aportraitofjoeI
46 Reviews liked by aportraitofjoeI
Club Penguin
2005
this game is fine but its kinda fucked up if you didnt spend $5 your penguin would forever be naked and ugly while every other penguin would shit on you wtf
This review contains spoilers
i'm of two minds about Sekiro. at times it feels like a great game hiding inside a mediocre one, and sometimes it feels like a mediocre game hiding inside a great one. there are moments where it is a deeply electrifying experience, and there are times where it feels utterly indistinct from the stock AAA formula.
let's start with the good: the one-on-one swordplay in this game is a delight. on a very fundamental level, it's not too dissimilar from the Batman Arkham combat that took 2010s AAA game design by storm: you have dodges and parries that you use in response to specific diagetic and non-diagetic (glowing swords, markers over people's heads) tells, and maintaining a consistent rhythm of combat builds up a meter that you can use to defeat enemies in one hit. sekiro is much more difficult than it's contemporaries in this style in a way that may obscure this similarity, but it is very much there, and it works brilliantly. sekiro has some of the best one-on-one swordfights in the medium, battles of constant aggression where backing off for even a moment to heal gives your opponent time to recover their posture, where a single mistake on your part changes the game, and where perfection is tantalizingly within grasp once you adjust to the game's rhythms. designers Masaru Yamamura and Yuki Fukuda and their design team - along with the game's fantastic audio and animations - are to be applauded for making a game that is experientally not a thousand times removed from a Batman Arkham/Punch-Out!! hybrid feel utterly fresh and unique. the game's combat admittedly loses something when you aren't up against human opponents: the all-too-frequent times you are up against animals strip away the core loop of perfect parries and well-timed dodges into a much less elegant game of hammering the dodge button to get away from unparseable flails of limbs, but even then it rarely devolves so much that the core enjoyment of the combat is no longer present. it's only once you slink away from a duel, back into the shadows, that the flaws begin to show in the game's technique.
the stealth...exists. i hesitate to call it bad but it's certainly not remarkable: if you've played any AAA open world game made in the past few years you know what you're getting here: hiding in tall grass or on branches and rooftops from patrolling enemies that you can kill in one hit by sneaking up behind them, and some distraction items and moves that you'll rarely if ever use because it's much more effective to just stab them in the back. stealth rarely feels like it is the cornerstone of an engaging encounter - only the sniper miniboss in Ashina Depths really felt like something that I had to make careful and considered use of stealth in order to make it through, and that may just be because I got there far too early - and usually either falls into thinning out a couple of enemies before a fight, or slowly picking them off one-by-one Arkham style. the one interesting thing Sekiro brings to the table is that you can take off one of a bosses (usually two) health bars by getting the drop on them, but this has a knock-on effect for the design of those bosses where if you don't get a drop on them, you just have to fight them twice, with only major bosses having different moves and patterns for different phases. technically speaking this rewards the stealth but I'm very tired of the go-to reward for this kind of AAA game being the ability to skip repetitious content. ultimately, like a modern Assassin's Creed or Horizon: Zero Dawn the stealth here would be unable to carry a full game, and just barely meets the boundaries of acceptability for what increasingly seems like an element these games simply must have.
this feeling of weary obligation manifests narratively as well. thematically, I dig what it is doing. this story about how clinging to life after one's time has passed produces a sickness of the soul that mutilates the self and destroys the world around you to sustain yourself is often resonant and occasionally powerful, but it's the moment-to-moment writing that really lets it down: characters are routinely flat and one-dimensional (the character of Owl is notably ill-served, being absent for almost the entire game before making a bizarre cartoonish turn to evil), the game is too eager to show you it's mysteries to really make the environmental storytelling sing (the monastery is theoretically my favorite narrative arc here but because The Deal is unveiled almost immediately there's no real escalation of information: you learn almost immediately that these guys made themselves into undying monsters through these freaky worms and there's precious little left to discover in the course of your adventure), and the game's refreshingly restrained storytelling for a big AAA game ultimately dooms this narrative to fade from the mind as quickly as it passes through the body. perhaps this could have been solved with more dialogue, but given that attempting to explore the narrative further "rewards" the player with a "true" ending that is total MCU sequel hook rubbish compared to the poignant normal endings, I'm not sure this is a quick fix. I do think the storytelling here is ultimately too slight, as the lack of space given to characters like Genichiro or places like Ashina to be understood as characters who have a coherent belief system or culture or context they are clinging to robs the game of a lot of the resonance it could potentially bring out by boiling things down to the point that the metaphors struggle to be gleamed through the Proper Nouns, but I think the wider problem is this game is far, far too long.
