The legacy of mascot horror is too repugnantly cynical for me to support in good conscience. The latest Five Nights at Freddy’s entry is so fundamentally broken that you can finish it in reverse in under an hour, but its issues are so systemic that they go beyond the game’s technical polish. Independent efforts are carelessly cloned in the vain hope of capturing a quarter of the same attention; this is not a new phenomenon. The overbearing cynicism of the creation of Poppy’s Playtime has more in common with Call of Duty than one might assume; both were thought of as brands before games, and thus have as much artistic integrity as Mr. Brainwash right next to Andy Warhol. In the case of Hello Neighbor, it’s hard to say whether or not its final release is the case of market trends crushing inspiration to fit a rigid mold or inexperienced developers shitting the bed due to the expectations levied on them. All there is to be known can be summarized succinctly by the tinyBuild team on Twitter trying to get Matthew Patrick of Game Theory fame to analyze a series of animated shorts they had put out on YouTube. Incapable of subverting itself, the market is hardly sustainable for creativity. Like many horror sequels, Hello Neighbor 2 doesn’t change this, only reiterating it with more force. Marketed as a better version of what many had hoped the original would be, it released with three separate packs of Downloadable Content—one of which was broken. The AI had hardly advanced in its technology, and while some strides were made to make it more palatable than its predecessor, they weren’t enough to turn any reception for it around—instead, the game released to fierce competition between speedrunners. Maybe I’m not giving this subgenre enough credit, but when expectations are drawn between this and Poppy’s Playtime, I don’t owe it any.

I'm keeping an open mind about this one. Is it going to be better than the original? Will it be worse? I saw what they did with The Medium, and I agree, that is pretty egregious. Maybe they won't do that this time. I don't know. It could go either way, and I don't particularly care for the discourse of 'it looks good,' or, 'it looks TERRIBLE!!! #FucKonami!'. I don't intend to insert myself into that discourse, not because I'm a nasty old fence-sitter, but because it's draining and a waste of my time.

Spec Ops: The Line sold itself as a reactionary statement on the contemporary military shooters it released aside. Although it lacked the bite and creativity that Wes Craven brought to his similarly meta effort Scream, it was shocking enough to naturally create discussions on violence in games. Hotline Miami had a similar effect, although, unlike Spec Ops, its efforts became lost on some of its audience. This effect would be echoed when Undertale was released three years later.
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Although it would be inaccurate to say that the decade that revived interest in 90s-style shooters was more introspective toward violence, the efforts made to chat about it gave it a certain leverage that the decades before it seldom had. In this context, Harvester almost seems prescient. Being a game that sold itself on gore alone, it's far from ambivalent on the matter. It's as much a commentary on the controversies surrounding games like Carmageddon as it is a game about Jack Thompson and the NRA using dated flash games to demonize the medium. With all of the games getting remade recently, I'd be surprised if something like Harvester isn't considered by at least one person.

I've seen the term Walking Simulator in relation to this a lot, and, having played, like, an hour of it, yeah. I see that. But I think it goes slightly beyond that. Do you know what Death Stranding reminds me of? There are days at work where I'm given a ton of tasks to do, and instead of blocking out all of my thoughts, I try to gamify it. What's the most optimal route to get from Location A to B? Which item should have priority over the other? It should be dull because the place is small, and the lighting's dim, and by the end of your first week there, you know the ins and outs of every area. But the fact that you know so much about the place is part of the charm. It makes you feel smart and keeps pushing you to move forward. Applying that description to this game, I don't think it's hard to see why it's divided so many people. But I find the damn thing to be fascinating.

There are three memories that I have from my childhood that I'm sure are dreams that have been chewed up and spit out so many times that any attempt to rationalize their presence in my life creates a confounding and confusing paradox of emotions that serve to confirm and contradict each other wordlessly. On the A side is a trip to the beach at the dead of night as the moon casts its cold warmth across the sand and water equally. The color violet is ever-present, inextricably tied to this memory in the same way that a dented and dusted-up Buzz Lightyear-themed portable fan is. The B Side casts a similar shade of blue on my back. I see myself shirtless, lying face down on a bed that belongs to my aunt. I feel the cold touch of someone who's familiar and distant in the same heartbeat, and within a second, it's gone. Part of me longs to hang onto this touch for the comfort neither my body nor a blanket could provide, but like the gum and mints I associate this memory with, its presence can only be admired for its short tenure, lest it overstays its welcome. The Bonus Track is a memory I struggle to recall at this point, but I'm sure exists in a broadly similar way to how I see it now. I see a trek along a narrow stone path that stands among a mountain, whose central stops are buildings made to look like record stores and pawn shops for computer parts. The color green flies flagrantly in the face of the other memories.
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Likewise, my memories of Myst are tainted by fading access to the sightline that allows you to carefully observe now and then. When I wrote fanfiction of it as a child in the way that I wrote my other chapter books, II used it as a way to rationalize what my memories of watching my father play one of the many versions of it on our Windows XP desktop were. That experience didn't have the same wow factor that one of his playthroughs of Half-Life 2 did, if only because that playthrough taught me to revere methods of cheesing in the way the audience reveres the comedian before them—all while singing, "IT'S A PILE OF DEAD GUUUUUUUYS." I guess it was the mystique of this strange game I half-remembered subconsciously that badgered me to do that. Regardless, I wear what memories I have of the memories I had as a badge of appreciation. I guess I love this game for giving me those memories. I don't know how to explain them, but I love them.

I honestly don't know what I expected from this. I'll say this of Atomic Heart: thinking about when its first trailers wowed me fills me with this youthful, nostalgic enthusiasm for a moment in my life that I don't recall with pride. Something about hearing that introduction and seeing those visuals... I mean, I had no idea what the supposed narrative was, but it looked good, man. The mysterious vibes remind me of two things: a poster for the Alice Through the Looking Glass movie that I've since misremembered, and Scorn. The poster in question was one of those character posters, but I seem to recall treating it like it was concept art at the time. Big, vacuous, empty, longing for a touch of guidance through a puddle of the unknown. A lot of concept art strikes a cord in me for that reason: It evocatively stings the part of me that wishes for something more. From what I've seen of and from about Scorn, it seems to be that very feeling put into a game, and I like that. I'm just not a big puzzle guy! I guess I wanted Atomic Heart to be like that but with guns and shit. And it wasn't, and I lost interest. Too bad. STALKER 2 looks good, at least.

I've barely even touched anything Danganronpa related (I keep trying to play the first game. I'll probably do it someday), but I know a stinky cashgrab when I see one. Not to mention, aren't most (if not all) of these characters teenagers? Something about this kind of thing not being a fan creation but officially produced and endorsed feels skeevy to me.
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Eh, maybe I'm not the kind of person who should be commenting on this. But eww

Babylon's Fall 2: A Good Day to Fall Hard With a Vengeance — Fall Harder Edition: Electric Boogaloo
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The main thing that sets Redfall apart from that description is that it's an Arkane game. I shit you not, Warren Spector, the original Mac-fucking-Daddy of the immersive sim had his hands on this. And what did we get? 70% of the studio's old staff left during development. Truly, something worthy of such legacy.
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But I'm not here to tell you that Redfall is a cynically produced game that's borderline offensive to the consumer. You all know that by now. What truly makes Redfall special is that none of this was surprising. From the moment the first trailer was released to the last, I was skeptical but willing to admit that there could be something good that I was missing. Call it a Callisto Protocol or early 2010s pop music phenomenon; it can be hard to say your impressions of something aren't great when you've only really seen a fraction of what's on offer. But sometimes, that fraction represents a greater whole, and you just don't know it yet. The most telling sign of this is that, besides the combat looking rougher than an underground circuit of drunken bats with claws duking it out, the focus wasn't on the game itself. Even the gameplay trailers had to look cinematic. You couldn't say that the combat looked mediocre at best because they weren't even really showing you a vertical slice of it. You were sold an idea, and whoops, it turns out I left the brownies in the oven for too long. It was a bad idea.
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In terms of these games desperately hoping to cling to the idea of being a persistent service for their own survival, I can't fathom a more accurate marketing campaign. The developers themselves have been beaten by their corporate overlords to the point where they don't have more than ideas, so why wouldn't the marketing say as much? Redfall is an Xbox game, but it's the kind of game Sony is trying to make more of at the moment. This kind of slop isn't an issue with exclusivity. We are all going to be fed it at some point or another. I feel as mildly annoyed at the gaming industry as those hyperbolic YouTubers with red lines going down in their thumbnails and tabloid-inspired headlines as video titles. No, not every game is going to look like this. But it's a damn shame that a non-insignificant portion of them are going to.

