If the original Sin & Punishment is Evangelion, then this is Gurren Lagann: sort of a similar thing, but in a more fan-appeasing/pleasing form; a little louder, brasher and self-aware, a little less thoughtful, meaningful and aware of its surroundings - though still leaps and bounds ahead of its contemporaries.

The price paid for this bigger/badder/better package is a bunch of time spent flailing the dodge button to try and get through ambiguous hitboxes of pure particle that obscure your entire view. At times it feels like you’re the victim of a practical joke by Treasure, playing a part in a parody of their shmup excess and the “faster, more intense” aesthetic choices that ruled anime of this era. The decision to give the player unlimited continues and generous moments of invincibility feels like an outright admission that a lot of this is pure bullshit, but it’s hard to feel bad about slotting in another quarter from your boundless pocket when you’re going up against a pod of cybernetic dolphins who’ve decided they’re sick of jumping through hoops and bouncing balls on their noses. While there’s a few too many bosses here who exist to pad this to a longer length than the original, there are still some really memorable baddies and associated cutscenes - big fan of the one where Isa just starts idly blasting a baddie during his big “rule the world” speech.

I approached this via the Dolphin emulator with some trepidation, expecting that using my mouse as an emulated Wiimote pointer would kinda suck, but I was pleased to discover that Dolphin’s a much sturdier creature now than when I last tried to do this sort of thing in the early 2010s. Playing through Star Successor with half an Xbox pad in one hand and my mouse in another was super pleasing, and I actually felt like some crazed cyberpunk badass... I can now empathise with those sickos who play PC FPS games using the same setup…

right off the bat, there's a binary choice to make here. either you opt for a traditional story mode, or you experience the los perdidos outbreak through the lens of 'nightmare mode' - a feature designed to bring the game more in line with previous dead rising entries. as a fan of the hectic hustle and bustle core to the franchise's dna, in which significant organizational sense and stringent time management were required to succeed, the choice hardly posed a dilemma for me. but nightmare mode more or less revealed an incogruous title on all fronts - appending a time limit to dead rising 3's broader framework shines a spotlight on the pervasive rot at its core. where previous titles succeeded in designing interconnected networks to immersive oneself in, with main arteries clogged by zombies, psychopaths and hapless survivors, dead rising 3 has almost zero semblance of focus. the game's insistence on depicting a city is part of the problem here. willamette was nothing more than a mall, content to function as quaint romero pastiche, and fortune city gets a pass as a somewhat believable gambling district, but DR3 devotes its attention towards depicting a citywide outbreak somewhere in socal, with the titles marketing boasting about los perdidos' size utterly eclipsing both willamette and fortune city. you can chalk it up to the typical western AAA developmental decision, largely in service of traditionally rigid AAA expansion (bigger! better!). im also gonna speculate that it was primarily to shine a spotlight on just how many zombies can exist on the screen at once with this new #tech, and, credit where credits due, there's a lot of em. scores and scores of them can be on the screen at any time, even, with no loss to frame rate on my decrepit laptop. however, thanks to the ease of play this time around, you're rarely put in a position where this is an actively stressful thing, nor is there ever enough incentive to utilize the games sparse strokes of verticality to traverse the environment too much. getting around rapidly in nightmare mode also means using a car a lot of the time, which chokes any interesting decision-making and essentially turns this into a game of going to marked waypoints in a vehicle that's half as slow because it keeps running into cattle. inventory management's barely a consideration since there's food everywhere and you can craft weapons on the fly. nightmare mode doesnt tell you where any save points are because the game was built with autosave in mind despite the mode adhering to traditional tenets of the series regarding save management ie if you die fuck you, reload your last save. the clock is way faster now which makes Doing Everything in One Shot, another series staple, virtually impossible, meaning to complete nightmare mode you have to jettison almost everything that isnt the main story. 'escortable survivors' have been reconfigured into 'stranded survivors' where the goal is to just kinda kill the zombies around them and let them escape on their own. the list goes on and on, beyond what im willing to critically focus on - it's not really dead rising, it's in an incredibly frictional state where it has to bow down to western design convention while simultaneously juggling series expectation which mostly results in some incredibly annoying, gimmicky bosses and incredibly strange design decisions. the end result is total gratuitousness, essentially dead rising as musou, and it's not even an interesting musou. dull as dishwater for the most part.

