I think Mikami understands to an unnatural degree that video games are fundamentally about problem-solving. Unlike an academic interpretation of "problem-solving" though, Mikami understands that the exercise of problem-solving is less about solving the actual problem but of learning new ways of thinking. Sure, other video games are problem-solving in a base sense, but Mikami's problems have that magical "Oh Shit" element to them; everyone who's done one playthrough of this game will instantly remember all three wolverine encounters, the first time they encountered Regenerators, the Krauser section, the entire 4-4 homestretch, etc. Consistent to all these amazing sections is that the game feels like it's adapting along with the player--as if Mikami was a math tutor guiding us along the workbook. "Ok you know how to deal with Wolverine now, but what if we stuck in you a locked cage with one of them? What if we put two of them in the same room? How would you adapt then?" You have to recontextualize and reinvent constantly, without forgetting the fundamentals that got you there. One of the fundamental pillars of a conservative mindset is the idea that change is risky--the problem might get worse if you approach in a new way, so it's safer to keep doing things the same way. RE4 looks at this mindset, kneecaps it, then gives it a head-exploding suplex--change is necessary, even if it is risky; use more of your resources, resupply, be more precise, exploit another weakness, or use a goddamn rocket launcher if you have to--just don't think the old way is the only way if you want to make it through. It's a constant escalation of gameplay, and that the narrative matches this escalation tit-for-tat is just aces. Literally one of the most radical games of all-time, in every sense of the word.

bitch youuuuuuu are a stranger. this broader aesthetic sense of making art thats like an overtly long talk therapy session with some two faced white woman is becoming maddening to me. i dont think its appropriate to belabor this because the "quiz" here is such a harmless & secondary example of it, and maybe is more self-aware than im pinning it, but also i had a pretty stark realization in here that i've heard this exact voice, story, talk, expression, diction, & conclusion more times than i ever thought possible. u kno both folks here probably said "power differential" 1 too many times in the relationship. forgive me but i gotta talk my shit for a minute: yall's own self-admitted lack of agency & disproptional reactivity dont bother yall?????? self-pitying shit is as much of a power play as anything else u woulda known that if you were up on ur nietzsche by now. might as well let ur fucking nuts hang & make art and say shit about what you would do if you had things your way instead of what would you woulda done were you the perfect lil tweebell them PhDs is tryna get you to be. like the final conclusion here is an overtly self-conscious epigraph about how being too self-conscious is bad. you bitches need an intervention!!! i may be a broke ass bitch ass nigga but trust that rapping along with pap when he goes "hunnid on me...these bitch ass broke ass niggas better not say nothing to me" prepares me to tackle life's problems more than anything coming from this lane. maybe im a sociopath and got a impaired sense of empathy & dont get it but also ian seen nary a post or analysis or even a interpretative lens that would reward deeper investigation of smthn that got this "autoethnography" or whatever stench on it. another big whiff from itch.io 4 me.

SWAT 5 but instead of copaganda its a Francis Bacon painting with a biopunk filter. This shit is the most arresting video game I've played since...I don't know when. I really hate to throw this in the 'needs a write-up' pile but there's so much to gush about here. The instant quotables ("I've been getting really into "hell". Both as a mindset and as something to strive for, in an organizational sense."), that OST, the gunplay that perfectly emulates the old skool tacticool FPS games, the level design, the secrets (did you know there's an additional hard mode that has rare enemies, new sections, & additional targets?!), the implants, the cryptic but emotionally evocative storytelling, both the LIFE and the Entrapment cutscenes, and just the whole indescribable aesthetic of the game. I've seen and experienced a lot of media that takes comfort in being dark, disdainful, and dreary, and indeed have the same emotional arc as this, but none do it with the quite the same balance of levity, futility, mania and malice like Cruelty Squad does.

Edit: So I saw that the dev retweeted this excellent video review of the game, which touches upon the actual themes of this game, which is something I neglected to mention in my gushing here.

