I love you Crows Crows Crows but as the kids say, 'this ain't it, chief'. In a post-[One Shot/Undertale/Pony Island/The Magic Circle/The Beginner's Guide/Anodyne/Frog Fractions 2] gaming landscape there needs to be more that pushes the metanarrative envelope. There are some moments I think are rather great, particularly the Memory Zone and its acknowledgement of reviews and their effects on the creative process. At the same time, the Memory Zone's nostalgia for the original Stanley Parable exemplifies the difficulty if not impossibility for Ultra Deluxe to live up to its predecessor and the expectations placed upon itself. Rather than make some attempt, however foolish or brazen, to be an ambitious step forward, Ultra Deluxe is content with doing little and hoping it is enough.

There is the distinct possibility that Ultra Deluxe is not made for someone like me. That my exposure to so many metafictitious works has built in me some tolerance which necessitates a greater boundary break to achieve a similar high. Unfortunately it's impossible to say for certain.

As Woodaba has already highlighted, the bucket detracts more than it adds, amounting to little more than the equivalent of a mirror mode in Mario Kart. But whereas a mirror mode brings about a new perspective which is refreshing, the bucket's shines a spotlight on Ultra Deluxe's abject failure to say anything that hasn't been said. The idea of the bucket is vaguely funny in theory, but the actual effect on the player is that I am playing the exact same content as I was in 2013 but there is now a bucket and altered dialogue to reflect my ownership of the bucket. It simply isn't fun or enjoyable because it renders so crystalline the fact that nothing has changed. The meta has been replaced by the memetic.

The removal of Minecraft and Portal in favour of Rocket League and Firewatch are utterly bizarre to me. That rights have lapsed and neither bear the same cachet is plain, but their inclusion in spite of growing irrelevance would fare better than what we have ended up with. Firewatch is sensible insofar as it's another walking simulator, but it is even more irrelevant than Minecraft. One was the best selling game of all time which has had a profound and unwavering effect on our culture, the other is a good walking simulator which was renowned when it released and isn't really thought of any longer. I cannot say what would have worked better in its stead (Gone Home? Fortnite? Roblox???) and I understand these too would bear their own challenges. Swapping out Rocket League in Portal's place is the much stranger replacement in my eyes. The Portal transition worked as well as it did because Portal is another first person perspective game, in the same engine (at least as the Source mod), with a gimmick that allows that sudden change in view to another place. We haven't had another game in that vein since, I suppose, but the choice of Rocket League is obtuse as well. Rocket League was cool at the same time as Firewatch, neither are particularly interesting now. Maybe this is a consequence of a long development cycle, again it is impossible to know what could have been, what was, and what could have been better. What I do know is my mom knows what Portal and Minecraft are. My grandmother knows what Portal and Minecraft are. Many 'gamers' I know have no idea what Firewatch is and/or have never played Rocket League.

This is all to say that Ultra Deluxe suffers from the Stanley Parable's success. Little could have lived up to all of it's hype as a follow-up to the original, but that doesn't mean the lack of trying should be excused. Crows Crows Crows can clearly do phenomenal work - Dr. Langeskov was superb and Accounting is very funny - but just because their writers are so witty doesn't mean the game should just be jokes. Something could have been said here, and instead I feel like I got the equivalent of an Applause sign.

"Gee, Ichi. What are we going to do this fight?"

"The same thing we do every fight, Adachi. Use our strongest AoE ad nauseam."

The transition to turn based JRPG battles is refreshing at first but becomes a drag as the game progresses. Unlike the other Yakuza games where you always adapt to a situation and feel like you've grown as a player through new combos, here you will almost always use the same couple attacks. I almost never used a status ailment outside of poison and rarely buffed my party or debuffed enemies outside of boss fights. That so many bosses resist all but one type of damage makes them exceptionally tedious, even moreso when they can one shot you. The cycle of Orbital Laser, Orbital Laser, restore MP/HP, repeat during the second last boss fight is the most egregious example of this. I feel this could largely be remedied by giving bosses more health and removing their resistances altogether so you can at least feel like you're doing something even with your party members who cannot exploit a weakness.

On the plus side the story is good but not great, though that's understandable given these are new characters without several games of backstory to fully flesh them out. Everything else is more Yakuza which is all it ever needed to be.

When I lost five credits on Polestar only to realise I couldn't coast through the game with lock-on that was my Sin and Punishment

I could, and did (on an episode of Retronauts), speak at length about Ape Escape and each aspect of its being but I want to focus on controls here.

Much ink has been spilled in reverie of Super Mario 64's influence on 3D gaming. It rests on a pedestal so as to always invite comparison, hailed as "the new gold standard in video games" since its release.¹ The notion that Super Mario 64 was "the first [game] to get the control scheme right" in the 3D platformer space is evident by that separation of player movement and camera movement across the gaming landscape today.² With how infrequently - which is to say, not all of the time - the player moves the camera in Super Mario 64, the relegation of the camera to a quartet of readily accessible buttons is puzzling but forgivable for such an early True 3D Platformer.

The most critical part of Super Mario 64's legacy is its insistence on player control in a 3D space being simple and streamlined; push forward to go forward, press A to jump, no faffing about. As seen with early 2010s titles like Octodad or Surgeon Simulator, requiring players to engage in more direct, less conventional control schemes is a 'meme,' some source of comedy in large part because those controls are in direct defiance of reiterated means of control in gaming. While neither title nor their contemporaries illustrate with clarity the benefit of these subversive control methods, Ape Escape did over a decade earlier.

As the first PlayStation game to necessitate use of the DualShock controller, Japan Studio sought to use its features maximally from the ground up due to its potential as a dual analog device.³ The use of the second dog-nose textured stick for gameplay and direct character action was one of the only marked control innovations in the 3D platformer space since Super Mario 64. Demo discs espoused the DualShock and its implementation in Ape Escape as a tool one needed to master alongside the gameplay itself. Contemporary reviews corroborated these claims in large part because Ape Escape's controls refused the immediacy of Mario, Spyro, Banjo-Kazooie, and Crash. Jumping could happen with the tap of a button but gadgets were not so simple, yet they were even more intuitive because of the DualShock's second analog stick.