at most i suppose i should thank nightmare mode for being such a babymode breeze that i wasnt compelled to stick around this world for any longer like i otherwise might have in a normal playthrough. not touching the narrative with a ten-foot pole, a total bastardization of dead rising's playful sense of tone and humor to such an inexplicable extent that i remain unsure how capcom vancouver was responsible for dead rising 2 as well. weirdly misanthropic and tasteless game overall, there's a kind of collectible you can get called a 'tragic ending' where you just stare at a dead body while a piano plays and they make a pun about their death and it's all...lacking in harmony. nick kind of sucks a lot too. part of the appeal for this series for me has been embodying atypical protagonists - dour and often selfish schlubby everymen who overcome insurmountable obstacles with a servbot smile, and nick is just too naive, one-note, and inconsistently characterized for me to be invested in his plight. also jesus christ, this games ugly. something about this game's aesthetic and colour palette was revolting to me, made me have a headache trying to focus on everything, and the UI which bleakly resembles this infamous riff on modern AAA design does it no favours. this 'XBone Launch Title Art Direction', as i've come to call it, really produced some of the most nauseating games on the planet. lococycle, ryse: son of rome, panzer dragoon de puta, powerstar golf, and fighter within...the idea that this game has a sequel that people hold in even less regard scares the shit out of me. if i ever get around to it, dead rising 4 might just be the worst game i'll ever play. impressive!

they made the psychopaths in this game represent the seven deadly sins. fucking grow up

what does it mean to "feel like Spider-Man"? after all, that's the refrain we heard time and time again upon the release of Spider-Man for the PS4, and it's the question that I couldn't get out of my head every time I thought about this game.

looking at the mechanics of the game doesn't really answer that question for me, mostly because a shocking amount of the experience of this game is simply lifted wholesale from the Batman Arkham games with precious little alteration. the combat, the surprisingly present stealth sections that involve isolating a group of enemies with a chronic neck injury that prevents them from looking even slightly Up, "detective" segments that entirely involve looking for a yellow line to follow, even an omnipresent voice in your ear feeding you constant info, it's all as it was all the way back in 2009's Arkham Asylum, mostly unaltered. indeed, these games themselves were lauded at the time for "making you feel like Batman" but not nearly to the same hyperbolic memetic extent as marvel's sony's kevin feige's ike perlmutter's spider-man does for the ultimate arachnid-boy. generally speaking I would not consider Spider-Man and Batman to be characters that share an enormous deal in common outside of the very basic concept of fighting criminals in an urban environment, and in many ways there is an argument to be made that spider-man is batman's antithesis. and yet, somehow, essentially the same mechanics that created an experience that made you Feel Like Batman has made a great many people Feel Like Spider-Man.

the one meaningful mechanic which differentiates this from Arkham (though, maybe not as much as it perhaps should given the zip-to-point mechanic is again lifted completely wholesale from Arkham City) is the web-swinging, and it's a useful point in elucidating what the mechanical experience of this game does. web-swinging in this game is pleasing, stunningly well-animated, highly responsive, and also completely effortless. it's a struggle to even call it a mechanic: it is almost completely on auto-pilot, with nothing more involved than successive presses of R2 seeing Miles swing, leap, run on walls, the navigational experience of Spider-Man swinging through a painfully detailed recreation of Manhattan reduced to a single button. much like Assassin's Creed's automated free-running that clearly inspired the rhythms of play here, web swinging in this game looks fantastic - especially on a twitter clip captured with the patented SonyTM PlayStationTM ShareTM ButtonTM - but mechanically vacuous to the point of non-existence.

comparisons to Spider-Man 2's (the 2004 game, not this, the second instalment of the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise, nor the upcoming Marvel's Spider-Man 2, the third game in the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise) much lauded web swinging are passé, I know, but indulge me for just a moment: web-swinging in that game was beloved because it was a system. It had depth, it had a skill ceiling, it had moves that were difficult to pull off and a learning curve that required familiarity with the mechanic. it was enough to make a game in and of itself, and indeed it largely did because the rest of Spider-Man 2 ranges from unremarkable to poor. i don't know if i would go as far to say that this system "made me feel like spider-man" but it was, at the very least, a systemisation of this aspect of the character in such a way that it made for a compelling gameplay experience.

