When it came to the world of video games back in the day, in their initial stages, things were always going to be pretty restricted. Since most games sold were primarily made on cartridges, not too much could be done to further enhance the experience of playing a video game past the primary gameplay, with elements like story, characters, and cinematics either being used with text boxes, or kept primarily on the back burner to focus more on the game itself. However, that all changed with the introduction of CD based technology, and all of a sudden, video games were changed forever. No longer were developers held back by the limitations of developing games for cartridges, being able to produce much higher quality content, process more information at once, and produce them at a much quicker rate then ever before.

This has been the standard used ever since the early 90s, and while not everyone jumped on the bandwagon immediately, and despite the age of CD-based games seemingly coming to an end, this is how video games have been able to produce much bigger and better content over the years, and not much has changed to keep this line of progression from stopping. However… back in the early days of CD based games, there was one type of game that were quite commonly made on CDs back in the day, which made them seemingly undesirable just for how low the quality on these products can be… FMV games.

For those who are unaware, FMV games are where they take actual “movie-quality” footage of real people, and incorporate gameplay around it, making the events seem more real, and to get you more invested with the game. These kinds of games are still being made to this day, and despite how there have been much better and more valuable products made with this style nowadays, back in the day, they were anything but valuable. If you were to want to see what kind of waste was made using this format, look no further then what was made for the Sega CD, an add-on for the Sega Genesis that was able to play CD-based games. For all of the games that couldn’t just be regular ol’ Genesis titles with some added flare, most of these titles suffered from extremely poor video quality, terrible performances and story from the videos themselves, and extremely confusing gameplay surrounding it, making you most likely give up on the game before trying to properly figure it out. And out of all of the FMV games that plagued the Sega CD, none of them are as noteworthy or as infamous as the one and only Night Trap.

When you take a look at what Night Trap has to offer nowadays, you gotta admit, it looks pretty fucking stupid. With it’s terrible acting, poor quality footage (at least with the original version of the game), and it’s sillier moments that can be seen throughout, most would probably write it off as nothing more then “the funny FMV game”, which would be an appropriate assumption to make. However, back when the game initially came out, it had a bit more of an… infamous reputation. Violence in video games had been becoming more prominent at this point, not only with the plethora of games already out there that could be classified as violent when looked at from a specific angle, but also with newer titles like Mortal Kombat, which made “realistic” graphic violence and extreme kills one of its major selling points. Needless to say, these kinds of games caused a bit of a negative reaction from the United States Senate, with Night Trap being no exception.

Now, is Night Trap really all that violent? Honestly, no, or at least, not in the general sense. As one can clearly see, it is pretty damn goofy, what with the way that the enemies move around, the way they get trapped, and even with how the characters react to them. Although, there are some scenes that did cause a bit of an uproar, specifically with one of the character’s deaths, and while it, again, does look somewhat goofy nowadays, you can kinda understand why kids shouldn’t see it without some proper warning. Therefore, due to this, along with what both Mortal Kombat, Lethal Enforcers, and Doom offered, this lead to the development and creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board, or ESRB, a ratings system that is still being used on video games even to this very day… even though most people would agree it doesn’t mean jack shit half of the time.

So, with a reputation like that which the game carries with it to this day, an outsider would likely suspect that a game that was able to do that should be one that must really be a sight to behold, and one that must still hold up even to this day. However, in reality… it really doesn’t. I wouldn’t consider Night Trap to be a bad game, or at least, not one that would fall under the same hatred as games like E.T. or Superman 64. Rather, it’s a bad game in the sense that it really is the prime example of what these shitty FMV games were like back in the day, with terrible video footage and weird-as-hell moments and acting, barely any gameplay to go alongside it, being needlessly frustrating for newcomers, and leaving you feel empty inside when you actually do manage to complete it. However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to play an experience. I would say this is almost on the same level as something like The Room, where the experience is so goofy, weird, and stupid, that it is very fun to experience, and if you don’t take any of it seriously, you can have a good time with it.