The Stun Club and Time Net are swung by moving the right analog stick towards your target, or spun through a full rotation. The Monkey Radar similarly is aimed in any direction to highlight the location of monkeys. This trio of tools is served to the player first because their input and action are direct -- you point the stick where you want the thing to happen, just as you do with the left stick for movement.

The Slingback Shooter presents the first deviation from what one might expect - rather than move the stick towards the target the player instead moves it away from the target as if operating an actual slingshot, releasing to fire. This movement is tactile thanks to the re-centring of the stick, snapping back with speed like taut elastic released. The Dash Hoop and Sky Flyer both require full, repeated rotations of the stick to simulate the movement, the latter mimicking a propeller around an axle, the former acting not as the hula hoop itself moving around the player but the player's hips working to get the hoop up to speed.

The final gadget (not including the post-game Magic Punch), the R.C. Car, is the most abstracted from convention as the second analog stick directly moves the vehicle separate from the player, likened by Tim Rogers to the dual arrows of Namco's 1983 game Libble Rabble.⁴ The comparison is apt on a surface level but while Libble Rabble requires simultaneous movement of Libble and Rabble to achieve the player goal of harvesting Mushlins, Ape Escape's R.C. Car is primarily maneuvered independently of the player in short bursts while the player adjusts their view or, more likely, stands still to focus solely on the R.C. Car. The player can, of course, move all they want while using the R.C. Car but this is not required because of Ape Escape's focus on oneness of control instead of separation of function and movement.

The Monkey Radar and R.C. Car notwithstanding, every gadget in Ape Escape complements movement in a similar manner to Mario's moveset in any of his 3D romps but with an added layer of immersion and intent. Chasing a monkey is not just a matter of platforming one's way toward an object through movement. The player needs to use the gadgets for their approach and for the act of catching the monkey, be it by hitting it with the Stun Club or Slingback Shooter, or just through aiming the Time Net towards an often moving target. The evasive maneuvers used by the monkeys heightens the pursuit further. If a monkey dives away from the Time Net the player can flick the stick towards its new location or perhaps keep the analog stick tilted and rotate it to catch the monkey in a spin. If a monkey is airborne the player can get near and shoot them down with the Slingback Shooter, or use the Sky Flyer to ascend to their level then quickly swap to the Time Net and catch them while you fall. Some monkeys require silver bullet solutions but player freedom is abundant across Ape Escape.

One of the greatest challenges of Ape Escape and enjoying it is that one has to meet it on its own terms. Just like one can't go into Gunstar Heroes expecting it to be like Contra, the prospective player cannot go into Ape Escape with the expectation it will control like or even resemble Super Mario 64. Just like the aforementioned piece of Treasure developed software, Ape Escape defies a reading which compares it to that which it is aesthetically associated with.

A few years back I came across an article which lambasted Ape Escape's controls following an authorial statement "to assess [old] games as if they were released today, not as products of the times in which they were created."⁵ Merits and flaws of such an approach aside, this umbrage with Ape Escape's convention-eschewing control scheme suggests that breaking from the Super Mario 64 style of platforming is itself heretical. Mention is made of the difficulty of rapidly adjusting the camera which were moved to the D-Pad and L1, something allegedly taken for granted presently whereas in 1999 there was "no well of experience to draw on" for this predicament.⁶ Ignoring the fact that 3D platformers had already contended with camera movement through the N64's C Buttons, effectively an analog to the DualShock's right analog stick, this perspective ignores Ape Escape's own camera concessions and means of manipulation. Ape Escape's levels are generally large enough to not require camera movement, and when the camera does need adjusting the L1 button immediately snaps the camera behind Spike, just as the R button did in Banjo-Kazooie. More direct control of the camera via the D-Pad is indeed more tedious and cumbersome but it is also in effect unnecessary by virtue of those expansive spaces. The article similarly raises qualms with the use of gadgets, considering the use of gadgets while moving to be analogous to patting one's head and rubbing one's tummy. This anapodoton that Ape Escape's controls equate to being poor is by no means unique to the article, and as a punchline it seems willfully ignorant of what Ape Escape expects of the player and their ability to adopt its way of thinking about control.⁷ Ultimately the article stands as the apex of decades of whinging about Ape Escape's perceived awkwardness, and the claims from those scant few who consider a suitable alternative to be pushing a button to engage in an action, akin to Mario punching. This is especially curious as Ape Escape got a port which 'remedied' this exact problem with 2005's Ape Escape: On the Loose.

The absence of a second analog nubbin on the PlayStation Portable saw gadgets being used through buttons, snatching from the player the degree of freedom in action the original release had. More critically, however, this digital interpretation of once analog intentions widens the gap between the player's actions and the actions of the character. The aforementioned oneness of Ape Escape is fundamental to the play experience because the title was developed for the DualShock, not around it or in spite of it. The placelessness of Super Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie or Spyro or any other 3D platformer which sees them effortlessly ported to new hardware with vastly different methods of control when compared to their original hardware is of value for those games, but it also demonstrates with crystal clarity that their universality opposes innovation vis-a-vis interaction with a game in a physical way. Contrastingly, Ape Escape occupies a position unique to and necessitated by the DualShock, evoking a sort of critical regionalism for games. In a similar vein to Alvar Aalto or Luis Barragán, both of whom have seen their architectonics (re)iterated outside of Finland and Mexico so as to suggest their forms exist and flourish outside their specific constraints and qualities of space and place, Ape Escape's ability to be placed outside of the PlayStation, with controllers that are not the DualShock (but resemble its form through four shoulder buttons and two analog sticks) should not be construed as it being separate from the DualShock.