spider-man PS4 has none of this. it's mechanics are intentionally stripped down to the point that essentially the entire game is about pressing buttons at the right time in response to on-screen stimuli, and I know all video games can be boiled down to that, but Marvel's Spider-Man comes pre-boiled: the illusion it creates is so wafer thin that even a minute of thought reveals the 4K smoke and mirrors for what they really are. contrary to the appeals to the fraught concept of immersion the phrase "makes you feel like spider-man" evokes, I've scarcely felt more painfully aware that I am a person sitting on a sofa, holding a controller, than when playing this. when your entire game is frictionless, there's nothing to hang onto, either.

there is one sense in which the gameplay experience of Marvel's Miles Morales succeeds in capturing the spirit of the character, and that's in how his new powers frequently dissolve tension in the gameplay, with his invisibility offering you a fast charging get-out-of-jail-free card if you mess up the stealth (if being the operative word here) and the way almost every fight will end with an overpowered Venom Blast.

indeed, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales often does feel like a Spider-Man comic, but rarely in ways I enjoy. After tremendous backlash from vocal fans at the time to "The Night Gwen Stacy Died" issue of Spider-Man, Stan Lee (who at this point was increasingly disconnected from the actual goings-on of the universe he helped create to the point that he only knew Gwen was dead when someone at a con asked if she would come back to life) decreed that Marvel Comics should avoid meaningful change, change that might alienate longtime fans or, more importantly, those who wished to turn marvel characters into lunchboxes and action figures and cartoons and movies, and instead only offer the illusion of change. while the obvious response to this is that Peter Parker could only be replaced by his clone, Ben Reily, for a short period of time before the gravity of the status quo would pull Peter Parker back into the starring role, it also had something of a side-effect, which is that as a universe where meaningful change is resisted and avoided, Marvel Comics as a whole has a reactionary and conservative worldview that gravitates towards it's baked-in assumptions and the presumed goodness of those assumptions.

in 2004's Civil War, Marvel Comics sided with the PATRIOT act. In 2008's Secret Invasion, Marvel Comics used evil religious extremist shapeshifting Skrulls who hide among us and could be friends, co-workers, countrymen plotting the destruction of earth as an analogy for islamic terrorism. In 2012's Avengers VS X-Men, five heroes empowered by a cosmic force change the world for the better, curing diseases, ending world hunger, only to have those changes be rejected as unnatural, and eventually are consumed by said cosmic power. In 2019's House of X/Powers of X, the X-Men founded a nationalistic ethnostate for mutants that is an explicit parallel for the apartheid state of Israel and sees this as a good thing.

Whatever form it may take, whatever illusions of change may, however briefly, be affected, Marvel Comics are bound to a reflection of our status quo that is essentially desirable, and a huge amount of Superhero comics are about reinforcing their own status quos as well as our own, with high-profile stories such as DC's Doomsday Clock ultimately being nothing more than desperate appeals to the supposed self-evident relevance and importance of the unchanging status of these characters. All of this does not even mention the aggressive copaganda of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, to the point where Captain Marvel was reproduced unaltered as propaganda for the US Air Force. Mainstream superheroes are always enforcers of the status quo, for good or for ill, but it's when the enforcement of that status quo comes up against depictions and discussions of the injustices of the real world that this becomes most uncomfortable.

There's a bit in this game, once you finish a side quest, where the camera pans up to a Black Lives Matter mural painted on the side of a building, and lingers there for just long enough to feel awkward. I don't object to the presence of this mural at all, but the direction decision here smacks as performative. It's not enough that the building is placed very prominently to ensure you can't miss it, but the game cranes itself to show you the image again, and the feeling of this can only really be described as the cinematography equivalent of "You know, I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could." It's desperate to demonstrate that it knows, it supports Black Lives Matter, but the functional reality of the rest of the game is aggressively at odds with what that movement is materially about.

I knew that the original 2018 Marvel's Spider-Man was in love with The Police but I can't describe how unprepared I still was for how aggressively conservative this game is. The story revolves around Miles Morales, while Peter Parker is on holiday to Generic Eastern Europeaistan, fighting against The Tinkerer and their evil plot to...destroy a product of an Evil Corporation that is giving people cancer. While at the eleventh hour they do contrive a reason why The Tinkerer's plan is #GoingTooFar, for most of the game there's actually no material reason for her to be in the wrong, and Miles Morales - and by extension, the game - is completely incapable of coming up with a single argument against her plan, simply resorting to "it's wrong! blowing things up is against the law!" or the classic "it's too risky! if even one person gets hurt that is too much!" said while Miles gives a Goon a severe concussion.

