Joyfully tasteless like a massive fart that begins with an explosion of pure chaos, gradually receding as it fills the room with its stench, petering out into nothing but laughter and disgust. I know people get angry hairs on the backs of their necks when others compare video games to movies and use words like “auteur”, but I think it’s fair to say that Tomonobu Itagaki filled a role in the 2000s Gamerworld that was similar to that of Michael Bay’s in the the 2000s Movieworld: all stops pulled out at expense of any pretentious good taste, maximising the potential of computers to delight insane teenage boys worldwide. The inclusion of Playable Rachel in Sigma somehow finds a way to crank the dial on what was already there, allowing you to control a bikini sexbot of the classic Dead or Alive inflatable mold, strutting around The Vigoorian Empire with an iron thong up your arse that makes your walk cycle look like you shat yourself, balloon boobs flailing in wildly different directions every time you land a mechanically-sound-and-tactile Square, Square, Square, Triangle ground combo. This shit is practically gift-wrapped for a painfully horny kid on their 14th birthday, lol. Painfully, painfully awkward to be seen playing this edition, a mortifying ordeal of being known. Imagine showing the tentacle boss to your grandmother! It would fucking kill her on the spot, right? Big jets of polygonal blood spraying all over your shame. Game Over.

Still absolute mad fun to play, though. Don’t get me wrong.

Content Warning for Attempted Suicide, Terminal Illness, Death, and Chronic Illness

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It’s September 2011 and I’m seventeen years old when I try to kill myself. There are two ponds near my parent’s house. It’s like 4 AM. I like to be out this early. Nobody else is awake, and they won’t be for a while. It’s like the whole world belongs to me. I wander around between the neighborhoods, along the roads, and in the fields. In ten years these will be fresh real estate properties but today they’re still farmland. This hour and a half is the only time the anxiety quells. The real world never knows peace. There’s a dread that accompanies every action and every moment; living in that house, going to school, hanging out with my friends (are they my friends? They are but I won’t be able to understand that until I’m healthier). I’ll always have to go back home. I’ll never be able to articulate what’s happening to me. The pressure is too intense. I don’t plan it, but, the pond is right there, and it’s deep enough, and early enough that no one will hear me. Not having a plan is what saves my life. Turns out impromptu self-drownings are difficult to pull off when the water is still and not THAT deep. So, it doesn’t work, and I’m soaked, and grateful to get home and hide the evidence before my parents wake up, but I don’t feel BETTER. I feel despair, still. There’s no way out. I wish I could just climb up the stairwell, out of this. I wish I had the clarity to understand what was wrong with me.

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What do you even say about Silent Hill 2? To say that it’s one of the best video games ever made feels simultaneously obvious and like I’m underselling it, right? Fuckin, uhhhh, Resident Evil 2 is one of the best video games ever made. Ace Attorney 3 is one of the best games ever made. Come on! When we see people talk about old games that they like they’ll so often say stuff like “it holds up really well for its age” or some similar comment that implies that progress is the same as quality. This is, of course, nonsense. I wouldn’t say video games are better as a medium in 2021 than they were in 2001; on the whole and in the mainstream I would say they’re demonstrably worse in almost every way – how they look, how they sound, how they feel. Silent Hill 2 was a AAA game. What do we get now instead? Far Cry 6? The fuckin, THE MEDIUM? We’ve lost everything in pursuit of bad lighting and looking like a mediocre episode of whatever was popular on HBO three years ago. Silent Hill 2 looks great and sounds great and fuck you it plays great too it feels good and even the puzzles are MOSTLY FINE. MOSTLY. Listen I’m saying this is the all time best video game I’m not saying it fuckin ended world hunger.