Right, I'm really enjoying this so far! I'll write more about it when I'm finished with it, but so far, I'm finding it to be a wonderfully atmospheric experience that streamlines old gaming staples just enough for them to feel fresh but not enough for them to feel undercooked. That's all fine and dandy! I'm writing about this here to talk about a pet peeve of mine.
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I've said time and time again that the job of a critic is not an objective fact, and anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is misinformed at best and a deceitful grifter pandering in the most embarrassing fashion at worst. The job of a critic is insight and opinion, and while the two are similar, they should be mutually exclusive. If insight becomes opinion, eventually you end up with a situation like the one Rem Michalski and his brother have been facing for damn near their entire careers. See, all of the games made by them suffer from the same thing, according to some critics: they're kind of fucked up, and not everyone is going to like that. Better start knocking off points! If you check the reviews left by somewhat niche outlet Adventure Gamers, and even some of the scant reviews for this game in particular, you'll notice that. And honestly... honestly? Why the fuck is that not just a disclaimer at the start of your review? As a matter of fact, these games start with content warnings, they advertise themselves as dark and messed up games—is that not enough? I get caring about people, I really do. But you're not writing these reviews from the perspectives of other people, you're writing them from your own, and you cheapen that when you have to conflate the two. It's not a sin to deal with dark subject matter, and unless you don't think it's done well, it should end there.
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I know this doesn't matter, but that's been bothering me. Anyway byeeeeee

I know it's easy to dunk on Grove Street Games for this. They're a mobile developer, for Christ's sake! But if you think about it from the perspective of the developer, I can hardly fault them for this.
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Imagine this, right? You're handed the keys to three pop culture icons, so massive in their influence that they partially defined what an outside audience views video games as. You've been granted permission to have your name on these historical landmarks. That right there is the wet dream of any sucker—granted, said sucker is given the time and resources needed.
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Grove Street Games weren't given that. They were handed the keys and told to fuck off, forever pariahs due to the incompetence and baffling ineptitude of the hand they reached to pull from. Whatever decisions they made that backfired, I guarantee those were out of necessity and not stupidity. Take2 shot this project in the foot well in advance, and it's unfair to assume that the fall guy they chose for the job is the sole proprietor of this disaster.

There was a copy of this that went unsold, right next to a sealed-in-box copy of Mafia II for the PC, for years at our nearby Target. Sometimes, I wonder what brought this eyesore to the store in the first place. I wonder how long it sat there for, where it went after my Target dealt with its clearance, and where the games like it go. I can envision a time in which a con like this was successful. More peaceful times when you came home from the grocery store, hugged your child, pat them on the head, and gave them a copy of this and Big Rigs that you bought from the local Walmart as a last-minute gift. I wonder about the capitalist grief that fuels those purchases—the thought process that led to my cousins giving us GameStop gift cards every Christmas, which is why we have a UDraw Tablet for the PS3 sitting somewhere around here. I wonder about the Wii U Gamecube adapter and NES mini and SNES mini that my father had to stick his neck out to get, and I wonder if, at all, he'd go back and stop himself from the hassle, knowing full well those are all items collecting dust in cabinets we hardly ever look at anymore. And it all beckons me to ask: Is there affection in hedonism? Is it more appropriate to let our memories of such gestures settle like the wind, or should we all laugh at associating such a concept with a product as half-hearted, inherently dated, and embarrassingly corporate as 700,000 Games is? If IGDB is right, this came out in 2013. How anyone thought stocking store shelves with this 20 years after it would have been viable is fucking insane. I'm assuming it was pitched to Viva less in terms of being a successor to Action 52 and more as an attempt to bank off of the momentary success of Flash Games. I can see that pitch meeting going down in a board room, and what I would have been willing to tell the average Joe behind this if I were in the room is this: You don't understand Flash Games. You have to understand Newgrounds was popular, not because it was a nice, civil place, but because it was transgressive, abhorrent, and, at times, pornographic. You have to understand that the tamer examples, like DuckLife, Papa's Pizzeria, and Learn to Fly, were practically phone games played by kids who didn't own a phone. EdsWorld was a counter-cultural icon that never made it to TV because, sometimes, what following your dreams really means is knowing how to ingratiate yourself to a board room that will boot you off the air multiple times if the imagination of you and your crew don't provide enough dividends. What school computer is going to stock 700,000 Games on the device they use for their math or literature classes? And that's not even getting into how much of a boneheaded decision it is to name your game 700,000 GAMES. Do you think Activision or EA could make 700,000 FATHER-FUCKING GAMES if they wanted to? Do you know the absurd amount of resources that it would take for even one of those games to function in the slightest? I mean, of course, they knew. This doesn't actually have 700,000 games in it... which means that NES pirate carts with the same games repeated a million times are less intellectually dishonest than this. Think about that for a second. Holy shit.
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But you know what the real crazy part of all of this is? Viva published a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game before this. Talk about range, man.

I had something incredibly personal lined up for this slot, but it honestly hurt to write. So instead, let me tell you about the time a Spy Fox game gave me a nightmare.
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The game crashed and gave an atypical error. That's it. I was scared of the red light on the back of our computer back then, alright? I thought The Terminator was going to become real and it would spawn from our very own home computer. I was a weird child. But yeah, I saw one error late at night when I shouldn't have been playing video games, and it spooooooked me. We gave the game back to the library, and I never touched it again. I don't even know if it was good or not.

What if Starfield billed itself as an adaptation of Solaris? If that question sounds befuddling, bear in mind: at least Starfield is a well-made experience that can be enjoyed from beginning to end. What if a small development team without the same experience or pedigree tried to pull off something as baffling, if not more conceptually absurd?
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Amok Runner is a game based on a novella where a lite-erotomaniac decides to drown himself with the corpse of his prized obsession. From what I've read of it, the gist is that it's not an action-oriented book. It was originally written in German, you can tell. So anyway, wouldn't it be cool if there were, like, guns and stuff? Bang, bang. Oh, you can drive a car. Wheeeee. Oh, and yeah, that creep that kills himself in the end for petty and unspectacular reasons? You play as him! Don't try to think about what the implications of that might be, that guy's trying to cut your head off!
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I haven't looked too far into this because reading that THAT'S what this is based on immediately made me want to check it out out of morbid curiosity. I haven't finished reading the novella as of writing this, and I have yet to actually play this. But by god, you will know when I have.

You're damn right they couldn't make a game like Duke Nukem 3D nowadays! Doing so would mean they would actually have to put effort into deconstructing the tropes it gestures toward. This isn't to say that 3D is an awful, terrible game by today's standards that no one should play. It's hardly the most feminist game of all time, but Duke loves his women, and he's willing to wage guerilla warfare for them to live as they are. He respects sex workers, and while there's a funny bug in the game that causes him to try and pay every woman like a stripper, you could just as easily say that he's financially supporting them. Kind of.
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If my attempt to justify Duke Nukem in a modern setting sounds like a flimsy stretch in areas, imagine having to explain Forever back in 2011. There's a lot that's been said, and will keep being said, about Forever. It's ugly, outdated, unfunny, and just not that fun to play. Twelve years later, though, I find a post-mortem on its failures fascinating as Forever, itself, is a perfect study on what to avoid in an adaptation. It's not that Forever serves as a fundamental misunderstanding of Duke; his love, lust, and machismo are all still character traits. It just never contextualizes those traits into a meaningful whole. Duke is just Duke, doing what Duke does. Aliens have invaded, but otherwise, what you see on display is fairly routine stuff that feels more mundane than the spectacle of its scale suggests. On paper, there's a potent irony to that that, if played to, would absolutely be the overall highlight of the package. It doesn't see this mundanity as it is, though, and just keeps going through its proceedings as though the absolute insignificance of what's on display is enough to warrant merit. Perhaps it would be good if the ideal version of Forever were bold, brash, and big, but then it would need to take risks that otherwise aren't on display in Forever. I'm not saying that Duke's main character traits should be turned into overt flaws a la Casino Royale, but I am saying that a little more examination of them, and a greater satirical focus, would have done this wonders. As it stands, speaking purely on the game as it was released, Forever is as inaccurate of a title as you could shoot for. Duke Nukem 3D has some charm to it, but it falls too squarely into the 90s' mean-spirited/edge camp for it to truly be timeless. Duke Nukem Forever does not dispel this notion, nor does add anything to the original that would make its central character appealing in a modern-day setting. But I understand, they'd have a much harder time selling copies if this were called Duke Nukem Temporary.
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What I'm trying to say is, wall boobs ain't in, boss.

The first YouTuber's Life, I can understand to a degree. Sure, you had the whole ContentID thing back in, what, 2012? 2013? There was still shit in the fan, sure. But by 2015-2016, there was this kind of optimism that wiped all but the chunks of corn. As disgusting as that metaphor is, it's fittingly apt for the era that brought us the peak of such channels as Filthy Frank, iDubbbz, and Leafy. Nearly a decade later, two out of the three are basically different people, and the one that's the same has held up so poorly that he's had to retreat to more spiteful views just to sell himself to a more relevant, modern audience. All of this is to say that YouTubers Life 2 isn't Imagine, it's I.G.Y.. How anyone could think that espousing the virtues of Influencer culture when the illusions of its merits have been so thoroughly torn down to appease advertisers is anything but questionable at best is genuinely wild to me. For perspective, this would be like if they made a sequel to Total Distortion while Jersey Shore was still on the air, kind of.
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I guess the game itself probably isn't terrible? I haven't played it. But conceptually, the whole thing is kind of a goof.

