While Im charitable to the fact that this game has First Draft Syndrome, its impossible to ignore how the ugly Brown Aesthetic of late 2000s video games merged with this austere desert looter shooter to form the most rancid vibes known to man. It is so mind-numbingly bare that it almost feels like a surrealist project, some David Lynch psyop where theres just an uncomfortable amount of dead air.

And in some ways thats interesting, its like Borderlands 1 is a peek into an alternate reality. Its a much more dismal, less successful reality to be clear, and this is something that can only be appreciated retrospectively; its difficult to regard Borderlands as the “starting point” of the series when its such a distant relative to what the series is at this point (and really its estranged relationship with the series is the only worthwhile thing about it worth talking about)

FIRST OF ALL my "BUMPSLASH ACTION" game angeline era is getting a demo (not full release) on may 9th...go wishlist it!! I know you like weird action games!! you're on backloggd reading a Dragon View review!! we made a good one!! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2393920/Angeline_Era/

anyways,

proto-quest 64 map navigation (the game gives you these hand-drawn-esque maps that you use to navigate a pseudo 3d overworld), baroque music bangers, snappy sidescrollng dungeoning/gameplay, some lovely sprite and artwork... Certified Good Time. i did use fast forward for the overworlds though too big lol. also there's funny old dudes hiding all over the various maps. strange stuff like a guy trading armor upgrades for 50 apples (what is he doing)

Pretty easy to progress without a guide too, i got hard stuck only once

the game doesn't give maps, but i really loved the dungeons and how they use multi-floor grid-based layouts, but it plays out as a sidescroller. the action and how it has you weave forward and back to dodge stuff is fun. maybe i should play beatemups..but i just love the sword to much.

i like how freaky and hostile it felt walking into a way too hard part of the overworld.... platforming through the mountain areas. side-on platforming with some Z-depth movement is pretty fun.

the damage /exp curves in ths feel pretty Ys-y. It's not really my personal favorite choice but it more or less works

Kind of interesting how much the space of these years were really into the sort of Tron/FC3 Blood Dragon Cyberspace. I think it's kind of "fun" in the way any cotton candy town can be appealing and enjoyable. Now on replay it hurts my eyes every so often, almost intentionally with its awful and absolutely dire random tv-crt cuts.

And that sums up the experience, awful every so often in a disappointing way. When the overall work grabs you it can be genuinely incredible, with desyncing enemies and comboing sequences together to become an absolute fast-and-furious powerhouse that demolishes through tactile precision and great understandings of your gunplay fundamentals. Things like blowing up a stage bomb to turn a few slashing enemies into projectiles that you've conveniently pushed towards an increasingly large shuriken, getting a particular bonus you set up ahead of time, to then use the new speed to rocket up another set of enemies that you then laser point-blank underneath their hides for ANOTHER bonus.

And then the encounter is already over.
What?

Yeah, the game is honestly way too forgiving, way too easy. It's so afraid of throwing particular enemy combos at you or putting too much on you that even its second boss fight will go invulnerable and just stand there staring at you while you take care of a poultry wave first. The real meat is in its aberration challenges, but those kind of pull apart having your own "sandbox" to combo enemies in favor of a pre-determined affair. Which I do personally prefer, but it means that about 3/4 of whatever setup you do with the menuing means nothing if the weapons are different.
But, when you've accustomed to the game's own rhythm, they provide the closest Desync gets to pulling you apart in a very engaging way. When these hardmode levels take away your dash and force you to tactfully make your kills to get back HP before your meter runs out. When you're playing a weird game of "keep-away" with weapons that require getting at least a bit close to do proper damage, because the enemies now decided to explode on overkill. When you've got one hit to your name and a host of smaller enemies swarming on you and there's only ONE way you can stagger them to do damage in the first place.

It all helps that at the end of the day this is a very fun frictional shooter, with devs at a midway point where they don't give a shit what you think but also graft on a rpg-your-weapon modifications because that's a thing now. It's a team that lets you be able to make the final boss a multi-enemy one of your own volition and say "deal with it", and has the least accessibility for its nauseating interface. The moniker "adult swim games" has great meaning here, and that's pretty cool.

