It's so funny how I'm giving this "just" three stars when I've spent hundreds of hours just aimlessly swinging around the city while moody and depressed at midnight as a 15 year old. i didnt want to talk to anyone nor have anyone, but i had this game (along with my spotify playlist) to pass the time at least. i'm forever grateful to it for that.

if only the actual game itself was more than just "neat" ! it's definitely not bad by any means, there's an aggressively alright plot, the combat is fun but nothing groundbreaking (even at the hardest difficulty its piss-easy), and i think the music was neat at times even if i can only really remember three tracks out of its generic triumphant superhero orchestra. the standout thing for me was, funnily enough, the photo mode. It's really well-done, and due to being able to enter it during combat and swinging, you have a lot of dynamic photo opportunities. with the filters sliders and the options and all that, there's a bazilliooon really cool/pretty/interesting images I've snapped (which definitely resulted in me having a vague interest in photography as a hobby lol). the best part of the game is definitely the Peter-Otto relationship, and the ending is like legitimately really fucking good, both in delivering cinematic spectacle, and for a bittersweet painful ending that puts Peter through a legitimately painful decision. I'd say the game's a good experience altogether and i'd definitely recommend it to anyone looking for something new to try out on their playstation.

all that being said, my grievances with the game are mostly narrative and world related. i just cannot fuck with Insomniac's Peter Parker/Spider-Man. this might be stupid, i know, but i've been the most obsessive Spider-Man nerd i know since i was like 5 years old, and god it bothers me just how "perfect" and squeaky clean this peter is compared to the peter i know and love (616). he's this absolute boy scout! yeah, i know i know, he probably mellowed out in the 8 years he's been Spider-Man, but god there's no real character tension or drama or anything because all the characters in these fucking games are so polite and nice to each other (unless you count that insanely generic subplot with MJ wanting to be taken seriously and Peter being overly protective).

There's zero bite or roughness to Spidey because it's all been sanded off. I've noticed this exact same thing with Ratchet and Clank (2016), where Insomniac re-imagined a character literally known for snark and turned them into this innocent kind silly goody two-shoes. It fucking bothers me, and I swear in this case it was inspired heavily by Dan Slott's take on Spider-Man, who writes him as this XD LMAOOO LAUGH AT THE SILLYYY manchild (unfortunately this characterization of him dominated the comics for almost two decades, and severely fucked with the perception of the character.)

i also legitimately do not get the point of him "having been Spider-Man for 8 years" when the game and its sequel never really adapts a story that requires Peter being a grown adult. it was done to show a "Spider-Man at his peak", but you don't.. really get that feeling? like sure he has some bullshit overly fancy tech gadgets that, realistically, make no sense for his economic position or the kind of superhero he is and shouldn't be thought about too hard, but besides that he's just as mature as a 16 year old Spider-Man would've been. he hasn't faced off against the Green Goblin or Doctor Octopus or Venom or Kraven or Carnage or Sin-Eater or a ton of other villains yet. again, i'm probably just nitpicking, but when the selling point of the game was an older, more mature Peter/Spider-Man, it's pretty disappointing that it practically resulted in quite literally nothing new or unique in this adaption.

i alluded to it but earlier, it's not just Peter. I also despise Insomniac's handling of MJ. In the comics, she was the confident, bombshell agency-wielding badass who, while still being a civilian, was probably the most important character to Peter. She had her own interests (modelling, being an actress) separate from Peter, and yet her backstory and abusive family meant that, like Peter, she'd put on this bright carefree mask for the outside world, hiding her dramatic inner feelings. She was the only person who fully understood him. I would argue that Spider-Man isn't complete without Mary Jane, and vice versa. Insomniac's game takes literally none of this into account and just inserts a Lois Lane ripoff into this story but with red hair. She needs to be more relevant to the plot, so we turn her into an investigative reporter who sneaks into enemy bases! and we need conflict, so we do the same old story of the hero and the love interest butting heads over how dangerous his mission is and how involved she can be. its executed fine, it works, but its boring and by the numbers, and that's largely how i feel about everything about the game. it works! it's fine! it's not very memorable or unique though!

