I beat the main story mode in 58 hours. That's the most hours I've ever put into a game that I could "beat."

And then I played both expansions. I've probably put like 70-80 hours into this game.

And you know what? Time well spent; this game is so zen-like and fun.

masterpiece. i don't really want to say anything else, it's just that good.

i'll just write my favourite audio log here and leave:
I keep having these dreams. Great empty cities, silent roads ---- for miles, the earth from space all dark, not a single light to guide me home. But if some one really did come from another world, what would the earth look like to them? A wilderness? A wasteland? I don't think so. Even after thousands of years, they would see a world shaped by our hand in every aspect of it's being. They would see the cites and the roads, the bridges, the harbors and they would say:
"Here lived a race of giants"
These dreams, they scare me, but they also remind me that we built all of this.

if you love:
- killing people
- exploring beautiful ruins
- inspecting incredibly detailed millenial artifacts
- killing people
- a story that is surprisingly entertaining and has actual good characters
then this game is for you

"Are you telling me I can play the Marble Blast demo and use Blades for 10$ new!?" - Me, four months ago.

Whatever brain disease I've got has progressed to the point where I'm nostalgic for a specific video game console GUI, and unfortunately there's just no coming back from that. They're going to put me down tomorrow. My caretakers are letting me eat chocolate because it's my last day on Earth.

Alright, alright, my reason for owning this is actually a bit more embarrassing. I wanted to buy that Sonic tennis game and saw there was a two-in-one. I like tennis games! So what! You got a problem with that? You wanna say something about how I spend my money? It was cheap and it was new, and I've arguably done worse things. I got drunk recently and bought a brand-new copy of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and that doesn't even come bundled with XBLA Uno.

This compilation disc is actually pretty neat, though. As mentioned, its interface is designed after Blades, the Xbox 360's launch GUI which was significantly more navigable Metro, and an incalculable degree better than the Xbox One's horrible Windows 8 launch interface. It also comes with the Xbox 360 launch video, which left me feeling quite nostalgic, and video previews for Viva Pinata and Shrek the Third. That's right, we got Shrek, he's on the disc, and there's even a demo for Surf's Up! We feastin'...

The main attraction is the five full Xbox Live Arcade games, which includes Boom Boom Rocket, Feeding Frenzy, Luxor 2, Pac-Man Championship Edition, and Uno. It's a bit of a mixed bag, but to briefly touch on each:

Boom Boom Rocket: A rhythm game where you time button presses to techno remixes of royalty free songs like Flight of the Bumblebee and Ode to Toy. The main gimmick here is that successful button presses cause fireworks to pop off. That's it. It's kind of dull and it seems like the timing is a bit off-beat, but I've mentioned before that I have no sense of rhythm, so this is maybe on me.

Feeding Frenzy: The best game I never played on Candystand dot com instead of doing classwork.

Luxor 2: I played this one the most. Weirdly addictive. I once lost a hundred dollars at the Luxor because I didn't know how to play blackjack. Ace is both a one AND an eleven!? The dealer looked at me the whole entire time like I was insane.

Pac-Man Championship Edition: I prefer DX, but this is pretty good! However, trying to navigate Pac-Man with an analog stick feels pretty bad and the Xbox 360's garbage D-pad is somehow worse.

Uno: This is a really good Uno game, but since I can no longer play it online, it's really missing something. I still had a great time playing against the AI, though.

There's also a few demos but most are nothing to write home about. There's one for Frogger, but it scales horribly, almost to the point of being unreadable, the aforementioned Surf's Up is ok, and I messed around in Viva Pinata for about a minute since I have the full game on my shelf. But Marble Blast... Man. Now that's a video game. It's too bad it's been delisted. Criminal, even. Preservation is incredibly important, and there's value in keeping games - and even old GUI's! - around, even if a scarce few want to access them. But the thing is, people actually want to play Marble Blast. We ARE the silent majority. Rise up, Marble-heads!

I love old demo discs and compilations. At the time, they were invaluable for filtering out which games you did and did not want to buy, and I find them worthwhile today as time capsules. You can also find this one for dirt cheap and I think it's worth the few bucks for the novelty alone. I feel weird rating this given what it is, so I'm not going to do that, but I did have a good time messing around with a lot of the content here and it was nice to relive the glory days of Blades.

Metroid's Sonic 2006.

