Deeply quiet and aesthetically beautiful, the original Destiny will never get the respect it deserves. In the years since release, it's grown into a monstrous blob, paving the way towards the live service number go up hell that has ruined Assassin's creed, Avengers, that one batman game, etc, etc. But for just a year or two, before the genre demanded three quest tabs with one hundred green progress bars under each, there was still something special about Destiny.

On release, it was absolutely half a game, but it was still half a Bungie game. There's no narrative, only introductions to each of the visually stunning planets. But narrative is not the same as story. The environments are empty, dead, rich with history but looted and torn apart decades ago, sanded away until all that's left is technology we no longer understand and enemies from societies as fucked as ours. The skyboxes have never been surpassed, even by the sequel. The backstory of the environments, left out of the game in favor of online Grimoire cards for some fucking reason, is told entirely in primary documents from the world. The story has already happened. We just pick up the pieces.

Gameplay is plain, go here, kill three waves, kill bad guy. The bulk of the content players will experience is patrol public events, crucible pvp, and strikes, brute force assassinations of enemy leaders. "Go here with your fireteam, break into this base, murder X commander/monster/imprisoned religious leader." The dialogue is all marching orders, dry asf. I actually like the feel of it. But even I have to admit the mundanity of constantly repeating these missions means the game is duct taped together by its excellent combat and the novelty of experimenting with a new weapon or ability. Raids are where the game shines. Infinitely replayable, highly collaborative, the strongest storytelling in the game despite having no words. Little secrets are hidden everywhere, the environments are the best looking in the game even though they're only in one mission that most of the playerbase won't experience. The intense mechanics have a way of bringing six randos together. One time I played Vault of Glass at age 14 and became friends for an hour with this grown ass man who called me "my ***** flappy from the left side oracles".

User interfaces are unparalleled. The little circle pointer thing you move with the analog stick? Destiny invented that (I think idfk). Even non-interactive ui is incredible. Mathematically perfect lines & graphs & shapes make the 2D cutscenes even more engaging than the 3D ones. The game has a psychotic obsession with symbology and geometry, in both story and design. Meaningless sets of symbols somehow become instantly recognizable. Each activity, location, class, organization, and theoretical concept has some logo built from 2 - 5 basic shapes, and each is just as memorable & distinct as the last. The story is fixated on shapes. Light vs dark, circles vs triangles, ontological opposites. Beauty in cleanliness, depth in simplicity.

It wouldn't last. The director & lead writer left just before release, if I remember right. They were put off by story changes late in development (side note these changes aren't as huge as most people believe. Almost all the "cut content" was sourced from sneaky hypotheticals about things that 'could' happen in their 10 year plan). The composer, the one from Halo, who just created the best score in any game, was fired or left or whatever. The developers that remained would be pressured into turning their game into an actual game, then into a profitable game. The release of the sequel marked the start of the Destiny everyone now knows. Long-form story, constant support. Shit dialogue, infodumps, annoying characters, novel-length lore. Content so worthless they just remove it after a couple years because no one will miss it. Setting the pace for the collective race to the bottom. Infinitely more popular and lucrative than D1, which looks almost humble in retrospect.

The insane polish, style, and game feel absent a real narrative accidentally forms a completely singular experience. In practice, the game becomes some kind of slice-of-life space wizard simulator about collecting bounties and wandering around enemy territory for spinmetal, punctuated by masterful high level story content. Item descriptions share micro glimpses into the world of the City. Guardians kill time by betting on games of go, intellectuals theorize on the nature of the world, someone scrapped your gun together from technology we no longer understand just to kill some time. For some reason these were the things that stuck with me when I first played. Had the original Bungie team stayed on, maybe they would have made the game deeper and not wider, made the mundanity more intimate and the punctuation more frequent. Instead they added more green bars.

