Real Time Strategy games are defined by their relationship between resources and opportunity. In a game like Starcraft, you can only hoard your funds and stockpile units for so long before your opponent death marches down your base. In Pikmin, the unstoppable march of time is your enemy. Try your best to min/max your time in combat, shave a few seconds off your routing and maybe you won't have to waste a day farming onion food.

The part where this all falls apart is in the precision. If I don't feel like I am actually in control of the micro actions, then why should I care about the macro optimisations? Pikmin feels like a survival horror, but in most shooters I know that my bullets aren't going to glitch into a wall and die.

Our sense of space and distance is simply incomplete when we are young. Our relationship to an urban environment is warped by our daily routine - three arcing lines leading from my front door to my school, the shop where I would buy sweets, and my cousin’s house, all held together (meta)physically by concrete buildings and dirt paths. One day, when I was 12, instead of following one of these three paths out of my house, I turned around and crossed a road that went in the opposite direction. I had unlocked an entirely new section of my town that I had never seen before and I could barely keep a hold of where I was, constantly reminding myself, ‘I took a left at the big tree and then crossed the road’ to try and remember my way back. And then suddenly, I find myself somewhere familiar, crossing between two houses that I had walked past on my way to school every morning for the last 900 days without thinking anything about.

When I eventually discovered the joys of google maps and running outside to see if the satellite would see me (despite the fact that there were a different set of cars parked outside of my house), I still didn’t fully understand where I was existing. My house pointed North, so even my pre-existing understanding of my daily arcing paths were longitudinally aligned with what I was being presented on the screen in front me.

The terraced houses in my street each had a garage, not attached to the homes themselves, but were instead nested into the bottom of culd-a-sacs. For as long as I had lived there, footholds had been carved into the brick work. On the flat tar roofs lay discarded glass bottles, sweet wrappers and bored teenagers. A 12 inch gap in 2 roofs perpendicular to each other at one end was enough to make 12 year old me feel like a parkour fiend. 3 years earlier I had made a similar leap between two wooden benches, only a foot and a half from the ground which resulted in me eating shit and snapping my front tooth in half.

When my dad moved out when I was 6 my bedroom in his terraced house consisted of a mattress on the floor and an Xbox on a upside milk crate. This new house faced onto a British A road, with a single tree in our shared backyard, a far cry from the pseudo-urban new town that I had grown up in. But inside the Xbox upstairs was a disk containing Jet Set Radio Future and Sega GT 2002, which came with the console, gifted to me for my 5th birthday. To 5 year old me, the former must have been almost entirely alien to me, the pop art pallete wrapping around a dense and intertwining metropolis, but now 17 years later, I am reminded of those 12 inch jumps I made between garage rooftops and finding my way back home via one familiar footpath.

Every FPS is a rhythm game if the soundtrack is good enough.

Here is Doom Eternal sans all of its intricacies, weapon wheel and abilities; stripped away in lieu of a metronomic blast-beat to make. sure. you. always. shoot. on. time. The enemies are immune to this however and will attack as they please.

The tracks that serve as the focal point for this glorified (demonified?) desktop visualiser blur into one streak - each iconic (or maybe symbolic) vocal performance flattened by un-inspired instrumentation and musical choices - the final track showcasing this discord the strongest. Serj Tankian is fighting for his life while the band is chugging the same power chords as the last 14 tracks.

Not a single 7/4 time signature or triplet in sight. Truly hellish.

I'm really sorry but you can't just make another Jet Set Radio Future and expect me to have the same emotional attachment or kinetic reaction to it. That is assuming that this IS another Jet Set Radio Future but in reality, it is not. It looks like JSR, it talks like JSR but somehow by the grace of god, it is not JSR. The edges have been smoothed off and now the circle fits into any shaped hole. The scenarios are frictionless save for the boss fights which reach the frustrating lows of even the Jet Set Radio Future helicopter fight - albeit with some forgiveness from the level-gods with generally more shortcuts to help you get back to where you fell from. The soundtrack is far too derivitave and can often be offensively repetive. I could just listen to the music 2 Mello has been putting out for the last half a decade and be in a better mood. I will be shocked if we remember this game in 2 years time nevermind 20 and that is a damn shame.