Other M has been on my radar for a while. The indisputable black sheep of the Metroid series, so known for the hate it gets that you'd be forgiven for not knowing it was positively received by critics upon release. I don't think I would've been able to appreciate what this game meant to Metroid fans circa 2010 as I would not have classified myself as one. In fact, my familiarity with the series was limited to Metroid Prime, a game I did not really care for, and which kept me from playing other Metroid games until only a few years ago. Being more familiar with the franchise now than I was, Other M has become a festering curiosity, always existing in the periphery while I play good Metroid games. It is not enough to be told it's bad, I need to know. I even began to gaslight myself into thinking the game is likely just mediocre, that all the derision and vitriol it gets is a classic case of people globbing onto a popular narrative and continuing to blow it all out of proportion.

Yeah, I'm an idiot. So what?

I don't even know where to begin with this game. Everything Other M sets out to accomplish - even on levels that are very fundamental to gaming as a whole - ends in spectacular failure. Its problems are so great, reviewing this game feels like walking into the home of a hoarder and being asked to sort everything out. I can't do that. You have to call in a professional, and apparently if you brought in any critic from 2010 they'd think it's just fine. GameSpot's Tom McShea looking at the wall-to-wall junk, shrugging, and going "I don't see any problem with this."

Like, do I start with the controls? That's a pretty important part of any game! There is only one controller setup for Other M: holding the Wiimote horizontally. I find this orientation to be inherently uncomfortable, and navigating Samus around in 3D using the Wiimote's gag D-Pad caused my hand to cramp horribly if I played for longer than an hour. Favoring uniqueness over ergonomics is an immutable element of Nintendo's greater design ethos, so... Whatever.

You can switch from third to first person perspectives by pointing the Wiimote at the TV, which you'll need to do frequently as it's the only way to fire your missiles. This locks Samus in place, making it very easy for her to eat shit while you're trying to line a shot up, but even more frustrating is how often the game drops you back out to third person. I started to worry something was wrong with my Wiimote or sensor bar, or that perhaps I was sitting too close to the TV, but everything seems to work fine in other games. It's just Other M that I'm having this problem with and given the overall poor quality of the rest of the game, I'm going to just go with it being either poorly implemented or outright bugged. Even if it was more reliable, I think this is a lousy way to play the game and would have vastly preferred they picked one perspective and just stuck with it. At one point in time, Other M was being designed as a purely 2D game, and I will lament to my dying days the fact that some bozo decided it ought to be this monstrosity instead.

Right, so, we've got a whole lot of garbage boxed up and taken out to the curb now, but oh no a whole fucking god damn muscle rack of SHIT has just fallen on me, and apparently it broke under the strain of Metroid's genre defining elements. All this crap about open-ended design and backtracking with new powers is all over the floor and I hate it here!!

Haha just kidding, because none of that stuff is in this game. Other M is less search-action and more action-platformer. All of your major suit upgrades are given to you at various points in the story, making them no longer feel earned, and most of the backtracking you'll be doing simply comes in the form of your objective marker arbitrarily moving around the Bottle Ship and it's three sectors. There's no satisfying sense of exploration here, and though E-Tanks and missile upgrades can still be collected, their presence is only to satisfy some sense of obligation to Metroid's identifiable pieces. You can just recharge your health or missiles when you're low by tilting the Wiimote vertically and holding down the A button, and because ammo is infinitely recoverable, enemies no longer drop health or missiles, giving you little reason to actually engage in skirmishes. In tacit recognition of the fact that nothing is worth interacting with, Other M frequently locks you into forced combat encounters and god do they drag. Most of them are spongy and have brief windows where they can actually be damaged. There's a handful against multiple enemies that like to zip around and collide with Samus, which causes her to bounce around like Brad Pitt in Meet Joe Black. I swear this game was either designed from a place of contempt for its players or Metroid. Maybe both.

However, I suspect the focus of people's dislike for Other M is its story, or more specifically its bizarre, borderline fetishistic portrayal of Samus Aran. Even if you get past the "male gaze" camera shots she's often framed in, her character is totally butchered. The story starts when Samus is called to the Bottle Ship after responding to a "baby's cry" distress signal... Baby's cry...? You mean, like the baby? Wait a minute, if I move the M in Other M it spells... Othmer!! Ah, it's all coming together now.

She's not the only one on the ship, however. The Galactic Federation has sent their own unit to investigate the disturbance, and it happens to be Samus' old squad, still led by her former CO, Adam. Samus has complicated feelings for Adam, which she articulates in very overwrought narration delivered by actor Jessica Erin Martin, whose delivery sounds like she's being stirred periodically from a medically induced coma. The way these feelings manifest in Samus is through utter submission to his authority. Like I said, you don't earn your upgrades, they're given to you through the story, and I mean they are literally given through Adam's permission. Oh, Samus is authorized to use her Varia suit now that she's been forced to run through several extremely hot areas that caused her physical damage? Well, I guess it's a good thing she acquiesced her autonomy to some asshole at the expense of her well-being.