In less grandiose terms, Ape Escape is the DualShock. Ape Escape deliberately avoided grafting camera controls to the second analog stick in favour of something more nuanced yet more natural and intuitive. Super Mario 64, the supposed pinnacle of 3D platforming and 'perfect' camera controls, is not the Nintendo 64 controller -- Miyamoto himself allegedly did not even like the C Buttons, and the game was designed using modified Sega gamepads for much of its development.⁸ Yet both can be and are played on newer hardware with controllers not of their era without being worse for the wear, if only because the DualShock and its dual analog sticks became the norm, the second stick functioning as a decent simulacrum for the solution of C Button cameras. And when Super Mario 64 got its portable port on the Nintendo DS, it was no worse for wear because the lack of C Buttons did not equate to a drastic change in gameplay. What is seen as awkward to some is precisely what makes Ape Escape work, and what made it so captivating to players in its own time, and still is today. That perfect implementation of a novel control scheme demonstrates to us a world of gaming that could have been; perhaps what should have been.
____________________
¹ "The Fun Machine: An Exclusive World Tour of the First Nintendo 64 Games," Nintendo Power 85, June 1996, 16.
² "Countdown to 200: The 10 Most Important Games," Electronic Gaming Monthly 187, January 2005.
³ "Ape Escape," PlayStation Underground 3, 1999.
⁴ Tim Rogers, "ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS PAC-MAN," YouTube video, 2:55:58, November 22, 2020.
⁵ Patrick Arthur, "Ape Escape and the Things We Take for Granted," Retro Spectives Podcast, March 31, 2019, https://www.rspodcast.net/articles/ape-escape-and-the-things-we-take-for-granted.
⁶ Ibid.
https://www.twitch.tv/protonjon/clip/LitigiousExcitedWrenDendiFace-uWmxCn2TR-f5klsO?filter=clips&range=7d&sort=time
⁸ "The Making of Mario 64: Giles Goddard Interview," NGC Magazine 61, December 2001.

Excruciatingly rough-hewn, unrelentingly insistent that the player abide by its demands, frictive enough to give new meaning to "NOW IS TIME TO THE 68000 HEART ON FIRE." Geograph Seal refuses to be anything except what it is, a labourious exercise in survival and traversal in the face of overwhelming odds. From the second gameplay begins the player is surrounded and confused, contending with a (then) novel means of moving in three-dimensional space, those oft-dreaded tank controls and an inability to aim independent of movement. No tutorial, no on-screen controls, just a crowded HUD labelling everything in view yet telling you nothing. A trial by fire. If Jumping Flash! is a playground littered with toys and freedom to do whatever the player wants, Geograph Seal is rush-hour traffic. The selfsame engine which shocked and awed investors, journalists, and gamers when demonstrating the capabilities of the Sony PlayStation absolutely chugs on the X68000. Geograph Seal rarely breaks double-digit framerates whereas Jumping Flash! frequently ascends to 60. Despite its belaboured rendering, Geograph Seal punishes the slightest hesitation with a cascade of enemy gunfire and lasers which can hardly be reacted to if they're even seen by the player. Geograph Seal crumbles under the weight of its own ambition and it is incredible. Every victory is hard-won. Each continue used is soul-crushing. Any shield recovery drop is manna from heaven, providing sustenance enough for the oppression to continue unabated. Doomed to start over from the beginning over and over, the player carves out a modicum of understanding how to progress. Boss fights are a blistering battle against time as your shield dwindles. The rail shooter segments are a maddeningly brutal cacophony of polygons and missiles. The maze stage is a claustrophobic lesson on Geograph Seal's combat essentials as you lose the one true advantage you had over your enemies, that taken for granted triple jump. Geograph Seal is a 3D game with no concessions made for the sake of access, it provides a Z-axis and shows what a proverbial game of the future might be like, no stepping stones to cross the torrential waters of 3D gaming. Exact Co. shrieks that there is no time to dawdle, we have the technology and holy shit let's just use it and let people figure out how to play it on their own.

Geograph Seal is a monolith -- imposing and unwavering. A precursor of exceptional things to come. A testament to phenomenology in gaming, one must be subsumed by it to understand that it is a delight. The béton brut of 3D polygonal gaming.

On the one hand I love seeing a mobile game that isn't MTX-laden, drenched in advertisements, or caked in time-gating. Ojiro Fumoto is a genius whose design sensibilities I adore, and Poinpy is heart-achingly adorable to look at and listen to thanks to Calum Bowen's picopop-esque compositions. The gameplay loop is fun and satisfying in much the same way as Downwell.

On the other, small hand, I think the addition of a progression system which actually fundamentally changes the gameplay to such an extent through additional jump orbs and perks is a misstep. The different player styles at the beginning of a Downwell run didn't really make runs that much different besides making the game a little easier for those learning its mechanics. Someone who picked Levitate could and would get to the end just as easily as someone who stuck to the Usual style . By contrast, Poinpy is restrictive in what the player can do until they get more jump orbs and perks. Sure I could get as far as someone with everything unlocked on my first run but it's going to require exceptional skill to do so. I think providing another jump orb or the choice of a perk when completing a biome (like Downwell) would work better. If I'm being cynical, my thought is the progression system leads to greater player engagement (read: time investment) to artificially inflate playtime, player numbers, and perception of the game thanks to those minute dopamine rushes which might make players think they're having more fun than they actually are.

On the other, much larger hand, this is a game published by Netflix, a corporation which has romanticized suicide and mental illness, promoted numerous pseudoscientific pundits, sexualised minors, provided a platform for transphobia, ableism, racism, and sexism under the guise of 'comedy,' avoided paying millions in taxes through tax havens, is seeking to prevent password sharing amid rising subscription costs, and consistently funds the most dogshit content available on streaming while cancelling anything actually inventive or interesting after one season. That my little Aggretsuko avatar persists in the bottom right corner is a stain on something I could otherwise be able to mentally separate from its ties to a corporation I detest so much. At least Fumoto got paid.