I'm not a big Bataille fan, but this game inspired me to take a second look at his work, particularly the Accursed Share, and I'm finding his words increasingly compelling. There's something so...accurate about the way Bataille describes capitalistic societies as being excessive growth & energy without any tension release. The "growth" of Capital, and the resulting inequality, is like an endless edging session that has turned the temporary delay of gratification into an eternal permanence of longing, a longing of gratification that is never coming (haha penis). Gone are the days of the potlach, Bataille notes, in which inequality was solved in a cathartic day of gift-giving and redistribution ( and maybe some orgies ;) ); what we have instead in capitalistic societies is that the wealth is concentrated into luxuries, with redistribution being only done "as necessary" through welfare. The excess & inequality is entrenched in the capitalistic system.

What gives me hope, and what gave Bataille hope, and what ultimately Cruelty Squad is hoping for, is that the growth will overflow at some point. A potlach is just a sexier, voluntary revolution--one of the capital P Points of The Accursed Share is that the excess growth in any economy must be dealt with; the problem with capitalistic societies is that the recursive spending on luxury and the restrictive spending on welfare isn't really dealing with the issue of growth. The excess growth, if never dealt with, will spawn its own revolutionary growth that'll find itself amongst society's most spited and downtrodden. For Bataille (and for me), this was American Descendants of Slavery; for Cruelty Squad, it's the gig worker. It's not just some 'le random xd' moment that Cruelty Squad Man begins his journey waking up from a depression nap in his small weak-ass apartment; it's recognition that the revolution will find its strongest energy in the depressed, the marginalized, the unlucky, and the unloved. The final text of Cruelty Squad is a quote from Bataille emphasizing the inevitability of this revolutionary energy; this era will collapse or it will burst, whichever comes first.

And after that?

G O L D E N A G E

F O O T D I V E

HARD KICK

M O L E C U L A R S H I E L D

GRAVITY SQUEEZE. HAHAHAHAHAH.
YOU.
ARE.
DEFEATED.

EAT THIS! YOU LIKE THAT? GRAVOMETRIC PULSE...ENERGY JAVELIN ENERGY JAVELIN ENERGY JAVELIN ENERGY JAVELIN

HUUUUMAN...ROCKET PUNCH

SUCK ON THIS

EAT LEAD

LOADING GRENADE.....OPEN FIRE

YOU WILL NOT SURVIVE

BOLTS. of. BALLSACK

N O W I M M O T I V A T E D

BY ODIN'S BEARD....MIGHTY TORNADO

JOHNNY BLAZE RIDES AGAIN

THAT'S ALL I NEED

Fun Fact: The current cuckold meme was actually popularized out of hatred for Borderlands 2's writing staff. In some nonsensical eceleb drama saga, one of the writers Anthony Burch was found out to be an open relationship, and because it was 4chan circa 2013, Burch caught a lot of hate for 1) being in an open relationship and 2) not getting as much out of the open relationship (i.e. sex) as his partner. Which then lead to several users of 4chan's videogame board to dig deep and find out various awful things that's happened to him in his life. Eventually this led to the phrase "At least you aren't Anthony Burch", which then got reduced to shaming him for being a (un?)willing cuckold, which then got reduced to calling anyone who "tricks" themselves into being passive a cuck. (Like with most memes, the actual definition of a cuckold is not really the point here)

Actually underestimated how dry and pointless this would be. I've been thinking a fair amount about dating/relationships and doing my own share and this still didn't strike a note with me--especially because you don't actually get left on read. The phenomenon of being left on read is so incendiary because for some folks text is where their thoughts and emotions can go unfiltered by meatspace, so for a love interest to go "k, not replying to that" can be pretty scarring. Yet the game is totally oblivious and uninterested in what its title phrase actually means, instead portraying cousin-who-you-text-annually-tier convos as some promising pen-pal romance instead of the banal drivel that it is. Not even cringe, because neither participants say anything remotely risky or potentially undesirable.

