"God created man's back to carry burdens, but to think you want to pile on even more..."

What if a regenerator from Resident Evil 4 had his decaying body infused with a soul and a conscious conscience and a will to live, something to fill the absence in its complex mechanical heart, to give it life in the dirt and let it experience the first-person's recurring pains of birth, growth, lust, love, commitment; the fear, anger, decay and darkness that follows from these things. Life, but never death, because nothing could stop this bio-tin man from following the yellow paint road, an invincible soldier game to do anything for the simulated reali(ties) and fami(lies) he's lost inside his machine.

This is Resident Evil at its stupidest and its smartest, which is, respectively, saying a lot and not saying much at all, respectfully. Like VII, VIL isn't really ashamed to borrow everything and anything it wants to say and do from its own past and its shared past with its brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, cousins and children across generations and genre-nations, channeling media mediums like a medium. It goes without saying that it's a composite, a family portrait, a photo mode of itself and the evils resident within. They were stupid too, but were none-the-lesser labours of love that shifted between mocking you and terrifying you; the fact that something's camp doesn't stop it from eating you alive. All are embraced in the compost of this newly-grown decomposition. It takes a village to raise a game, after all, but the progenitor of the survival horror virus isn't willing to eradicate its parasites just yet. Chris Redfield (a mimic of Chris Redfield in the desert of the snowbound real?) doesn't start smiling until Ethan Winters cocks a 9mm and announces to his God (he has himself down as Alpha in Ethan's phonebook, for God's sake) that he's gonna march backwards into Hell while flipping the bird to the bird-lady... or he would, if he still had his middle finger.

The game is deeply dumb and it knows it. But the beauty of vulgarity and camp and the aforementioned stupidity of man is that it can skirt up against truth just as easily as intellect can, and this is, ironically, how the game shows itself most clearly as intelligent, perhaps above its more literally-minded and literary-minded peers. Virtuous lack of virtue until the very end - I've said it before, but games that steep themselves in darkness should be permitted, from safe distance, to unsafely explore the fears that darkness creates, unpleasant, unkind and unsanitary as they may be. Do you want to experience a contradiction of scenes from your storybook of mental violence and gore, or do you want to L3 sprint without introspection through an eternal funfair of funhouses, simulcra of what you experienced before? Don't worry, you don't have to think about it - it's all still here. We're giant babies confronting the possibility of a giant baby in our home. Do we have the heart to understand what that means?

Also they finally brought back The Mercenaries - that's fucking sick bro

I am called to revere Elden Ring out of spite. I once heard someone I no longer speak to for various reasons say, upon seeing a then new trailer, that they wish FromSoft would making something interesting like King’s Field again instead of this. Now, I was playing the King’s Field games for the first time when they said that, and I happen to love those games a lot, and I certainly want them to make another one or something like it, even though they never will because the games industry is full of cowards. But I also happened to know that this person had never played King’s Field, and were probably only saying it out of a smug sense of superiority. And this made me angry.

Yes, yes, the familiar gang is here. Yet another lowly warrior usurps the eternal cycle. The fallen order, the god-kings, corruption, the moon, the flame. Invasions, summons, messages, bloodstains. Tragic sidequests, Patches is there, and multiple endings. Magic is blue, holiness is yellow. You can parry and backstab enemies. You upgrade your weapons to scale with your stats. You dodge roll and stagger. These are familiar. They are played out, to a degree. And yes, they are not exciting in that old way. But I don’t really care, because I’m a “fan of the genre”. I am enthusiastic about the new things that come from this company, and the genre they’ve inadvertently spawned, and I’m always ready for innovation. But that doesn’t preclude me from finding joy in the familiar. Because it was never the uniqueness that mattered most.

There’s this kind of jealousy surrounding the Souls series. The fans (myself included) view them as special, unique, and precious gems. When something besmirches their name, it is a disgrace, because there is something transcendent about these games that we hold sacred. But as the series has become a prototype, a whole genre sprouting from its seedbed, the things that made a game like Dark Souls special have become no longer so special. How many games can we find that are trying to be exactly like it? Those qualities, whether it be difficulty, inscrutability, atmosphere, even specific mechanics, they’re not special anymore. How quaint does Super Metroid feel now? How cliche is The Shining now? Are The Beatles run of the mill? Is Seinfeld funny anymore? It’s like the old joke: “I don’t get the appeal of Hamlet. It’s just a bunch of famous saying strung together.”