i actually did like Aunt May in this game, just wish she had more to do. Miles and Ganke were alright, even if it is a bit annoying how everyone's a tech genius lol. I thought Sable's presence was surprising but I appreciated it. Martin Li is an upgrade from the godawful character he was in the comics, but i still wish he had more focus or presence in the story. idk, i feel like the game doesn't really do enough with all the characters and relationships with each other. You had a good thing going with May working for Li, not knowing he's evil, and you could've explored that more! wtf is Norman even doing in these games he's not giving Goblin at all! idk i think the main appeal of Spider-Man is the interpersonal relationship conflicts and drama, the soap opera nature of his stories, and i understand that isn't something that's easy to capture in a game, but when you have all these fancy mocap-ed models with individual pores showing and this humongous AAA budget, i think delving deeper in that direction would've been pretty neat and interesting?

the open world itself is pretty, and it's a great environment to swing through, but you can't really interact with it much. there's this odd disconnect i feel, probably due to how good the graphics have gotten, between "swinging mode" and "fighting mode". it feels like the world's just a cardboard backdrop, even though there's civilians and cars, and i mean i guess that's fine, but the wallclimbing in this game fucking sucks (how is it a downgrade from Beenox's TASM games?) and the "parkour" is pretty useless and just a few glorified animations, and so you sort of feel separate from it all. i'm reminded of how much better it was in the Assassin's Creed games and Infamous 1 and 2. in those games, the way you interacted with the world was the same, both for combat and for traversal, and so you didn't feel the weird disconnect between your character and the world they exist in

there's also the whole NYPD sucking-off this game adores, and the dumb "spider-cop!" running joke. i won't get much into it because everyone has already, and Insomniac's pivoted away from it for the sequels, but i think it's actually hilarious how that even made it into the game, when an iconic component of most classic Spider-Man stories was his frosty relationship with the police. i think it just speaks to how little this game really understands or adapts the character, beyond surface level designs and names (speaking of which, holy fuck insomniac has some awful over-designed tech-ed up designs fetish).

it's not a videogame for "Spider-Man", it's a videogame for the general public's sanded down, fandomified idea of "Spider-Man"

wherever tifa lockhart and vincent valentine go, i'll be there

shitty in a very distinctly cool way. makes me miss when i'd walk into the arcade of a movie theater or w/e in the late 90s/early 00s and chuck a few of my parents' quarters away on something barely playable that looked rad as hell to my idiot child brain. i love how easy it is to cheese the AI with spamming specific attacks, the whole experience is just a flailing mess and it rules. makes me wanna boot up power stone or something, it's been like two decades since i've even thought about games like this, but i know my life is only enhanced by their existence

tifa's design here makes her look like an action figure for pervert otakus, but w/e i like spamming triangle and juggling the bad guy when they're close and spamming tifa hadouken when they're far away and winning. girls are so cool. i like the powers dog that has a red XIII alt and the animorph girl and the guy who shoots rockets out his leg. don't like the old guy with the annoying stick or the yoyo cop tho. i'll play the minigames and quest mode someday maybe, idk just something about blasting through an arcade mode that appeals more to me in these types of games

adding this to my "games that would fucking rule at slumber parties even though i'm turning 32 in a week and all the friends i could have slumber parties with are productive adults who live halfway across the country from me and also i have crippling student debt" list! shirtless sephiroth tho

CW: Discussions of Transmisogyny

The common response to vulnerable niche play experiences like Video Game Feminization Hypnosis (2019), Cave Story Sex RPG 2007 (2021), and He Fucked The Girl Out of Me (2022), is mockery both for the boldness of name and of content. Video Game Feminization Hypnosis is a psychic-design-manifesto with lines like "i dont care about the "puzzles" i just wanna explore weird islands & mess with the machines" and "ive half-joked about my games being laced with estrogen but i wonder how powerful they could be. what if we could use video games to forcefem ppl all over the world" nested as hyperlinks throughout her vent towards a better girly gameworld. Written in lowercase text and using internet acronyms like 'ppl', she speaks with a casual concern for unfettered femme exploration games as a way to potentially rewrite the social code.