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It’s October 2012, I’m nineteen and I’m sitting in a business communications class when I get the text confirmation that Sam’s brain tumor is back, again. It’s not the first time, and I know that there’s nothing left to do, he’s going to die. It’s fast, untreated. He’s one of my best friends, and the only person I know from home who went to the same college as me, but we live really far apart on a big urban campus and I haven’t seen him as much as I’d have liked to. Now he’s gonna spend the rest of his time with his family back home. When I see him next it’s at a hometown charity event for his family in December. He’s unrecognizable physically, and he can’t speak. The event is at our old catholic elementary school, in the gym, where in the years since we graduated they’ve painted a giant tiger on the wall. It’s the school mascot. I feel incredibly awkward around him and spend most of the time away with our other friends. I only speak to him briefly, and when I do it’s a stupid joke about the tiger mural. These will be my last words to him. I do know this will be the case, I think. Later that month I’ll be one of his pallbearers. I spend a lot of time angry and ashamed of myself for not being better to him, not knowing how to act or what to say. I’m about to drop out of school for reasons financial and related to my mental health.

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So what DO you say about Silent Hill 2? That it’s a masterpiece? That it’s the most well-conceived and executed video game ever made? That every detail of it dovetails into every other in a legitimately perfect cocktail story, presentation, and play? That the performances, cinematography, soundscape, all of it are untouchably top of their class? That when Mary reads the letter at the end I WEEP because it’s one of the best pieces of acting I’ve ever heard? That if I ever meet Troy Baker it’s ON SIGHT? These things are all true. We all know it. Everybody knows this. It’s Silent Hill 2.

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It’s August 2019, I’m twenty-five and I’ve just managed to graduate college in time to move to a new city with my partner as she enters her third year of medical school. That’s the year they kick you out of the classroom and you start going to the hospitals to do your real hands-on training month to month. I’m job hunting unsuccessfully and we’re living exclusively off her loans, when what seems at first like a pulled lower back muscle becomes a fruitless early morning ER trip (five hours, no results, not seen by a doctor) becomes an inability to get out of bed becomes a forced leave of absence. Without a diagnosis she can’t get disability accommodations. While on a leave of absence we can’t have her loans, and in fact we have to pay them back. We’re getting desperate, thousands of dollars in debt, and I take the first soul sucking job I can find. It takes almost a full year of visits to increasingly specialized physicians but eventually my partner is diagnosed with non radiographic axial spondyloarthritis, an extremely rare condition that culminates in the fusion of the spinal column. We can treat the pain, sort of, but it’s only a matter of time until it’s likely to evolve into a more serious condition, she’ll never have the strength or stamina she had before, and the treatment options are expensive and difficult. Her diagnosis doesn’t even officially exist as a recognized condition that people can have until September 2020.

Suddenly I am a caretaker and everything is different now. Obviously our mood is stressed from the financial dangers, but she’s in pain, terrible pain, constantly for months. She can’t sleep, she can’t eat. There’s nothing I can do. It’s exhausting to live like that. She’s depressed. On good days we try to walk outside but good days are few and far between, and grow fewer over time, and her body makes her pay for the walks. She’s on drugs, a lot of them. Do they help? It’s unclear. They don’t make her feel BETTER. Nobody knows what’s wrong with her. Her school thinks she’s faking, they’re trying to concoct ways to get her kicked out. She wants to die. It breaks my heart. She’s everything to me, all that there is. She has literally saved my life. And I can’t help her. But it’s exhausting for me too. I don’t want to admit this, not even privately, to myself. It is hard to be the person who is leaned on, especially when the person you love can’t give anything back. I’m tired. I’m not angry, and I don’t think I’m resentful. But I’m tired. I feel shame for thinking about it, for acknowledging it. I know it’s silly to feel the shame but it’s there. I do find a job eventually, thankfully, but it’s still a long time before we get a diagnosis, much less an effective treatment. Even after things settle somewhat, it’s a hard year. And there are hard times to come.

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Ever since I first played it as a teen, Silent Hill 2 is a game that has haunted me through life, like a memory. It struck a deep chord with me when I was too young for that to be fair, too young to identify why I could relate to these people and their ghosts. I used to think this was a special relationship that I had with the game, the way you kind of want to think you have these when you’re younger, but the older I get the more I recognize this as part of growing up. Silent Hill 2 doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve encountered situations in life that closely mirror that of the protagonist. I mean, Angela’s story resonates deeply with me despite little overlap in the specifics of our family traumas. Silent Hill 2 touches me – and most of us – so deeply, because it has such a keen understanding of what it feels like to be Going Through It. It is a game that knows what it is to grieve, to despair, to soak in the fog, and also, maybe, to feel a catharsis, if you’re lucky, and you do the work.