Sidebar: it's a personal pet peeve of mine when people pretend as if text is some alien & hobbled form of communication, and that nothing 'real' can form out of it. text-based friendships and romances have existed since dudes could put words on a page circa 4 millennia ago, pick up a history book.

shit goes crazy why nobody said nothin? important reclamation fiction of what shoulda happened after the #8 seed franks upset the #1 seed umayyads at the battle of tours: the legacy of the caliphates, mythologized into a assassin quasi-prophet who kicks really hard and fast, spinnin back to hit a vicious stain on the now globalized "West" and "Neoliberalism" across 5 side-scroller stages. look i know "the west & neoliberalism" mean absolutely nothing beyond "uh america & profits" in the current critical landscape but the opps here are the Federal Government (proper noun) and an Attorney General who double crosses you after using you to put down a religious cult in the Persian Gulf. shits like a silver bullet made for the Bush family's headtop and a very personal short call of the Dollar System as far as political specificity in video games go. contra strider, osman asks you to put the weapon down and beat ass with two hands and feet--you'll be sliding n gliding n crouching through the mud like any side scroller but the greatest mechanic here is the afterimage system. each powerup you get gives you an brief stationary clone that'll stay in your last attack spot and synchronize with your attack inputs for the next few seconds. seems strong enough right, but the real trick is to plant like 8 of these clones right in somebody's hurtbox, run away, then start whiffing like a ken player to trigger all 8 of those attack clones at once and deal unconscious amounts of damage in quick succession. nomiss runs of this are like 15 minutes because of how much burst damage you can put out in addition to the bombs--bosses here can go out sad in like 20 seconds if you've been on it in keeping your powerups & bombs available. was this intended? maybe, but it made avoiding any death to keep my resources really critical, and some sense of tension along with unhinged ingenuity is all i ask from the MAME experience these days n i got it in spades. there's also some metatext here but honestly just taking this shit at face value was a joy. prescient in recognizing the global south is where the revolution at and we're just kinda pussy.

A lonely, challenging experience. Of course most DOOM WADs don't have any other characters in them, very rarely deciding to sprinkle in marine corpses to signify someone was here, but Sunlust is such an oppressive experience that the lack of humanity of it all feels emotionally attuned to the level progression. Any notion of humanity left in Sunlust's world is actively malignant-- MAP29 for example, "Go Fuck Yourself", is uniquely human to the player in design, architecture, and title. The Archvile Carousel is too purposeless, too vexatious to be designed by any thing but a human. Yet, like with most challenge maps, it's made to be bested, but only by those willing to buy in and mortify themselves to gitting gud.

In fact, this idea of mortification, of purity through rigid self-discipline, is an idea that permeates not just in Sunlust but in the discourse of 'difficulty' in video games as a whole. For every new completion of Sunlust, there's a DOOMer out there who will remind you that you haven't really 'completed' Sunlust until you've done it with no savescumming, and there's a DOOMer above them that will remind you that only pistol start UV counts as completion, and so on and so on. Anyone who had the unfortunate luck to witness Souls "summoning discourse" can also attest to similar convos. It's eerily similar to where this mortification discourse actually comes from--Medieval Christianity. You aren't really free of sin until you've abstained from something important, until you've fasted, until you've lived ascetically, until you've self-flagellated, etc.

And while the merits and foibles of mortification are too big for this review, the takeaway shouldn't be to do away with the ideas of purity or self-discipline, but to take a more personal, existential approach to them. Play Sunlust, but don't feel the need to surrender to it's weight of difficulty or of being one of the GOAT WADs or anything else. noclip to admire the architecture, throw on godmode, try a UV run, make a save for the Cathedral fight to replay forever, do whatever--just make it challenging and purifying to you, and see where you land. ribbiks has said he views DOOM more as a canvas than a video game, and there's no reason you shouldn't too.