I'm using this as an excuse to talk about game critics because others have done the same lol
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I don't believe game critics are paid off in the way that netizens of platforms like Twitter would have you believe. There's an inherent notion I've seen on such platforms that game criticism has less merit overall because it's all just advertising! I don't agree with that sentiment. Bear in mind there are droves of fucking idiots who will swarm all over a review if it provides an actual critique. There's a certain level of pressure to working for those outlets that I wouldn't envy in a thousand years. And to be told that something you liked a lot is a "rigged fake opinion"? I admire the level of professionalism these guys have, honestly. I do believe that hype plays a big factor in it. But the same types who lampoon IGN over a goofy review summary without ever having read or understood the review it came from would never have the amount of self-reflection required to see that, if put into the same position, their hypocritical asses would just exacerbate the things they like to bitch and moan about so much. If it's not Deathloop, if it's not The Last of Us Part II, it's something else with a different label. At that point, you really have to ask yourself: what's the issue with that? It's not 2008 anymore. GameSpot no longer fires writers for having opinions they don't like. I mean, for fucks sake, look at their review for Hogwarts Legacy. They were one of the few publications willing to talk about the game's complicated history with the trans community before the game even came out. If it's fair to say that IGN's assessment was a reflection of someone's legitimate excitement and giddiness, why change the channel when someone's skepticism is involved? The inverse of this absolutely applies, too.
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There are aspects of games journalism to criticize. I don't doubt that pockets of it are bought out, and yeah, the overwhelming focus the games industry has on hype culture does play a big part in why games like Deathloop see such massive discrepancies between community and professional viewpoints. There are also a fair amount of articles that regurgitate social media posts and ragebait you into clicking on them through Twitter. The issue with games journalism isn't that IGN didn't give your beloved a 10/10, it's that the journalistic coverage of video games is relatively limited. You have about four areas of focus, and everything outside of that is tertiary because it's not a topic important enough to warrant secondary interests. In other words, it's just film journalism on a smaller scale. It's crazy to say that, knowing full well that the PlayStation you play on after work is where all of the run-down mom-and-pop theaters have gone. The difference is that films have been around for over a century, and video games are just barely inching their way to that destination. I do wonder if that discrepancy means that all of the experimental musings about the entertainment landscape were sacrificed on the altar of film so games journalism can be a bit drier instead. Like, imagine if five separate creative directors proclaimed that video games are dead because they're not as new as they used to be. I can't help but admire that level of pretentious nostalgia; it's cute.
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What I do take issue with is that, more often than not, criticism of games media as a whole takes things from the wrong angle. If I'm being less polite, it often manifests itself as one of the most obvious grifts I've ever seen. Peddled by white-bread contrarians (cough cough moistcr1tikal cough cough) and the chucklefucks who share the same bed alike, it seldom addresses actual issues with the writing itself. I've seen one too many riff on "Too Many Water", but I've only ever seen someone dissect the meaning of it once, and honestly? I don't disagree with that writer! But that's never stopped there from being this pervading narrative that outlets like IGN are simply wrong. And why is that? Because the writers they hire don't agree with your personal opinions? Come the fuck on, are we on a playground right now? And you can't tell me that that's not what it is. Both the Mario and FNaF movies have firmly proven to me that big-budget Hollywood studios are now weaponizing this. If Hollywood agrees that you're all fucking pathetic, that is harsh. I'm sorry it happened to you, maybe you should stop, and it won't happen again. I cannot imagine being nurtured by someone as phony, plastic, and disingenuous. Maybe when you stop cherry-picking old articles to offset your lack of a spine, I'll consider your service. Until then, kindly fuck off.

Dead Matter is the cumulative result of the past decade's fascination with crowdfunding. I'm hardly being facetious here. In what other decade would you get one guy asking for money so he could build a giant robot that juggled cars and another trying to recreate 9/11 faithfully as public spectacle. Oh, you have your success stories. Undertale this, Undertale that. What about Shovel Knight? Can I shovel Shovel Knight down your urethra? And Slay the Spire, and A Hat in Time, and Yooka Laylee. When was the last time you remember hearing someone talk about Yooka fucking Laylee? But it's an example, right? See, you hear all of these examples. And sometimes you hear about Star Citizen. May I make another suggestion for now: you loathed love, now try Dead Matter.
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Believe you me when I say that an inexperienced Crysis 2 modder couldn't manage a talented studio being handed millions of dollars to make his dream project for jack shit. Believe you me when I tell you that the reason for this game's most recent delay was that it was so broken that Valve themselves rejected the build they were handed. Let that sink in; Valve, who let one developer under a dozen names publish nearly 200 games until the most obvious ruse you could muster was up, thought this would make them look bad. I cannot emphasize this enough: Valve, who lets such gems as Prostitute Simulator 2 sit next to their marquee titles, did not want this. And they wanted you to be excited about this! This was supposed to be the best version of the game yet. Depending on who you ask, this is either the peak of schadenfreude or a horribly depressing situation for everyone involved. What was once a passion project quickly became a cash grab so unfinished that not even the menu options were properly labeled on release. They once had NDAs for this! Tencent invested lots of money into these developers. Zombies clip through your fucking car!!!
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And honestly, it makes sense. Think about it this way, right: Kickstarter was once a gold rush so prolific that one of the most influential YouTubers during that period started his career by covering it. And now what? You have iceberg charts describing it like it's a relic from a bygone era. That enthusiasm and curiosity, which led some to mock and many to flock, is now as lively as the Blackberry sitting in the wooden drawer by your couch, buried under the weight of a thousand cables and cords that haven't been touched in over a decade and may never see the light of day again. It's the PDA to an iPhone, a pager to a Motorolla. And the sad thing is, it's not dead. It's still very alive, and every now and then, you'll hear a peep about a project or two that gets off the ground fast. But none of those projects will have the nascent curiosity that the public once had with a project like Dead Matter, and the results speak for themselves. Forget how naive the higher-ups involved with this blunder were; did you honestly remember this game before channels like Kira shined a light on it?
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A way, I'll give good ol' Johnny Guitar this: he chose the right name for his project, for all the wrong reasons.

Tempted to say that I have this on my "to-play" list because a certain someone reminded me of its existence. I really, really like you, but I've actually owned this for over a decade at this point. Yeah, my dad saw that it was, like, two dollars on a midweek madness one day and bought it out of habit. As kids, we played the tutorial... and not much else.
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My biggest regret with Psychonauts, and this is doubly true for Grim Fandango (for which I still have the CDs still lingering around somewhere in their pristine, cracked jewel case), is that I never got into it. I get why Double Fine has the following it does. It would take a fool's errand not to see that. Those old LucasArts games that became Double Fine games have such striking voices, through their art styles to writing, that they beckon to be listened to as soon as they start talking. I will probably play Psychonauts at some point and love it for that; I wish I could say the same for Grim Fandango because that's the one I was (sort of) raised on more. I mean, none of us ever beat it; I can remember my brother popping in those CDs and witnessing the autorun program spring to life with its opening strum in the way that I did for The Neverhood. It turns out I'm not very good at inventory-based puzzles!
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No, but seriously. Those autorun programs are super nostalgic for me. The one thing I didn't like about console gaming as a kid, I shit you not, is that they didn't have that--a five-second program that inconveniences you before you start a game. I guess you just had to be there or had to have had a father or mother who was there and still hung onto their possessions from that time to understand the sheer luxury of being inconvenienced in that way. Put it this way: I love the idea of having to swap discs. It's so fucking stupid, but I can't help it, it's unique.
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And what are Double Fine games if not unique, right? So, anyway, fuck my Steam copy; I'm finding a version of this that runs on Windows 98 and playing that instead. I'm joking, but I wish I weren't.