It becomes difficult to vindicate why these games are good. So, we get jealous. We get protective. “No, you see, these games are special. How else could I love them so much if they weren’t? They are doing something different. They are beautiful in a way only I can understand.” Everyone thinks they are the sole prophet of Dark Souls liking, and that everyone else is some misguided mystic. I do, too. But I know I’m fooling myself. I know these games are mortal.

See, I’m not sure these games were ever that special to begin with. I remember, years ago, sitting on a couch playing Demon's Souls, and wondering out loud how they made this game, how they reached something so specific. And he said to me that "it had to have come from someone with a vision". As years go on, I find that statement less and less true. They were and are unique, sure. But they didn’t come from nowhere, sprouting from Miyazaki’s forehead like Athena. They were made by people in a company making a software product. Elden Ring was building off of Dark Souls, which was building off of Demon’s Souls, which was building off of King’s Field, which was probably building off of Ultima Underworld or something, and yadda yadda. Iteration is underrated. I think what ends up getting underrecognized, ironically, is that these are good video games. It’s not because they’re special. They haven’t unlocked a secret to games that no one else can know. These games don’t have to be special to be good. They can just be good. Which they are.

Anyway. I liked Elden Ring. I thought it was fun. I thought it was cool. I liked exploring its world. I liked crawling through its dungeons. I liked fighting bosses. That’s enough for me. And so you might ask, “Is Elden Ring even that special?” And I’m going to say, “Who cares?”

An old woman stumbles towards you with a raised pitchfork in her hands. You stab in her in the face, causing her to stagger backwards in pain. This gives you enough distance to pop her kneecap open with a 9mm bullet, and she falls to her knees in agony. The woman's head is now at the perfect height for you to spin-kick it into the piranha-infested waters like a toxic football, separating from shoulders that gush powerful jets of blood. The sheer force of your kick causes her husband to stumble, tripping a landmine in the process. The mine incinerates the dock you're standing on, and the rest of the woman's family with it; they melt away into chicken eggs and pesetas. The threat neutralised, you pick up your phone and tell your operator the name of this Spanish village is an unpronouncable mouthful. Bullets pierce the screen and you're praised for how effectively the family was slain.

You return to Resident Evil 4 for a lot of things, but I think the paragraph above succinctly describes the core loop that we all keep coming back for on the GameCube, the Wii, the PlayStation 2, the PlayStation 3, the PlayStation 4, the PlayStation 5, the Xbox One, the Nintendo Switch, the PC and the Oculus Rift. The scenario might change, the enemies might change, the weapons might change, the graphics might change, but you are always controlling a baying mob in the cleanest, nastiest, most efficient way you possibly can. Bonus points if you can make it look goofy as Hell in the process.

Playing this right after Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, it's plain to see how this game was originally a forking point between the two series - both games are essentially the same implementation of a core idea, but choose to tackle combat from different angles of genre. At their best, the two games emphasise close management of an advancing enemy pool using a fairly limited toolset that flows naturally into the other aspects of itself: Knife to pistol. Pistol to kick. Kick to grenade. Grenade to egg. The movements feel primitive, awkward and unintuitive at first, but soon reveal themselves to be expertly crafted for natural achievement of a precision-flow state, racking up minor-yet-satisfying hits to keep a crowd under control while setting up scenarios where bigger and badder moves can be unleashed at the appropriate time. Put Leon in a red trenchcoat and I bet he could manage at least a few floors of Bloody Palace.

This replay of the game was inspired by a conversation I had with my younger coworkers last week when the topic of the Resident Evil games came up. As someone who spends a lot of time talking shop to people about people like Shinji Mikami and Hideki Kamiya, it's easy to fall into the trap of evaluating these games as beautiful little puzzle boxes to be mechanically solved and understood - but spend ten minutes with someone who likes Resident Evil because they watched all the movies, and you'll discover that there are actually people out there who think Resident Evil 4 (in its current un-remade form) is as much stupid nonsense as your average Carry On film. I hate these people, but I do understand where they'e coming from - when this game originally came out, I bought it for my brother on his 14th birthday despite knowing he was deathly afraid of zombies and spiders and guns and all that; even worse, he was the type of person who said things like "you wouldn't actually say that" when Arnold told him to stick around. Resident Evil 4 was essentially his worsetest nightmare. I was selfishly buying a bowling ball for Marge, but unlike Homer, I never came to regret my heartless decision. Resident Evil 4 really is just that good.