Despite Pokemon both being an insanely successful franchise and one that I personally hold in very high regard, I also cannot deny the fact that I’m very much not a fan of its first 2 generations at all. It’s sadly not really a case of a game simply not trying at all and ultimately falling flat due to having no ambition, but the opposite problem, where it really feels as if the game ended up crumbling under its own weight as it attempted to further expand upon where the first game left off without always being exactly clear about what would result from many of these decisions. You’ve got not only a lot of improvements to many core mechanics that served to make things a far smoother experience overall, but a lot of neat, interesting gimmicks and ideas that would become core to future games both to provide further variety and attempt to make the created world feel far more alive, but many of these still feel either very simplistic or flawed in their execution or just don’t work as they really should. While this certainly makes the gen 2 Pokemon games a very interesting case to look at, it also makes it all the more unfortunate when looking through and seeing the amount of potential buried beneath an ongoing wave of bad decisions that caused this to easily become the least enjoyable experience with this series as a whole.

One of the biggest aspects about Crystal that I like so much is the way it feels like it really took full advantage of the hardware it was on, making for a lot of really clever moments throughout or simply more impressive presentation that made things flow much smoother. The proper colour is a big one in this regard, serving to make the game feel considerably more vibrant and generally nice to look at, compared to the monochromatic art of the first games. This somewhat offsets the issue of it often being somewhat hard to tell what you’re looking at from moment to moment, and the variety really does help long-term to stop the game feeling nightmarish to stare at for longer periods of time. The addition of some more detailed UI, with more elements being represented through proper graphics as opposed to lines of text is also a huge help at making things flow easier and just look nicer. This is especially true for the inventory system, which also had the upgrade of being split into different sections so it no longer felt as if you were being punished for every key item you picked up, along with a few other sections to make all of this a far less painful experience. That said, they didn’t fix this entirely either, as the limited inventory space still ends up being an annoying problem later down the line, with the player constantly having to rearrange their bags in order to leave room both for restorative items and the various held items that were introduced in the game. Once again , this hits a point where it just becomes tiresome to see another item lying on the ground, making you essentially hope that it’s something you already had, which feels completely counterintuitive in a game that wants the player to take their time to explore so much of the world.

While the inclusion of held items theoretically was a huge step forward, they didn’t really do too much in this game, with fairly trivial bonuses for the most part eliminating the future strategic depth to the team building aspect of the games. The idea of adding the phone to this as a way to essentially be able to interact more with certain NPCs, contributing to things feeling more fleshed out is another example that ends up falling flat. This is both thanks to the way the player can only have a limited amount of them without knowing which ones would be important to keep around, and also because of the way they’ll make random notifications that appear, having the game reach a grinding halt in a similar way to the day/night transitions of Castlevania 2. This issue of ideas that didn’t see their full potential at all can be seen in many other core aspects of this as well, such as the way Pokemon breeding was implemented so haphazardly in a way that didn’t contribute anything to the game loop, instead allowing the player to acquire certain “baby pokemon”, which were functionally useless in battle and felt more like a poor attempt at providing some more significance to certain ones without realising that nobody would really use these since they’d already have to have access to their more powerful evolutions to acquire them. This adds an additional layer of frustration to the idea of attempting to collect even the majority of Pokemon here, even though it’s not quite as egregious as some of the other obtuse ways in which they lock things off from the player. Whether it’s certain trees that are shuffled along that will rarely give you a special Pokemon, the 1% encounters across the board or the amount of these locked behind the postgame, it almost feels as if the game is attempting to stop the player from even attempting to spend time collecting so much of the new stuff introduced here. This needless overcomplication of things can funnily enough also be found in the soundtrack, with a lot of interesting ideas being drowned out by additional layers of melodies that ultimately serve to remove some of its unique character and intrigue, instead being far messier than they could have been.