I wish I hadn't been The Witness to Jonathan Blow being a COVID truther. Or pro-Blue Lives Matter. Or anti-'cancel culture'. Or an advocate of political horseshoe theory. Or his belief that women aren't genetically suited to tech jobs.

In most cases I can forgive and forget the machinations of a creator's mind and create some mental separation between art and artist. However, The Witness is so inextricable from Blow's self-aggrandizing bullshit that it's impossible here. The notion that the search for truth is an everlasting but uncompletable journey is noble in theory and when not spouted by a QAnon nutter. This isn't even me imposing some sort of negativity onto Blow and his work with seven years of retrospect; Blow ousted himself as a misogynist loon in late 2017, only a few months after The Witness released on iOS. Should we even be surprised at this though? As Leigh Alexander put it, "he's that guy who made the Mario about women running away from him right"?

Blow's masturbatory belief in his own superiority, as a man, as a white man, as a right-wing white man, as a right-wing white male programmer taints his messaging to the point of it becoming an insurmountable task to read certain moments of The Witness as anything but Blow blowing himself. Good on him for making puzzles inaccessible to the deaf and hard of hearing, how great for Blow that he wasted at minimum an hour of many people's lives as they traced that fucking moon across a screen. Wow, after playing The Witness I see patterns in everything just like the creator, bra-fucking-vo. And it's a shame because the puzzles are fine and most of the game is serviceable. Everything surrounding it coalesces though and you realise it, well, blows.

At least its better than that game Soulja Boy laughed at.

The fact that this has allegedly demotivated Jonathan Blow in the same way that Soulja Boy talking about Braid did already makes this praiseworthy. That both Bradley Lovell and Soulja Boy truly enjoyed Blow's works, and that Blow deliberately ignores that, makes The Looker as incredible as Soulja Boy's review. Fuck Blow.

2013: I finish New Vegas and start playing the DLC content. I leave Honest Hearts for last. As soon as I load into Zion the ending cutscene plays and I get a black screen. I have to load an old save and this bug occurs every time I try to enter Zion.

2015: I get a new laptop for university and replay New Vegas from the beginning. I decide to try Honest Hearts. My game crashes when I enter the Northern passage. I disable all of my mods. The same bug occurs. I do a clean install of the game and Windows. My game still crashes when I enter the Northern passage.

2017: Our apartment in Paris is robbed, including my laptop. With the insurance money received I build a new desktop. I install New Vegas on it. I decide to replay Old World Blues and Lonesome Road. They both work fine. I decide to try Honest Hearts. I am able to load into Zion. All of the NPCs in the initial firefight die except one White Legs ambusher. The quest does not progress to the 'Move into Zion Valley' stage. No NPC will talk to me. No NPC is hostile to me. I TCL throughout Zion and nothing progresses no matter what. I disable all mods, do a clean install of the game, and try a new save entirely. This still occurs upon entering Zion.

2018: I replay New Vegas. This time as soon as I leave Doc's house I beeline my way to Northern passage. I pick up nothing. I speak to no one. I fight no beast. I take a sip from my trusty Vault 13 canteen. I do not wish to let my save be altered in the slightest way lest I be denied the forbidden fruit I have gone without for over half a decade. I enter the Northern passage. I complete 'Happy Trails Expedition.' I begin 'Arrival at Zion.' I load into Zion. My heart beats faster and faster. My palms sweat. The firefight begins. The caravan is dropping like flies. I know now this is supposed to happen. in VATS I plug the White Legs full of lead. One remains. I cross the bridge to progress the quest. My lip quivers. Follows-Chalk approaches me. He stares at me. I take a sip from my trust Vault 13 canteen. I interact with Follows-Chalk. I am greeted with "Hoi! White Legs don't leave survivors often. You're some kind of lucky, let me tell you." But this is not in a dialogue box. Though the subtitles emblazon the bottom of my screen, I am given no opportunity here to press further. My quest draws to an end before it can even begin. I set flags to different states in the console to no avail. I TCL around only to have NPCs regard me with passive dialogue. My actions have no bearing on this godforsaken land. I am but an observer for a world I cannot, will not ever know. I have no mouth, and I must scream.

2022: In an envious last-ditch effort, I reinstall New Vegas with the Viva New Vegas modpack. In this instance, I figure I should not let the vanilla game hemorrhage and hope to progress before it crumbles under its own weight. Fallout: New Vegas will be wrapped in as many bandaid fixes as Joshua Graham. If it has allowed the Burned Man to survive in the face of certain death, perhaps I will be granted the Lord's blessing as well. I create a new character and help the people of Goodsprings against the Powder Gangers to refamiliarise myself with the wasteland. When the dust settles, I beeline it to New Vegas. Not for revenge, but for salvation. Warnings of deathclaws and radscorpions fall upon deaf ears. I kill a deathclaw caught between a chair and a wall to reach level 2. As with my previous attempts, I ultimately seek to reach Zion with minimal influence exerted on the land, lest some quest flag, some quirk of the game engine deny me the promised land. I come across Sloan, an outpost I had never known about, an outpost I will never know about as I must press onward. A Stealth Boy grants me passage beyond a final pack of deathclaws. I am proud of myself for making it through. I recall that Honest Hearts requires a low carry weight to begin, so I make a stop at the Crimson Caravan Company and nearby clinic to offload my wares. I have made a miscalculation.