its a cliché but there really is smthn special about loading into a lobby in a COD and just immediately hearing a 40 year old OG tellin some kid over the mic to stop flipping weed packs. or finishing a demolition match and hearing two friends say good night to each other and exchange pleasantries. or hearing a dude ask "is the daddy still in the picture?" when his mom gaming buddy talks about her kids (shooters gotta shoot). im glad this series has over anything retained that strand of anonymous, impermanent interaction--everyone joins a lobby with their mic unmuted, and the mute all feature is legitimately bugged i think. there's little to no carryover of players between matches (crossplay is really seamless which adds the exchangeability of teammates & enemies). COD is rlly like living in the city where these other popular battle royale-tinged shooters are like living in the suburbs where everyone is contained in their own little silo's. not that there's anything wrong with fragmentation & keeping the circle small! but sometimes i just want to be with some strangers for the night. u stay crashin bout a nigga we don go on dates😒

as a game its a lil shite tho lol. but not in an unlovable way. the last COD i played was advanced warfare which had the same sorta lootbox/premium system....coupla years and its still rlly bad. reusing maps from the original Black Ops 2 is so funny, and kind of embarrassing that is the state of the FPS multiplayer experience. weapons are really anonymous, which is a problem i've had with treyarch titles and every COD not named MW2. spawn system is as cooked as it was in the old titles. scorestreak rewards feel extremely underwhelming, at least the nuke was funny. having the usual weapon system level on top of the regular level progression system on top of an operator level system on top of a callcard & emblem system on top of a daily/weekly challenge system makes one of the insane end game screens imaginable. smthn is deeply cooked if im skipping through my unlocks at the end of the match like theyre youtube ads. all of the perks feel inconsequential save a select 6 which every experienced player seems to use. only new positives are i think the scorestreak system here is rlly the best killstreak overhaul they've done & i like the addition to CTF the standard game queue. oh and the level of modularity in the attachment system is rlly quite cool, idk if those are unique additions to this entry but they were appreciated.

the appeal here for me is that this the last title that feels like a complete COD from what fans on the internet say, and the least that's like, fucked with ig. and that the simple truth is that ADS hitscan feels as good as it did in 2010, squeezing the trigger and seeing the hitmakers pop up is some real "neuron activated" gaming what can i say. its infrequent but when you load in a match and its already lit in voicechat and you start puttin up SGA numbers with your red dot SMG hittin all the flanks its like perfect videogame junk food.

admirably janky and esoteric? contemporary blizzard's calculated & castrated style of development has increasingly irritated pretty much every type of person I know--storyheads are mad at the sloppiness that has become starcraft/warcraft lore, hardcoreheads are mad at the removal of the legitimate labyrinth and arcane knowledge and dedication required to compete at the higher level of their games, aestheticheads are mad at the pretty homogenous 3d cartoon style that has ran blizzard's art direction for a decade now. overwatch has flipped from a rally point of team fortress 3 to a common point of derision, only relevant in so far as to how quickly the character designs can send hornytime signals to the brain. all of this piled upon a really horrid culture of abuse (not just the sadistic misogyny of contemporary blizzard, but also the labor abuse of the blizzard of past--this game did have about a year and a half of crunch) has pretty much soiled blizzard's reputation, and deservedly so.

picking up D2 then with the context of all of that, I was pleasantly surprised by how playful and whimsical a mess of a game this is. as in, its actively encouraged to trick the game into believing you are playing with 8 players if you're doing a single-player run in order to get better gear. as in, you can and should abuse the town portal spell in combat to literally teleport in and out of boss fights to reup on health and mana potions to have effectively infinite HP&MP. as in, one of the main builds in this game is to teleport into a crowd of enemies, send out some comically small floating hammers, and then watch the corpses pile up. as in, one of the most important aspects of gear in this game, runewords, isn't mentioned at all in the actual game and requires players to look it up, but can turn your painfully average loot drops into gear that can last a whole playthrough.