again, this is something sekiro very much has in common with it's contemporaries in the AAA space. Sekiro took me just over 30 hours to finish - with at least 4 hours dedicated to Final Boss Attempts alone because Good God - and I think you could have halved that and it would have twice the impact. i'm not really interested in speculating on what a hypothetical half-long Sekiro would look like, or Sek if you will, but certainly the game as it is empties it's bag of shinobi tricks (generously) about two thirds before the end, and relies on quite a few palette swapped enemies and bosses (it is a crime that the Chained Ogre is in here at all, let alone twice) as well as some truly sloppy designs (Demon of Hatred, Headless Ape) that don't gel at all with the experience the game is aiming for. somewhere in the imagination there exists a 12-15 hour Sekiro that excises the bosses that Just Don't Work, and focuses on the supremely polished, rock-hard core of the game that is consistently electrifying, but instead we have this bloated, confused, game that gets messier the more you step away from that ironclad heart.
inevitably, I am brought back to the question that dominates all my thoughts about sekiro: why? why is Sekiro like this? why did it feel the need to be 30 hours long? most linear action games without Open Worlds tend to clock in at either half of or a third of that length, so why does this have the length of an RPG? speaking of RPGs, why are the countless vestigial elements of currency, upgrades, that do little to enhance the core design here as well? why is this game riddled with unnecessary elements that either do not help it or actively undermine it? i'd almost say that it feels trapped in the poisonous swamp of some other, predecessor franchise from which many of these vestigial design elements originate from, the fanbase of which would expect a game with certain features and considerations and of a certain length, a fandom that would give tremendous benefit to this game by only viewing it through the narrow lens of the other games in this series rather than the wider industry design trends that it is clearly in conversation with, and that Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice ultimately wounded itself in order to accommodate a formula set down by these prior games that the developers are tragically wedded to despite said formula not truly fitting with the core design of this fundamentally distinct experience...but I couldn't possibly think of what that might be. i'm pretty sure from software didn't develop The Surge, after all.
perhaps we should count our blessings: at least it didn't try to infect itself with an Open World.
let's start with the good: the one-on-one swordplay in this game is a delight. on a very fundamental level, it's not too dissimilar from the Batman Arkham combat that took 2010s AAA game design by storm: you have dodges and parries that you use in response to specific diagetic and non-diagetic (glowing swords, markers over people's heads) tells, and maintaining a consistent rhythm of combat builds up a meter that you can use to defeat enemies in one hit. sekiro is much more difficult than it's contemporaries in this style in a way that may obscure this similarity, but it is very much there, and it works brilliantly. sekiro has some of the best one-on-one swordfights in the medium, battles of constant aggression where backing off for even a moment to heal gives your opponent time to recover their posture, where a single mistake on your part changes the game, and where perfection is tantalizingly within grasp once you adjust to the game's rhythms. designers Masaru Yamamura and Yuki Fukuda and their design team - along with the game's fantastic audio and animations - are to be applauded for making a game that is experientally not a thousand times removed from a Batman Arkham/Punch-Out!! hybrid feel utterly fresh and unique. the game's combat admittedly loses something when you aren't up against human opponents: the all-too-frequent times you are up against animals strip away the core loop of perfect parries and well-timed dodges into a much less elegant game of hammering the dodge button to get away from unparseable flails of limbs, but even then it rarely devolves so much that the core enjoyment of the combat is no longer present. it's only once you slink away from a duel, back into the shadows, that the flaws begin to show in the game's technique.
the stealth...exists. i hesitate to call it bad but it's certainly not remarkable: if you've played any AAA open world game made in the past few years you know what you're getting here: hiding in tall grass or on branches and rooftops from patrolling enemies that you can kill in one hit by sneaking up behind them, and some distraction items and moves that you'll rarely if ever use because it's much more effective to just stab them in the back. stealth rarely feels like it is the cornerstone of an engaging encounter - only the sniper miniboss in Ashina Depths really felt like something that I had to make careful and considered use of stealth in order to make it through, and that may just be because I got there far too early - and usually either falls into thinning out a couple of enemies before a fight, or slowly picking them off one-by-one Arkham style. the one interesting thing Sekiro brings to the table is that you can take off one of a bosses (usually two) health bars by getting the drop on them, but this has a knock-on effect for the design of those bosses where if you don't get a drop on them, you just have to fight them twice, with only major bosses having different moves and patterns for different phases. technically speaking this rewards the stealth but I'm very tired of the go-to reward for this kind of AAA game being the ability to skip repetitious content. ultimately, like a modern Assassin's Creed or Horizon: Zero Dawn the stealth here would be unable to carry a full game, and just barely meets the boundaries of acceptability for what increasingly seems like an element these games simply must have.