Pathologic drags you behind it at an aggressive pace. The day's tasks are timed out in such a way that perfect observation and planning will leave you with a few valuable hours to dig yourself out of your hole of debt or hunger or reputation. Anything less than perfection will have you barely scraping by, and the consequences of failure are brutal. But absent any big fuck ups, there is always just enough time. With the small exception of how youre basically encouraged to save scum to avoid catching the plague and dying, failure isn't some random bullshit that happens. Sometimes bullshit, but never random. It has a presence, you see it coming miles away, you spend every second the game gives you trying to put as much distance between you and it as possible.

The plague in Pathologic has a face. Literally, the clouds of plague juice have faces. I don't know why. Much of the text is "esoteric" (read "Weard ass Russian Shit"), the dialogue and visuals are stilted. Science is magic and magic is obscure dirt poor cult shit, or maybe magic is actually more real than science. There's a lot of spiritualism in the local populace but I don't remember any of them anthropomorphizing the plague itself. But regardless. The plague clouds have big faces. Some of them even chase after you and you gotta put them on skates.

One time I starved to death because I forgot to eat before I went to bed.

A blunt, angry funhouse mirror reflection of the early 7th gen era. 2012, the year of Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Brothers in Arms: Furious 4, Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2, and, of course, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. In a sea of space marine games, and normal marine games, and a year after MW3 and Battlefield 3 probably made more money than God, Spec Ops: The Line released. And it released with an agenda, a secret plan to bait normal people into playing it and then go "Fuck you kill one million american soldiers and then nuke a bunch of civilians cause I said so."

Spec Ops is not exactly about how war is bad, a lot of people get that wrong. 10 years out it seems like the main take on it is "yes game I'm sooooo fucked up for blowing up these children when you're the one requiring it in order to progress." This isn't the point. Its primary target isn't the player; it's other games. Spec Ops positions itself against even the concept of a war game, and it does so by actually depicting war. Eight games in the Spec Ops series, dozens of army shooters in the last 3 or so years, and this is the first to really show armed combat, instead of the weak facsimile that its peers hang propaganda around.

And this is the point of Spec Ops. It doesn't use atrocities as win conditions to guilt you, or shock you, or to be all edgy. It does so because it has to; because if it didn't, it would not be a war game.

No game before Ace Combat: Electrosphere has ever reached total parity between the gameplay and the character's interaction with the world, and no game ever will again. A series of magic tricks, stacking themes and revelations on top of each other, somehow taking transhumanism and fighter jets and deeply intertwining the two. It draws attention with sick planes and immaculate UI, then spirals into an anticapitalist antihumanist terrorist murder nightmare, and then you unlock a new plane thats even fucking sicker than the last one. Because there is one constant in the world of Ace Combat, even in the year 2040; jet planes are fucking awesome, you're always free in the sky, as long as you have wings to get there

Good sequels take the original and twist it into a new shape, reinforcing and undermining everything that came before at the same time. And MGS2 is a great sequel. MGS1, refracted on itself in a feedback loop until it becomes an upgrade, a derivative slog, its own twisted bizzaro world nightmare of itself.

The geopolitics have somehow become more absurd, as it was the only way to make them more insightful. The US develops metal gears. Russia steals them. Every intelligence agency in both countries probably thinks Ocelot is a triple agent for them. "Intelligence" is actually a myth, and if you think you possess any then you're being played, if you trust anyone then their plan is working. Patriot is a bad word. It probably should be. The villains are terrorists. The terrorists are eco terrorists, or are they pro metal gear, or are they anti metal gear, or are they anti American (after all, they are exmilitary), or is it about something else entirely? Who cares what they want or where they came from anyway? They're terrorists (the kind with a capital T). The terrorists' leader is a secret genetic experiment who was maybe designed by the illuminati. Who is also the former president of the United States. Imagine joe biden running around in a Doc Oc suit committing terrorist acts off the shores of New York. That's what we're working with here. (Btw nearly all of this information is revealed during the introductory cutscenes.)