Being only level 3 upon my arrival at the Northern passage I cannot meet the Speech check to get the others in the caravan to bear my burden. My Survival too is below par. Still, that I have made it this far is promising. I am insistent on bringing as many items into Zion as I can, so it's off to Freeside to do some short quests. I enter the Atomic Wrangler ready to collect some debts and hire some escorts when the one-armed bandit lures me closer with its siren song. My scant few caps become chips which become devastating loss. With only 7 Luck I am statistically likely to break even at Blackjack, so perhaps I can recuperate my funds in short order. Liquidating the rest of my inventory does not have the desired effect as my losses are doubled. Another level would grant me a perk, a chance to increase my Luck one point further. Mick and Ralph's nearby has the lustful Naughty Nightwear which will also increase my Luck. Or, penniless and with only my pistol at my side, I could leave for Zion at once.

I was never one to let bygones be bygones. With any number of options for earning coin in Freeside, my sloth gets the better of me and I recall that The Silver Rush across the street is comically easy to steal from. The plethora of guards watched me drag plasma rifles into the bathroom only to waddle out over-encumbered. With a fat pocket of caps, I purchase the Nightwear. Having veered so far from my intended path, I wrathfully murder Dixon and some Freeside addicts to level up. With 9 Luck, I cannot lose. In no time at all I clean out the Atomic Wrangler. The Strip calls.

I should have known my greed would lead me down this path, but no matter. I excuse my behaviour as a need to purchase a high-quality firearm from the Gun Runners, even if I know it to be a falsehood. In no time at all I am barred from Gomorrah, The Tops, and even the Ultra Luxe. When I had crossed paths with Benny in The Tops I paid him no mind, so absolute was my drive to reach Honest Hearts. By this point my pack was as full as my purse, bursting at the seams with drink and food. Why let it go to waste? Imbibing all I had won in an act of unbridled gluttony, I develop an alcohol addiction and make my way to the clinic outside of Freeside. All patched up and level 7, carrying few enough goods to meet the post-Survival check weight limit, I return to the Northern passage.

As my eyes adjust to the beauty of Zion, I hold my breath. I dare not do anything I am not expected to, lest I be cast from this proverbial Eden for my arrogance. The caravan is wiped out in the White Legs ambush. The corpses will have to remain untouched for now. I cross the bridge in anticipation. Follows-Chalk approaches. He speaks to me. I receive the next part of the quest. I make it to the Dead Horses camp. I speak to Joshua Graham. He and I are not so different. He and I do not belong here.

I do not belong here.

This might be the most important game I've played because it made me mad enough as a child to snap my DS in half and this taught me about responsibility.

The push to get others to play ZeroRanger instills in me a certain malaise, specifically because it comes with the caveat of 'avoiding spoilers.' That insistence on going in completely blind affects expectations more than those recommending it might know. If you are interested in ZeroRanger, my advice would be to go for it with a few things in mind. I put these forth after the following paragraph to avoid marking the whole review as a spoiler, and to place those light spoilers below the break.

The sentiment that ZeroRanger is one of the best STGs in recent history has rattled around my head since its release. Claims of a work's greatness already make me wary, but for such praise to get tossed around from genre fans and dissenters alike made me all the more apprehensive. An insistence on 'not spoiling' ZeroRanger served as a final nail in the coffin for me in the wake of games like Undertale and OneShot. I was content to ignore ZeroRanger and play conventional STGs like Crimzon Clover and Deathsmiles. Around a year ago when I dove deeper into shmups, ZeroRanger became something I certainly wanted to try if only to see what the hubbub was really about. I played it a bit, couldn't get past Stage 3, and put it down. Credit feeding is a practice I try to avoid despite its use in honing ones skill, and this was no different. What I failed to pick up on by not ever using even a single continue is that ZeroRanger explicitly wanted me to use my continues to my advantage. It went back to the bottom of my shmups to beat list and the still present praise for it befuddled me all the more.

Light Spoilers
1. You need to use your continues. All of them.
2. The game is absurdly long for a shmup. Any time you think you're at the end, you are not.
3. You can use the stage select with no penalty outside of score.
4. Getting hit is fine, the game is incredibly generous with extends, especially if your lives are low.
5. There are some fights that feel impossible. There are tricks to beating them you can find if you experiment a little.
Light Spoilers End

The drive to improve without using continues persisted due to the oppressive difficulty of the game while I found my footing. Quirks of its design were unknown to me because I wasn't getting far enough to see how its systems actually worked. Those 'aha!' moments finally came when I shook things up and tried Type-C's rearshot on Stage 2's miniboss and it melted. From that point I knew I wanted to see this through to the end.

ZeroRanger is awash with hills and valleys in difficulty oscillating constantly and consistently. This leads to periods of rest which are greatly welcomed in a game whose full runs take over an hour to complete. When progressing this meant I was being built up and torn down repeatedly, thinking I had finally become 'good' only to get punished for my hubris. Nonetheless, as the game was never an unceasing climb in its difficulty, my progress did not wear at me like typicaly STGs such as Espgaluda had. The improvements in my play were palpable and my failures pushed me to do better next time. By no means was that experience unique to ZeroRanger, far from it, but it was more apparent here than in any other shmup I had played. It only became grating near the very end of my time when I had seen the start of the end of the game but hadn't realised I could freely use the stage select without remorse.

What I appreciate most about ZeroRanger is that it rendered concrete for me how I can and do improve at shmups (and games in general). By overcoming that inital hurdle of actually using continues and fighting back even harder after getting damaged, it clicked for me that I had been missing something in STGs this entire time by eschewing growth in favour of perfection. There's a pain point in that ZeroRanger's systems are far more forgiving of mistakes than, say, a CAVE STG but the lesson has been learned nonetheless. That desire for a 1CC will never leave me, and I plan on getting on in ZeroRanger, but my path towards that goal should be more constructive from now on.

Purely as a shmup, I think ZeroRanger leaves a little to be desired but I can't quite say why. As a stepping stone towards more healthful practices of playing and approaching games, it's one of the best.