this feeling of weary obligation manifests narratively as well. thematically, I dig what it is doing. this story about how clinging to life after one's time has passed produces a sickness of the soul that mutilates the self and destroys the world around you to sustain yourself is often resonant and occasionally powerful, but it's the moment-to-moment writing that really lets it down: characters are routinely flat and one-dimensional (the character of Owl is notably ill-served, being absent for almost the entire game before making a bizarre cartoonish turn to evil), the game is too eager to show you it's mysteries to really make the environmental storytelling sing (the monastery is theoretically my favorite narrative arc here but because The Deal is unveiled almost immediately there's no real escalation of information: you learn almost immediately that these guys made themselves into undying monsters through these freaky worms and there's precious little left to discover in the course of your adventure), and the game's refreshingly restrained storytelling for a big AAA game ultimately dooms this narrative to fade from the mind as quickly as it passes through the body. perhaps this could have been solved with more dialogue, but given that attempting to explore the narrative further "rewards" the player with a "true" ending that is total MCU sequel hook rubbish compared to the poignant normal endings, I'm not sure this is a quick fix. I do think the storytelling here is ultimately too slight, as the lack of space given to characters like Genichiro or places like Ashina to be understood as characters who have a coherent belief system or culture or context they are clinging to robs the game of a lot of the resonance it could potentially bring out by boiling things down to the point that the metaphors struggle to be gleamed through the Proper Nouns, but I think the wider problem is this game is far, far too long.
again, this is something sekiro very much has in common with it's contemporaries in the AAA space. Sekiro took me just over 30 hours to finish - with at least 4 hours dedicated to Final Boss Attempts alone because Good God - and I think you could have halved that and it would have twice the impact. i'm not really interested in speculating on what a hypothetical half-long Sekiro would look like, or Sek if you will, but certainly the game as it is empties it's bag of shinobi tricks (generously) about two thirds before the end, and relies on quite a few palette swapped enemies and bosses (it is a crime that the Chained Ogre is in here at all, let alone twice) as well as some truly sloppy designs (Demon of Hatred, Headless Ape) that don't gel at all with the experience the game is aiming for. somewhere in the imagination there exists a 12-15 hour Sekiro that excises the bosses that Just Don't Work, and focuses on the supremely polished, rock-hard core of the game that is consistently electrifying, but instead we have this bloated, confused, game that gets messier the more you step away from that ironclad heart.
inevitably, I am brought back to the question that dominates all my thoughts about sekiro: why? why is Sekiro like this? why did it feel the need to be 30 hours long? most linear action games without Open Worlds tend to clock in at either half of or a third of that length, so why does this have the length of an RPG? speaking of RPGs, why are the countless vestigial elements of currency, upgrades, that do little to enhance the core design here as well? why is this game riddled with unnecessary elements that either do not help it or actively undermine it? i'd almost say that it feels trapped in the poisonous swamp of some other, predecessor franchise from which many of these vestigial design elements originate from, the fanbase of which would expect a game with certain features and considerations and of a certain length, a fandom that would give tremendous benefit to this game by only viewing it through the narrow lens of the other games in this series rather than the wider industry design trends that it is clearly in conversation with, and that Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice ultimately wounded itself in order to accommodate a formula set down by these prior games that the developers are tragically wedded to despite said formula not truly fitting with the core design of this fundamentally distinct experience...but I couldn't possibly think of what that might be. i'm pretty sure from software didn't develop The Surge, after all.
perhaps we should count our blessings: at least it didn't try to infect itself with an Open World.
Elden Ring
2022
When Demon’s Souls released in 2009, I was going through a pretty hard crisis of faith regarding videogames. I had grown old enough to finally see their limits, the industry-imposed repetition and condescention in their design, the corners that have to be cut and padded. I blindly took the advice from a few raving cynics I aligned myself with and imported Demon’s Souls from America as a last shot before I defiantly moved on from the medium like the little drama queen I was. DeS was exactly the game I needed, I had never played anything else like it, I had my mind shattered by the way the bosses in the title weren’t so much battles as they were puzzle boxes - imposing small situations to solve, being asked to find the lone small thread that will make the beast unravel. It felt like a NeverEnding Story adventure or something, I loved it, I still do.
With every new Fromsoft game, Hidetaka Miyazaki takes the opportunity to twist the dial even further from Adventure Fantasy to Battle Fantasy, the focus becoming more oriented around a type of mechanisation I personally find diagnostic-feeling, much less fulfilling - stat optimising and gear building, rote memorisation of excruciatingly difficult boss movesets. Very disenchanting open world too; everything in every corner is there to make your character more powerful, a handful of “types” of dungeon/outpost, a truly memetic core routine that made me feel like I was just playing Genshin Impact. This is obviously just a preference thing, but you must forgive me for feeling a little left behind.
There is a lot beauty in Elden Ring’s world, if I had anyone to thank for giving me the desire to trudge through this game to the end, it’ll be the stellar art and design team. Some of the most stunning locales I’ve seen in a minute; I’m particularly fond of miquellas haligtree, crumbling farum azula, and even revisiting Radahn’s arena post-battle for a taste of what I’d personally hoped exploring Elden Ring’s open world would feel like. The monster designs are nuts too, some skirting the perfect balance between recognisable and grotesque to lend some genuine unease.