Since this game likes to treat itself like an interactive movie, I feel it is only appropriate that I do the same for now. The story is basically every single generic horror “slasher” film ever made, which was probably intentional, given how goofy it is presented, so it makes sense, the characters are all incredibly generic archetypes of what you would typically see in those films, but there are some stand-outs among the bunch, like some of the girls and Eddie, the acting is, again, pretty bad, but much like The Room, a good number of the performances and delivery of these lines make it much more entertaining, the way that the augers fall into traps is very over-the-top and exaggerated in the best possible way, and it has moments throughout that are pretty stupid, but again, pretty memorable at the same time.

Obviously, it’s not meant to be a proper film through and through, so there are plenty of moments throughout that don’t make sense, and you will constantly be taken out of it whenever characters talk directly to the player, but that was the intention, so I can’t really complain too much about it. And in all honestly, treating this game purely as a film and nothing else is probably the best way that you can experience it, given that the main game itself is all focused primarily on one aspect of the footage, that being trapping the augers. This does lead to one of my problems with the story though, which is more so the game’s fault, but it is still an issue: if you play through the game the way it was intended, you will barely experience the story at all.

Right after getting the instructions on what you are supposed to do, you are thrown right into the game, and you have to start going around and trapping augers immediately, or else risk missing them and getting a game over. However, while all of this is going on, the live-action footage is being played in other parts of the house, meaning that while you are doing all this, you are pretty much going to miss most of the plot. Yeah, you can chime in every now and then whenever nothing is going on, but trust me, if you plan on making it through the game, then there will be very few moments for you to do this, which does really suck, as again, the dumbass live-action moments are the best parts of the game. It’s not a complete deal breaker for those who just wanna play the game, but it is still an issue overall.

In terms of the gameplay, this is where things start to go from being the pretty fun kind of bad, to just being flat out bad. If I were to describe the main gameplay of this title in a way that makes sense, I would say that this is basically Five Nights at Freddy’s before that series existed (I know, I’m sorry for making that comparison, feel free to laugh at me). Throughout the whole game, you will be surveying the house the game takes place in via security cameras placed throughout, looking out for augers that will be creeping about through the night, making sure to trap them whenever you can so that not too many end up infesting the house, and changing codes whenever you can so that the traps will still work. It all may seem very simple, and yeah, it really is, but trust me, whenever you are actually taking control yourself, it is anything but simple.

For the original Sega CD release anyway, you have no idea where any of these augers can be, so you will be constantly switching these cameras around in a panicked rush, hoping to catch them before they escape, and 9 times out of 10, you are guaranteed to miss at least one of them, making you even more stressed out, and rush through the cameras even faster. It is really a test of memorization and reflexes, making sure you memorize where augers can appear, what part of the screen can they appear on, where the traps are, when to set off the traps, and when they actually start to interact with the characters themselves, then that just opens up a whole nother can of worms to deal with. Needless to say, this is NOT easy whatsoever, because if you aren’t familiar with what you are getting into, you will have almost no idea what you are doing, relying only on the instructions that you are given at the beginning, and even then, that may not be enough to fully take the augers down, causing you to have to start over again and again and again, all in the vain hope of maybe, just maybe, you won’t screw up this time. It also doesn’t help when there are plenty of instances where you will encounter moments where you MUST take down a specific auger at a specific point in order to keep going, and if you don’t do it correctly, well then tough shit, back to the start with you.

But fear not, as there is a bit of a method to the madness, because despite how random and fast the augers come at you whenever you play the game, you then start to realize something: everything is all predetermined. All the locations of the augers, when they will show up, what order they show up in, it is ALL set in stone from the very beginning every time. The only randomized aspect of the game is the color of the code that you will need to change it to throughout the game. So, if you want to get a leg up on the game after it screws you over after so long, just look up a guide, follow it exactly as it says, and you will manage to get through the entire game without missing a single auger whatsoever, and trust me, getting through the game like this after I trial-and-errored my way to death many times… it was cathartic, to say the least.

However, while it may be cathartic, this also raises up another issue: once you know everything is predetermined, the game also loses its replayability. If you know where everything is every time, then there would be no point to actually reexperiencing the game again, unless you wanna do so for the goofy-ass story, in which case, you can just look up a YouTube compilation of all the scenes and call it a day. This may seem like a random point I am making that means nothing, but to that, I refer to a title made by the same developers as this one, Double Switch. Gameplay wise, it is almost the exact same as Night Trap, although what sets it apart from this game (aside from everything else) is the fact that all of the normal enemy trappings happen at complete random, meaning that with each new playthrough, there will be a new set of people going in a new order that you have to figure out, which makes things more satisfying, especially when you manage to conquer the challenge for yourself. Unfortunately though, this game doesn’t share that similar quality, and suffers because of it.