Happy belated Halloween! I would have had this much closer to midnight if Backloggd didn't have a brainfart and deleted what I'd spent an hour writing about because I made the silly mistake of moving to another page and then going back to the list without saving it. Really frustrating, and if I were unmasking here, this entire section would just be me swearing at people unrelated to my issues, because that's a totally healthy way to deal with stress when you're tired. However, it has accidentally given me the chance to revise my ideas, so there's that, at least.
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The Halloween season has given me a chance to do another yearly rewatching of Nascence's 2021 puzzle demo. I wouldn't be surprised if: A) COVID means that a lot more of this demo will be unrepresentative of the final product than meets the eye, and B) the production of this demo kind of distracted from proper dev time a la Cyberpunk 2077. What I will say, officially, is that it rules. I write this from the perspective of someone not well-versed in horror games. My favorite scare from the demo (which I'll get to) does seem derivative. But it's the way these developers have executed it that makes it just one memorable part of an unforgettably eerie demo.
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Something that I have to shout out right now is the music, which you don't often see advertised in games. It appears the devs understand the criticism of the way their last game used music, as there seems to be significantly more quiet time on display here. But the music that's shown off in this demo, as well as what's been officially released so far, is fantastic. There's a difference between Jim Guthrie (bless his Canadian heart) and an Italian music nerd in Abbey Road trying to cook, and going off of the scant pieces of marketing released so far, that's on full display. Music often isn't advertised in games because it's an expected part of the medium, not an accessory. I respect it immensely when developers try to treat it like an accessory, and that's no different here.
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Outside of the music, what makes this demo so compelling to me is that this whole thing oozes atmosphere out of the wazoo. You could easily say the pervasively oppressive nature of it is just a result of the demo being set at night, but what ties it all together is that it feels understated. A wolf howling is given presence through a text blurb describing its presence, but it wasn't until a few rewatches that I realized its true purpose. The wolf is no coincidence; something ethereal and god-like has compelled its presence and willingness to hunt to get you to move. To get what you want, you have to bury yourself in the process, and, cliche as it may sound, these developers have gone a long way to making it feel suitably terrifying. This unease and dread peaks when the game makes it explicitly clear that everything you are doing is being monitored and that the state of surveillance is beyond all mortal control and comprehension. But I'd argue that it's the most effective at around fourteen minutes and forty-two seconds in the video. The scene is this: you're looking for an old friend who was supposed to find and excavate ashes. When you find him, he's in a locked room, a fetid corpse surrounded by rot and fungi. Slowly melting into the decay around him, he still manages to hold tight to an object you need to do what he didn't. You pick the object up, and he looks straight at you. His head doesn't snap, doesn't turn, doesn't make a sound, but you wouldn't know it because you had to look away from him to snatch the object. All of the sudden, his eyes are on you. The sound effect for picking up an object is recontextualized; you do not know the next time something as insignificant as a statue will elicit a similar reaction. As you discover the room next to your dead friend, the teleportation of his head stops feeling wistful. It is angry, and if you keep trying to push your luck, it might attack. I cannot say that my interpretation of this holds true, as this quarter-of-an-hour demo only represents a vertical slice of what these developers are aiming for. But if any of this is in the final product, they're onto something worth paying attention to.
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What I do feel like they could have done better with in this demo is some of the storytelling. A concept they've put forth in the description of their Steam page is that Relune is home to a lot of small, personal, and tragic side stories. And while I would love to see how far they'll go with that, what's represented in this demo feels somewhat half-baked. Your character is moving around an area, looks at an object, and begins an exposition dump about how they used to be a photographer. It feels inorganic to a degree because the game suddenly jumps from mentioning the beginning of the main character's career to its abrupt ending, like there are a few pieces that are missing. There's certainly intrigue in that, but the way it's presented fuels less mystery and more confusion. I shudder to think that, if looked at out of order due to what appears to be a less linear structure, it'll make less sense than it did when I first watched this demo. I really hope this is something they're able to do somewhat well because, flimsy narrative delivery due to evident budget constraints aside (self-published! co-developed with a team continents apart!), there's some real potential here for horror stories that feel more compassionate and inquisitive than exploitative.
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As excited as I am for what this could be (and as prepared as I am to take breaks from playing it so I don't wear myself out), I don't expect it to come out anytime soon. It already has a better track record than this studio's last attempt at a sequel, whose original trailer now only exists on shady gaming new sites scummy enough to rip the trailer from YouTube and claim it as their own. I'll also say that it's more immediately compelling than that previous pitch, feeling more in line with what you'd expect a mid-small budget studio like this to produce than a kidnapping story mixed with a love story mixed with Lovecraft and tragedy. I'm not shitting you, that's what they were originally shooting for, and anyone who's seen the screenshots for the project and played Anna will know why they're using this as a way to soft-reboot that project into something more workable. What I will say of Nascence, then, is that it's the smart kind of ambition: push expectational boundaries without being unreasonable while honing in on what worked well about your previous projects. Anna might have been janky and amateurish, but it managed to unnerve me by covering my screen in fog for a second and placing a burning object behind me. These devs clearly know how to scare easily, and while that's not actually why I'm looking forward to this, it does fascinate me.
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Even if I'm the only person who's talking about this right now, it deserves a mention on (or in my case, slightly past midnight) on Halloween as a spooooooky game.

Consider this supplementary reading for my Halloween preview piece on Nascence.
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You could say ambition killed White Heaven, a game by a small Italian studio featuring Lovecraftian elements, a love story, a kidnapping, and the eerie Italian Alps. And if you've played Anna, that's true. But I think it's unfair to say that it was just a case of the developers biting off more than they could chew. Remember Haunted House: Cryptic Graves? James Stephanie Sterling famously ripped this a new one, and even non-pundits at the time, like ProJared, found it a hilariously broken experience bereft of meaningful content. This is the kind of game you'd put on a resume as a last resort, and that's not my words speaking. Despite being developed by the famed developers of Anna, Haunted House: Cryptic Graves is not on their website. Anna is, and by all extents and purposes, I'm talking about the Extended version there. You can still play the original version if you own the game on PC, but these developers were never famous; they made a flawed game that they spent a year fixing, nobody really noticed it, and they moved on. They were cheap, desperate, and looking for experience with an engine they were unfamiliar with so they could build their dream project. In comes the shambling corpse of what used to be Atari, holding onto enough capital to feed the development of multiple projects but not enough to make any one of those good. My gut instinct says they stopped paying Dreampainters at some point and, despite wearing the name of their previous project like prestige, forced them to release a glorified pre-alpha. You could say that the game never being updated and not on their website would give that away, but the real kicker in this Alan Smithee-flavored smoothie is that you can't even buy Cryptic Graves anymore. The shitty Alone in the Dark game that Atari forced another developer to puke out, that's still on Steam. You can pay five dollars for it. It never really got fixed, but it managed to change hands and is now being sold by THQ Nordic. There was also a bad take on Asteroids that was the only honest one of the bunch, having released in early access. But that's been nuked so hard that the only remnant of its existence is a community tab whose last bit of activity was in 2019. Haunted House: Cryptic Graves released as a full product. Its Steam store page is still up with the screenshots and trailer used to promote it, and you cannot buy it. No elaboration necessary. Fun fact: a whopping twenty-six people reviewed this game on Steam before it stopped being sold. Not two hundred and sixty, twenty-six.
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So, what happened to White Heaven? If you consult the Q&A written for Nascence, they say it was "too much, too soon," which is just a polite way of singing the part of Once in a Lifetime where David Byrne says that the money has stepped on the train and is not coming back anytime soon. With that in mind, comments directed toward these developers about how unfinished this was become recontextualized. I don't like to pity, but I feel really, really bad for them. They had a golden opportunity that, if handed out by a more competent, less disingenuous corporation, could have easily led to the creation of two imperfect but equally fascinating and personable works of art. To say that the bag was fumbled is an understatement; it was dropped at a nuclear level. These devs were given molecules to work with and had to try building the Empire State Building from scratch. That is fucked!
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I really hope Nascence does moderately well for them because, as one creative speaking to another, I rarely like to see failure, especially when a team has as much potential to make something truly remarkable as this one does.

Agony is proof positive that novel vertical slices don't always make for compelling results. On paper, this is great. A Frictional-type set in hell that commits to the gothic, abhorrent, and deviant nature of the setting without prudishly pulling punches—I can't say I've seen that before! And then you play the game—or watch it because god knows you don't need first-hand experience to see where this is going—and you understand why the pitch stopped itself so short. What art style cannot convey is solid level design or storytelling, but what it also can't do is account for monotony. Once the it-factor of braindead babies being used as bricks in a literal wall blurs into the background, does it surprise you that all of the fruits have vaginas?
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On one hand, I pity it. These developers committed to the bit one hundred percent. Repetitive, amateurish, janky—these are all adjectives that describe the experience to a tee. But soulless? Not really. There's a good setting in here, but the background alone cannot stand as the foreground. The issue with playing hell straight as a horror setting is that it's as subtle as a sledgehammer to the knee and a brick to the face. Horror works in more discreet degrees. What scares a person does vary, but what's consistent among each kind of scare is that it plays off of an uneasy, unrecognized aspect of the human condition. This might seem like a weird take, but bear with me: I think hell, as a setting, works better if used as the backdrop for a black comedy. Hell is about as disconnected as you can get from the human experience, so subverting that, even if the characters don't recognize it, brings the flavor out of the baby-ridden walls. It shows that, even among the scraps of degradation and decay, there's a part of us that perseveres. Commit to the bit all you want, but if you can manage to be shocking and make me feel something special, you've more than earned your marks.