Elden Ring is a fantastic game, just not a game for me. It actually gives me a little tinge of sadness to play a Fromsoft title and be made to think “this reminds me of another game” so many times. I respect the player-hostility maximalism of the bosses and the dizzying open-endedness of character builds - and in all honestly, Elden Ring very clearly has some of the richest thematic storytelling across the Miyazaki platter right now - I would just rather watch people snap the game over their knee on Youtube than ever play this again.
2024 Addendum long after the point of writing: I'm not exactly comfortable with my "eh it's not really for me" take being among the top reviews for this game. I use this site as a personal journal more than a platform for formal academic reviews; ultimately I'm glad that I'm not alone in my perspective, but we all know how Souls fans act, and believe me I'm not pissing all over your holy object - I'm bemoaning the fact that I've felt this illustrious series slip through my fingers and take the form of something I can no longer care for.
With every new Fromsoft game, Hidetaka Miyazaki takes the opportunity to twist the dial even further from Adventure Fantasy to Battle Fantasy, the focus becoming more oriented around a type of mechanisation I personally find diagnostic-feeling, much less fulfilling - stat optimising and gear building, rote memorisation of excruciatingly difficult boss movesets. Very disenchanting open world too; everything in every corner is there to make your character more powerful, a handful of “types” of dungeon/outpost, a truly memetic core routine that made me feel like I was just playing Genshin Impact. This is obviously just a preference thing, but you must forgive me for feeling a little left behind.
There is a lot beauty in Elden Ring’s world, if I had anyone to thank for giving me the desire to trudge through this game to the end, it’ll be the stellar art and design team. Some of the most stunning locales I’ve seen in a minute; I’m particularly fond of miquellas haligtree, crumbling farum azula, and even revisiting Radahn’s arena post-battle for a taste of what I’d personally hoped exploring Elden Ring’s open world would feel like. The monster designs are nuts too, some skirting the perfect balance between recognisable and grotesque to lend some genuine unease.
Elden Ring is a fantastic game, just not a game for me. It actually gives me a little tinge of sadness to play a Fromsoft title and be made to think “this reminds me of another game” so many times. I respect the player-hostility maximalism of the bosses and the dizzying open-endedness of character builds - and in all honestly, Elden Ring very clearly has some of the richest thematic storytelling across the Miyazaki platter right now - I would just rather watch people snap the game over their knee on Youtube than ever play this again.
2024 Addendum long after the point of writing: I'm not exactly comfortable with my "eh it's not really for me" take being among the top reviews for this game. I use this site as a personal journal more than a platform for formal academic reviews; ultimately I'm glad that I'm not alone in my perspective, but we all know how Souls fans act, and believe me I'm not pissing all over your holy object - I'm bemoaning the fact that I've felt this illustrious series slip through my fingers and take the form of something I can no longer care for.
Plug & Play
2015
...oh yes, that's how a relationship looks like: like the human centipede.
My favorite videogame moment so far this year focuses on the face of a teenage girl – freckled, flushed, screen-lit. She’s playing a broken arcade machine with her eyes closed, listening to her best friend narrate a Street Fighter fantasy. It’s an act of trust, of shared imagination. And in this moment, Ellie is seen.
Left Behind repurposes its AAA mechanics – the shooting (of waterguns), the lobbing (of bricks at cars), the quick-time-event (her face) – not for domination or survival but connection. It left me longing for entire games of altered verbs. Of fumbling connections. Games of seeing and being seen.
Left Behind repurposes its AAA mechanics – the shooting (of waterguns), the lobbing (of bricks at cars), the quick-time-event (her face) – not for domination or survival but connection. It left me longing for entire games of altered verbs. Of fumbling connections. Games of seeing and being seen.
NieR: Automata
2017
"this game is deep and stuff bro, it says something about the human contidion" I utter as I furiously masturbate to 2B sfm porn
Metroid Fusion
2002
All of the mainline Metroid games are about self improvement and overcoming your environment in some form or another, but Fusion is the first to directly tie that into its theme in a meaningful way. Stripped bare of all abilities, you play a Samus robbed of agency, as the game literalizes its structural shift of closed off mini-missions into a story of reclaiming autonomy. You're unprotected and bare, unable to take hits as you used to, and enemies reform right before you eyes. Your worst enemy is a version of Samus who has the strength you once did. A relentless Metroid hunter (not like you yourself were in Metroid 2) coming after the final metroid, Samus herself.
Much has been said about this game being far more linear than all the others, and it's true, but I think also slightly overstated. Yes, the maps are both compulsory and come with objective markers, but you stray very far from them into massive hidden areas and entire pathways pretty often. It's less consistently linear and more as if the game starts hyper linear, but becomes more and more like a proper Metroid game as Samus becomes more like herself. The stripped down protagonist, more relentless enemies, and closed off areas leads to the most claustrophobic and dangerous moment to moment gameplay yet. No longer can you comfortably tank all incoming damage, as even normal enemies can kill you pretty quickly if you're not careful, let alone bosses. You're vulnerable to both heat and cold, and the freezing weapon is forced to be tied to an expendable resource instead of your normal weapon. There's nothing quite as satisfying in the other Metroid games as getting the varia suit so the fucking freezing X blobs can't hurt you anymore.