Overall, despite it’s extremely goofy and enjoyable story and acting, as well as that feeling when you finally manage to get everything down just right, Night Trap is the poster child for FMV games for all the wrong reasons, providing frustrating gameplay with no true reward for conquering it, terrible visual quality (at least with the original version), strict punishments for messing up just once at specific points, and carrying a legacy that it certainly could never live up to. I would recommend it solely to experience the so-bad-its-good performances and story, or maybe for those nostalgic for this age of games, but for everyone else, then there is no reason for you to come back to this. Although, at the end of the day, no matter whether you agree with me, disagree with me, or you want me to shut up, I think we can at least all agree on one thing… the Night Trap song is a fucking banger.

Game #311

At this point, we have talked plenty about the Sega Genesis and its lineup of titles from the good, the bad, and the ugly, and we have even talked a brief bit about several Sega CD titles and how good they can be when the proper time and care is put into them……… which rarely happened, but you get the idea. So, I think it is about time that we briefly, and I mean briefly, go into the last ditch effort that Sega had in order to keep the Genesis alive throughout the mid-90s, the Sega 32X. Much like the Sega CD, this was an add-on for the Sega Genesis that was meant to be a placeholder for Sega fans before the Sega Saturn came out, allowing them to play 32-bit games straight from their Sega Genesis. However, as you would expect, this didn’t really work out well at all, as not only were there only 40 games made for this system, which is practically nothing compared to almost every other video game system out there, but the games that were released onto the thing really weren’t all that special, with a good handful of them even requiring you to need both the 32X AND the Sega CD in order to play it with! But hey, at least some noteworthy games came out for it, so we may as well go ahead and cover what is definitely the most noteworthy game out of those 40 to choose from, Knuckles’ Chaotix.

Much like with Tails’ Skypatrol, this is the first and only time that Knuckles managed to get a starring role in his own game, with most people probably not even knowing about this thing existing, considering that it is one of the only Sonic games from this era to never be ported onto anything else or included on any sort of collection pack. It is a shame too, especially considering how many other garbage Sonic games have managed to get the port treatment, and back when I first discovered that this was a thing, I was curious myself as to how it turned out. The fact that it was a game starring Knuckles was enough to convince me to give it a shot, but I at least hoped it was on the same level of quality as something like Sonic CD, where I would say it is the only reason you would wanna get a Sega 32X. So, I loaded up a totally-legal emulator to play the game on, and I can certainly say that it is, indeed, a video game. It does what it does well enough, and I’m sure that big Sonic fans would have a good enough time with this, but it definitely has plenty of big issues holding it back, making for what I would consider to be a “whatever” game and nothing more then that.

The story is typical for that of any Sonic game, where on a mysterious island, the evil Dr. Robotnik and his loyal servant Metal Sonic set out to find all of the mythical Chaos Rings in order to take over the world, but when Knuckles hears about this happening, he just can’t have that shit, so he assembles the Chaotix, consisting of him, Vector the Crocodile, Espio the Chameleon, Charmy the Bee, and Mighty the Armadillo, to head on out to this mysterious island themselves and stop Robotnik from doing the evil things he usually does. It’s a Sonic game, so you know exactly what you are going to get from a story like this, but it is cool seeing the introduction of the Chaotix, who would go onto being recurring characters throughout the rest of the series………. well, except for Mighty, who is probably dead in a ditch somewhere.

The graphics are great, looking about as vibrant and colorful as any other Sonic game that was released around that time, even more so given what the system is running on, and they even show off some of them fancy-schmancy graphics they have their with sprites changing sizes and all that, so that’s pretty cool, the music is solid enough, having plenty of energetic and wonderful tunes to listen to while you try to blaze around at the speed of sound, although it isn’t gonna come close to the quality of some tracks from other Sonic games despite its quality, and the gameplay/control is, for the most part, typical of what you would see in a Sonic game, with there definitely being the foundation for yet another great entry in this series in here somewhere, but……….. hoo boy.......