It has not been product tested for review, nor has either of the other 2 games mentioned. The problem here is that the culture of 'gaming' itself is unable to step beyond the bounds of product review. Franz inquires into this problem around Cave Story Sex RPG 2007

"Why do we seek to quantify something clearly very personal based on how much it resonates with us?

I think my problem is that I think people are looking at this game as they would a product. Like it needs to have some value to me, otherwise it's not "worth playing".

Nadia, Fewprime, Blood Machine, npckc, communistsister, bagenzo, and [pourpetine] (https://xrafstar.monster/games/). These are in my mind the most notable transfemme gamedevs and their relevant store pages for their work¹. It's obviously not a comprehensive list, but this is my notation for who is the most publicly notable and prolific within the scene. Notice that all of the games on these pages are free as are the 3 games I opened with at the start. That's because transfemme gamedevs more often have to make their corpus free just to get eyes. So what are gaming spaces assessing the 'worth' of a completely no strings attached free simulated experiences? I think its the fact we dare to make people uncomfortable and borrowing a modicum of their time (across all the devs I've mentioned I cant think of 1 that takes more than 3 hours to finish, usually only being around 20 minutes in length at most). My sisters have to cheapen themselves to 0 just to get your ear and its still just met with mockery, harassment, and belittlement².

Even when a transfemme game dev gets the chance of any success at all she is thrown down again. In pourpetine's Hot Allostatic Load (2015) she notes among a litany of pained observations that

"One of my abusers was sent a list of the nominees for the upcoming games festival Indiecade. Unfortunately, I was on the list. I ended up winning an award, ostensibly to recognize my feminine labor in the areas of marginalized game design—years of creating access for other people, publicizing their games, giving technical support, not to mention the games I had designed myself. Instead of solidarity from other marginalized people in my field, I was attacked."

Video Game Feminization Hypnosis beats to a much more Utopian drum. A belief that we can mesmerize people into a more pure goo out of this vindictive rut, create a games made out of love, show people feminine Exits.

I believe in all that. I also believe that my words and those of my sisters are constantly being cast a sidelong jeer of disposability. That I and my sisters are then to blame for when a mobbing happens and not the world's own biases and outrage. This world has made this all quite non-negotiable, no more playing along with the democratic cesspits and hateful comedy routines. Here's to reflecting on the play experience others treat as compost as if its the most meaningful urtexts in the world because to quote pourpetine again "Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain." trash art is my queendom.

I hope it suffocates society before it can flee to their patriarch Arks. As princess put it here 'flood the world and dilute the sludge'.

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1. 2 notable exceptions I know of with pay to play games by transfemme is princess/Girl Software's other games, and the cowriting of Aevee Bee on Worst Girl Games. Also key in on the fact here I'm making no judgements on individual pricing of games as a moral decision.

2. Does not remotely just happen On Backloggd³ if you think this is just a grievance I have with this site you're gravely misreading me and I urge you to slow down your social media outrage use for a bit qt~

3. Although I should not lie, social media sites are remarkably more unreliable habitats for trans people than they initially appear, this place has been a great learning experience of that in my case

hateful women just make the best protagonists 100% of the time what can i say
I need more people to play this. It's a platform fighter platformer... thing? Does platform fighter already imply platformer? Whatever. I bought it because it advertised itself with the fact that its bloodshed makes the game chug. That's gnarly, and not the only thing this game has in common with Drakengard 3.

Games that handle trauma don't tend put the word directly in the title. I was worried it was be on the nose - and it was, but in like... a good way? Half the enemies are straight up angels or the silhouette of Jesus Christ or some shit. The themeage to gameplay is straightforward too; your memories are scrawled on the background of the game's levels, and as you kill more crawling polygonal things, massive blood fountains and explosions of gibs cover up your screen (and those memories), grinding things to a single-digit-fps crawl. Repression by way of catharsis. If I had to make a shitty Tim Rogersian comparison, I'd say it's like Pizza Tower for newgrounds trans girls who like DMC and Touhou 11. To play this game front to back with max gore settings is to willingly fry your dopamine receptors. For like 3 dollars and (not even) 3 hours of your time, I'd highly recommend it. Especially with the replay value of additional runs! Kill those high scores just like you wanna kill your dad, girlie, I'm here for it.