I only really have one big issue with this game. Every Metroid game has overly cryptic hidden secrets, but this feels like the only one where solving those hidden bits are actually necessary to progress sometimes. The sequence after beating Nightmare is the worst at this, sticking you into a maze extending across sections with multiple seeming dead ends and arbitrary progression paths. Speaking of which, Nightmare itself kinda sucks too. It's easy enough to forgive when literally every other boss here more or less surpasses any of the other ones in any Metroid game though.
Much has been said about this game being far more linear than all the others, and it's true, but I think also slightly overstated. Yes, the maps are both compulsory and come with objective markers, but you stray very far from them into massive hidden areas and entire pathways pretty often. It's less consistently linear and more as if the game starts hyper linear, but becomes more and more like a proper Metroid game as Samus becomes more like herself. The stripped down protagonist, more relentless enemies, and closed off areas leads to the most claustrophobic and dangerous moment to moment gameplay yet. No longer can you comfortably tank all incoming damage, as even normal enemies can kill you pretty quickly if you're not careful, let alone bosses. You're vulnerable to both heat and cold, and the freezing weapon is forced to be tied to an expendable resource instead of your normal weapon. There's nothing quite as satisfying in the other Metroid games as getting the varia suit so the fucking freezing X blobs can't hurt you anymore.
I only really have one big issue with this game. Every Metroid game has overly cryptic hidden secrets, but this feels like the only one where solving those hidden bits are actually necessary to progress sometimes. The sequence after beating Nightmare is the worst at this, sticking you into a maze extending across sections with multiple seeming dead ends and arbitrary progression paths. Speaking of which, Nightmare itself kinda sucks too. It's easy enough to forgive when literally every other boss here more or less surpasses any of the other ones in any Metroid game though.
Metroid Fusion
2002
Breakneck pacing through linear design cleverly made to feel open, combined with the themes of lost agency and the powers one serves betraying them, which juxtaposes excellently by finally facing off with the pinnacle of power Samus used to be - now a horrific weapon to be feared and avoided. I love how naked it all makes you feel, Samus has her powers literally surgically removed from her body, your superiors withhold upgrades from you and lord complete command of your exploration, the new Fusion Suit follows a very bare, muscular system aesthetic, and that's the point.
Your adversary is the SA-X, a fully suited and booted walking sun, it practically glides through the station like a hot knife through butter - but despite inferior firepower and four layers of Federation protocol to sieve through, you've got the one thing it lacks. Wits.
If I could change one thing, it'd be for the opening act to be far less verbose and slow. If I could change a second thing, it'd be to make power bombs actually useful against bosses.
Your adversary is the SA-X, a fully suited and booted walking sun, it practically glides through the station like a hot knife through butter - but despite inferior firepower and four layers of Federation protocol to sieve through, you've got the one thing it lacks. Wits.
If I could change one thing, it'd be for the opening act to be far less verbose and slow. If I could change a second thing, it'd be to make power bombs actually useful against bosses.
Metroid Fusion
2002
PREVIOUSLY ON METROID: Samus Aran, galactic hero, nemesis of the evil space pirates, and bounty hunter who to my knowledge has never actually Hunted a Bounty, commits genocide.
this isn't a game theory or another example of a leftist unwilling to read a game in a way that isn't materialistic (i mean. not entirely, anyway...), this is just textually what occurs in Metroid 2. Samus touches down on SR388 and doesn't leave its surface until she's exterminated every single Metroid, except one, a final act of mercy that's immediately dropped off for invasive scientific study.
difficult to approach and often really quite tedious, Metroid 2 is nonetheless a truly remarkable game accurately described by FMTownsParty (https://www.backloggd.com/u/FMTownsParty/review/1831/) as an "art game for the Game Boy", and something of a black sheep in Nintendo's vast catalogue. it's a game I respect immensely even if I will probably never play it again, and its uniqueness stands out all the more for the abject failure of its twin remakes to replicate it, even if they are accomplished works in their own right, and one of my sticking points with Super Metroid, a game I like but cannot bring myself to love, is that it largely excises these more narratively complex elements in favor of something far more traditional. super metroid is an exceedingly fine game, but it doesn't really go for it, y'know?
thankfully, Metroid: Fusion makes up for it's predecessor by going for it harder than few games could ever hope to match.
becoming a new kind of life-form made out of the DNA of the single act of mercy you offered to a species you exterminated only to find yourself hunted by the physical embodiment of that past extermination wearing your face and using your powers is enough of a killer hook to hang an entire game out of but somehow Fusion just keeps going, adding layer upon layer of incisive thematic work interrogating it's central character relentlessly, until it cements itself as (with the possible exception of Majora's Mask) the single most thematically rich, narratively accomplished nintendo game with no input from Shigesato Itoi. every pixel of this game is bursting with resonance and detail and purpose that is near un-rivalled. fusion isn't just the best metroid game, it's one of the best games, period.