Whenever I hear somebody compare themselves to Tony Montana, I immediately think, "Oh, so you want to stick it in your sister, too?" Seriously, it's fucking wild to me that we have not one, but two movies named Scarface that coincidentally have incest as a plot point, and yet what general audiences got out of the De Palma remake was another generation's Patrick-Bateman-Alpha-Male meme. And it's especially funny, too, when you consider that Tony Montana is fucking miserable at the end of Scarface. He's such a badass! Just ignore the giant stack of cocaine that he has on his desk to cope with the fact that the woman he loved only sees him as a chauvinist pig, his violent reputation means that he'll never truly feel loved, his relationship with his sister (the only proxy he has to family) is beyond repair, and the only thing that the world has left for him is a vacuous mirage for him to keep pointlessly stroking his ego in. What a badass!
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So, anyway, Scarface: The World is Yours begins by entertaining the idea that Tony Montana's actions did not meaningfully catch up to him at the end of Scarface, and therefore, he's allowed to start again. On paper, I do like this idea, but not for the traditional reasons. If you're going to revive a figure as blatantly flawed as Montana is, there's room to explore the very concept of redemption and its limitations. The issue The World is Yours has is that, for such an idea to work, it can't be borderline. It has to be clearly defined with a resolution that acknowledges Montana but does not forgive him. No one was interested in big-budget, playable examinations on the human condition in 2006, though. And so The World is Yours is yet another Open World Crime Game in the wake of Grand Theft Auto III, and it's... alright? If you ignore how illiterate the very concept of this game is, it's not half bad! Driving's fine, shooting feels fun, and since that's pretty much the base for these kinds of games, it's at least solid. I haven't played enough of this to know whether or not either is substantive enough to last for hours like most Open Worlds do, but I'm assuming it's good fun for five to eight hours or so.
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There's also a Wii port, and being the gimmick-enthusiastic I am, I'm definitely giving that a try first chance I get to see if they use pointer controls in the way I'm assuming they do. One other anecdote about this game is that it once held the Guinness World Record for the most amount of times the word fuck was said in a game before Mafia II came out. I take it that if those records were still updated, that record would be overtaken by either GTA V or Cyberpunk. I'd like to imagine Cyberpunk would be more eligible for the most amount of times the word cunt is said in a game because, holy shit, I totally forgot how frequently it appears in the dialog. Since GWR isn't Australian, I'm assuming that's not a record they're going to be keeping any time soon. But it would be funny, though.

An extension of: Domina
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I've gone into detail about this in the past, but I'm a bit mixed on the auteur theory. Something that I hadn't considered while writing that review is prominent voices like Hideo Kojima and Sam Lake. Another thing I had missed is that even though it's a less enthusiastic play now than it was then, the other BioShock games that aren't Infinite still hold up. With that in mind, has my mind changed at all? It's a tough call to make, honestly. But, to have a spine and not be chickenshit about this, I have to say that I err more towards the side of directors providing guidance and not control. If the director's vision needs to be altered to fill in a gap, or because it's too broad or narrow, it absolutely should be. There's an anecdote told by James Stephanie Sterling in their video on the work culture of Rockstar Games circa 2019 that epitomizes the underlying problem when you confuse guidance with control. A developer wanted to make an improvement to Rockstar's often criticized combat mechanics, seeking to modernize systems that, even at their glitziest, have always felt out of the PS2 era but with slightly more bells and whistles attached. For this, they were fired. While I do enjoy aspects of the combat in Red Dead Redemption 2, it still leaves something to be desired, and it all leaves me to ask if the game would have had more personality if the bosses in charge of the project hadn't demanded there be less. But that's assuming you're working in a team of hundreds, thousands of developers across continents, spanning budgets in the millions, backed by one of the largest firms in all of entertainment. Say you're on a team smaller than that with about twelve people; how fucked are you? Say you're working with five people, and one of them's declining feedback because they want to be the auteur who takes all of the praise and gives none; how fucked are you? Say you're working for TinyBuild, trying to bring a project by one Alex Mahan up to snuff so that it may be sold, bought, and enjoyed after several years of anticipation. You're just plain fucked then, aren't you?
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I see myself in Mahan just a little bit. I don't see myself in the way he sought after a minor in the position of power he held, nor do I see myself in him as someone who needed everything to be his way or the highway. Sometimes, things don't work out. And you could take the easy route. You could always just break up with her, after all. Or you could plead, beg for a relationship that was a non-starter to flourish into something it never wants to because you have this pit in your stomach that says you have nothing else. You could have the heater on in your room, a blanket covering every inch of your skin, a jacket on, every light in your house on, and be around the laughter of others, and you'd still feel as though your body was below ten layers of ice. As children, we're taught about courage as an act of collectivism. What they seldom teach you is that it can also be an act of selfish kindness that coincidentally has the opposite effect on occasion. I feel for Mahan; I didn't learn this when I was supposed to, either. I was a coward, and just admitting that felt more damaging to myself at the time than anything you could hurl at me.
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And so I see in Yandere Simulator a wannabe auteur, desperate and uncertain, hungry for the positive attention his other interests don't get him as much. Fanmail that was, at once, the beating heart of his endeavors and the unfortunate kidney stones of his pursuits; offers from publishers based purely on the word of mouth he'd gotten; voice actors who couldn't care less about the crassness of the material they were working with because he would make their names important. Was he too narrow-sighted to see that very few were excited about Yandere Simulator for the reasons he was? As someone who desires to mirror the impact art has had on my life, I feel for the vulnerability of this position. It's unsettling to know that the pieces of myself that I would like to shed one day might very well keep me an arm's length away from those I'd wish to speak to. But that's the trade-off. You either accept that, or you get the fuck out before it's too late. And Mahan stayed. He dwaddled, taking constructive criticism like artillery, maintaining a sheer defiance toward compromise and personal growth. He is just one of many inhabitants aboard The Stagnant Cruise, and before it blew up in his face, we were all watching. Godspeed, you impotent, godless child of dirt and concrete. Godspeed to you now 'cause you aren't getting much more than this, pity, and two cents from the remnants of a dollar store newspaper stand in 2023.
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The real tragedy is that there isn't much to ask here. What can you learn from the failure of Yandere Simulator? It's all on the tin. Don't be too ambitious, don't be too cocky, and, on that note, think less often with your cock. Do think with your coq out, though, because chickens are beautiful little creatures and deserve all the love and care they can get. At least they're more fun to think about than the Cum Chalice kid choosing to stay out of the joke. Alex, my man, that's not going to go away anytime soon. You made a goof of yourself, and it's funny! Play into that, liven up! Nobody's getting hurt, and your ego doesn't need to suffer for it if you just learn to laugh along. Christ, is it that hard?

I wrote my review for this entirely because of [REDACTED]. I didn't consider it at the time, but the echo chamber some of their comments seemed to foster didn't sit right with me, so I thought it would be funny to take the piss out of it.
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I'm not putting this here to stir shit or cause unnecessary conflict. All I intend to point out here is that I do not like echo chambers all that much.

Allow me to make something abundantly clear: I care about soyjacks as much as I cared about Rage Comics back in their heyday. One of the only differences is that Wojacks are nigh inescapable in comparison. They're used by communists and fascists, the right and the left, the moderates, and the centrists. But mostly just for obnoxious, vapid discourse that overstays its welcome quickly. I have no desire to play a game like Gem Defender: Soyjack Survivors. But I will defend on the merit of preservation alone. Going in line with the Rage Comics comparison I've drawn here, this is the Wojack version Rage Wars. Regardless of if it has any actual worth ten years down the line, it's a curious artifact that reflects our contemporary attitudes with a modicum of effective humor. As fucking annoying as these things are, there's value in that, and I respect it because I'll be able to look at it then and say to myself, "Thank god things have gotten better".

I was on the side of this not being a necessary re-release until I saw this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVkO70xYcxs
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I highly recommend it if you haven't seen it yet. I get why this exists now, and while it might not be worth its current asking price, it's probably a decent buy when on sale.

There's a certain appeal to the fear of the unknown that, in the early 2010s, captivated an audience in ways too archaic to be much more than a bittersweet shot of nostalgia in our modern times. But unless you're well versed in internet culture, or you were there, a lot of it seems to be kind of... forgotten. SCP is the only one of the bunch to have seen any sort of longevity, and even then, it's considerably more niche than something along the lines of Poppy's Playtime or FNaF (I will get to you...). There are terms to describe this era in internet history: "No Sleep," "Creepypasta," et cetera. But I'll be blunt and call it for what it was: a gimmick. Homegrown horror on a poster board with paper stars glued onto the side to mimic the already cheap packages of gold sticker stars found in classrooms all across the globe. The appeal of these types of stories wasn't how well they were made; looked at through a contemporary lens, Jeff the Killer is amateur-hour shit whose rough draft spec script quality wouldn't last a minute on the desk of a Hollywood mogul, let alone a second, and that's me being exceptionally generous about it. But good old Jeff didn't ride high off of quality or the mounds of cocaine and strawberry jam his face was perpetually smeared with in low-res Jpeg image formatting. People loved Jeff because they could have made him a thing, credentials be damned. It's the first stage of a pyramid scheme, which virality inherently resembles, where the enthusiasm over what could be dwarfs the fact that there's only enough food for those at the top. And so people kept telling stories like Jeff the Killer, and the pit of apathy grew by the day.
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And then Sony made a movie based on Slenderman, and nobody cared. Only a select number of critics were generally positive, and the audience didn't care either way. To hone in beyond asking what a creepypasta means in 2023, what is Slenderman? A child was nearly killed because somebody wrote a story on the internet, and over a decade later, I'm only being reminded of its existence through a Caddicarus video lampooning how homogenous nearly all of the viral indie horror hits of the 2010s were. Fictional horror turned real-life horror is now real-life comedy through the mystical power of hindsight. Johnny "Guitar" Watson would have a swig of that in blue and red, I feel.
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I have another hypothesis for where all of these things have gone, and, pardon my cynicism prior to my landing on this destination, I feel there's merit to it. In nearly the same time frame it took for Hollywood to make a Slenderman movie that tanked, they've managed to make a Five Nights at Freddy's movie that, while not doing well critically, was a massive hit at the box office and revered by fans of the source material. You can disagree with those fans as much as you'd like to, but the numbers are cold, hard facts: they're going to be making another one of these things. It's an inevitability. What I'd like to posit about the success of FNaF over Slenderman is this: the denizens of the internet enamored by horror learned the same lesson that Hollywood did. To an extent, it was known about earlier through the stories most will remember from this time period. Brands sell. The reason Bruce Campbell shot down Freddy vs Jason vs Ash was that he was fully intent on keeping the scruffy, 'fuck franchises' vibe of the original Evil Dead trilogy intact. What studio executives saw was this: as opposed to two household names you can squeeze into a movie, you can have three and probably make thrice the amount of money. Creatively bankrupt? Sure, but how else are they going to be expected to return? Slenderman, unfortunately, doesn't have much of a brand. He stands menacingly at you, game over. The scenarios developers can place him in can prove frightening, but ultimately, there's nothing you can market from the jump scares alone. Mascott horror, for as insufferable as it has become, wasn't a happy accident for no reason. What Scott Cawthon probably realized through the development of his series was that it wasn't one game alone that kept people coming back. In conjunction with quantity, brands enjoy success through novelty. Once that novelty wears thin, you can consider the brand a fallen monument and move on to the next new, exciting thing to glom on. What use is there in chasing eight papers when you can create six different variations of sitting on your ass and hoping you don't get jumped, pump it full of new lore, and call it a day? Did Slenderman ever stand a chance? Did any of these old creepypastas?