When I think of what Spider-Man means to me, what it is About, I think I'd describe it as the struggle to live up to an ideal of being our best selves, of always doing the right thing, in a world that makes that incredibly difficult to actually achieve, with our own personal failings and our endless conflicting responsibilities. In that sense, the Tinkerer, instrumentalized into meaningful action against an evil corporation by the death of a loved one, and struggling with how that affects her personal life and the relationships she has, is far more of a Spider-Man than Miles Morales in this game could ever be, given that his job is one of endless praise and assumed goodness facilitated by a hilarious uncritical depiction of the gig economy that sees the responsibility of Spider-Man morphed into a Deliveroo hustle grindset that always makes sure to respect Our Boys In Blue. How can something that loves the Police and hates direct action this much possibly claim to believe that Black Lives Matter?

In attempting to provide an "All-New, All-Different" up-to-date Spider-Man without making any effort to change the underlying assumptions it has about the world in which it lives, all this game does is expose how out of touch and outdated this whole concept is when the illusion of change fades away. Everything about this game is completely surface-level, all a well-presented illusion of Being Spider-Man that breaks the instant you think about it in any way, and you find yourself sitting your sofa, with your expensive toy for privileged people, pressing buttons to make the copaganda continue to play out in front of you.

I finished Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I had a perfectly ok time. I was rarely frustrated and occasionally found it charming and visually enthralling. I liked stuff with Miles' uncle. It also made me feel like everything about this style of game and this type of story had hit an evolutionary dead-end and had nowhere to go but running on the same treadmill, forever.

So, yes. It made me feel like Spider-ManTM.

With the greatest of respect to DotEmu, it’s very funny that years of hype, delays and beta testing has given us this game, which is essentially Windjammers 1 with smoother graphics and minor mechanical meddling. It’s a move David Sirlin pioneered with Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix back in 2008, and like SSFIITHDR, Windjammers 2 is a sequel that serves as a sleeper agent for its 32-bit father figure, a shiny new HD experience that will potentially introduce fresh-faced players to the backrooms of Fightcade and local fighting game communities. The new game plays great, but I can’t help feeling like it is stealing some of dusty old valour from Data East’s chest - so much of this is out-and-out just the original game from 30 years ago, and it feels weird that Disc Jam - the indie Windjammers knockoff - is trying that much harder to bring the Flying Disc Game into the 21st century. Nonetheless - it’s Windjammers, for fuck’s sake. Give it a go.

Have you ever just completely lost patience with what you're doing while in the middle of doing it? Like, you realize suddenly that you would rather be doing anything else than what you're doing at that moment?

Origami King started off so promising. The presentation is wonderful, music is top-notch as it's always been for this series, writing is genuinely very funny and there's a lot of just contagious fun that the game is having with the Mario series. As someone who was burnt by Sticker Star, even when I knew this wasn't an RPG in the style of the first two games, I was still game to try what this game was doing. And I thought I would be able to tolerate the battle system.

But then something happened where in the middle of spinning that fucking ring for the 50th time I just kind of snapped. I straight-up hate the ring puzzle aspect of these battles, it always feels like busy work and for some reason my brain just can't solve them while having that timer breathe down my neck. Of course there's an option to pay for the game to solve it for you, or to pay to get more time, but it's when I realized I was paying EVERY time that maybe my time could be better served elsewhere. Even outside of the ring nonsense, these battles felt so weightless and nothing. It was all busy work and no variety, and maybe that's unfair to say when I only got about 5 hours into the game, but I can't be bothered to find out if it gets interesting at all.

At some point I have to ask why this series bothers with turn-based battles at all. It clearly resents ever being an RPG, so why not just go the Super Paper Mario route and have it all take place in the overworld? The overworld puzzle solving and adventuring was my favorite part of this game, I'm sure they could find a way to build the game entirely around that. Instead, every game since SPM has been like "here's our new nightmare battle system that you'll tolerate!" It's a sad state, honestly, especially now that the Mario and Luigi series is dead, this is the only thing close to a Mario RPG series now. Basically, either give up on the RPG dream entirely or become something different altogether, because I can't stand this middle-of-the-road compromise nonsense anymore.