Some errant thoughts:

The palette is the most striking thing about ZeroRanger, but I actually consider it a detriment in some ways. The visual contrast of the Colorblind Mode was much more legible for me and I'm not colourblind. The palettes unlocked after beating the game were infuriatingly helpful. That such beneficial colour schemes are kept from the player until they've finished the game is mindboggling. The Gray/Orange palette could at the very least be offered before beating ZeroRanger.

I'm thankful that the challenges and extras are nonexistent before getting the all clear as I am certain I would have obsessed over them above actually completing the game first.

The singular focus on movement at the end of the game is wondrous but it could have done with some more interesting patterns.

Wrought Flesh is held together by rotting sinew and prayer. It is mechanically and aesthetically grotesque. It tears itself apart with ambition and harbours more bugs than maggot-ridden offal. It is wholly unique despite being comprised of incongruous parts sewn into a Frankensteinian mass. It is a casu martzu, off-putting in nearly every regard but a delicacy for a select few.

The core of Wrought Flesh is simple. Pursue your prey and assimilate viscera into your body cavity along the way. Organs function like gear in a typical RPG but rather than be assigned slots, they take up a certain number of spaces within your body like Resident Evil. Further complicating matters is the fact your organs deteriorate through use; imbibing corpses wears down your intestines, healing over time breaks your heart, taking bullets fills your fat with holes. Some items lack durability but these are typically unique and come with some other caveat which will more likely than not make your other organs rot even faster. For example, a literal iron lung bestows massive agility but tanks your HP regen, making your heart(s) work harder and wither quicker. The player is constantly on the hunt for new organs to replace aging ones. This weaves a rapid gameplay loop where caution is typically thrown to the wind to kill enemies before your body fails. Parts can even be swapped in combat, but good luck playing inventory Tetris with bugs flying at your face. An option to quickly replace organs could have made the process of mending oneself mid-fight a smoother experience, but the current system of risk-reward works well enough. Organs can also be eschewed to leave space in your body cavity to hold more ammo and Killfuck. I, however, saw the cons of not having those stats to heavily outweigh doubling my reserves.

Organs are central to Wrought Flesh's Bio system. Some guns use blood instead of bullets for ammunition. As such, higher health pools mean a greater supply of shots, higher regen rates ensure leeched vitality is recuperated faster. Organs can also have elemental attributes like Fire, Electricity, Acid, or Explosive. While those impart resistance to their respective damage types, they also imbue Bio weapons with damage of that type. Bio weapons are greatly customisable as a result, able to exploit the weaknesses of some foes should the player have the appropriate organs. Even without picking up Bio weapons, the player always has their Finger Gun available should they throw their weapon to the floor, so in a pinch those elements still come into play, and this is in fact critical to defeating enemies which resist bullet damage. Elemental organs invariably occupy an inconvenient amount of space in your body cavity, which helps keep Bio in relative lockstep with weapon upgrades, neither becoming greatly stronger than the other.

Aiding the blistering pace of Wrought Flesh is a skiing system straight out of Tribes, though it leaves something to be desired. Without the jets of Tribes, momentum vanishes when hitting an upward slope. A high agility stat helps by giving you a greater jump and speed to simply leap over hills, but without enough agility you're going to be walking uphill a lot. One quirk of the engine is that your falling speed is taken into account when you start skiing, so jumping from a monstrous height onto flat terrain leads to ludicrous speeds.

The map design is effectively a series of spiderwebs, a central town stretching into small areas every which way for encounters and quest objectives. The lack of a map screen and repetitious environments would ordinarily cause navigational confusion. However, since there is invariably a separate objective in each of the cardinal and ordinal directions, and quest destinations are expressed as belonging to those directions, it is difficult to get lost. Those quests are also pretty damn simple for the most part, being in the vein of kill these enemies, get these key items. Some break the mould by offering a choice or requiring the player to carry certain organs in one piece to a destination.

Wrought Flesh's world is no masterwork of worldbuilding and lore, but the snippets of exposition gleaned from dialogue are engrossing enough and paint a portrait of disturbing dystopian surrealism in the tradition of H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński. In this land it is not only the bleeding flesh which is worshipped, but the euphemistic as well, the player character often rewarded for their efforts with a satiation of carnal appetites.

These constituent parts are rather incongruous at times, but Wrought Flesh is a perfect melange of grotesquerie for me, a Cruelty Squad I can gel with, a Brigand: Oaxaca of a different flavour.

Regrettably I am presently softlocked due to crashing on load, a shame since I loved what I was able to play.

A perfect tasting menu of Sonic.

Genuinely stunning considering that, on paper, none of Sonic Pocket Adventure's quirks should be conducive to a good Sonic experience. Being made in conjunction with SNK to be purpose-built for the Neo Geo Pocket, there's a greater understanding of the hardware on display here than in the Game Gear titles or the Sonic Advance series. There, speed becomes a burden. Here, speed comes naturally just as in the mainline titles. There, the screen is cramped. Here, despite the square display, you don't feel the need to cautiously inch forward out of fear for what lies ahead. Not once across my two playthroughs did I feel like I got hit because of something outside my control.

Stages are all derivative of previous titles (primarily Sonic 2) but they've been scaled down or reworked to accommodate the handheld experience. Despite this, levels still contain alternate paths and an incentive to explore (especially if you're going for puzzle pieces). Not only are levels themselves transplanted, so too is the vast majority of the soundtrack. Rather than take, say, Casino Night Zone's music from Sonic 2 for Pocket Adventure's Cosmic Casino Zone, the tracks are taken from Sonic 3 & Knuckles' Doilus Bonus Stages. Those tracks are then de-made for the Neo Geo Pocket's sound capabilities. In effect, the soundtrack is an official remix of Sonic 3 & Knuckles by SNK's Maitaro.