The game is a 2D platformer, where you take control of two of any of the characters I just previously mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago, including some other joke characters that Sega included in there just to fuck with you, go through a set of six different zones in whatever order the game decides you will go through them in, defeat plenty of enemies as you fly and bounce through all over the place with your Chaotix powers, gather plenty of different powerups to assist you along the way in some of the most ridiculous ways that you could possibly imagine, locate all six of the Chaos Rings so that you can get the good ending of the game so that you don’t feel like a pathetic piece of shit, and take on plenty of bosses that can range from either being generally easy to being just as unmanageable as the game itself is most of the time. What we got here is mostly your typical Sonic adventure, except with plenty of wrenches thrown into the mix to change things up, and while some of these wrenches manage to turn those bolts enough to where it makes the game a little more fun, those other wrenches are turning some other bolts that I would much rather not be there at all.

To get the good stuff out of the way first, the amount of original stuff this game has in it compared to plenty of the other games in the series is quite impressive, from the amount of characters you can play as to the powerups that you can get, each one being somewhat different then what you have ever seen before, and it is pretty fun messing around with all of these different things to see what does what and what works best for the adventure ahead. It’s especially sweet whenever you find those characters and powerups that work just wonderfully for you, such as the case with Charmy the Bee, who is RIDICULOUS in this game, being able to fly around all over the place and pretty much snap the entire game in half. Kinda renders the entire main gimmick of the game mute at the end of the day, but…… sigh, we will get to that in just a second.

What I also liked about this game was the bonus and special stages that you could find in the game. Much like Sonic 3 & Knuckles, you can find plenty of big rings hidden throughout the stages, and these will take you to a bonus game where you are falling down a giant corridor, hitting all of these different blocks with goodies in them before you exit the stage. It is a pretty simple concept, not having as much interactability as the bonus stages from Sonic 3 & Knuckles, but it is simple and manageable enough to where I am still able to enjoy it all the same, and get plenty of helpful goodies along the way. But of course, we can’t forget about the main Special Stages, which you get to by getting 50 rings and jumping into the giant rings at the end of the stages, and these stages are pretty much 3D versions of the Special Stages from Sonic Tw- NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO................................ ok, to be fair, they aren’t as bad as the ones in Sonic 2, with these ones being a lot more open, manageable, and instead of needing to get a bunch of rings, you instead just have to collect a few of the blue spheres again. This can be a bit frustrating at times, especially when it comes to some of the later special stages, but they didn’t manage to give me as much shit as those other stages, so I will gladly take these any day of the week over those.

But anyways, now that we all that out of the way, we may as well get to the stuff that I DON’T like in this game, and they are some pretty big parts of it to, so let’s start off with the main gimmick of the game: the Bound Rings. Throughout the entire game, you will be permanently stapled to another person, who you can swap out with someone else at these stations you find in the stages, but no matter who you play with, you are stuck with them through these rings. With these rings, you are meant to propel yourself forward and backwards with your partner, using your momentum to get you around to specific areas and to get through the stages, with you also being able to perform specific actions at certain parts where one of you will be temporarily stuck in place, while your partner will be spinning around trying to help you proceed forward. This, if you ask me, is what ultimately kills this entire game for me.

I don’t hate this idea on paper, as I feel if properly managed, this could make for a very interesting mechanic that could be very fun to fuck around with. However, when it comes to this game, it does NOT work at all in your favor in the slightest. It feels so fucking awkward to do anything in this set up, as you will either be completely halted trying to get yourself moving again, which is definitely what you should not be at all in a SONIC game, or you will be yanked around all over the place, flying around at the speed of sound, not being able to control yourself, and just begging for the end of the stage to be around the corner so that you can just get a move on. Sure, it isn’t as bad as how I am describing it in parts, but trust me, when you actually try this game out for yourself, you can feel how broken this shit is, and not in a good way, making it way more frustrating to play as a result, and can be the one thing that will decide whether or not you will enjoy this game.