It's all so out of character, to the point where I just assumed this was written by someone at Team Ninja who didn't care for the source material at best and at worst had some very problematic views on women, but uh nope, this is all on Sakamoto. This is a character who has always been portrayed stoically, hardened by her experiences as a bounty hunter and being orphaned. I never got the sense she'd have a panic attack seeing Ridley, someone she's canonically murdered four times prior to Other M, but she starts hyperventilating at the sight of him and it nearly gets someone else killed. Someone who, by the way, has a habit of calling Samus "princess," which should get both his arms broken. She's cool with it, though, and within the context of the game's narrative she finds it exhilarating to take orders from someone.

It is such a rancid depiction, and at several points it feels like she's just being written by a creep. It is also very heavy-handed in its themes about maternity, and it never has anything interesting to say about it. It's all surface level, superficial crap that's no more deep than the title of the game abbreviating to MOM. Even the more emotional beats feel hollow, partly due to how wooden everyone is, and partly because nothing feels earned within the story. Adam sacrifices himself to eliminate the sector the Metroids are propagating in, but like whatever. Get fucked, loser, you wouldn't let me power bomb.

Other M is legitimately one of the worst major franchise releases I have ever played. When I started this review a hundred years ago, I made a comparison to Sonic 2006 that might just seem snide, but I honestly don't think it's that off-base. It may not be broken in the same way as Sonic, but I think it's equally poor in terms of gameplay and how it feels in-hand. They're also responsible for nearly killing their respective franchises on the spot. There really isn't much else I can say about it, Other M fails to get even one thing right and that's astonishing.

I am not a man. For most of my life, approximately the first twenty years of my existence, I identified as one, and it seems likely that unless I radically change who I am to hide behind the aesthetics of androgyny, I will always be externally identified as a man by those around me. To escape a bioessentialist lens of analysis in our society is near impossible -- it is a lens that permeates even my internal self, leads me to question whether I am really non-binary or simply afraid of being labeled as a man, and by such label being condemned as inherently violent, hateful, and dominating. I despise patriarchal masculinity for the ways in which it has defined the world around me, shaping my relationships with my parents, friends, classmates, and partners, continually seeking to shunt me into a role which I have always found repulsive. I am not a man, and yet it seems impossible for me to exist without the baggage of maleness.

All this is to say that my relationship with masculinity and maleness is a strange and complicated one. At once I want to disavow it and reclaim it. To do either, or both, or neither requires that I understand masculinity better, that I understand boyhood better, that I find a means by which to deconstruct the patriarchal and toxic frameworks in which these experiences have been shaped, and that an alternate model -- a positive, feminist masculinity -- must take their place.

Within communities centered around the Life is Strange series of games in the several years following Life is Strange 2's release, a common criticism was often levied of the game that I could not seem to understand. The sentiment was, roughly, that Life is Strange was a series about women -- Max, Chloe, Rachel -- and that to write a new game in the series and center it around male protagonists was a step back. Yet another story about men! How tiring. It took me a long time to figure out why, exactly, this criticism rang so hollow, even though in other contexts I would agree with this same piece of criticism about other pieces of media. As someone who would consider themselves an intersectional feminist, diversity in media is something I value -- to have a series centered around the internal experiences of not just women but specifically sapphic women in a landscape of gaming dominated by stories of men was something that I felt was an achievement by Life is Strange.

In an all-too misogynist media sphere, Life is Strange was a breath of fresh air, a piece of media that aimed to take seriously and capture the internal lives of teenage girls -- one of the most maligned groups in the popular consciousness! -- and for doing such, it received extreme criticism in the public eye. There's much to be said about how Life is Strange breaks down the typical archetypes of teenaged femininity, presenting a cast of young women who at first glance fit easily into typical tropes of the cheerleader, popular girl, nerd, manic pixie dream girl, and then going out of its way to humanize those characters and deconstruct those tropes. This, of course, is a prime reason why so much male hatred was directed at the series -- if you were on the internet at any point during Life is Strange's release, it was impossible to avoid accusations levied at Life is Strange of being an "extremist SJW toxic feminist" game. As teenage girls in real life have been mocked for their patterns of speech, so the same was replicated in the virtual space with an absurd assertion that the regionally accurate slang was "cringe" and stupid. It was one of the games picked up by Gamergate as an icon for how "far-leftism is coming for your vidya." All of this for presenting women as humanized characters in a video game!