If you want my actual opinion on this game, as per the criteria of this list, this looks cute! I tried to get into A Way Out way back when that came out, and the grittiness just didn't do it for me. But having that kind of experience put under a more self-aware and cute lens is something I welcome.
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And now, here's a completely unrelated discussion of matters only tangentially related to the game I'm meant to be talking about. Enjoy?
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I suppose this is a rough-draft of a much larger rant I have inside of me, but following last night's entry into Geoff Keighley's yearly excuse to pump mostly mediocre games at the end of the year, I cannot, in good conscience, agree with Josef Fares' thesis that The Game Awards hold more merit than The Oscars.
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The Oscars has had some bad ceremonies over the years; in my personal opinion, it bottomed out post-COVID in 2021, where the arrangement of the awards was about as consistent as the ceremony's lacking entertainment value. Let me be perfectly honest about what The Oscars actually is: it's prestige-flavored Junk Food. It's sports for cinephiles, a big-budget, officiated game of Superfight between many of the year's biggest hits played by the industry's most glamorous stars. There's always food for thought after the ceremony because, even in years where the competition between titles is less than fierce, there's always a possibility that your own picks don't align with the Academy's. You may not have the budget that the Academy does, but you do typically have family, or friends, or hell, even acquaintances or co-workers that you can use the Academy to springboard into a long and winding discussion about movies. As someone who loves the movies, The Oscars is fucking puerile trash, and every bit of criticism, satire, or otherwise aimed directly at how grotesquely excessive its glamor is tends to be spot-on. It's what those meaningless awards represent to me, as somebody who has loved movies since childhood, that gets me like Pachino in Part III every year.
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The Game Awards fucking sucks, and I don't mean that in the endearing sense that I do for The Oscars. The Game Awards takes the industry circlejerk of The Oscars and dilutes with advertisement after advertisement, to the point where the inspiring speeches that have redeemed certain ceremonies hosted by The Academy are poorly mimicked. Last year stood out, in particular, because the eight-minute speech given by Christopher Judge, that year's winner for best voice actor, threatened to represent a paradigm shift in the way the ceremony handled awards. This year? Please Wrap It Up. The need to publicize these award ceremonies comes at the inherent cost of the expressions of those individuals who are honored, but never before have I seen anything egregious to this extent. And for what? Advertisement after advertisement. When The Oscars threatened to go this route by promoting Steven Spielberg's then-upcoming remake of West Side Story, I worried. But it's with that one advertisement that The Academy is able to show its hand. Although The Academy tends to lead failed attempts toward appeasing younger audiences for the sake of viewership, the reality is that they barely need to try. Film has been around for over a century; it's an agreed-upon, established art form, and The Academy is at ease with that. If they have to take a match out of Keighley's book, they're taking one and leaving with that. Confidence is prestige, and when you have to waterboard your viewers with advertisements for new and shiny products, I doubt your intent to hold an awards show predicated on honoring the industry you're serving.
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And Keighley loves to double down on this. Simu Liu actually gave a pretty fun speech, bent-up leg and all. He is the one celebrity whose presence I cheer on with no hesitation because, even if he was reading off of a prompter the entire time, he sold his passion for a medium new to his career. Think about this: Daniel Dae Kim, mostly known for his work on films such as Spider-Man 2 and the recently released Joy Ride, is the voice of Johnny Gat in Saints Row. And it never feels like a gimmick. If you didn't know that he owns the studio that produces The Good Doctor, you wouldn't realize that photoshopping his face in that meme to look like that of Gat's is actually redundant. He doesn't need to sell you on how cool video games are; you can hear in his performance that he has fun with the role. And then you get into Keanu Reaves/Idris Elba territory, where it's clear that they similarly enjoyed their roles. But they still need to sell you on a product that's typically out of their wheelhouse, and it borders on feeling oddly hollow, banking entirely on their charisma to seem less corporate than it really is. Keighley's issue is that he likes to bring guests on the stage like Matthew McConaughey and Michael Madsen, and they know as much about video games as Ray Liotta did when interviewed about his role in Vice City. You cannot tell me that the same man who looked a bit old and decrepit in Reservoir Dogs knows more about this medium than Mario Brothers; I don't fucking believe you for a second. But they try, so hard. And I don't know whether or not to be embarrassed by that. I think it's kind of cute, but in the way that you were cute as a child when you tried to do a puppet show with two toys that were certifiably not puppets, and you had no grasp on what a proper story structure is. Simu Liu, Hideo Kojima, and Jordan Peele carried last night's celebrity cameos, but it's undeniable that even their relieving presence took precious time away that could have been used for the awards part of this awards ceremony.
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The best way I can examine the differences between The Oscars and The Game Awards is this: at The Oscars, a moment of conflict is one celebrity slapping another. It's salacious, admittedly kind of goofy to us laymen, but it borders on being relatable to the point where I can't say I don't see myself in Will Smith's moment of impulse. At The Game Awards, a jokester takes the stage and delivers an esoteric, eminently memeable phrase. And then somebody else tries to do the same thing, and it feels about as bereft of spirit as the showcase itself. It's gray, bland, a homunculus of effort that I'm not entirely convinced is worthy of my time.
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My reading on what "Fuck the Oscars" means in 2023 is this: The Game Awards, in spite of it all, has become a bigger circlejerk than The Oscars has in nearly a century of oft-maligned ceremonies. I don't know how, but somehow, The Oscars giving merit to a documentary that appeared in a video game also represented at The Game Awards feels less byzantine and more honorable than it should on paper.

I actually wouldn't have minded a solid zombie extraction shooter that played like a more polished version of Deadzone! It's a shame that that's not how they sold this and that the developers are clearly frauds and plagiarists. You thought Redfall was bad? This is where redemption arcs (or, collectively known in the gaming sphere as "DAE NO MAN'S SKY?!1/!:/1?!???"") go to rot.
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And really, that's just the kicker, isn't it? I started out my impressions by comparing this negatively to a Roblox game from ten fucking years ago. As much as I loved Deadzone back then, you'd really have to put in a herculean effort to make a modernized version feel less like the Americanized Eurojank it is. Nevermind false advertising, or bugs, or shady volunteer work, or a suspicious trademark dispute—your game being worse than the slop we used to enjoy on Roblox? Ouch, a Band-Aid isn't going to stop that bleeding.