The biggest issue this game has however can be found in the form of its mostly awful balancing and the way it contributes to other flaws within this design, aspects which can mainly be chalked up to a few flaws that pervade the vast majority of content here. The attempt at nonlinearity the game makes ultimately muddles a lot of the difficulty thanks to the way that the game needs to account for the possibility of the player fighting a selection of 3 gym leaders in any order, meaning that even the strongest of these still needed to be feasible for someone who’d only just gotten to the halfway point of the main game. This results in only the first of these actually having any sort of challenge to them, since if you beat one, you basically can beat all of them, especially since by the time you get to these other ones, you’ll have become even more powerful. This leads to a dramatic lull in difficulty where everything around you feels horribly underlevelled and the game turns into an act of button mashing through hours of content without any resistance. This underlevelling ends up being a further issue once the game attempts to provide some moments of difficulty, as it often leads to huge spikes in it to the point where even if the player has spent the time to take on every possible encounter, they’ll still likely be woefully unprepared. When the exp distribution is so lacklustre that it’s recommended the player only has a team of 4 or is alternatively told that they can just win with nothing but their starter, there’s something fundamentally off about the way things have been balanced. While Pokemon games tend to be considered way too easy for the most part, I feel like this one is so braindead in this regard with how weak everything is, but in such a way that it can lead to some downright infuriating encounters by the end.

The low level of everything makes the idea of effective grinding a pipe dream as well, with the divide in what’s required for the player and what they’re given being so absurdly large that it’s both unreasonable as a way to attempt to strengthen your current team, and also makes adding something new out of the question as well thanks to how much weaker it will be than the rest of your team for the most part. This effectively reduces playstyle variety dramatically and feeds into a feeling of aimlessness that increasingly becomes a hindrance to the overall experience as time goes on. Much of this aimlessness also stems from the aforementioned nonlinearity the game attempts to provide leading to a much less structured story being able to happen, making the character feel more like a spectator in events just wandering from town to town with nothing much to do, rather than actually interacting with the world in a meaningful way. This all culminates in an overwhelming feeling that there’s no major drive actually pushing you along beyond the sight of numbers going up and the game explicitly telling you that there’s definitely some progress being made, even if it doesn’t feel like this at all. This also makes the game feel rather anticlimactic for the most part, with the villains contributing practically nothing, with no sense of looming threat or stakes making them feel like they have even less of a presence than they did in Red and Blue and making the encounters with them feel more like padding than an integral part of the experience. This is made all the worse by the way the battles were made so slow, with long pauses inbetween each attack, animation, and text box creating a sense of boredom during even the most significant of moments.

With all this said however, the game could have been a very small, concise experience that had some flaws but overall one that felt like a step forward in spite of its many issues if not for the fact that every negative thing said feels as if it’s worsened tenfold by everything in the post game/path to the true ending. While I admire the idea of allowing the player to explore the region of Red and Blue, its effect on the overall experience is so egregiously bad to me that I’d have genuinely rathered if it had a similar idea to gen 1, where it just unlocked an extra cave and then had its climactic moment at the end of it and that was it. The player exploring the Kanto region after making their way through Johto has very similar issues to that of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night’s inverted castle in its sense of total aimlessness and ease. This takes my issues with the nonlinearity the main region suffered from to a whole new extreme by essentially giving the player free reign over an entire region with no set order. What makes this even more problematic is the fact that it’s the Kanto region but without any significant landmarks, whether it’s the safari zone being closed, having so many routes get dramatically shortened, or having so many of the iconic buildings and caves being completely sealed off, this just feels like a gutted version of what was already a relatively uninteresting area to explore in gen 1. This means that for a solid few hours, there will be literally no challenge thrown towards the player at all, as they’re essentially going on an oversized fetch quest to key locations, battling weakling after weakling that would have often belonged in the game 5 – 10 hours ago until they’ve gotten all of these essentially arbitrary rewards to unlock the only worthwhile parts of the game, the fights with Blue and Red.

Despite my issues with literally everything else this part of the game, having the player fight these two is a stroke of genius in the long run, after all, after the player has defeated literally everyone else of note in 2 separate regions, what else is there to do other than battle the former champion and the player character from the first game? It’s made even more brilliant by the fact that both of these actually feel like the logical extreme of the game, with their higher levelled teams that provide a variety of threats to watch out for, rather than being easy to sweep with a single party member. While admittedly the difficulty spike was obscene for the Red encounter, I appreciated the way everything really came to a boil at that point, it felt like the game decided to try and make up for how much time had time been spent slogging through the previous few hours with a truly climactic conclusion to everything, and felt like a genuinely perfect way to close off the game, feeling like a true boss fight as opposed to just a slightly stronger than average final encounter.