But this is exactly why this criticism of Life is Strange 2's protagonists fell short for me -- Life is Strange is not a series about women, but a series written from a strongly feminist lens, and feminism cannot exist as a substantial framework of analysis if it only has room for one of the sexes. Feminism is a radical rejection of the patriarchal norms which shape and define our society. It is an insistence that we do not need the patterns of male domination and violence which have come to be implicitly accepted as natural -- more than that, it insists that these patterns are harmful to every person in our society. An analysis, deconstruction, and positive reconstruction of masculinity is not going above and beyond the bounds of what feminism is supposed to be, but is crucial to any feminist project that would seek to abolish patriarchy once and for all.

This brings us to Life is Strange 2. The core conceit of this game is that two young Hispanic brothers, Sean and Daniel, witness their dad being shot by a police officer. In reaction to this, Daniel suddenly gains powers, and in a moment of overwhelming grief and rage, he kills the police officer, without knowing that he did any such thing. The series begins from this point on, the two brothers weaving their way across the west coast of the United States, traveling from their now-abandoned home in Seattle to Mexico in pursuit of freedom from the ever-looming violent hand of the criminal justice system. There is much to say about the obvious racial politics of this game, which are largely transparent and at times lacking in nuance, but it seems to me that the racial politics of this game are more of a mechanism than anything else. They create an impetus for the brothers to leave their home and define a goal for the brothers to pursue, but the real meat of the game is everything in between those two points. In-between those two points is a story about brotherhood, love, family, and masculinity, one which I believe is often overlooked by people when they engage with this game, and one which I think is an incredibly lacking narrative in much of the medium of gaming to this day. Life is Strange 2 is the rare game that explores feminism by positing what a positive model of masculinity and male connection can and should look like.

It would, perhaps, be too trite to step event by event, or even episode by episode through this game and notate the precise ways in which this analysis is done. It is easy to point to the traumas that the Diaz brothers experience and how those make them shut out their emotions, how they (especially Daniel, but both of them at times) seek control over their life with violence and domination, and how Sean's initial instinct towards patriarchal masculinity alienates his brother. It is easy to note that from the very first episode, we see a complex mix of positive and toxic masculinites expressed in the people that Sean and Daniel meet on the road who help them and hurt them, connect with them and steal them away from one another. I think once you're aware that the game is using this lens of analysis in its writing, much of this falls into place naturally, and I believe there's significant value in revisiting the game to see what ideas about masculinity it presents for yourself. For me to prime others to see the exact same messages that I see would be a mistake, as it is not often that we have the chance to critically engage with pieces of media that recognize the toxic nature of patriarchal masculinity and are interested in showing us a image of what positive masculinity can be. To steal that chance away from you, the reader, would be a legitimate shame.

And yet, I cannot help but express the absolute beauty that I find in Episode 3 when this lens of analysis clicks into place and everything suddenly becomes more clear than it has ever been! In the midst of a journey full of pain and hatred and violence and rage, where the brothers fight not only with the world around them, not only between one another, but with their own internal selves, the third episode is a sudden break away from the patterns that have dominated the lives of Sean and Daniel, the structures that have defined our own lives. For a brief moment, Sean sees what life could be like free of the baggage of the patriarchal scars that he's been burdened with for his own life! It is a vision of community and family and love, where he yields his need to control and dominate his life and allows himself to open to the people around him. He sits quietly next to Cassidy and watches her play guitar. He talks earnestly and emotionally with Finn. At some point Sean and I blur into one. I walk around the camp with Daniel and do chores together and finally, at long last, two states away from his home, Sean treats his brother like someone he loves and respects rather than an annoyance to be cast away. We stop being afraid of our brother's potential to hurt. We kiss Finn. We go on night swims and help Daniel train his powers and it seems like finally we're free of all the suffering, that we've broken the cycle of the violence and estrangement innate to our lives under patriarchy!

But it is a brief moment, and no longer. All too easily the outside world and the norms and power structures rush back in and the episode ends again in violence and loss and rage, a patriarchal norm forced back onto its unwilling victims, and as Sean loses an eye and his brother runs off alone, I weep.

I am not a man. But over time I have come to think that it is impossible for me to extricate myself from the relationship to masculinity which has been foisted upon me by the world. The best I can hope for is to shape that relationship into something positive, something not corrupted by the sexism that eats at every aspect of our relationships to others and ourselves alike. Episode 3 is a snapshot of what that might look like, a haven from the world. It is written with a love of men and masculinity, it embraces of all the positive potential that they have, and it denies the insidious idea that the standards of patriarchy we live under are innate and biologically determined. It is wonderfully feminist, and in its quiet but firm commitment to a better masculinity, it is even a little bit radical.

I am not a man. I do not think I will ever be a man. But if this was what it meant to be a man -- perhaps I wouldn't be so terrified of being seen as one.