"What happened to games like Resistance 3?"
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Let me tell ya: in the PS3/360 era, there was a common misconception that bland color palettes and grittiness were the only things a game could sell itself on. Halo, Gears of War, and Call of Duty—all of which were notable as Xbox titles—dominated. There was a real paradigm shift happening for about two to three years. And then Microsoft embraced the Kinect, military games got repetitive, and Halo stopped being relevant. But the killing blow was this: Rockstar dominated the sales charts in 2013 with Grand Theft Auto V, but in terms of prestige, they had the sore misfortune of releasing the same year that The Last of Us did. The Last of Us is one of those special games: completely and utterly derivative, even when it first released, but done so well that other things manage to stand out instead. What it ultimately taught the games industry is this: context sells. If it doesn't move as many copies, it at least gets people talking.
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Do you want to know why the days of God of War being a character action game are up? Because that's what the mainstream all too broadly describes as a video game with an eye roll instead of a wink. It's lame; childish, a toy. If you get people talking about your games like they're TV shows, that is, eventually, where the money is at. TV works a lot like that: did you watch the latest season of Fargo? And the answer is usually no. But Fargo is really, really good. Damn near up there with the greats like Breaking Bad. And soon enough it's Barry, and it's Severance, and it's Beef, and in some rare cases, Brooklyn Nine Nine and Community. For certain individuals, books are where it's still at. But for many of us, streaming has made it so that these shows have become that fourth pillar of sorts. And to seem cool, to seem hip, we have to adapt. So we watch Fargo before our friends are talking about it, and it happens to be really good. And it's one show after the next, and suddenly, we're all couch potatoes. We're an 80s stereotype, plugged in with modern buzzwords in a new era that finally accepts us. I'm willing to wager video games have become like this, if not entirely interchangeable with it.
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So, where does a game like Shadow Fall fit into the equation? Honestly, I don't know. A game like this really goes to show that hindsight is 20/20. If Sony knew where the market was leading, they would have told Guerrilla to lead with a game like Horizon much earlier. But this was still two years out from Resistance 3 and Killzone 3, so the very conceptualization of a PlayStation shooter was fresh on the mind. In the pursuit of becoming that fourth pillar, the PlayStation shooter has been lost in the mud. It's easy to see how a game like InFamous might be easy to adapt to this model, but Killzone? Put it in the same camp as Resistance: this was all part of a grand experiment, and the experiment failed. We are never seeing anything like this again. That's the message you ultimately have to take away from a game like this being a launch title: they don't care enough to give it a proper burial. Blow its jaw off with the same smoking barrel and nobody will think to look at the corpse any further.
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I would be angry if these games were anything other than mediocre (except for the PS Vita one, that was cool). I guess I'm disappointed that we're never going to see a great Killzone game. Resistance 3 was actually pretty damn good, but the name that was supposed to make the PlayStation 3 what it was will forever be a collective shrug.
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Happy new years, everyone.

I think there's a lot out there about how dated this feels, or how cringy its dialogue is, or how it should have been this, or that. And I have to reason with you here: none of that's unfounded. And yet I find the clips I've seen of this to feel eerily nostalgic. This is an early-era PS Plus game, back from the days where they could afford to give you a metric fuckton of games every month. It's the perfect kind of introduction to the open world genre for a kid whose parents won't allow GTA in the house and who hasn't really heard of something like Far Cry. It's barebones, but as a first open world game, I don't think that's all too offensive.
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The problem is, this was trying to sell itself as a progression of that. But I don't think it's inaccurate to say that it's a faithful modern adaptation of what these games meant to me as a child. It's a shame that that's all this is, and that long time series fans who have a different relationship with these games than I do didn't get the ideal version of this they should have. But weird dialogue aside, my only real compliant I'll have with this when I try it is whether or not there's an airport I can drive to. Come on, you gotta have that.

I have only barely played Silent Hill 2, so I don't have much of a personal connection with this series. I am, however, acutely aware of this infamous HD collection.
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So, what do I have to say about this that nobody else is saying? Not much, except for the fact that it is currently THIRTY FUCKING DOLLARS on the Microsoft Store, ready for you to buy and play on modern Xbox consoles. Bare in mind: the PlayStation port got patched, but the 360 did not. It is not an exaggeration to say that they are currently selling the worst conceivable ways you could play either of these games for THIRTY FUCKING DOLLARS in the year of our lord 2024, twelve years after this collection came out. There are other oddities in there, too, like XCOM Enemy Unknown and its standalone expansion pack selling for forty dollars, each. I am convinced that Microsoft is just pulling their prices from the 360 marketplace and is not updating some of these prices respective to age. How else can you explain having to pay twenty dollars for Hitman: Absolution? What about thirty-five for Saints Row IV, a game that already has a port available on the Xbox One?
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My point here is, I respect the work that Microsoft is putting into porting their back catalog. As I've said in the past, I'm a firm believer in game preservation. I guess, in the case of this HD Collection, thirty dollars is at least cheaper than the ludicrous prices nostalgia scalpers have been labelling on the original, much better versions. But when the PC version has been abandonware for years, and thus accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and has been seeing free mods from fans to bring that port to parity for nearly a decade at this point, game preservation isn't really a good excuse to charge someone thirty dollars for a twelve-year-old port of a twenty-three year old game. What the fuck, Microsoft? What crack are you smoking? Can I have some?
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(I should also add: it's stupid that they have games on their back-pat catalog that aren't being sold online anymore, but have a store page for some reason. Either let me buy a copy of The Orange Box for your console digitally or let me filter out its presence so I can look at the games you're actually selling. But Crackdown and Too Human are free now, so it's cool that the user experience on your store sucks a donkey's dick, I guess.)

Angry Birds Trilogy is a strange, strange beast. This is a perfect example of the corrupting power that money has. All three of these games were sold at a price of at least two dollars originally. In this collection that originally cost in the range of thirty dollars, they blend together into this unchanging homunculus of early-touchscreen era artifacts. I can see the Wii port having some value attached, as the potential use of pointer controls might have threatened to mirror the touchscreen controls in an interesting way. Still, that doesn't justify this.
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And yet, yet...
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This is a perfect piece of game preservation. Unlike many of its contemporaries, all three of the games in this collection are not butchered to run on other platforms. Purely, this is Angry Birds and two of its sequel projects as they were in 2012, and that's what they put on the back of the box. What they likely didn't was "this might be the only way you can play Angry Birds and its sequels, as they were in 2012, twenty years from now." There's a smartphone game that IGN once gave a 10/10 that you can't play anymore, and the original Angry Birds was nearly dealt a similar killing blow early last year. My point is, the iOS is not a safe place for games if you want to view them as more than disposable products. In a way, knowing this devalues collections like Angry Birds Trilogy somewhat. But, if you have the mindset of a preservationist, this has a reason to exist. Finally.

There is such a thing as bad publicity; denying that is not only idiotic, it sets up for failure. Since PT Barnum didn't have a time machine at his disposal, he had no way of knowing that, in the foreseeable future, bad publicity would get crueler and more personal than ever before. What PT Barnum also would not have observed was the total brand collapse of one of gaming's most prominent figures.
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It's funny to think about Jack Thompson in 2024. He may have been a mustache-twirling villain, but the end of his career was always a certainty. It turns out that when you keep filing frivolous lawsuits about things as ultimately trivial as video games, the law eventually tires of your persistence. It gives you credit, no doubt. But little more than that. Trying to kill the video game industry is a Sisyphean task, if ever Sysphean tasks were designated to be as stupid. What Thompson was in opposition to was the needle being pushed too far, and as it were, he needn't have said anything for that to have happened.
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Rockstar's first taste of unsustainability was the time they tried to add Barbie-Doll sex to a Grand Theft Auto game to show that the studio was maturing, and then had no time to hide the evidence before the game was slated to ship. It took two months after release for modders to discover it and hit the web once the game was ported to PC. Twenty days after the port was released, a class action lawsuit had been filed against the studio. The game now had to be released with an Adult's Only rating until the offending content could more thoroughly be patched out. If Wikipedia is to be trusted, things got dire to the point where Rockstar's parent company, TakeTwo, canned a project out of fear that it would further damage their brand.
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So, what does it say about the future of the games industry when, a year later, they shit the bed again, and this time, the controversial material was so fundamental to the game itself that more than a patch was necessary to gut it?
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You can no longer buy Manhunt 2, kind of. See, you can still buy it on the PS Vita, but that's a technicality. The game was sold on the PSP's digital marketplace originally and, wanting to have their most popular PSP digital games on the Vita, they then re-released a handful of emulated versions on the Vita, including Manhunt 2. The Vita's store was nearly shut down a couple of years ago, in conjunction with the PlayStation 3. But owing the outcry in response to such an action, the servers are still up today—with limitations, of course. Within those limitations, you can still buy that emulated copy of Manhunt 2. And nowhere else. You can still buy a pirated copy of the first Manhunt game on Steam, but Rockstar doesn't care very much about it, so you have to install community patches for it function. Bully and Grand Theft Auto IV have been patched to include forced integration with the Rockstar Games Launcher, and owing to the shitshow that was their attempt to remaster the first three 3D GTA games, that original trilogy can also be played on the Launcher... sort of. Manhunt's Steam store page, on the other hand, warns that the game is not functional with Windows Vista, 7, or 8. Two of those operating systems are no longer supported by Steam, and neither are the operating systems that this version of the game likely runs with normally out-of-the-box. They're still selling this version of the game, as well as emulated versions on platforms like the PlayStation and Microsoft Store. But it feels as though it's only been included out of obligation, as if it's only there to have a "complete" collection of Rockstar Games on all official platforms, and little else. Y'know, avoiding the game's sequel like the plague. Mostly complete.
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But at least the Vita version is still on sale. The uncensored version, the PC release, is just straight-up abandonware. It was never released on Steam, instead handed to a service called Direct2Drive. Don't recognize the name? That's because it shut down twelve years ago. Whoops. You would assume, though, that a game company so litigious that its relationship with the modding community is tenuous and strained at best would try to at least reclaim one of the games that its team of animators, programmers, writers, artists, et cetera worked hard on for years. MyAbandonware begs to differ. And then something funny happens.
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You don't have to play the uncensored version of Manhunt 2 to tell why they're actively ashamed of it. The fact that that was not how they ever intended to release the game is about as subtle as the violence portrayed in the game, itself. Ugly filters distort the screen, causing the ensuing chaos to feel like a disorienting, confusing mess. Behind the layers of gunk, you can tell how committed the team was to the filth of the game they were creating. But unless you go out of your way to remove those filters, you will never see it.
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Back-to-back with the Hot Coffee fiasco, Manhunt 2 proves The Streisand Effect can only take you so far. While Grand Theft Auto V certainly courted controversy with its one mission involving torture, that's one example I can think of since Manhunt 2's release seventeen years ago where Rockstar has felt close to their roots as troublemakers. Do I mourn their mission to be as edgy and excessive as possible? No, because Hatred exists and it's shit from a butt. But the real lesson to be learned from this all is that, by focusing all of your energy on carelessly pushing boundaries, you do all of the artists working under your belt a disservice by forcing their work to be hidden in some crevice, somewhere. I know Cyberpunk released in an unacceptable state and had a horrible, rushed development cycle, but if it's indicative of anything, you can push the boundaries somewhat and still respect your artists.