and underneath all that outwardly goofy design and "is this intended?" mechanics is some really rather ingenious game design--there's this article that I was just reading that breaks down how D2 uses randomness and procgen in a way other ARPGs haven't replicated, and looking at how this game has had several "close, but not quite" imitators 21 years on, you cannot discredit that blizzard north had struck magic. this is blizzard (more accurately blizzard's former employees as most of the talent behind this game would leave the company) being calculated not in PR but in understanding the history of RPGs, of what Y2K PC players were expecting of level systems, of how to reroute the dopamine rush of action games to the frontal-lobe focused role playing genre. even if the status reveals I ultimately bounced off this for now, when this was clicking I felt like a B.F. Skinner rat giddily planning out my build paths and gear progression as I was dripfed items and levels I wanted. each 30 minute trek before teleporting back to base being like a small map of DOOM or a quick level of Mario, in that I progressed enough to have a marked difference an hour ago but not enough to truly feel accomplished, which strangely felt me wanting more instead of frustrated. its a progression loop few others replicated, and when I feel the urge to delve into this tome of weirdness again it'll have me just as captivated. except next time I won't pick such a heavy mouse 1 build like holy fire paladin, man that was starting to get boring.

= http://thegamedesignforum.com/features/RD_D2_2.html

Doesn't make a whole lot of sense actually? Now that I'm coming with the correct context of ME1, ME2 does a lot of weird shit. Like, why am I automatically working with Cerberus, an actual terrorist organization that has done actual crimes? It's such a bizarre decision to strongarm Shephard into working with them despite how pro-cooperative and pro-alien you can be in ME1. And why would Joker work with them as well? I didn't talk to Joker much in ME1 but working with actual terrorists is such a jump for him even if the Alliance is doing their bureaucratic bullshit. Like, Cerebrus isn't just some rebel/outlaw faction that Sidesteps Democratic Insufficiency, they've literally attempted a hijacking of a Quarian ship and bombed it. I get the game is going full hard-on with this jingoist fantasy of Special Operatives Who Always Get The Job Done, but this is so far gone. It'd be like if you had a game about an American War Hero in the Iraq War, and then in the sequel you found out the War Hero is resurrected and being supplied by ISIS. Except Cerberus has far-less justification than Middle Eastern terrorism. Just a bizarre narrative decision.

I'll accept the sideswiping of working with Cerebrus--the game tries its hardest to assuage Paragon players that they're just working with Cerebrus, not actually under Cerebrus; a pretty meaningless distinction but fine, maybe there's a larger narrative point the writers want to hit and having Paragons work with Cerebrus was the best way to do that. What I don't get as readily is the wild swings in everything else that happens in the game. You have Mordin over here who's pretty unshaken by having participated in the Krogan Genophage Project, so there's that can of worms again; then over here you have Miranda who's just a pandora box of genetic modification, perfectionism, and inadequacy schemas, so there's that character arc; then you have Jack who also has her share of inadequacy schemas and as well as lot of weird codification by the writers to have her be this 'abused' or 'damaged goods' bad girl archetype; Jacob is the 'sane one', which is okay, but it feels kinda weird that they gave the black character a lack of interiority but whatever. And then you have the batshit DLC characters Zaeed and Kasumi with their own short but strangely excessive plotlines as well. Now having all this in your game is fine, my question is: what's the point?

The personal traumas at play with the characters here are fine, and they should be explored, but what's the connection between any of them? In ME1 all the lore about the Krogan Genophage, the Reapers, the Protheans, the Alliance, the Council, the romance options, squad decisions, etc. all lead to the central question of the game: how should human civilization interact with aliens? Whether we should integrate on our hands and knees, be cordial but maintain our own interest, or assert dominance is all up to the player's Shephard. And the game tries to provide evidence for and against all three different paths using both the history of the world and what happens on your quest to defeat Saren. Even small design decisions like having to buy non-Human armor for your squad can help players express how willing or unwilling they are towards accommodating aliens. Now, you can think the way Mass Effect 1 goes about these connections makes the game overall more tedious to play, or that the way the actual event-by-event plot moves is not entertaining, but there's a far more cohesive narrative in that game than in this one. There's a cohesive sense of edginess and grittiness in ME2, reinforced by the moral ambiguities, Cerberus, the 'suicide mission', setting a lot of the conflict outside the Council's jurisdiction, the more urban and oppressive combat settings versus the open plains and industrial rooms of ME1, etc. It's a coherent and understandable tonal shift, but what is this tonal shift saying? And that's probably my biggest problem with ME2--it's in many ways less tedious than ME1, but it's not saying anything compelling, which makes it a good bit more boring to me than its already rather sterile predecessor.