What also doesn’t help this out at all are the levels themselves, as they are also pretty poor as well. Most of these levels are built in the way that you would typically expect for a Sonic level to be built like, which would usually be a good thing in most cases, but this isn’t a normal Sonic game, and as such, it suffers as a result. You will have to fight with the level design in many instances while also fighting with the Bound Rings, which can make it so that some of the levels feel like mazes, not sure of where you need to go in order to be done with this shit quicker. It just goes to prove even more that a gimmick like this simply does not work for a Sonic game, as it expects you to go about this in a way that you would usually do so in your average game in this series, minus a few sections here and there, and it just makes things all the more difficult as a result. Thankfully, there are some levels that don’t suffer from this too much, but a good amount of them do, and it can make for a very unsatisfying journey as a result of this.

Overall, despite some pretty great visuals, music, characters to mess around with, and special/bonus stages to try out, I just simply wasn’t able to get too into Knuckles’ Chaotix as a whole, with the Boun Rings making doing anything in this game much more stressful and annoying then it needs to be, making for what I can only say is an ok game at the end of the day, and nothing more. I would recommend this game for those who are huge Sonic fans, as well as those who don’t mind dealing with gimmicks like this in one of these games, because while I certainly wasn’t able to enjoy it that much, you could probably get more out of it then I could. Or maybe not, but hey, you won’t really know for yourself unless you try it out. But hey, if I will give the game any sort of credit whatsoever, I will say that it was at least one of the most memorable games from the entire 32X library. I mean hell, what other games do they have on here, anyway? Some Spider-Man game, a random shmup, an FPS or two here or there, and of course, how can we forget everyone’s favorite game of all time!…………. Slam City with Scottie Pippen.

Game #605

what if… racism was bad? but what if… hating racism too much… was also bad? wish roger ebert was here to see this… he’d understand just how Important this game is

…I guess, on that point, it’s always interesting to me what games get put on a pedestal — what, according to Gamers, ‘proves’ that games can be art. Every few years it always seems like something comes out that’s immediately lauded for pushing the medium forward, for being more than just something where you press the buttons to run and jump, for really showing just what gaming can be… and they’re usually all triple-A western franchise titles, exorbitantly priced, and being touted as such by more mainstream publications — the ones that don’t generally cover games that don’t have a marketing budget or pre-existing hype behind them. No judgment towards any of those games, of course, I’ve yet to play any of them, but it seems as if the argument is more as to whether mainstream games can be art — whether or not we can make Roger Ebert a Gamer. There’s so many cool games out there that, to some extent have already proved what this medium is capable of, but to some extent, it's always been a measure of self-validation more than it’s ever been a desire to broaden one’s horizons. It’s kind of like those weird Gaylor Swift conspiracy theorists: why listen to an actual LGBT artist when I can instead pretend my favourite white woman actually stands for something? Why leave my comfort zone when I already have the validation I want?

What personally bugs me is that a lot of what gets pushed forward as 'prestige,' I feel, doesn’t truly take advantage of what the medium truly offers, or, as is often the case, are actively scared of letting you actually play the game. There are so many cool things you can do, so many ways you could use game mechanics or ludonarrative to illustrate or underline a thematic point, but so many of these Elevated games instead feel like they’re going for things that movies can already do, and I feel like that’s leaning in the wrong direction as to what can, honestly, feel profound. Just as an off-the-cuff example, the final choice of Ace Attorney: Justice For All asks whether you, as the defense, plead your client as guilty or innocent. Do you believe in protecting your client, or protecting the innocent? Do you exact (relative) mercy on somebody who’s wronged you? Or do you subject them to the monkey’s paw-esque fate they've more than had coming? Which of those is truly just? It’s not a choice that matters — the scene plays out the same regardless of what you pick — but in this sense the option you choose exposes something of you, the player: what you value, and what you, personally, have taken out of everything that’s just happened. You have to choose — the scene doesn’t move forward until you do — and in that sense, it's something that could only be done within an interactive medium: you are directly made to engage with the text, you are directly made to provide your own interpretation of its thematic content. BioShock Infinite does something similar within its first hour, and the question asked is just as profound: are you racist? Or are you not racist?