The game feels like such a departure from the cold, dry militarism of the first. It tries to stand out in every way, except for its gameplay, polished to an inhuman level. Even when trying to be cynical, the game can't help itself from making cool & memorable environments, bosses, characters, aesthetics. Names are pulled from Paul Auster stories, the credits end with smooth lounge music, all the rain and the skyline and the politics, its characters all live in New York or lived in New York and it's all so singular for a military action game setting. The credits song is great, but the same could be said for every other song on the soundtrack. There's lots of little things to unlock, too, in the main game or as rewards for completion or whatever. There's an entire new set of VR missions attached, with their own entirely separate soundtrack. There's a bonus skateboarding mode. It's easy to overlook the countless small things this game does right in favor of the monolithic insane psychotic shit that's the staple of the whole series.

Mgs2 is always up to something, always operating on some unseen level that goes one step beyond what it's willing to show you. It's like playing the first game all over again, re-experiencing that moment when you're like "wait why tf is this boss doing literal magic?" It lies to you. You think it's a spy game, but secretly it is another spy game, that is secretly is a different spy game, but secretly it was actually designed to reach through your tv and kill you in real life the whole time. And then the current president of the United States shows up and grabs your junk.

The Last Of Us 2 is a pretty good videogame even though it has gay people and even women in it. People who don't like it are ontologically stupid because I am always right. Except if they don't like the parts that I don't like. Then they are based.

It's kind of incongruous with part I. Where Joel could get fucked up by like three dudes, our characters here regularly get out of situations crazier than even the loudest parts of the first one. The game is overall more weird & striking in its world design. This is a good thing, generally speaking. I prefer stories that emphasise moments by breaking from the usual stark realism of the setting. But when compared to the super minimal, plain, dry storytelling of I, it feels kind of jarring.

Where tlou2 really hits a fuckin homer is the gameplay. It feels as good as it looks. Good environments. Great gunplay. The dodge button. Large and small scale resource management+decision making. Is the knife kill worth it if you 50/50 might take like 3 shots to the face on the way. It's a new kind of stealth. The game makes you FEEL like a skeevy fuckin rat girl. Crawling around the mud and murdering people and their dogs and looking a guy in the eyes before blasting his dick off because you know you have time to scurry through a wall & under a desk before his friends can find out exactly where you went.

The pacing is actually great, there's a steady build to the intensity of the encounters & every horrific beat of the first half is necessary to get players to buy into the second. Where it kind of loses me is the sheer number of characters, almost all with something to say; but unlike number I, II can't rely on physically moving the plot away from them once they've served their purpose.

It's been a while since Last Of Us I. At this point in the Sony Exclusive Serious Videogame era, just about every 2020 narrative-led game takes 2010 arthouse visionary milestone landmark hit Heavy Rain and beats it to death behind a dumpster like patrick bateman & pisses on its corpse. I appreciate a game that's not just satisfied telling a capital-G capital-S Good Story and calling it a day

Battlefront 2 2

I am a whore for multiplayer games that are extremely uncompetitive and look great and are slow and tell a story and awkwardly hang multiplayer matches around a structure that borrows way to heavily from single player design. You might say this is bad game design. Pvp should be designed like a sport -- give people rules, have them go against the other people. You don't play football for the aesthetics. I say, imagine playing a videogame and engaging with it on a level beyond purely mechanical

Ace combat is special because the games start off with you shooting planes to protect your base and end with you flying to space to blow up the top secret super weapon named "Laevatainn" or some shit that's designed to assassinate foreign leaders by shooting radioactive sniper bullets from orbit. Ace combat is very special because of how it builds up to that shit in a really measured and believable way

It's like the metal gear of flight sims ("sim" lol), but also the exact opposite in a lot of ways. An exercise in minimalism, Ace Combat 04 uses the simplest possible gameplay and structure to tell the most satisfying story it can, and also it is cool and fuckin you shoot giant planes and super weapons and stuff. In-mission dialogue, pre-flight briefings, steady power scaling in the gameplay, and the rare cutscene are all used so precisely to make peak in the fewest words possible