been playing hella yugioh and moved back 2 my parents place which might indicate illness & questionable judgment 2 some (🧍‍♂️) but confident in saying this is juiced. played this with a 2016 mod or smthn similar that added in cards up until then & just went absolutely 2 town with some green/white creature spam. just gets that i like being teased a lil with some perfunctory side quests and random encounters until i can go in the shop & get that one absolutely busted card that'll take my deck from celtics shaq at the free throw line brick machine to the most consistent bomb after bomb pile u've seen since the obama administration. late 90s British pc gaming influence all over this tooooooo every piece of armor is grainy as fuck all the sorceresses & enchantress sprites are just recolored elviras every creature from beyond the grave has glowing red eyes. shit just closes itself automatically when u beat the game too no credits no nayfin this is just gaming at its finest man.

looking back at the 2018 hype for this shit i think marvel 3 might be the most misunderstood fighting game of all time. in comparison to the literal screen tearing positional tug of war of marvel 3, where dashing to take your assist out of the screen is a fundamental offense strategy, movement in this game feels like a weird mix of kof hyper-hopping, melty blood's importance of constricting your opponent's aerial movement, and maybe like any given 2D fighter franchise weird entry where they added assists (i.e. kof 99/2000 or now MK1 I guess). i've been playing this game on and off for closer to 5 years now and been exercising mid 30s salarymen dedication to watching stray replays during lunch hours/work down time and the neutral
movement here has never looked slick tbh. the reliance on super jumping and holding 2/8 to control momentum and fall speed means that say, hopping over a beam to punish the recovery feels genuinely awkward on a pad. in a way that saying magneto holding up hitting a dash micro and pressing S doesn't. absconding to pockets of the safety on the screen feels way harder than it should for a game based off flying aliens. dead horse but i wish they took more from arcana heart than blazblue.

speaking of, as a fighting game designed for beginners i actually think this might be the most frustrating game to play for beginners/intermediates, on par if not worse than tekken 7 (tekken 7 having a higher playerbase and somewhat more reliable netcode offsets the knowledge gap i think. also a far worse matchmaking/lobby system. look i get it playing an arcsys game past 2004 and going "ooooo the lobbies suck not the lobbies 🤓🤓" is low hanging fruit, but like, its still true). i think the autocombos suck because the grounded versions do not lead to a knockdown like most other fighting games autocombos, i would not show this game to someone to demonstrate the get a hit -> knockdown -> run some oki flowchart of anime 2D fighters. superdash as a whole mechanic is more tilting for new players to counter than any superarmor/invincible reversal super/comeback system possible. granted inputs and learning any given character is easier, but if im at a function and somebody was like "matt bring one of dem fighters around" i'm still reaching for soulcalibur, tekken, or kyanta first u kno.

but having said all that, this game can be rlly cool on occasion. the attention to detail is rlly outstanding, and seeing any of the lvl 3 closeups or intros looks rlly good when u haven't seen it in a while. there's also some characters who diverge from the boring fundamentals here: zamasu, ginyu, krillin, nappa, gotenks, & baby are beacons of light, possessing the creativity and uniqueness of something more in line with p4a than p much what every other character is doing. they can actually like, run oki, besides guessing a tech direction and going for a meaty. crazy. in spite of how simple the building blocks are it's wonderful the type of synergy in blockstring/combos you can explore. i just wish this game had a more even experience & design, the xenoverse 2 level dedication to updating this shit without planned DLC down the line is rare, it's doing justice to a property that hasn't seen a W in like 7 years, it's in conversation with a pretty vaulted subgenre of 3v3 fighters, it's just too frustrating and awkward to deal with long periods of time...this was always gonna be true and technically has been true for a while but budokai tenkaichi 4 will truly be better