i think we've mostly chilled out on decrying Fusion for its linearity, but i wanna highlight what the game's structure does to serve it. the game's loop is simple: you arrive in a sector, adam tells you roughly what you need to do and why, and then you go do that thing, usually with some little hidey-holes you can poke in along the way to get an upgrade. but within this loop, the information you are given and the information that is withheld is pointed. even before the big reveals it's clear just how much the federation is manipulating and lying to you, and as you question your orders more and more, the game widens the scope it offers you, going from your first run in sector 1 being practically on-rails to the sections where the game lets go of the reins entirely, inviting you to find the path forward on your own, which are inevitably the moments where you push up against and bomb your way through the walls of the conspiracy around you. portal wishes it could do this as well.
everything about the storytelling in this game is so incisive, so pointed. the way the game emphasizes the destructive/predatory nature of Samus by making clear that you are not only the reason for the X's existence, by wiping out its natural predators, the Metroids, from the ecosystem, but also for it's spread throughout the station, as the AI reminds you that by opening up other areas, you are letting the X spread into them. the federation and samus' intertwined culpability in this incident is never left in doubt, the very act of playing a Metroid game, of increasing your ability to navigate this space, is toxic and bringing about it's destruction.
this culminates in one of the most remarkable sequences in the game and, indeed, the series, when you trick your way into the restricted zone and discover, inevitably, that the federation is breeding metroids. for "peaceful purposes", they claim. contrary to the game's reputation as constantly talking (Samus has some internal narration but it's genuinely quite sparse, and her actually talking back to the AI at the end is a big moment) this entire sequence, from the reveal to the knife-twisting that is the SA-X showing up to do as Samus does: butcher Metroids, to the final escape, where you drift upwards through an elevator shaft filled with other metroids - your kin, now - it's all done wordlessly, and communicates far more complicated feelings than anything in Super Metroid.
more than Other M could ever conceive, Fusion is about Samus. her destructive and violent past in the prior metroids, and her current status, a tool of the federation that they are preparing to discard once they find multiple, mass-produced SA-Xs they believe they can control. after all, why not? they controlled Samus, at least up to a certain point. the way the game pulls back its tight linear pacing ever so slightly as the story reaches its climax communicates Samus' push for personal autonomy beautifully, which is why I wish the ending was just a little tighter.
don't get me wrong, it's a knockout in many respects. facing the SA-X, the embodiment of what Samus once was, and triumphing over it with the new(ish) powers you've obtained from interfacing and embracing the life forms you destroy is a fantastic final battle, as is the last-minute reprise of being saved by the baby metroid. much-mocked as it is, I actually like the Fusion one far better, because rather than being a straightforwardly paternalistic relationship, the SA-Xs motives are far more obscured. is this the Samus part of it? or is it the X, protecting what could be the last remnant of its existence inside Samus? or is it a bittersweet reclamation and restating of Samus Aran as the one who kills the Metroids? it could be all of them, and that's why I like it. i like metroid when it's not doing gender, frankly. i like it, even more, when Samus Aran is ultimately saved by the funny little animals she saves innocuously around halfway through the game. i think that's why i like samus, ultimately, despite her genocidal tendencies, despite the fact that she is absolutely someone who would take away one of her hands, one of the ways she is able to reach out and embrace the world around her, with a gun. here, at the end, she still has enough good in her to save people.
which brings me to the actual sore point with the ending: Adam. there's a generous read to be made on the game's depiction of Adam for much of it, and I maintain that the game is genuinely critical of him as a person, as the twin reveals of him actively deceiving Samus throughout the adventure and also being the actual mind of Adam Malkovich do much to paint the picture of a kind of shitty military guy that Samus is all too willing to absolve him due to her own guilt. the problem is, of course, the Gender. the "any objections, lady?" shit and Samus' frankly embarrassing "no wait hold on it's fine actually his misogyny is secretly woke come on" is hard to swallow and impossible to muster the enthusiasm to do so after Sakamoto went on to write and direct Metroid: Other M, a fucking dumpster fire with the biggest gender essentialist TERF energy imaginable. Other M's very existence makes it a bit harder to be generous to Fusion in the way that I would like to.
there's so much to like about the end of this game, but there's just a twinge of (ahem) Dread it envokes. from the (genuinely forgotten by me until this most recent playthrough) backpedaling of Samus' revolutionary act against the government by Adam insisting that "someone (in government) will understand" to the aforementioned gender, there are things about it that could be taken in a bad direction. nevertheless, it's hard to hold the mistakes of the future, be they in Other M or, potentially, in Dread, against Fusion too hard. it remains an absolutely singular work that I love dearly, a thematic embarrassment of riches that deserves to stand up and be counted as a true classic.