While I also have some other issues with this game, such as the way so many bits and pieces don’t work properly, the fact that there are so many places that feel like they serve 0 purpose, and the fact that the lineup of newly introduced Pokemon is lacklustre and weak for the most part, going over every individual issue with this game would take far too long for it to be readable in any capacity. Overall, I appreciate this game a lot for making an attempt at pushing the series forward in a lot of ways and making it an overall far more complex and detailed game, having a ton of niche interactions that add a lot more personality to things, but it still feels so limited in a lot of key areas along with frankly poorly balanced in some regards that I found the majority of this to be a borderline miserable experience unfortunately. No matter how much potential this had, it manages to simultaneously feel light on meaningful content while also being ridiculously bloated, with the technological limitations from the Gameboy making things feel overly clunky, and it all culminates in a game that I’d rather not touch again any time soon. Once again, the optimal way I’d consider to play this game is its HeartGold and SoulSilver remakes, which might have some of the same problems, but overall feels far more polished and well-rounded and the only way one should really play a Johto game outside of nostalgia reasons.

Taipei ➡️ Zuoying (Kaohsiung City)
Duration: 01h34
Train Model: THSR 700T
Train No: 0145
Number of carriages: 12 (1 business car, 11 standard cars)
Number of seats: 989 (66 seats in business car, 923 seats in standard cars)
Seat allocation: 2+2 in business car (4 seats each row); 2+3 in standard car (5 seats each row)
Top operation speed: 300 km/hr
Length of train: 304 m
Electric system: 25 KV 60 Hz AC

Welcome aboard Taiwan High Speed Rail! This train is bound from Taipei, to Zuoying. All seats are reserved. Please make sure you are in the correct seat. We wish you a pleasant journey. 🌸

Slim but unquestionably reverent and adorable. Maybe I'm gassing this up too much but it's nice to see the Trainguy subgenre have a little more meat on its bones beyond polygonal simulations and instead could be secret FMV games - accelerating and decelerating your train like it's a really meditative Superhot or something. Railfan seems very keen to show you a brief look into late-00's rail transit life, right down to explaining the historicity of the locales the line calls at, the specs of the train, even local cuisine!
Looking up the devs of the Railfan titles to find that they are predominantly dedicated to educative tactile train driving simulations, still making use of full-motion video rather than computer generated sims. I dunno man I think that's neat. I've seen people with the Densha de Go joystick but now I want a carriage door peripheral for me to lean out of.

the discomfort zone got too comfortable so we made the comfort zone discomfortable. samus: meet samus

where super dove uncritically into the power fantasy that metroid II (the game with a literal Genocide Counter in the UI) unmasked and deflated, this feels like it's turning it inward against you personally. Your body, Your likeness, and Your autonomy hijacked; Your celebratory past tense role as (repeated) casual annihilationist to reckon with and cower from

it operates as something of a Super Negative Image Metroid: an inversion right down to the uncomfortable, choking grip of the direction. all that clammy ADAMsplaining, those sequestered zones, the redline urgency; everything's dialed perfectly into the exact same channel with uniform intent. even the woozy alien psychedelia's been spirited away in favour of clinical, detached interiors and astroturfed xerox biomes with some of the most appropriately sterile Oops No Backlight lighting on the GBA

and no, it obviously doesn't accomplish the same things as its predecessors, but it's not attempting to. this is a game about lack of control, and altering the format would be akin to breaking the spinal column that holds it upright. fusion's big successes (the pacing, brevity, tonal and thematic consonance, and delicate curation of tension and challenge) are the result of its structural changes. being shunted around a tiny sarcophagus isn't a flaw, it's the entire premise. duh

even without all that though it's impossible for me not to love a game with nightmare, the Profaned Baja Blast Suit, AQA's sunken banger, shots like this, and those absolutely psychotic ridley screams

quite possibly the best SA-X heavy fusion since the sultry sounds of steely dan

outside of the (understandably) on-the-nose coloured doorways nearly every instance of environmental interaction is rich and tactile. thirty years later it's still a wonder to grope and paw at every (Possibly Maybe) malleable surface and leverage every new upgrade toward greater structural manipulation and command