I’ve been Angela, parts of her. I’ve been Laura too. I’ve had more James in me than I would prefer. I suspect all of us have these people, these feelings in us, to some degree or another. We collect them as we get older. That’s just part of it. Silent Hill 2 isn’t a happy game, but it’s one that Gets It, and lets us explore those spaces in a safe and cathartic way. It does this about as well as any piece of media I’ve encountered, on top of being so excellent at all the cinematic and video game stuff. But that’s really what makes it what it is. The empathy, and the honesty. I think it’s beautiful.

a more confident, accomplished, and nuanced use of deliberately tedious game mechanics than almost any other game yet made, that will struggle to be popularly recognized as such because it stars mickey mouse and tetsuya nomura OCs, and also because square enix have done their best to erase the actual game from existence and leave only a bad compilation movie in its place.

uses the framework of daily missions handed out by actively malicious older men exploiting the identity crises and ennui of teenagers to explore the simple but ever-present existential nightmare that is Work, the hold it has over our lives and the fact that we're just expected to Deal With It without any reason or justification, as well as the uniquely cruel violence of enforced identity society enacts on the young. all this and one of the medium's best accidental trans narratives. if this had Grasshopper Manufacture's logo on it instead of H.A.N.D we'd be neck-deep in thinkpieces every single day.

the co-op multiplayer is neat but also extremely baffling for a game that is Like This. imagine if Pathologic 2 had a separate co-op mode where the Bachelor, Harsupex, and Changeling ran through the termitary competing for a high score and that's the vibe

Attempting to characterize a website with a diverse community is always something of a fool's errand, as by definition you are making a broad generalization about a very large group of people, which is usually not a good thing to do. However, I don't think it would be remiss of me to observe that, at least among the writers I follow routinely putting out wonderful pieces, there is an interest in examining friction in game design, games that push back against a player rather than yield to them. It's a subject I've been interested in for years, and in my time on Backloggd, I've been absolutely feasting on these perspectives.

Which is not to say I always agree with them. One game I was disappointed to find myself somewhat let down by was perennial backloggdcore crown jewel Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days, which was a game I found to honestly be a little trite and vapid. As an aesthetic achievement it's wonderful, and I have nothing but praise for that side of the equation, but I found myself really disappointed by how ultimately unadventurous I found it's play. It reminded me of Spec Ops: The Line, another game that has much I find praiseworthy in it's presentation, but kinesthetically unsatisfying because of how the game's presentational and narrative ideas failed to transfer over to the play experience.

Despite the claims of many purveyors of the most profoundly annoying and vacuous "critique" ever made of a game, Spec Ops doesn't think you are evil for playing it, and it does want you to finish it, to see the end, which is partly why it remains an interesting but unsatisfying game for me. The same is true of Kane & Lynch 2: while I don't think that game wants you to finish it, exactly, as the basically nonexistent narrative has no direction or payoff and neither does the gameplay design, it doesn't really resist you either, beyond the initial culture shock that comes from trying to get to grips with this presentation. The thing that let me down about K&L2 is that I simply learned to deal with it, and play it like I would Spec Ops or Binary Domain. I think it's a fine game, but I don't really find it terribly remarkable in the same way that I don't get a lot out of A Serbian Film. It's an important step in the development of video games as an art-form, in that it's one of the first mainstream video games to successfully make me shrug and move on the same way I do at a lot of empty transgressive art.

While I am sure there are some artists who are able to derive fulfillment from the act of creation alone and have no need for an audience, I imagine that most artists are like myself, in that they need an audience for their work to come alive. Certainly, when I was making (excruciatingly bad) games more regularly, I wanted people to play them, wanted people to see the end, even when I wrote awful dialogue about how, actually, by playing this game you have fallen into some nebulously defined trap and how you should have simply stopped playing, blah blah blah. If I didn't need other people to see my work, to share my thoughts and ideas, then they would remain in my own head, where my words are immune to the cold gaze of time and the imperfect translation process of thought to word. Most of us make games because we want people to play them. It may be harder to work out why, exactly, we want people to play them, but I know that we do. And those of us who write and post do so because we want people to read what we have to say.