i didn't even mention how much fun it is to shoot da guys! it's very fun. five stars.
this isn't a game theory or another example of a leftist unwilling to read a game in a way that isn't materialistic (i mean. not entirely, anyway...), this is just textually what occurs in Metroid 2. Samus touches down on SR388 and doesn't leave its surface until she's exterminated every single Metroid, except one, a final act of mercy that's immediately dropped off for invasive scientific study.
difficult to approach and often really quite tedious, Metroid 2 is nonetheless a truly remarkable game accurately described by FMTownsParty (https://www.backloggd.com/u/FMTownsParty/review/1831/) as an "art game for the Game Boy", and something of a black sheep in Nintendo's vast catalogue. it's a game I respect immensely even if I will probably never play it again, and its uniqueness stands out all the more for the abject failure of its twin remakes to replicate it, even if they are accomplished works in their own right, and one of my sticking points with Super Metroid, a game I like but cannot bring myself to love, is that it largely excises these more narratively complex elements in favor of something far more traditional. super metroid is an exceedingly fine game, but it doesn't really go for it, y'know?
thankfully, Metroid: Fusion makes up for it's predecessor by going for it harder than few games could ever hope to match.
becoming a new kind of life-form made out of the DNA of the single act of mercy you offered to a species you exterminated only to find yourself hunted by the physical embodiment of that past extermination wearing your face and using your powers is enough of a killer hook to hang an entire game out of but somehow Fusion just keeps going, adding layer upon layer of incisive thematic work interrogating it's central character relentlessly, until it cements itself as (with the possible exception of Majora's Mask) the single most thematically rich, narratively accomplished nintendo game with no input from Shigesato Itoi. every pixel of this game is bursting with resonance and detail and purpose that is near un-rivalled. fusion isn't just the best metroid game, it's one of the best games, period.
i think we've mostly chilled out on decrying Fusion for its linearity, but i wanna highlight what the game's structure does to serve it. the game's loop is simple: you arrive in a sector, adam tells you roughly what you need to do and why, and then you go do that thing, usually with some little hidey-holes you can poke in along the way to get an upgrade. but within this loop, the information you are given and the information that is withheld is pointed. even before the big reveals it's clear just how much the federation is manipulating and lying to you, and as you question your orders more and more, the game widens the scope it offers you, going from your first run in sector 1 being practically on-rails to the sections where the game lets go of the reins entirely, inviting you to find the path forward on your own, which are inevitably the moments where you push up against and bomb your way through the walls of the conspiracy around you. portal wishes it could do this as well.
everything about the storytelling in this game is so incisive, so pointed. the way the game emphasizes the destructive/predatory nature of Samus by making clear that you are not only the reason for the X's existence, by wiping out its natural predators, the Metroids, from the ecosystem, but also for it's spread throughout the station, as the AI reminds you that by opening up other areas, you are letting the X spread into them. the federation and samus' intertwined culpability in this incident is never left in doubt, the very act of playing a Metroid game, of increasing your ability to navigate this space, is toxic and bringing about it's destruction.
this culminates in one of the most remarkable sequences in the game and, indeed, the series, when you trick your way into the restricted zone and discover, inevitably, that the federation is breeding metroids. for "peaceful purposes", they claim. contrary to the game's reputation as constantly talking (Samus has some internal narration but it's genuinely quite sparse, and her actually talking back to the AI at the end is a big moment) this entire sequence, from the reveal to the knife-twisting that is the SA-X showing up to do as Samus does: butcher Metroids, to the final escape, where you drift upwards through an elevator shaft filled with other metroids - your kin, now - it's all done wordlessly, and communicates far more complicated feelings than anything in Super Metroid.
more than Other M could ever conceive, Fusion is about Samus. her destructive and violent past in the prior metroids, and her current status, a tool of the federation that they are preparing to discard once they find multiple, mass-produced SA-Xs they believe they can control. after all, why not? they controlled Samus, at least up to a certain point. the way the game pulls back its tight linear pacing ever so slightly as the story reaches its climax communicates Samus' push for personal autonomy beautifully, which is why I wish the ending was just a little tighter.
don't get me wrong, it's a knockout in many respects. facing the SA-X, the embodiment of what Samus once was, and triumphing over it with the new(ish) powers you've obtained from interfacing and embracing the life forms you destroy is a fantastic final battle, as is the last-minute reprise of being saved by the baby metroid. much-mocked as it is, I actually like the Fusion one far better, because rather than being a straightforwardly paternalistic relationship, the SA-Xs motives are far more obscured. is this the Samus part of it? or is it the X, protecting what could be the last remnant of its existence inside Samus? or is it a bittersweet reclamation and restating of Samus Aran as the one who kills the Metroids? it could be all of them, and that's why I like it. i like metroid when it's not doing gender, frankly. i like it, even more, when Samus Aran is ultimately saved by the funny little animals she saves innocuously around halfway through the game. i think that's why i like samus, ultimately, despite her genocidal tendencies, despite the fact that she is absolutely someone who would take away one of her hands, one of the ways she is able to reach out and embrace the world around her, with a gun. here, at the end, she still has enough good in her to save people.