in ensuring how and when are given as much significance as what and where it forms a relationship between actor and environment that bears uncommonly personal patterns and markings as you learn to use Your body as an implement to interface with the world. sidepaths and back alleys that carve Under - Over - Through reshape the familiar thru layered mechanical discovery and shift the internal v external dynamic in turn; mastery of the self begetting exponential mastery of the other

a fitting problem then that the biocircuitry, plunging intestinal mazes, and gloomy dark ambient synthesis quickly become less something to endure so much as to dominate; the dissonance for show, and the brutality nakedly glamorous and one sided. so much of it exists in service to the pursuit of (Your) power, kneeling with its neck outstretched waiting to feel bones shatter for Your gratification. sure, I feel obscenely powerful, but I'd rather feel anything else

it's not hard to understand why sony abandoned epidemic's original title for its western release; this is a massive improvement over kileak in almost every way (primarily because it isn't aping iron angel of the apocalypse anymore)

first, the almost: narratively it tries harder, but i'd be lying if i said that was to any greater outcome. cutscenes are pretty whatever and the localization is so piss-poor that it's often hard to tell what's going on or why you should even care to begin with

the core gameplay though? it's actually fun this time around because levels aren't entirely composed of 1x1 corridors and 4x4 squares! enemy fire is avoidable now and your mech feels equal parts weighty and satisfying to maneuver. the new ability to jet-boost through halls and around corners especially makes backtracking a nonissue and has a certain slickness to it that i'd compare to something like f-zero or wipeout. excluding deaths i logged about 3-4 hours and i could easily see that being cut down to 30-60 minutes on replays due to this mechanic alone

ammo and energy are also handled better - mainly because weapon energy recharges and boost juice occupies its own meter. can't say the boss fights are any more captivating as they're all still solvable by standing still or circle strafing while firing, but they serve more as a health/ammo check than anything else and i'm alright with that

i can't help but wish kileak's body horror elements were improved upon instead of completely abandoned, but i'll still take this over it any day. can sincerely recommend to anyone looking for an unconventional, mech-based fps

"The world once shaped by the great will has come to an end.
It was a foregone conclusion. All is preordained.

If in spite of this you still have the will to fight, now is your chance to prove it."

This is a particularly difficult game for me to write about because I want to greedily compare and contrast every ballhair with the first title’s, just so I can diagnose exactly where my issues with it lie - why a game that is functionally so similar in DNA to one of my all-timers doesn’t hit the mark. Personally speakin, the long & short of it is that Dragon’s Dogma 2 is something of a sidegrade to the original title that distances itself too much from what I found spectacular about it to begin with.

Possibly my favourite element of Dragon’s Dogma 2 is one that could be felt from the moment you first gain control of your character. There’s a palpable heft to character locomotion, complimented by the multilayered textuality of the land itself & the threats of wrong turns into the unknown or slipping off a slick cliffside to your untimely demise - it leans wonderfully far into the concept of traversal being a battle unto itself. As was the case with DD1, being tasked to travel from safety to a marker deep into the fog of war is never a simple request. Goblins, ogres, harpies, and whoever else decides to grace you with their presence are waiting in the bushes to act as regular speedbumps to be carefully considered and planned for accordingly.

Where DD2 slips at this for me is in how little it reciprocates for what it demands. This is a sequel that has ballooned itself in scale to a dizzying near 5x the original map’s size, but hasn’t developed the enemy roster nor the environmental design acumen to make use of it. Take for instance that DD2 has fifty caves strewn around its tectonic world map, and I don’t think a single one is as impressive as one that could be found in DD1. Where the caves/dungeons in DD1 were concerned, there would be special objectives relevant to the overall story, a person you were going there on behalf of who represented a town or group, they would unlock shortcuts for faster world traversal and upon repeat visits you’d notice the location’s role in the world change for the denizens. They would be densely designed so that every corner was worth being scanned to the best of your ability for pickups, shortcuts, levers, climbing points - lending to the almost DnD-esque adventure core followed passionately by the game’s design. Hell, the locales would generally sound and look different too, built to purpose so as to become plausible enough to justify their utility in the world and lend credence to exploring them.