Nothing on offer here overstays its welcome with shorter levels that work for quick sessions, and a stage select that means putting the game away won't hamper progress. Unlike other 2D Sonic titles, here I actually wanted to do the Time Trials to see how fast I could tear through the stages. Clocking in at about an hour and a half per full playthrough, you get a delightful morsel of your typical Sonic zones without ever thinking how desperately you want out of Chemical Secret Plant. There's even a little Sky Chase! You get to fight Knuckles and Mecha Sonic! Eggman is seen in his classic and Adventure outfits! Hot damn!!!

One of the weirdest consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a fundamental shift in how art can be and is consumed. The pre-vaccine pandemic prohibited the perusal of physical artworks since galleries are enclosed spaces which, at times, necessitate a close proximity with others outside of your cohort. With how stringent the atmospheric conditions are in most galleries, the idea of introducing additional moisture through people with COVID-induced sniffles was certainly a concern for many curators. With the rest of the world moving to primarily online modes of functioning, the realm of art followed suit with a greater focus on digitisation and accessibility. With a 77% drop in museum attendance in 2020, cultural spaces were afforded the rare opportunity to strip the walls of famous works so they could be catalogued more extensively, scanned in higher quality than ever before, and be presented globally over the internet.¹ As a part of Google's own AR initiatives, paintings and sculptures could be virtually projected into one's own home to impart a sense of scale, and to allow viewers to get incredibly close to the artwork.² These searchable catalogues and viewable works are great in theory, particularly from an accessibility standpoint, but the glut of artwork available means a lesser focus on the provenance of particular works and artists, and a consumption pattern akin to scrolling through an Instagram feed. One of the most important parts of the gallery experience, personally, is the contextualisation of more renowned works amongst similar pieces which are largely omitted from the cultural canon. Why should these specific works by Degas or Warhol or Vermeer be so celebrated, so singularly highlighted? This digitisation and the general accelerationism induced by COVID only exacerbates this problem. If I have access to all this art but no guidance, no structure to appreciating it, then I'm just going to look at the artists I'm aware of and look at their work, like those who enter the Louvre and beeline it to the Mona Lisa. In most cases these people don't care about the context of the work, just that they saw it. Perhaps this isn't intrinsically wrong, but it is certainly a vapid means of consumption, focusing on clout over appreciation.

When restrictions did ease up in the second-half of 2020, the spaces which were available for much of the world were more open environs where physical distancing was easy and air circulation was better. It was about this time that 'immersive exhibits' exploded in cities across North America and Europe. Largely hosted in industrial spaces, these shows permitted distancing through projections of works onto the walls of a space, creating an 'immersive experience' by having attendees be subsumed by an artwork or its constituent components. There's an argument to be made that 2020's Netflix series Emily in Paris aided the exponential growth of these shows as a consequence of the Netflix Effect, but even with this as a contributing factors, the omnipresence of these exhibits seems inexplicable.³ Nonetheless, the directors of these shows and artist foundations have claimed that this maximal approach to the works of Vincent van Gogh in particular assist in understanding the artist on a more personal level, as if viewers will see the world as the artist did, will understand the machinations of their mind prior to their death.⁴ Even ignoring the fact that this is an impossibility, to understand the lived experience of another, this perpetuates the masturbatory romanticisation of the tortured 'other,' without engaging with their purported experience in a critical manner. This ballooning of the work may induce a sense of being 'inside' the painting, but it also means turning the work of an artist known for their impasto and its consequent three-dimensionality into a flat image. Beyond this, the poor quality of a projected image in relation to a physical work means those brushstrokes won't even appear on the walls of a space, just as they won't on the screen of a phone.⁵ My problem with these exhibits is not with idea of simulacra of the works themselves, but with this glorified and yet dehumanised reproduction, claiming to be focused on the personal history of the work while losing the humanity and physical deliberation of the paintings' creation. The immersive experience has nothing to do with the works themselves, but with the idea of the work, allowing us to say we were there rather than we saw.⁶ And in the wake of the success and proliferation of these van Gogh shows, we are now inundated with these $50 multi-sensory experiences for Klimt, for Monet, for Chagall, for Picasso, for Tutankhamen, for Frida Kahlo (who I'm sure would have loved the commodification of her work for vapid consumption by white people). The presence of pre-recorded vague statements and the wafting stench of cypress brings as much to the experience of viewing these low quality images as South Park: The Fractured But Whole's promotion stunt the Nosulus Rift did by letting you smell farts. These shows claim to complement the physical gallery experience but they merely detract. What impetus is there to gaze upon a work in person when influencers claim this is superior to the rinky-dink painting, when one can state with the authentic belief that they have already seen it, when you can go do yoga in a painting!?⁷

With it made abundantly clear now how much I detest the idea of the immersive experience, it must come as surprising that I was rather taken by this low-tech educational multimedia game from 1998 of all things. If the immersive exhibit is something I consider almost infantilising, how could this fare better? What Mission Sunlight has going for it immediately is that it isn't trying to pass itself off as some truest means of taking in van Gogh's work. The intro cinematic makes it evident that this is not the world of van Gogh, but some dystopic strangereal where the sun has gone out, taking with it the colour of the artist's paintings.

Our first interaction is with an on-the-fritz robot who gives us a magical star and makes it abundantly clear that despite his algorithmic attempts at restoring the paintings, he crucially has never been able to see the paintings up close. When we inspect the sprite of Fourteen Sunflowers in a Vase, we are welcomed by a polygonal representation of the artist himself. Rather than be some depressed bastardisation of our posthumous reinterpretation of van Gogh, this avatar is almost chipper in his sun hat. He invites us to use the magnifying class button, and when we do we get an incredibly close-up look at the painting and the brushstrokes on the canvas. A 115MB title from two decades past renders this human aspect more concrete than the supposed technological marvels of our present day can. Furthermore, you can click another button to have van Gogh hold up the painting so you can understand its scale.