…I don’t think it’s really going to be possible to talk about BioShock Infinite without talking about… all that, huh?

sigh

I have to begin this with a disclaimer, I guess: I’m white, I don’t think I’m entirely equipped to be talking about this, but the guy who wrote this is also white so maybe, actually, I’m just as qualified to at least try. This game thinks it's making this grand, profound statement about how racism is bad — and how the ‘good old days’ of the U.S, as is the visual aesthetic of Columbia, was built on the abuse and discrimination of the non-whites and immigrants — yet fails to back that up at every turn. For as loudly as it says it, it doesn’t feel like it has much to actually say, with most of its observations feeling so so, surface level. What does the game define ‘racism’ as, anyway? Is it the mere act of an individual discriminating against another on the basis of their race, or is it the systemic act of providing opportunities and benefits to one group over others? Is this society meant to be based off of the pre-emancipation era of the United States, the ‘separate but equal’ segregation that preceded the civil rights movement, or one of the periods in-between? Is there anything that can be said about how white supremacy movements are still prevalent today? Is there anything worth mentioning in how almost all the enemies during the first half of the game are cops? I wouldn’t know: the game doesn’t seem particularly interested in actually going in-depth on the topic, feeling like it’s merely taking a brave stance of ‘racism was bad’ and expecting that to be enough.

And it’s frustrating because it often feels like the game is on the cusp of saying something actually potent… right before it veers away without fully committing to it. You start the game in a church, it becomes clear that Columbia is very much a fundamentalist state. You could maybe lean into how most fundamentalists will misquote or selectively take from the Bible to justify their bigotry, or maybe even go into how the church was often used to subjugate and control colonized peoples… or you could simply treat this the same way the racism is treated in general: very surface level, religious fundamentalism is bad because religious fundamentalism is bad and because using religious words like 'our prophet' and 'messiah' to surround your bad guy is subversive and creepy. Early on, after rescuing Elizabeth, you’re sent to a beach area, you get to mingle, and you learn that the segregation discriminates against the Irish, as well. You could use this to maybe go into the historical mistreatment of Ireland, maybe show how these fascist systems will keep moving the goalposts until those at the very top of their hierarchy remain… or you could just, like, never really bring it up again. That works too. Later on, you go into a museum, you find out that the justification for this discrimination is that the founder/prophet of Columbia lost his wife because the labor underclass rose up and killed her and this could be so fascinating and a window of the paradox in how fascist systems treat women: both as one of the defacto ‘inferiors’ to be subjugated… yet at the same time the madonna figure, whose innocence must be protected, and who through this comes the justification to commit atrocities against the other inferiors. The game is on the cusp of realizing this with Elizabeth — being locked up in a gilded cage, being forbidden from interacting with the outside world, yet also being a literal symbol, both the justification and continuation of this totalitarian system — and then this is all just thrown to the wayside because the story wants her to be Cute and Quirky. Every time this story stumbles on something it could actually say it decides it doesn’t feel like doing so. It wants credit for taking the stance it does but never actually wants to get its feet in the muck. And here I thought art was meant to alienate. Silly me.

(also… I feel like if you’re at least trying to condemn racism I don’t think it’s a great idea to have the only defined asian characters be speaking in broken English? again, white guy over here, I don’t want to make assumptions on things I don’t know well about, but, like, maybe not the time and place?)

I mean, I guess it’s trying to be anti-racist. I think that’s what it’s trying to be. I mean I’m not as confident as I was initially because holy shit does the game fucking swerve on its message right at the halfway point. See, by opposing the forces of Columbia, you eventually come into contact with a cabal of rebels seeking to overthrow this fascist system. You help them out (but… only because you’re forced to, Booker is rather ‘yeah whatever’ about basically everything other than Elizabeth), and by changing the timeline to give them GUNS you give them the means to meaningfully act out and rise up against their oppressors… to which the game immediately goes “oh no… this protest… is too violent… are these people really all that different from the slave owners?” And then suddenly the rebel leader goes “oh, by the way, something something you’re not the real you, you must die,” the game decides to show she’s actually The Bad Guy by having her try and murder a child, Elizabeth is made to kill her, and Booker’s response, verbatim, is “the only difference between [a racist, totalitarian system] and [trying to overthrow said racist, totalitarian system] is how you spell the name.” Maybe the Vox Populi should’ve just protested peacefully, ala MLK and Ghandi. Maybe we should’ve just voted out Hitler. And- and honestly what’s most wild for me is that this is how the game just fucking forgets that it’s about fascism and racism right after this. You watch Elizabeth shoot the only named black character in the game the rebel leader and the fallout of the scene is pressing F to reassure her that everything’s okay. The rest of the plot that follows is almost exclusively about time travel and alternate dimensions as opposed to anything regarding the rather delicate subject matter the game was attempting to handle earlier. The slavery of this one white woman is more important than the slavery of Columbia’s entire underclass. You shoot down rebel soldiers almost exclusively past this point and neither you nor the narrative bats an eye.