Compared to that, DD2 has shockingly little of this. Its myriad nondescript caves wallhugging the world could scarcely be five prefab rooms tied into a loop to house a few potions, or some equipment you could find at a store. No unique gimmicks or trials, only populated by a handful of gobbos and maybe a midboss as a treat. I feel that Dragonsbreath Tower was supposed to act as something of a callback to Bluemoon Tower from DD1 - it being a perilous journey across a handful of biomes towards a crumbling hanging dungeon that houses a flying peril, but it’s so bereft of pomp and confidence. A truly memetic core routine that made me think less of adventures and more of waypoints and upgrade materials. I want to use a Neuralyzer to remove BotW shrines from the face of the earth. And god why is none of the new music good.

DD2 implies at a big story, but to me it felt like nothing came together. I had no idea who anyone was supposed to be beyond Brant, Sven and Wilhelmina. DD1’s progression from Wyrmhunt -> Investigate the Cult -> Kill Grigori -> Deal with the Everfall -> Confront the Seneschal was great, and throughout all of that you kept up with characters like the King and got to see his downfall. The writing and delivery of the cult leader and Grigori himself far surpasses anything in DD2, despite having very similar subjects. Outpaced by DD1 in setpieces and pop-offs and thematics. There's barely any antagonistic people in the game and once you get to Battahl it feels as though the game trails off like it’s got dementia.

It's a completely different kind of design that, sure, encourages player freedom - but communicates it in this really loose way that I just don't care about. I spent much of my playthrough having no idea what I was doing besides wiping off the blank smudges of world map. What expounds this problem is that quest discoverability is astonishingly low here, oftentimes made worse by restricting itself to AI astrology, time of day, relationship levels (??). The duke could stand to commission a farcking quest board imo!!! I won’t kid myself and say that the quests in DD1 were even a bronze standard, but they worked and communicated exactly what they needed to do while also leaving open ends available for interpretation. But in DD2, they’re just awful, I absolutely hated the experience of trying to clear up Vermund’s quests before pushing Main Story progression and at this point I wish I cared as little as the game does. What need is there for almost all of them to have a “return to me in a few days” component in a game with such limited fast travel, do you want me to throw you into the brine? Frankly the game is never as interesting as when you're doing Sphinx riddles.

Combat’s good enough, I do enjoy how the interplay of systems would present the player with all sorts of unique situations, but even these can and do begin to feel samey when a very slim enemy pool on shuffle. What makes these emergent conflicts even less impressive to me is how I can't help but feel as though the ogres, trolls and chimeras in particular have had their difficulties neutered. The hardest time I had with the chimera was during a sidequest where you had to get the poison-lover to be doused in chimeric snake venom. They're barely a threat otherwise, and can either be chain stunlocked with well-placed shots or slashes, or get too lost in their own attack animations to really hit anyone. Comparing these enemies to DD1 where climbing was far more effective at dealing damage encouraged the player to get real up close to them and it felt like their AI knew how to deal with that. Like when I fought the Medusa it felt like they didn't have any idea where the party even was. I think if the hardest encounters the game has to offer is Too Many Goblins we have a problem. (Dullahan is very cool though)

I’m not miffed no matter how miffed I sound. When do people like me ever get sequels to games they love? I’ll tell u dear reader it’s Never. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is full of wonder & delight and I think anyone less fatigued by SCALE and SANDBOX than me has a home in it. I feel a little left behind, having spent 12 years wasting away in the waiting room rotating in my head the concepts DD1 confidently wields, and its further potential as a foundation for a sequel. A game that was absolutely 'for me', course correcting into sick-of-this-already airspace. I’ll be excited to see whatever news, expansions or the like the future holds for DD2. Right now, though? I think DD1 has a stronger jawline.

Modern Arcade games are, of course, not really designed to be "video games". Theyre designed to be credit-crunching spectacles, meant to wow children with yet uncritical tastes. But as I play Super Bikes 3 while waiting for the text that says my tables ready at the korean BBQ place next door, a nascent thought I have every time Im in an arcade crystalizes into focus: why dont real video games play up this spectacle more?

Why are there so many racing games where youre driving through an "authentic" (but highly abbreviated) Mexican desert and so few games where youre shattering through a Himalayan ice shelf to discover the Yetis long-lost Hidden Forest? All people care about are expensive graphics and yet were not using them to make a game where you drive through a hurricane? What a fuckin waste.