Walking through the exhibit space, not only are the walls a disgusting hue of dentist-office beige, but they are dirty and in disrepair. The paintings are grey-scale, and even the vases which should be abound with almond blossoms are little more than collections of gnarled branches. Clicking on these paintings transports the player 'into' them, and here they are shown in colour. The subject matter is therein rendered three-dimensional and the player can move their perspective to see beyond the confines of the painting. What is particularly endearing about this is how the dithered textures impart a quasi-Impressionist feel despite being a limitation of technology. Instead of hearing lilting violins, the soundscape is realistic. Roosters crow, the wind blows, leaves tumble to the ground. In each painting you need to find an object to restore the colour, and certain interactables help you proceed. For Cottage with Decrepit Barn and Stooping Woman, one can actually enter the slanted building only for the interior to be the selfsame from The Potato Eaters, with the table embodying Still Life with an Earthen Bowl with Potatoes. Obviously some liberties have been taken in order to create these more singular, cohesive spaces, but it helps to demonstrate that these paintings were not created in a vacuum, and in fact were inspired by similar, if not identical, settings. These early works are of the same earthen hues in game as they are in reality, contrasted against a gorgeous blue sky.

Finding a potato for Still Life with an Earthen Bowl with Potatoes bestows upon us an educational tidbit of context, that still life paintings are historically flowing with finest dining ware and ostentatious displays of food, representing wealth and bounty. We swirl around Jan Davidszoon de Heem's Still-Life with Fruit and Lobster before van Gogh tells us his desire to show the food of the poor and demonstrate this connection between dining ware from the earth, and tubers from the earth in a display of realist honesty. Restoring The Potato Eaters tells us that it is difficult to break with what you have been told to do. Though this is obviously in response to academic traditions as taught to classically trained artists at Paris' École des Beaux-Arts, it resonates with me because of those immersive experiences. In a sense, those exhibits have broken with the expected, but they have also perpetuated that consumptive mode which snaps a picture and moves on, akin to an Instagram trap. In Mission Sunlight, the tradition of the art gallery has been eschewed for a different maximal approach which at times demonstrates a falsehood about these works through the artistic liberties of an imagined 3D space, but by also teaching directly without shoving contexts onto a placard, a catalogue, or an art history education. Maybe this gamification of art is itself problematic too, but as an edutainment piece of software I am more forgiving.

When we venture into The Night Cafe, I am apprehensive because of my time with 2016's The Night Cafe: A VR Tribute to Van Gogh. That grotesquerie attempted to bring multiple works into one space in a manner I would consider a failure, those other works managing to detract from titular cafe. The scale of the people made it especially hard to immerse myself in, but thankfully Mission Sunlight opted to remove those figures entirely. The geometries here are simpler and more angular, but it weirdly works. Instead of the yellow smears of smooth brushwork in A VR Tribute coming off the lamps, Mission Sunlight's lamps take the actual brushwork of The Night Cafe and turn them into quasi-3D sprites, like a tree in Super Mario 64 to much greater effect. A VR Tribute is a strangely disconnected sensory experience. Mission Sunlight inundates the player with the din of cafe culture, clocks ticking away incessantly, indistinct conversation washing over us.

The later part of van Gogh's life is, understandably, much less depressing here than in reality. Stepping into the Hospital at Arles series, we can hear the anguished cries of the patients who are again not depicted, but the commentary avoids sounding downtrodden. Van Gogh himself speaks of the proliferation of Japanese art and Japonisme when we restore Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, rather than wallow in misery. Ward in the Hospital in Arles' commentary touches on the unappreciative response to his art, but again it isn't masturbatory, but informative. We see van Gogh not as a man defined by mental illness, but simply as a man who wished to paint. Though this is painting too simple of a portrait in many ways, it also helpfully avoids the pratfalls of the contemporary imagining of van Gogh.

Mission Sunlight warms the cockles of my heart in a way I didn't expect it to at all. It is simply a good piece of edutainment software which is informative in a way I wouldn't expect of a children's approach to art history. It is refreshing and truthfully immersive in rendering paintings as physical spaces, rather than as flat images on a wall. It evokes an honesty to the painted work that is astounding for 1998, and serves as a phenomenal alternative to AR experiences or digital catalogues. This is a work which expects willful engagement, and rewards it handsomely. I wholeheartedly recommend downloading a copy and running this in a VM if you have the slightest interest in art history.

1. Alexander Panetta, “A World of Art at Our Fingertips: How Covid-19 Accelerated the Digitization of Culture | CBC News,” CBCnews (CBC/Radio Canada, May 8, 2021), https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/digitization-culture-pandemic-1.6015861.
2. “Show Me the Monet - Google Arts & Culture,” Google (Google), accessed September 3, 2022, https://artsandculture.google.com/story/yAUh79Qtnpb8bA.
3. Brian Boucher, “'Emily in Paris' Fueled a Frenzy for Immersive Van Gogh 'Experiences.' Now a Consumer Watchdog Is Issuing a Warning about NYC's Dueling Shows,” Artnet News, March 16, 2021, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/immersive-van-gogh-better-business-bureau-1951887.
4. Christina Morales, “Immersive Van Gogh Experiences Bloom like Sunflowers,” The New York Times (The New York Times, March 7, 2021), https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/arts/design/van-gogh-immersive-experiences.html.
5. Jay Pfeifer, “'Immersive Van Gogh' Has Upsides and Downsides, Explains Art Prof,” Davidson, accessed September 3, 2022, https://www.davidson.edu/news/2021/04/16/immersive-van-gogh-has-upsides-and-downsides-explains-art-prof.
6. Anna Wiener, “The Rise of ‘Immersive’ Art,” The New Yorker, February 10, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-rise-and-rise-of-immersive-art.
7. “You Can Now Practice Yoga within the Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit in San Antonio,” KSAT (KSAT San Antonio, August 12, 2022), https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2022/08/12/you-can-now-practice-yoga-within-the-immersive-van-gogh-exhibit-in-san-antonio/.