Time has a way of making all things small.

I remember playing Final Fantasy Adventure when I was a kid. I was new to RPGs, fresh off of Final Fantasy, thrilled to have one I could play in my treehouse, safe from interruptions. I didn't know it would be closer to Zelda than its namesake, I didn't care once I found out. The world in that little cartridge seemed so big, so mysterious. I didn't mind the janky combat, the weapon switching, the simplistic dialogue and storyline. I loved exploring, grinding, leveling, was delighted by new towns and twists. It was full of possibilities, it was mine, and I played it over and over again.

And now I've revisited it. The map now seems smaller, emptier. The borderline linear nature of the game stands out. The hitboxes, the bizarre choices, the godforsaken snowman puzzles all stand out in stark contrast with my memories. The music is at times grating, it is all too easy to forget how to get back to some prior location you are suddenly directed to, the incessant swapping of weapons and the borderline antagonistic enemy immunities causes you to spend an inordinate amount of time in menus. Chests can block your path, magic is all but useless outside of healing, items simply build up in your inventory until you have to start throwing them away. Critical items like keys and mattocks are limited, rarely found and often purchased. It's all too easy to run out of them in the middle of a dungeon, leaving you to hunt down the one enemy type in the game that produces them.

Nonetheless: a lovely game, an oddball barrel of design decisions. Elephants as the final enemy type, grafting robotic legs to beloved companions, spring-based enemies found in natural environments, a man who is more hair than flesh, a noble who is the child of a medusa, a medusa that creates more of its kind via bite-based infection. It's strange, amateur, reaching and endearing all at once, the athletic brother to the more steady Final Fantasy. And while it may be smaller now than it once was, it was more than big enough to get lost in once again.

Incredibly bizarre survival horror game sporting some uneven gameplay and a narrative that's generally just campy shlock (in a fun way) but will occasionally veer into being grotesque and shocking (that acid bath murder sequence is genuinely unsettling). I was surprised to learn that this was directed by Kinji Fukasaku (film director of Battle Royale and the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series) but in hindsight Survival Horror is just naturally cinematic, especially when fixed camera angles are involved, so it's honestly a pretty nice fit even if some of those motion capture scenes have aged horrendously.

I think this might be one of those games that falls into the 'so bad it's good' category for me and it's absolutely the type of game that couldn't get made today (outside of a misguided crowdfunded revival project perhaps) but honestly it was consistently entertaining and really managed to invoke the feeling of watching a B-Horror movie (though I'm mostly certain that wasn't their intention), which is a pastime I quite enjoy.

outside of the (understandably) on-the-nose coloured doorways nearly every instance of environmental interaction is rich and tactile. thirty years later it's still a wonder to grope and paw at every (Possibly Maybe) malleable surface and leverage every new upgrade toward greater structural manipulation and command

in ensuring how and when are given as much significance as what and where it forms a relationship between actor and environment that bears uncommonly personal patterns and markings as you learn to use Your body as an implement to interface with the world. sidepaths and back alleys that carve Under - Over - Through reshape the familiar thru layered mechanical discovery and shift the internal v external dynamic in turn; mastery of the self begetting exponential mastery of the other

a fitting problem then that the biocircuitry, plunging intestinal mazes, and gloomy dark ambient synthesis quickly become less something to endure so much as to dominate; the dissonance for show, and the brutality nakedly glamorous and one sided. so much of it exists in service to the pursuit of (Your) power, kneeling with its neck outstretched waiting to feel bones shatter for Your gratification. sure, I feel obscenely powerful, but I'd rather feel anything else

I played this with a friend who is usually very on edge during any kind of horror media. He fell asleep.

I could stop my review right here, on this tongue and cheek, but also completely sincere remark of my experience, because it hammers my main point of contempt home. That these games are utterly boring and uninteresting.
Even external things like a drinking game with the homie can't upgrade the experience. The game has a fucking catch phrase (used in the drinking game by us) it constantly spouts in desperation for relatability and as a lacklustre faux identity. The instagram motivational content classic you see at the bottom of your local gym bros workout pics "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger". The game tries to evoke Nietzsche, but can't even reach Kelly Clarkson.

I know there is a subset of narrow minded people in high up positions who actively want games to just be interactive films, but it seems to me like no matter how many A's these studios have their attempts fail even at B-Movie level. Made up of mostly cutscenens plagued by over done horror clichés and a term coined millenial writing. The second half consisting of tension robbing quick time events, fixed camera angles that learned nothing beyond superficiality from the original resident evils and choices the game just can't help but remind the player of, right after they were made.