Being a standalone expansion to Marvel's Spider-Man from 2018, this game delivers more or less the same as it's predecessor. Which for me isn't a bad thing since I really liked the last game. Marvel's Spider-Man, in my opinion, gave us the quintessential Spider-Man gaming experience. So to get more of that sweet webslinging action is great in my book.

Though it would have been nice to see some interesting changes to the game to make it feel more like Miles Moralis' version. They did try to do this with the implementation of the venom mechanic and the camouflage. But the venom mechanic feels a little underdeveloped and I would have like it to be more engaging rather then being a simple damage boost to your attacks. The camouflage is nice but sadly not really utilized since there's not a whole lot of moments where you would actually need it. It feels more like a luxury gimmick that's tacked on to bring more Moralis flavor to the game.

All in all it's a good game! The gameplay is pretty much the same and the story is fine, but I prefer the story in the last game. If you enjoyed the last game and want to swing around the streets of New York again, then this is the game for you! But I would recommend waiting for a sale before buying it.

there are parts that feel stolen right out of uncharted and the last of us that i thought really rocked and worked for a call of duty game.

and then there are parts that were lifted and remixed from old call of duties that felt staid and boring.

by the end i felt exactly as entertained as i felt bored. there is a futurama episode where bender meets God and God exclaims, "if you do something right no one will think you've done anything at all" and that's kind of what this game feels like.

felt actually like an amalgamation of several different mindsets at play to the point it loses all identity. it wants to be zero dark thirty and sicario but it's a game where the cover character wears a skull mask in every setting. it's a game that's like "we can't do anything with the villain because of laws" and then throws them out the window later on hoping you've forgotten that. i've written a review like this before where i've said, as an expert in being a dumb person and a bad writer, i can spot dumb, lazy writing a mile away, modern warfare ii has all the hallmarks that. it's the equivalent of that horse drawing meme that starts of super realistic and in each installment becomes sloppier and sloppier until it resembles a blind child's depiction of a horse. you could extrapolate some political takeaways from this but at this point it'd be in vain because it contradicts itself through its sheer contempt for basic coherent consistently.

ultimately i think despite looking like a billion dollars it just doesn't play any better than any other call of duty. and i think it's disappointing it fails to really remember what made the first modern warfare 2 so good - the commitment to michael bay levels of balls to the wall action (it gets there in spurts but it's almost more of a reboot of the 2010 medal of honor game than the og mw2).

it's fine. it's cute. it kind of has no idea what kind of game it wants to be. there's one too many AAA elements lumped in almost as if they couldn't say no when someone asked "what about stealth?", "what about combat?", "what about a hub world?", "what about collectibles?", "what about side quests and a inventory?". it could have just been a Limbo or Ico esque minimalist linear journey but I guess you can remove the developers from Ubisoft but the Ubisoft from the developers.

I am also just a little sad that it's a game about robots. why feature robots if you're going to humanise them. just use humans. the "lore" just feels childish to me. a lot of Stray reminded me of Kentucky Route Act V, where you're also a cat, roaming around listening to - and soaking in - the lives of everybody in this town. it's very written first, gameplay-orientated second. whereas Stray feels like "okay we got a game where you're a cat, now let's fill in the rest quickly". but hey, they nailed the cat stuff. so good on em. i wish it were in service of something more though.

Agonizingly AAA. Surprisingly racist, even for mainstream Western media. No idea how to motivate a character beyond "my loved one is dead". Bottomless disdain for the player. But damned if they didn't make fighting a robot t-rex pretty fucking sick. The combat is the real selling point, and between setting up traps, capitalizing on weak spots, and carefully choosing skills it made me feel consistently clever.

I can't fathom how embarrassing this must have been to release next to Breath of the Wild though. A game with graphics a full console generation worse than this that nevertheless runs circles around its open world design. Even knowing this was pre-BotW I keep trying to go to spots that look interesting on the map and being crushed when there's nothing there or, worse, it's totally inaccessible.

For as much as I love this game, I can't help but wish they had gone even harder on making a game that completely throws action-packed missions to the wayside in favor of making a cowboy slice-of-life. If I had spent 33% less time mowing down dudes and 33% more time with Mary Linton, 33% more time breaking into a slave catcher's foreclosed house, 33% more time learning about the cholera outbreak affecting one of the game's towns, I'd be even more in love with it. The guns are fun, I like them, but I think their presence could be significantly reduced without feeling like the violence has lost its thematic weight.

Not every game should be like this, of course, but Rockstar proved that they can make something interesting with all the money they pumped into this product, so I can only wonder what would've happened if they tried a little harder to break with convention.