Remember Space Invaders? Me neither. These days, it’s a game that mostly exists to pad out ‘Top 100 Video Games of All Time’ lists and sell novelty heat-change mugs. So when Space Invaders: Infinity Gene declares ”THE KING OF GAMES IS BACK!” in its opening moments, it kinda feels like that time your drunken dad shouted ”THE KING OF GAMES IS BACK!” while weaving towards the karaoke machine for a frenetic cover of a 60s hit you’ve never heard of. The game goes to great lengths to show you how much it’s evolved, but ultimately it’s an exercise in stripping away everything that uniquely identifies Space Invaders in favour of a standard shmup that seems hell-bent on inducing epilepsy in anyone who’s able to make it beyond the first world. Taito have swapped their king’s crown for a Yankee snapback and squeezed him into some skinny jeans - it would be impolite of us not to give him an encouraging smile and a respectful nod, but maybe keep your distance. The old man is dying.

A small, overlooked link in the 3D-space chain Capcom forged from 1996 to 2006. Essentially a dead-sea scroll or rosetta stone that allows us to work out how the studio progressed from Resident Evil and the original Devil May Cry to its now-revered stable of mid-2000s action games like God Hand, Resident Evil 4, Devil May Cry 3 and Dead Rising; there’s even the genesis of Capcom-offshoots like Bayonetta and Vanquish in the mix here!

Unfortunate that it’s been left to languish in the GameCube’s dusty cupboards for so long - Capcom are unwittingly sitting on a little 4-hour gem here that they could easily wrap up in a PC-compatible bow and market in much the same way as killer7 or Onimusha: Warlords. Lots of talk about how this unfinished experience was doomed from the moment it had to be released on a £40 plastic DVD case in the 2003 days before post-launch updates, but there’s a chance for redemption here on the digital-only storefront. Absolutely worth checking out on Dolphin - a simple 1080p upscale and an aliasing filter over its minimalist aesthetic gives it enough shine to pass as modernity. And you’ll be able to save-state past the one-hit-killshit to focus on what really matters here - boogie-running beats and a mecha called Mister Giraffe.

The fact that this game is put on a pedestal as not only one of gaming's flagship titles but was nominated for multiple game of the year awards and has a sequel on its way that is one of the most anticipated releases of 2022 is something that I feel sums up everything about modern gaming.

Let's start with the positive - Horizon is a stunning looking videogame. I've gone back to my old save file - one I bailed on back in 2017 - on PS5 and I can't quite believe this is a five year old game and not a native PS5 title. The smooth 60fps upgrade is likely doing a bit of heavy lifting but even in the many screenshots I have taken from my playthrough, it is an undeniably good looking game, right up there at the very top of the pile.

That's it. That's the positive.

Christ, where do we start with the negatives? What Horizon: Zero Dawn offers is little more than a visual treat. As an open world game, it is doing nothing more than the stuff we got bored of on the 360/PS3. As an action game, it feels awkward with all of the attacks feeling far too over-animated and taking far too long to give you a snappy sense of control. The stealth elements are basic, barebones, nothing special but certainly not bad. Most of the sidequests are fetch or kill quests. The characters are all generic tropes, from the father figure who dies to give you a motive to the villain you remember from your childhood - there's not a single original character arc in the entire thing. The overall lore of the world of Horizon comes dangerously close to being actually interesting but then spaffs that up the wall by only revealing itself to you via an insulting amount of audio logs or, in two hilariously bad sections, unskippable exposition dumps.

Open world games are extremely popular and everything about this feels so fucking cynical. Skill trees lock away basic abilities because heaven forbid you have too much freedom from the word go. Yellow fucking objects show where you can climb and you better not get any ideas about climbing on anything other than these obvious climbing markers! From the lead character, sub-Netflix "box set" show storyline and game mechanics that are so well-worn that you basically know exactly how this game plays and feels before you've even started it - and this is all entirely by design. You're supposed to know exactly what you're getting in to and that is one of the main reasons behind its success. It's a game for the lowest common denominator. It's a game that doesn't want any friction whatsoever. It's the gaming equivalent of wall painted in magnolia white with a Live, Laugh, Love framed poster on it.

It is the most basic of basic bitch stuff.

I think it speaks volumes that this - the absolute fucking DEATH of the old style of open world game that Ubisoft and their ilk have been milking since the first Assassin's Creed and has been begging for death for over a decade - came out only a few weeks before Breath of the Wild showed up and instantly made anything that treads the same boards as Horizon look like a relic almost immediately.

Looks great though so you know 10/10 GOTY please tune in to the Game Awards!!!!!!