i hate the idea of the "perfect game."

it's true tetris is, mechanically, without meaningful blemish. especially accounting for rerelease after rerelease, it has been polished to a gleaming shine. but it's an unadventurous mindset that decides something's worth on how few flaws you can find with it.

there's a rock-solid elegance to the purity of tetris' easy to learn, hard to master gameflow. but i can't deny that many iterations on it have been even more hypnotizing, if a little more lopsided.

tetris is a beautiful, pristine pearl of gaming history. but i can't help but find more value in the chipped diamond, myself.

Blowing someone's brains out with a close-range headshot in Kane & Lynch 2 made me considerably more uncomfortable than any gore-obsessed shooter ever has. I know for a fact that the model's head is perfectly intact and they've just slapped on an obligatory blood splatter decal atop whatever unsuspecting flesh caught the blow, but pixelating the carnage as the body slumps to the floor made me feel as if I'd just seen some low-resolution footage of something real, something that had been edited just enough to make it onto some unsavoury websites visited only by the morbidly curious and the sociopathic.

Following Lynch around the streets of Shanghai with the shakiest handheld camera known to man; complete with the visual artifacting, poor directional audio and overwhelming ambience that comes with it, is an absolutely horrid experience replicated with intent by few others in the medium.

You could argue that Kane & Lynch 2 is a bad game, hell you'd probably be right, but I'll be damned if it isn't something truly special in a way very few other games are.

It's basically an art-house version of Max Payne 3.

Kane and Lynch 2 has received a positive reappraisal in recent years and having played it for the first time a year or so back I’d have to agree. Dog Days is a filthy and visceral satire of the PS3/360 gen of shooters and crime games. I have some familiarity with the first game and this game also feels like a takedown of its predecessor as well and its attempts to try and make Kane and Lynch gritty anti-heroes. The titular duo engage in the usual maelstrom of hyper-violence most shooter game protags get into but unlike most of those protags Kane and Lynch are completely loathsome and pathetic scumbags who created said storm of bloodshed completely out of their own blundering bullshit. They have no real sense of comradery; their hatred of each other bubbles up multiple times over the campaign and the only reason they stick together is that at this point all they have left is each other as well their shared delusions of being cool crime-men who are going to have one last big score. And the game loves showing how selfish and delusional they are without really stressing it; Kane thinks that his estranged daughter will just completely forgive him for years of his bullshit by throwing dirty money from a gunrunning job at her and its clear he has never considered her feelings and what she actually wants while Lynch callously disregards his girlfriend’s wellbeing by dragging her into his violent screw-ups which leads to its inevitable conclusion. They’re ugly, vile, washed up old men and the game neither sympathizes with nor glamorizes them.

One of the most discussed elements of the game is the camera and I have to agree that its rad. The camera really does feel like there is some unseen camera man chasing the duo around with a crappy camcorder. It can be a bit disorientating so it’s probably not recommended if you have a propensity for motion sickness but I was fine playing it. The VHS effects are also done real well, effects such as head-shotting a dude and having it be censored by a ball of static makes the game feel even more visceral and messed up.

The gunplay isn’t exceptional but it does add to the hectic and visceral feel that envelops the game. One interesting thing is that there isn’t any truly safe cover, enemies will plink away at you if you stay behind a piece of cover for too long, incentivizing you to be on the move when need be and to take out enemies as quick as you can. Kane and Lynch are also kind of crappy shots so they chew through assault weapon ammo if you’re not too careful, which also adds to the breakneck and sloppy feel of the game. The game is rather tricky at first, but once you get the feel for it gets more manageable as you go along.

The game ends in an abrupt anti-climax but I think it’s the perfect ending for the game. Kane and Lynch will never have a happy ending, will never find peace, they are incapable of achieving it due to their grievous character flaws and they don’t deserve it either. You know they’ll just meet their gruesome ends in a rain of gunfire eventually so the game doesn’t give its characters or the players any sense of closure. It just bluntly ends, just how the rest of the game has been so brutally blunt and breakneck paced. Dog Days is a short campaign, around 3-4 hours, but honestly as I said it as long as need be. Really I just love how abrupt the whole game is and even though I do like this game I don’t think I’d want a sequel, it would just feel unnecessary to me. Definitely check the game out if you’re interested, especially because it’s usually on sale on Steam for like three bucks. Just a unique game that we’ll probably never get again in the AAA sphere.

La exaltación de un recuerdo de niñez reavivado en la forma más pura de aventura.

Ante la aparente limitación y la imposibilidad, se elevan la inteligencia (aquello que permite diseñar y unir las piezas que conforman la totalidad de una obra) y la sensibilidad (la capacidad de dotar al conjunto de un impacto y significado mayor) para dar paso a la posibilidad y la maravilla.

Esa unión es la clave para concebir un mundo tan rico como Hyrule: inhóspito, desafiante, pero también intrigante, poético y evocador. En cada una de sus pantallas aguarda una posible historia, un secreto por descubrir, una bifurcación de caminos donde coexiste el desafío de la navegación junto a la tensión del combate para dar como resultado la lucha por la supervivencia, una lucha donde cada acción y decisión importan frente a estas tierras totalmente indiferentes a nosotros.

Es esa indiferencia la que enfatiza el desafío de esta aventura y su naturaleza indómita por medio de la escasez de recursos, de parajes laberínticos, de supervivientes reticentes, de enemigos impredecibles y de misterios que se ocultan a simple vista. Hyrule se resiste a nosotros y, en consecuencia, buscamos prevalecer pese a la adversidad. Todo ello a través de los ojos de un niño como lo es nuestro protagonista, quien, guiado por su sentido de la justicia y armado con su pericia y valor, afronta los peligros de este reino en ruinas doblegado por la barbarie.

Un niño frente al mundo. Parece un esfuerzo fútil, ridículo, casi imposible, pero con cada derrota, con cada descubrimiento y con cada victoria superamos los límites conocidos. Crecemos. Una vez superada la percepción de esos límites, la figura de ese niño se engrandece. El valor ilumina nuestra senda, revela el mundo y da paso a la posibilidad.
Solo entonces ocurre la maravilla.
Solo así nace la leyenda.

The sounds of Flores con Historias end up feeling like an eerie procession, a calm cacophony to horror. The horror of stories left untold and repressed, pierced down and pinned under buckets of pain and intentional misery. And yet despite the timeline in front of me, nothing has changed. In my own country a 50 year tide is threatened to be overturned by a decision that feels progressively powerless to counteract in time. Stories like this are a reminder to fight, for the garden of lively flowers we help live on, hopefully to never see reaped.

Yet still continuously discomforting how the voices of men compound, breaking down so clearly visceral lived experiences like this. "Not nuanced." "Not of sufficient interest". "So clearly explicit and lacking in subtlety." There is not a shred of empathy in those words, there is no understanding of rights and life there is only an impulse to eye roll at stories that do not affect them. Much better to live in detached houses away from the world, letting the violation continue, refuse the memoir for the easier to consume, to play with the world in centrist "high art" but seek nothing of what's real. I am not surprised, but it will forever be continuously torturous. Eventually they will become discarded wastelands, but as of now they make the gripping darkness of these stories more apparent. We have to keep striving to give these flowers light. For a brighter future. Salud.