(addendum here: a friend pointed me towards BioShock Infinite’s Wikipedia page and I really just have to share this paragraph here because, like, what the fuck do you mean “the good and bad sides of racism”? what the fuck do you mean you weren’t trying to make a point and were merely trying to be 'accurate for the time'? I’m going to selectively apply death of the author here so that I don’t have to edit everything I just said because, like, jesus dude, I don't think a game has ever made me lose respect for its writer like this)

One last thing before I move on past the story: I’m notttttttt an Elizabeth fan, sorry. She never quite felt real or consistent as a character; more like a manic pixie dream girl, malleable to be whatever is required to facilitate the plot. The moment you meet her is the moment you free her from the gilded cage she’s been trapped in her whole life, and it was the same moment my suspension of belief broke. It feels like Elizabeth has barely any reaction to any of this, no horror at realizing just how large the world around her actually is, no transitional period to actually being outside for the first time in her life, she’s just immediately exuberant, so wide-eyed at everything, unable to stop herself from dancing with racists as soon as she hears fiddle music. And it comes off like like it’s trying to make her so Cute and Quirky and Lovable and to me it never really worked. Especially when the game pulls absolutely all the narrative beats you’d expect it to. The Liar Revealed bit leading into the Second Act Breakup — where once you get back together and she still doesn’t trust you the game can’t even fucking commit and have her not help you as much during combat because then maybe that’d at least be a fun way this attempt at art could actually remember what medium it’s in. You’ll have an argument that’ll open a (metaphorical) rift between the two of you and then you’ll point at a locked door and she’ll be like “I’ll get that open for you Mr. Booker : ) “ So much of her dialogue — especially once the game decides it wants to be about alternate dimensions and time travel — is so flowery and… honestly, I’d say a bit pretentious in execution, feeling like it’s actively trying to position itself (and a lot of the plot elements here) as complex and smart, thinking that by making it just barely intelligible whoever’s playing it will be like “wow… this is so complicated… and beyond me… this game is so intelligent…” By the way I just love how the game says, verbatim, “[y]ou don’t need to protect Elizabeth in combat[,] she can take care of herself” like it’s some girl power, progressive thing… then all she actually does in combat is throw you items, open doors you can't, let you tear rifts in time to give you things that’ll help you, teleport right near you when you’re not looking like that one Sherlock Holmes game. She’s basically all the things an escort NPC does except I guess making you actually have to escort her would be a point of division among the Gamers. And it very much falls into that trope where a female character primarily exists to bolster their male counterpart, except here they try and dress it up as if it's subversive and feminist. Between that and some of the quips, you could’ve made me think Joss Whedon wrote this.

So, uh, yeah. I’m not particularly into what this game has going narrative-wise. It wants to act as if it’s tackling these huge themes, it thinks it’s profound by doing so, yet at every turn it feels so unwilling to divide, or challenge, or properly stand for something that it veers away from anything interesting it could actually say — let alone how little it does anything with the medium it’s actually in. And- and Jesus I’m still so thrown by how it can’t commit to even going just ‘racism’ is bad, it has to both sides it, it has to please everybody, it’s so scared of alienating that it alienates itself. If this is art, then maybe that speaks to having to go back to art class.

...At least the gameplay’s loosely fun?