That last one is something that I will never get. How unconfident in the player's ability to understand that they just made a choice is the game? Can they expect me to take it serious if it doesn't take me and the limited opinions of interactivity as such and therefore itself serious? Why try to immerse the player with 'agency' if you then immediately televise to them that this is just a game? Just put it in the logs without the pop up notification. At the same time revealing their cards like this let's the player notice whenever their choices actually meant nothing instead of leaving it out or god forbid up to interpretation. The path I choose was to shelve this game.

Before my friend fell asleep he said something that hit the nail on it's head "if this was a film I would have already closed it."
He is right. Games have this excuse. The novelty of interactivity alone carries way to often completely unoriginal and boring stories. How long till this novelty wears off?

To cleanse my soul and to keep my guilt conscious from feeling the need to review and find the right words for the games I actually love, for at least a little longer, I'll have to give credit where its due.
The scene with the narcissistic girl in which she walks the pier alone while talking to her phone. No other character would be able to have scene like this, but her behaviour up untill this point of the game makes it completely believable that she would just talk to her phone camera and half ironically pretend like she is talking to her followers. But i think the interesting part happens at the end of the scene. Idk if this is optional, but she does some verbal introspection about her actions towards the guy she likes and it humanises her. It was the first and only time i said "damn, this wasn't even bad writing" to my friend who was already asleep, but not yet snoring. Mere seconds later she enters a cabin at the end of her walk and gets killed by one of the things. The game humanised her right before killing her off. They robbed the viewer of the 'satisfaction' from seeing the unlikeable character killed and turned my indifference into sympathy and as result the moment almost into horror in the last second. I say almost, because the scene was still goofy af.

Also graphics so good they'll make you say "thats that dude from the netflix show they cancelled after one season." I don't know why netfilx is catching strays now, but i especially don't know how to end rev

You never really hear about PS3 homebrew, do you? After hacking my PS3, I found out why. It's a fucking pain in the arse.

If you know where to look, and join a private discord, you can find people modding old PS3 games. I almost found myself motivated to pursue this when I found out that fans have brought back MGS4's online mode, but that didn't feel like something I needed. Apparently, having the whole of Revolver and Magical Mystery Tour as Rock Band DLC was.

I guess it speaks to how earnestly I love The Beatles. They weren't just a bunch of guys who played good songs. When they emerged out of the early sixties, they were like a whole new kind of person. They broke the conventions of what an adult was supposed to be, and with their wit, intelligence and compassion, made all those guys look ridiculous. They made it okay not to live for the expectations of society or your family name, but your passions. Maybe you're not a fan of the band personally, and that's fine, but I think if you have any interest in pop media, fringe political thought or the embrace of foreign cultures, I think you owe some gratitude to The Beatles' influence. I can't imagine there would be a videogame industry without The Fabs. (This is beside the point, but did you know all those Atari 2600 cover artists were Yellow Submarine animators?)

Playing PS3 Rock Band in 2024 at all is a pain in the arse. If you didn't buy all the equipment 15 years ago, and held onto them for the following decade and a half, you have some very expensive eBay purchases ahead of you if you want to get in on this. I've still got a couple of the guitars, but thanks to multiple house moves, and weird, malicious flatmates who may not have appreciated my vocals on Debaser, those USB dongles were long gone. And it's not as if you can just buy any old dongle. With very few exceptions, they will only pair with their specific controller. And I have one of those fancy George Harrison Gretsch Duo Jets that you couldn't even buy in highstreet shops. I'm not willing to readily give up how much I spent on the dongle when it finally showed up for sale. Unless you're emulating (and seriously, if you're new to all this, please consider emulating), there's no new devices that are compatible with the PS3 games. Harmonix remedied this a little bit with the release of Rock Band 4, which supported full song exports for the previous games (which require DLC keys that are no longer purchasable) and are still playable on PS5 and Xbox Series consoles today, but one-off games like The Beatles Rock Band, which didn't allow you to transfer their highly-valued content to other titles, are still trapped on PS3, Wii and 360, with all their awkward "it made sense at the time" quirks.

So, hacking. I'm not confident I can recall the process well enough to provide even the most rudimentary of tutorials, but if you're going to hack your PS3, you'll need to be on a specific outdated firmware release, and it matters what kind of PS3 you have. You can utilise custom firmware on original PS3s and some slim models, but if, like me, you currently own a "superslim", you'll have more limited access to homebrew software. You can still do it though, with the Homebrew Enabler software ("PS3HEN"), but it's just a little more awkward. Each custom song needs to be transferred to the PS3 via FTP software (something that the installation guidelines only give a cursory mention of, and I hadn't used since college), you may need to make a direct Ethernet connection between your computer and PS3, and you'll need to keep every track in a special folder on your PC to use an executable to recompile the full tracklist each time you want to modify it. You also have to transfer over a special bit of software to make the game modifiable in the first place, and in the haze of everything I tried and retried, I really can't remember how I did this. This isn't a casual undertaking.