I'm sorry, no. I don't need to see the gameplay, another trailer, or anything to know that the decision to remake this was made by a committee of darts. Silent Hill 2 and Dead Space are the kinds of remakes I get from a financial perspective. If there's any indication of its impact, horror legend John Carpenter is a big enough fan of Dead Space to sing its praises to the tune of a hypothetical adaptation. He's too old and out of it; what will likely be his last directorial effort was operated over a video call. But when your elders recognize newer art, imagine the youth. And I don't even have to tell you how big of a splash Silent Hill 2 has made. In terms of video games as pop culture, you have obvious candidates like Mario, Grand Theft Auto, and Fortnite. But Silent Hill 2 may genuinely be one of the only horror games to meet that criteria.

But Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons? As far as I can tell, the original game was fine. I remember Dunkey referencing an old video he made about it way back when, and Jacksfilms referenced it in an even older episode of YIAY when one of his viewers used it as the answer to a prompt. I'm pretty sure that it does well in small conversations. People ask you what you've been playing recently, and it's there. But it's hardly a seminal piece of artwork. And its original version doesn't have enough bruises from its age to really warrant another version of it. They could have easily just resold the original version. I don't get executives.

The seventh generation was kind of an ugly duckling. I'm not going to deny that there weren't bonafide hits, games that played with the medium in fascinating ways, or things to be nostalgic for now. What I will argue is that it mostly represented a perfectly mediocre middle-ground between the ambitious but technically held-back sixth-generation and wild-eyed eighth. To give a point of reference for my perspective, The Last of Us, which was released at the tail end of the seventh console generation, was revered for its story, but ten-plus years and one remake later, that story and a few pleasant set-pieces fail to hide monotonous gameplay loops basking in mostly underdeveloped systems. The Last of Us Part II, for as contentious as its narrative is, manages to balance its story and gameplay in satisfying ways.

But I do think this is underselling the seventh generation somewhat. I believe the eighth-ninth generation has been a great period of stagnation. The games may be great, but unless they're pushing graphics tech, they seldom try new tools. I would love to compare Grand Theft Auto V to Red Dead Redemption II and make some grand statement about how much better the latter game is, and while it's more accomplished on an aesthetic and thematic level, its gameplay pillars remain largely unchanged from the former's. Now more than ever, we need cool shit. We need Prey 2.

I think the appeal of what Prey 2 could have been is fairly obvious. It was going to be a bounty-hunting sim with light RPG and parkour mechanics set in a Sci-Fi universe. If you, like me, got sidetracked in Red Dead Redemption doing bounties, Prey 2 practically sells itself. In an era focused on leaks, part of me sincerely hopes that one day, on a random Tuesday, a nearly complete build of it will be uploaded to the internet. It happened to the original version of TimeSplitters 4 recently, fingers are crossed I get to see this in action, too, before I die.

There really isn't a moral here, just casual spite toward Bethesda. Prey 2 was not canceled because it was a bad game in any way, shape, or form. It was canceled because Bethesda wanted to have their cake and eat it, too. If they couldn't own the developers, nobody would! And thus this went down the shitter, Human Head was reduced to only its name, and The Quiet Man happened. But Todd Howard is funny and charismatic, right? Fuck you, Pete Hines.

I don't care about mechs, but perhaps I just haven't given them enough of a chance. I would love to give Steel Battalion a chance, though. I absolutely adore controller gimmicks, as you might know already, and this is the purest form of that. For all intents and purposes, Steel Battalion's controller makes it a PC game focused on keyboard controls brought over to consoles through the power of imaginative design. But I would argue it's more than that: two joysticks, an array of unevenly placed buttons, a dial, a throttle, the works. Nothing looks or plays like this. Even if the game itself is mediocre, even if its sixth-console-generation-ass trappings prevent it from being more interesting than the form it's packaged in, that package makes this a bizarrely fascinating entry point for this sort of a thing. I don't know; it should be niche. But holy fuck, I have to have that thing, it's so fucking cool.
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And it usually goes for three hundred dollars on eBay, fuck.

Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor is perhaps the most fascinating game to have ever used motion controls, and it's also probably the most frustrating. I genuinely wish this were good. If you want a good portrait of how much the original Steel Battalion's core conceit bottlenecked it, its Backloggd page has it on at least seventy lists, but only six people have ever written reviews for it (at the time of writing). This might have to do with the fact that its current price range is currently sitting just above three hundred dollars USD. As Backloggd user Lapbunny helpfully points out, its lack of accessibility and uniqueness has made it practically a mainstay of many expos and conventions, so it's likely that there is an audience for it that just has never been able to own a copy of the game and its controller, themselves.

All this is to say that Heavy Armor was too early for the party. For all intents and purposes, this is a VR game that was made for technology great at emulating mobile games but was mixed with just about anything else. And I have to say, VR is the way to go for a game like this. The peripheral era of gaming is over, long dead, there are piss stains on its tombstone, and game companies are wise to that fact. The best thing that can be done now is to emulate what those peripherals could do without wasting space, and I don't think there's any other format more suited to that than VR.

About the saddest thing to be gleaned from the failure of a game like Heavy Armor is that, regardless of whether or not it can feasibly done now, there must not be any motivation for anyone with a budget to try it again. Steel Battalion isn't a franchise, and it probably wouldn't sell like one, either. If your main goal is to move units so you can keep making games, it's not something you would take another shot at. But somewhere inside me, I have hope. The indie scene is where a game like Steel Battalion will flourish again, as it has done for Guitar Hero quite recently. Godspeed, indie developers, godspeed.

I have a couple of takes on this. One involves infighting, makes me look like a hypocrite, and isn't very fun.

Booooring. The other thing, though? Strap in, strap on, men, women, enbies alike!

If the one thing I know about your game is that it has ass and tits in it, what separates it from pornography? I know you're not willing to go there, and by all means, it's fine to have creative restrictions like that in place. But when I'm reading headlines about your game where you say your team worked tirelessly to perfect the ass of your heroine, and all of the buzz surrounding your game is one side ogling and furiously masturbating while the other side watches in shock and awe... aren't you just marketing to the same crowd? "Porn that you can play with your family around—as long as your family is okay with all of the pervy anime you watch!" almost sounds like satire you'd hear in a game like Grand Theft Auto.

And it's not like I'm against sex appeal, either. When I bought Nier Automata at full price as a birthday present for my sixteen-year-old self in 2017, I was well aware of the fact that 2B's character design was sexualized, could have her skirt blown off on command by the player, and that the game director explicitly encouraged his fans to make lewd art of the character and send to him. I knew all of this, but I also knew that the game was a great work of art that managed to be thought-provoking, heartbreaking, funny, and even slightly cute all at the same time. The clothes off command be damned, it was a worthwhile purchase that I recognize as a masterpiece.

I also don't mind sex scenes, even if they seem pointless. I'm only human; titillation, when done tastefully, rules!

Everything I've had about Stellar Blade so far makes it sound like a fun game, but I don't get that emotional core from Nier off of its fans. I don't get the scenes in a TV show or movie before a sex scene that lets me allow its presence. Honest to god, the toxic, childish discourse surrounding this thing just makes it seem like the game equivalent of that thing you did as a teenager where you took something that was broadly sexy (whether it be those sex scenes or just a suggestive pose from a music video), and then cut out everything but the sex appeal, exported it to a .mp4 file on your computer hidden in an area that no one but you would know to look for.

And the thing that really blows is, what if somebody else had this same opinion about Nier Automata back in 2017 because they never watched the videos that I did? What if all they knew was that the game director was encouraging Rule 34 content of his game? What if I've been listening to the wrong people, or what if the people who are expecting me to listen to them have all the wrong takes?

But that still wouldn't curb the fact that these developers fired a woman for expressing feminist views, though. FUCK YEAH, KOREA!