None of this is written with a shred of condemnation. It's natural, and good. But it presents a problem when it comes to making truly frictional art, games that actively do not want you to finish them, games that do not push back a little but eventually relent, because ultimately, most people care about their art, and most of those people want people to see it.

What then, would a truly repellant game look like? A game that truly did not want the player to finish it, to see it through to the end, a game that, in every aspect of it's construction, repelled enjoyment? Let me introduce you all to Taz-Mania: friction embodied, and the ultimate Backloggdcore video game.

I'll save you the trouble of regurgitating in detail the ways in which this game sucks, partly because it would be identical to a list of things that are in this game, but mostly because every other review for Taz-Mania have accomplished that task better than I ever could. Instead, I'd like to draw your attention to the GDQ run of this game where one of the co-commentators claims to unironically love this game. Before I sat down and actually tried to play this, I thought this was just hyperbole, but now...I think I'm with them. I think I love Taz-Mania too.

Preemptive apologies for the navel-gazing that is to follow here, but I've been thinking a lot lately about writing, about why I do it, and specifically why I write about video games and how they tell stories. Professionals in the industry are exhausted individuals who lead thankless jobs and who inevitably try to seek succor elsewhere in the industry or beyond it rather than continue to write guides for Horizon Two Dawn or whatever for GamerCum Dot Com. Why do I aspire to this? Why do I aspire to write my own games, when all around me people who write and talk about games assert wholeheartedly that games are just bad at telling stories compared to films? What worth is to be found here?

What is it for? Who is it for? Is it for me? Is it for you? I don't know. I genuinely don't know. Sometimes I fucking hate this place. Believe me, I have often wondered if I would be happier if I hadn't posted a stupid mean Xenoblade 2 review last year. But it's also given me a lot of joy. Sometimes I want to pack it in. Sometimes I want to write more. Sometimes I feel proud of what I've written, and sometimes I feel deeply embarrassed about it. And sometimes I feel all of these things, at once.

I thought about all of this as I tried to play Taz-Mania. Why was I here? Why was I pushing myself forward through a game that was hurting my eyes and was actively miserable to play? For the sake of a joke? For the sake of a meme?

But I kept going. For a good bit, anyway. Sadly, Taz-Mania defeated me because it just became too frustrating to master. But still, for a good while, I persevered. Partly because I went to the trouble to find a Master System/Game Gear emulator, something I was sure I would never use again, but also because, well, someone wanted to know what I thought about this game, and no matter how much of a joke that was, no matter how serious or why they did that, they still did it. And others did the same and wrote reviews I got great enjoyment out of reading. In this barren wasteland of thought, these people found meaning. They made something out of nothing.

Taz-Mania is not just backloggdcore, Taz-Mania is video games. It is amateurish, barely functioning, and devoid of the qualities that prescriptivists about "quality of art" extol in other mediums. And yet it lives, lives in the words and in the minds of others, breathing life into a collection of pixels held together by tape and code and hope. More repulsive than Kane & Lynch, and providing a truer test of the meaning and worth of video games than Ending E of Nier: Automata could ever muster.

To a certain extent, I do agree with many of those why say that video games struggle to reach the narrative heights of other mediums, but I also acknowledge that those heights are there because we put them there: regardless of the theory and thought behind it, sound as they may be, ultimately things are considered good because we like them, and great literature and great filmmaking and great game design is considered such because we've, consciously or unconsciously, come to some kind of a general agreement over factors that are desirable in a work of art. And to be sure, Taz-Mania doesn't meet any of those factors. But I like it anyway. Because I choose to. Because that's really all it comes down to, isn't it?

Why do I write? Because I want to. Why do we like and care about video games? Because we do. Why do we find profound meaning in Kane & Lynch, in Paper Mario, in Ocarina of Time, in Persona 4 or Kingdom Hearts? Because in play, in investing in these dumb things wholeheartedly and earnestly, we create that meaning. And Taz-Mania is here - will always be here - to remind us that that deep down, no matter what else we might say, this is the truth at the heart of it. Video games are stupid, broken, vacuous, often ugly and repellant. But we love them anyway, and because we love them, they come to life.

Now and forever, we're gaming.

Thanks for the recommendation, LetsHugBro!