which brings me to the actual sore point with the ending: Adam. there's a generous read to be made on the game's depiction of Adam for much of it, and I maintain that the game is genuinely critical of him as a person, as the twin reveals of him actively deceiving Samus throughout the adventure and also being the actual mind of Adam Malkovich do much to paint the picture of a kind of shitty military guy that Samus is all too willing to absolve him due to her own guilt. the problem is, of course, the Gender. the "any objections, lady?" shit and Samus' frankly embarrassing "no wait hold on it's fine actually his misogyny is secretly woke come on" is hard to swallow and impossible to muster the enthusiasm to do so after Sakamoto went on to write and direct Metroid: Other M, a fucking dumpster fire with the biggest gender essentialist TERF energy imaginable. Other M's very existence makes it a bit harder to be generous to Fusion in the way that I would like to.
there's so much to like about the end of this game, but there's just a twinge of (ahem) Dread it envokes. from the (genuinely forgotten by me until this most recent playthrough) backpedaling of Samus' revolutionary act against the government by Adam insisting that "someone (in government) will understand" to the aforementioned gender, there are things about it that could be taken in a bad direction. nevertheless, it's hard to hold the mistakes of the future, be they in Other M or, potentially, in Dread, against Fusion too hard. it remains an absolutely singular work that I love dearly, a thematic embarrassment of riches that deserves to stand up and be counted as a true classic.
i didn't even mention how much fun it is to shoot da guys! it's very fun. five stars.
Badland
2013
I like how simulateneously playful and violent my sessions with Badland could get.
My obsessive streak pushing me to headbutt a level into completion ; the game's infamous dificulty curve squishing my little bird once more. Mobile gaming is all about compulsivity in the end.
My obsessive streak pushing me to headbutt a level into completion ; the game's infamous dificulty curve squishing my little bird once more. Mobile gaming is all about compulsivity in the end.
Destiny
2014
How undignified.
Destiny pairs epic posture with perfect gunfeel but possesses not a morsel of respect for the player.
Grinding and farming, levels and loot – it’s all debasement in the end. The fabled Loot Cave has proven the perfect allegory of our debasement. It cannot simply be patched out. Because it’s not something in Destiny. It is Destiny, distilled.
So we remain in the cave. We refuse to leave. We convince ourselves again – this is gaming. The fire of our screen burns bright with colored treasure. It casts so many shadows on our wall. We can’t even imagine the sun.
Destiny pairs epic posture with perfect gunfeel but possesses not a morsel of respect for the player.
Grinding and farming, levels and loot – it’s all debasement in the end. The fabled Loot Cave has proven the perfect allegory of our debasement. It cannot simply be patched out. Because it’s not something in Destiny. It is Destiny, distilled.
So we remain in the cave. We refuse to leave. We convince ourselves again – this is gaming. The fire of our screen burns bright with colored treasure. It casts so many shadows on our wall. We can’t even imagine the sun.
Papers, Please
2013
A paperwork simulator that somehow isn't absolute garbage, unlike real world paperwork
Papers, Please
2013
Very unique in many aspects. I'm always fascinated when menial jobs are game-ified. The stress of working as a border inspector is part of the puzzle itself. Just when you think you are getting the rhythm of the job down, new mechanics are introduced and it feels like your own personal workflow is annihilated. You know... Like a real job.
This game is a tight 4 hours, and yet has a highly engaging narrative. I won't go into specifics since the draw of this game is a moment that should be experienced blind. The perpetual threat of not being able to provide for your family is enough of an incentive for whatever task needs to be done.
The purposefully grisly art style enhances the dreariness of this universe. Everything and everyone is colourless, providing an oppressive atmosphere that is not undermined by a fair bit of welcome humour.
I haven't played anything that left me with such a specific sense of anxiety mixed with a yearning for more. Maybe this is what people who love their jobs feel like.
This game is a tight 4 hours, and yet has a highly engaging narrative. I won't go into specifics since the draw of this game is a moment that should be experienced blind. The perpetual threat of not being able to provide for your family is enough of an incentive for whatever task needs to be done.
The purposefully grisly art style enhances the dreariness of this universe. Everything and everyone is colourless, providing an oppressive atmosphere that is not undermined by a fair bit of welcome humour.
I haven't played anything that left me with such a specific sense of anxiety mixed with a yearning for more. Maybe this is what people who love their jobs feel like.
Papers, Please
2013
i liked this a lot at the time but the pseudo-soviet aesthetic irritates me a lot. reminds me of when people post pictures of american urban desolation with captions saying "this looks like a run-down soviet state!" and its like no dude. this is just capitalism. capitalism does this.
Papers, Please
2013
hey its the funny guy with his fake passport i love the funny guy