I’m sure the learned scholars of Backloggd will already be familiar with I, We, Waluigi: a Post-Modern analysis of Waluigi, a foundational lens through which we can view almost every video game mascot ever conceived - Ms. Pac Man, Ken Masters, Evil Ryu, Roxas, Shadow Mario, Dark Link, Dark Pit, Dark Prince, Dark Samus, and, of course: Shadow the Hedgehog. But who is Shadow the Hedgehog? Following the tenets of Waluigi Theory, it’s safe to say he’s a copy of the individual shaped by the signifier - a stencil-clone of Sonic the Hedgehog, who himself exists as a reflection of Super Mario, having been created for the express purpose of giving his codemasters a jumping mascot to stick on the box of a video game machine¹. Appropriate then that this black-furred badass lab rat would be called Shadow, existing as he does in the literal shadows of his progeniting mascots. You think I’m taking the piss, right? Well, Shadow the Hedgehog (the game) thinks the same thing I do about Shadow the Hedgehog (the character): that Shadow is just that - a shadow, an unindividual who ceases to exist when Sonic the Hedgehog inevitably moves from the light. And in the year 2005, Sonic the Hedgehog was almost standing in the dark.

Shadow the Hedgehog’s writing team, keenly aware that the 8 year olds playing the game may not have read the works of Swiss semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure, choose to expound this metaphor in a more explicit manner, and centred it in the game’s narrative. Shadow the Hedgehog (the game) begins with a literal Judgement Day, The Creator appearing to Shadow the Hedgehog (the character) in a biblical vision evocative of Exodus 3:3. The Black Doom asks: I created you, but who or what are you? And what form shall you take? Follow my commandments, and you can become as God. (Though unlike the Bible, Shadow the Hedgehog is more interested in getting you to follow the tenets of Collect 8 Orbs than not making unto thee any graven image) Late in the events of Shadow the Hedgehog (the game), it is revealed that Shadow the Hedgehog (the character) isn’t actually Shadow the Hedgehog at all, but in fact an android replica of Shadow the Hedgehog who is imitating the memories and actions of his predecessor, Shadow the Hedgehog. The shadow must define itself in a battle between the unconscious aspect of the self and the conscious ego that does not identify in itself, or the entirety of the unconscious; that is, everything of which a person is not fully conscious. In short, Shadow the Hedgehog is the unknown.

And how does the unknown choose to define itself? Well, this Sega of America-developed video game takes place during the great uncertainty of the War on Terror. Not just in the figurative sense that the game came out four years after 9/11; it literally places Shadow’s mission to collect the Chaos Emeralds in the middle of a war between the United States government (referred to in-game as Westopolis) and an enemy ‘terror force’ called “the black aliens” (the US President in the game always uses this term for them!! that shit is NOT a coincidence baby!!!!). As with his foray into Saussurian philosophy, Takashi Iizuka doesn’t quite trust the patrons of DeviantArt to grasp the nettle of his argument he’s making here, and eventually has to have characters say things like “we don’t negotiate with terrorists!” and “if you’re not with me, you’re against me!”. Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith was released six months earlier.

To tie a bow on the whole treatise, the war is ultimately hijacked by a hypercapitalist/industrialist force - lead by a Northrop Grummanesque Dr. Robotnik - who reveals that Shadow the Hedgehog (the android) isn’t actually an android, but is in fact the original Shadow the Hedgehog (the character) after all, conditioned to believe he was an android replica of himself for a purpose the game doesn’t explain. Presumably the developers trusted the player to digest such philosophical matters on their own time, so allow me to explain the game’s message: capitalism has created your character, Shadow the Hedgehog, a being who can only exist in reference to other things. Shadow is the true nowhere man/hedgehog, without the other things he reflects, inverts and parodies he has no reason to exist. Shadow’s identity only comes from what and who he isn’t – without a wider frame of reference he is nothing. He is not his own man. In a world where our identities are shaped by our warped relationships to brands and commerce we are all Waluigi Shadow the Hedgehog.

To sum up this game in a sentence: Charmy Bee leads an assault on a United States federal prison.

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¹ Super Mario himself is a reference to Jump Man (star of Donkey Kong (1983)), who was in turn an homage to Nintendo of America’s Brooklyn landlord. This arguably makes Shadow the Hedgehog the inversion of a reflection of a copy of a signifier of Mario Segale, a 62 year old landlord.