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“Life does not have inherent meaning; to say that our lives are pointless and our achievements meaningless is to state the obvious. No matter how grand our achievements or how broad their scope, time turns all to dust and death destroys all memory. But that does not mean we cannot ascribe our own meaning to what we do. It is because nothing has meaning unto itself that we are free to create meaning, to make metaphor, and in doing so reflect on ourselves and our world.

Leveling to 99 in the first reactor is pointless and meaningless. So why do I do it? I do it to express my hatred, and more importantly my disdain, for Dick Tree. I do it to express the camaraderie I feel for those of us who have followed this topic for years only to be disappointed by Dick Tree. I do it to prove to myself that I can persevere. The act is meaningless; I give it meaning.”

- CirclMstr

playing the demo for babylon's fall is a bit like watching the slow-motion death of video games occurring before your eyes. this miserable game, limping onto store shelves covered in the wounds of a visibly disastrous development cycle, is only able to offer a substantially slower, less responsive version of the combat system of a game from 2017, deliberately stripped back and wounded in order to accommodate a miserly loot grind that actively makes the game worse in order to sell to you a season pass, a battle pass, and a daily treadmill running endlessly towards a carrot labelled "the prospect that this game might eventually be fun" kept forever out of reach. it's not just a bad videogame, it's a game deliberately made worse, stripped of all potential to be good, in order to try to sucker more money and time out of you.

this is the kind of game that platinum's ceo wants to be making rather than the by-most-accounts very good Sol Cresta. what the actual fuck is going on at this company. someday there's going to be a tell-all documentary about what was going on behind the scenes at Platinum in the past decade or so and it will be one billion times more entertaining than this dreck

Fills me with a rare feeling. I've played a lot of games in my time - far too many, if I'll be honest. I often find myself playing something others laud as a groundbreaking new exploration of genre or visuals where it only leaves me thinking I'm experiencing deja vu. Cuccchi is one of the recent cases of me playing a modern game and it feeling genuinely otherworldly. Visually, this is unparalleled, I've never seen anything else like it. Even on replays, I find myself stopping in my tracks, just to pan the camera around and absorb what I'm being presented, both to take in its beauty, and to try to understand its composition.
I am so hungry for the further exploration of games as vehicles for concept albums, digital museums or virtual mausoleums.

Cucchi is Intensely reverent of an artist I'd otherwise never heard of; Enzo Cucchi (pronounced "cookie"). His artwork is wonderfully realised, riding the wave of expressionism and shaking its own visual conventions with surprising regularity. Something about the low-resolution rendering direction somehow lends every scene from every angle a genuinely painterly feel. The music is astounding too, remarkably reactive to the player's position in the world.
So naturally, the catch is that it has a certain lack of confidence in itself. One of the central mechanical pillars of the game is the task of finding collectables and avoiding enemy skulls in Windows 95 maze screensaver-esque sequences. The levels themselves are peppered with unlockable artworks by Enzo for you to later inspect via a submenu, which adds some annoying blemishes to the landscapes. No reason for any of this to be here at all, I'll be frank, just because you're a game doesn't mean you have to carry the baggage of one. The heart and soul of the Cuccchi is the exploration of sight and sound, that's all it needed.

The game has recently received an update that adds a few more levels and songs to what was present at the time of writing, as well as a difficulty setting modifier you can use to outright remove the enemies! Sadly, the maze segments remain - and with a distracting sense of emptiness if you choose to remove the hostile annoyances. An imperfect solution, but it's nice that the experience can be tuned none the less.

it'd be way too harsh for me to complain that this still outdoes every other third person shooter bc it had such an insane unsustainable dev cycle but god I still want to! even disregarding the ridiculous amount of ideas that went into every level of this thing, it's still proof of how far a good combat loop will get you

in fact there's so much good game design wisdom here, the games it inspired almost universally took steps to make the core gameplay more frictionless and less restrictive and ended up way less engaging and satisfying for it, I wouldn't change these controls for the world and if the remake does I'll be thoroughly disappointed

final point - thanks to said controls this game is fucking SCARY with headphones on and the volume up and I will stand by that forever, the sound design is neither subtle nor complex but it works so well to instill panic in players like me who don't like having shit behind them