Which reveals my position in the debate, I guess. For all I’ve talked about what makes art — and why I feel like sometimes what gets touted as prestige doesn’t quite meet the metric — I don’t really have much of a horse in this race. I’ll be happy to do my best to discuss themes, and I’ll always look at these things as more than just product, but as a writer, as someone who looks at things from that lens, I’ve always personally been more interested in looking at things from a technical lens: the craft, how it’s refined, what works, what could use improvement. And from that lens, BioShock Infinite is… cromulent. I like shooting things. I like the way the game only giving you two guns basically encourages you to vary with what you carry with you — building an impromptu armory from whatever you can scrounge up around you. I’m fond of the ‘vigors’/phasmids/magic spells you can use, how they all help out in different ways. I especially like how this combines with the gear system in a way that lets the player create legit builds: on my end, I eventually ended up with this playstyle where I’d use a vigor to fling myself directly towards an enemy, whereupon I’d create a giant AOE explosion and wipe out whatever cluster of enemies surrounds my target. I also like the way the game… both hews close and veers away from BioShock the series. It has all the hallmarks, all the defining characteristics that made the series what it was, yet it alters or recontextualizes them in a way that makes them feel fresh. Chief among these is the setting — which, while visually rather breathtaking on its own, really works as a companion piece to Rapture, a city in the sky rather than a city in the sea — but there are other things too: the anachronistic covers of 60s-80s songs mirror BioShock 1/2‘s usage of period-accurate music while also working to set up the timey-wimey aspects of the plot. The combat feels exactly like the previous two games, yet the use of more open areas, in addition to mechanics like the skywires and the rifts make it feel much more fluid, much more arcadey than the claustrophobic meat grinder of Rapture. I’m not entirely sure whether it’s a step forward or a step back, necessarily, but it’s certainly an iteration: things have been looked at, tweaked to become brand new… while not losing the same feel they used to have. It’s neat to see in action.

But man, while I’m not somebody who usually likes judging a work for being an adaptation, a sequel, whatever, it is just… rather tragic that a lot of the wrong lessons seem to have been learned from it. The original BioShock, to me, is genuinely so cool in showing just what videogames: silly moral choice system aside, there’s so much going on with ludonarrative, and diegesis, and it feels like every little videogame-logic thing has something going on behind it in a way that contributes to the overall picture. To go from that, to something that has virtually nothing going on mechanically is such a disappointment. And, in turn, when what’s there instead is something that feels like it’s convinced itself of its ascension, that takes real-world sensitive subject matter for the sake of set design and abandons it once it's no longer needed, that mistakes being complicated for being smart, man am I not impressed. It’s funny, honestly, how this loosely ushered the whole era we’re in of prestige, ‘artsy’ games that at the same time seem so afraid of being video games, because it’s BioShock Infinite’s gameplay that makes me hesitate to call it outright bad. It thinks it’s some profound work, some real watershed moment, something that’s really pushing the medium of gaming forward. In reality, it feels much more like Oscar bait. 4/10.

Any season that actively makes competitive players pissy and angry while giving casual players new toys and tools to work with is a good season in my book.

I'm wary of how things will play out since it's still early for the season (I'm wanting to do logs for the start and end of seasons since I think it's worthwhile looking at how stuff changes and my thoughts over time), and I really hope that Epic at least partially ignores the "pro players" in favor of the overwhelming majority who play the game for casual fun; the vehicle meta is a very different change of pace that has brought much needed variety to how matches generally play out. I do think the vehicles are a bit overly spongy on health, to the point that you're basically guaranteed a death sentence if you don't have one by endgame or yours blows up, but I really hope Epic's solution to that isn't just nerfing vehicles and instead giving on-foot players more weapons and tools to deal with them instead. Like, it's pretty surprising the rocket launcher wasn't unvaulted for this season? The explosive crossbow is okay but it doesn't drop as frequently as it really should to be a proper solution.

This is the season that has finally made the Chapter 5 map worthwhile. I love the new overhauled bottom portion of the map with all the different ways you can not just traverse it, but going fast while doing so. The Nitrodome is maybe the worst boss location, but I also wonder if that's more just to do with early season excitement and everybody wanting to land there like most seasons tend to have. XP speeds have significantly been bumped up compared to last season but I wonder if that's more to do with Epic just further giving up on any story at all at this point; the only sources of XP you're getting are from the thankfully improved dailies (you don't have to random chance it from the list, you're given three quests you can tackle on any match in any order), weeklies, and Creative/Festival/Racing/LEGO. I can't really complain though when we're barely through week one and I'm already at level 20 compared to last season when I had barely gotten through level 100 by the very end.

We'll see where things end up by the end of the season and also what the metaverse modes will have to offer as they update in the middle of the season, but the core Battle Royale mode itself is finally interesting in a unique way again that I hope Epic sticks to their guns on.