - and Matsuno games - it seeks to emulate, but without the nuance, FF16 becomes a game where the perspective of the enslaved is almost completely absent (Clive's period as a slave might as well not have occurred for all it impacts his character), and the power of nobility is Good when it is wielded by Good Hands like Lord Rosfield, a slave owner who, despite owning the clearly abused character who serves as our introduction to the bearers, is eulogized completely uncritically by the script, until a final side quest has a character claim that he was planning to free the slaves all along...alongside a letter where Lord Rosfield discusses his desire to "put down the savages". I've never seen attempted slave owner apologia that didn't reveal its virulent underlying racism, and this is no exception. In fact, any time the game attempts to put on a facade of being about something other than The Shonen Hero battling other Kamen Riders for dominance, it crumbles nigh-immediately; when Final Fantasy 16 makes its overtures towards the Power of Friendship, it rings utterly false and hollow: Clive's friends are not his power. His power is his power.

The only part of the game that truly spoke to me was the widely-derided side-quests, which offer a peek into a more compelling story: the story of a man doing the work to build and maintain a community, contributing to both the material and emotional needs of a commune that attempts to exist outside the violence of society. As tedious as these sidequests are - and as agonizing as their pacing so often is - it's the only part of this game where it felt like I was engaging with an idea. But ultimately, even this is annihilated by the game's bootstrap nonsense - that being that the hideaway is funded and maintained by the wealthy and influential across the world, the direct beneficiaries and embodiments of the status quo funding what their involvement reveals to be an utterly illusionary attempt to escape it, rendering what could be an effective exploration of what building a new idea of a community practically looks like into something that could be good neighbors with Galt's Gulch.

In a series that is routinely deeply rewarding for me to consider, FF16 stands as perhaps its most shallow, underwritten, and vacuous entry in decades. All games are ultimately illusions, of course: we're all just moving data around spreadsheets, at the end of the day. But - as is the modern AAA mode de jour - 16 is the result of the careful subtraction of texture from the experience of a game, the removal of any potential frictions and frustrations, but further even than that, it is the removal of personality, of difference, it is the attempt to make make the smoothest, most likable affect possible to the widest number of people possible. And, just like with its AAA brethren, it has almost nothing to offer me. It is the affect of Devil May Cry without its texture, the affect of Game of Thrones without even its nuance, and the affect of Final Fantasy without its soul.

Final Fantasy XVI is ultimately a success. It sought out to be Good, in the way a PS5 game like this is Good, and succeeded. And in so doing, it closed off any possibility that it would ever reach me.

It doesn’t really surprise me that each positive sentiment I have seen on Final Fantasy XVI is followed by an exclamation of derision over the series’ recent past. Whether the point of betrayal and failure was in XV, or with XIII, or even as far back as VIII, the rhetorical move is well and truly that Final Fantasy has been Bad, and with XVI, it is good again. Unfortunately, as someone who thought Final Fantasy has Been Good, consistently, throughout essentially the entire span of it's existence, I find myself on the other side of this one.

Final Fantasy XV convinced me that I could still love video games when I thought, for a moment, that I might not. That it was still possible to make games on this scale that were idiosyncratic, personal, and deeply human, even in the awful place the video game industry is in.

Final Fantasy XVI convinced me that it isn't.

Had a really good time, but honestly felt like I was missing something, waiting for a set piece or a cutscene or whatever to knock me sideways. There's some mad stuff for sure, and the post-game had me momentarily stunned, but overall I'm not in love with it. Maybe it's just been hyped up too much.

There's an unfinished vibe permeating the world; quest lines that wither to nothing, tripwires in the wild that don't seem to belong to anybody, what are those big empty cages for, a vague lost-in-translation plot, etc. A climactic moment referred to my "beloved" and I was like...her? Honestly feel like I accidently skipped some important stuff, or it didn't trigger, or something. Or again maybe I was just expecting too much.

It's a testament to how fun (and funny) it is that I simply ignored stuff that I've properly grumbled about in other games, like the generic fantasy aesthetic and the excessive amount of materials for crafting (which I managed to almost completely ignore by just having magic pawns cover all the healing and buff/debuff business). Combat is a hoot, and the party system makes for a grand adventure. Even when I'm not sure what I'm doing next (which is often), I'm happy to just pick a random quest from my list and head out with my scantily-clad entourage. Plus the Bitterblack Isle stuff is some good solid dungeoneering.

It's good! I'm not sure it's great. Though there were definitely times when I muttered quietly to myself "this is better than Elden Ring".

I mentioned this in my review of Powerslave (and any other time I've brought up Nightdive, to be fair) but Nightdive really are the absolute masters of presenting a game that looks and sounds and feels exactly like your fond, rose-tinted memories of it. I love Quake II - it's Aliens to Quake's Alien - with the big, daft sci-fi action movie vibe really appealing to my 14 year old brain upon release. It has a lot more of the 'boomer shooter' revival DNA in it than the original game does and I think it has largely stood the test of time remarkably well. Nightdive have taken this opportunity to add a few new quality of life bits and add some unfinished beta content back into the game, all of which is a genuine improvement on the original release. I'm sure there's some mods someone can bore you to tears about, but for 99% of players this is the best way to play a great shooter that I feel gets a bit of a bad rap. After all, Aliens is better than Alien, right?

(Quake 2 64 also gets thrown into this package and is a totally different but also very enjoyable shooter and I recommend giving that a go too)