I'd argue Harmonix are one of the most under-valued development studios out there. Even in their smaller games, like Super Beat Sports, that nobody cares about, they're stuffed to the brim with extra modes and optional content. Rock Band was an insane logistical undertaking. Not only are thousands of songs accurately transcribed for multiple instruments and difficulty settings, but the on-stage bands are authentically animated, too. They made enormous bespoke electric drumkit controllers and sold them to American normies. By the peak of all their energy and ambition, on Rock Band 3, they were even including tracks for two backing vocalists, "Pro Guitar" mode (which would have you plug in either a midi-compatible electric guitar or a special, expensive plastic one with buttons on every string of every fret, to play the real guitar parts) and keytar, and barely anybody was playing the game like that. That doesn't even scratch the surface of how much of an undertaking it was to acquire the licences to an incredible range of pop and rock songs from a huge number of different publishing houses, and re-sell them. Of course, modders don't have to worry about the legal aspect, but it's just as ambitious for them to attempt reverse engineering the game to play home-made content and match the level of quality that Harmonix established.

There are amateurish custom Beatles Rock Band DLC tracks out there, but they're not the ones made by the core TBRB Customs devs. For the most part, you'd really struggle to tell them apart from the official Harmonix ones without prior knowledge. Sure, they have to lean on the handful of environments that were established for the original game, some of the surreal Pepperland visuals wear a little thin when applied to multiple songs, and in a post-Get Back world, Twickenham and Apple Studios seem like crucial Beatle locations, so it's a shame that they haven't been incorporated, but man, they managed to hack the Magical Mystery Tour bus into this. Would you have even the slightest idea how to make your PS3 games do that? They've been pretty clever, utilising the established assets to animate each new song, and the multiple costume changes during Glass Onion's callbacks are a particular treat.

TBRB Customs have set themselves the goal of creating custom DLC for every studio-recorded Beatles album, including the Past Masters singles collections and Giles Martin's remix album, Love. It's a lofty ambition, and the team have approached the to-do list with a completionist mindset. Frustratingly, this means that many of the most wanted tracks have been held off on for now, while we're stuck pissing around for the files for Sie Leibt Dich and Hold Me Tight. So far, there's been a huge number of tracks from With The Beatles and A Hard Day's Night, but no All I've Got To Do or You Can't Do That, and I personally find that extremely distressing. No Baby's In Black, no Hide Your Love Away, no Bad Boy, upsettingly few White Album songs - we're promised them in the future, but apparently, there were no new releases in the whole of 2023, and the team's recent focus has been on making previous tracks available for the Wii version of the game. I really want to believe they'll complete the tracklist, but I worry their energy may run dry when they see how many years they'll need to devote to the process.

There's also the fact that the modders seem to be young American Beatles fans. The kind who cried over 2023's Now & Then and think all of Paul McCartney's solo career is worth paying attention to. They don't have the same interest in the back catalogue as us slightly older fans who still think John was the big Beatle to like, despite the things he's alleged to have done after hearing of Nixon's reelection. They're insular and memey, and if you look into the more amateurish Anthology and Solo Career projects, you'll have to wade through some rake of Spongebob shit to get some comparatively rough content. It's very annoying that they've made a custom track for George's terrible White Album off-cut, Circles, while we're still waiting for Happiness is a Warm Gun, but I shouldn't upset the babies too much while they're working so diligently on my precious Rock Band DLC.

There's always a bit of a fear of custom Rock Band stuff. The most hardcore fans seem to be those who never got over Through the Fire and Flames, and not just guys who really like songs. While the focus in this DLC has been on matching Harmonix's precedent, there's still a wee bit of that Guitar Hero elite in here. We were never supposed to play the tape loop at the end of Strawberry Fields Forever, and I think you know this. Please take your job more seriously, unpaid hobbyists.

Many have approached the custom content as a thing strictly for emulators, and sensibly, it's the only way I can recommend a fan to go through this rigmarole. That strips out so much of Rock Band's appeal for me, though. For me, accessibility was such a draw to these games. I've played them at house parties with exchange students who really struggled with conversational English, but were delighted to see those falling note icons and become part of the band. If fellow Big Bad Beatleborgs are over, I can show them my special game that has twice as many songs as anybody else's copy, and we can delight in playing the whole of the Long Tall Sally EP. Nobody should go through the embarrassment of having to navigate a docked Steam Deck in front of another person. Now I've got everything set up, Beatles Rock Band is just as inviting to casuals as it was in 2009. I can grumble about minor details or the trajectory of the project, but really, it's so cool that any of this is possible.

Does some really clever stuff in juxtaposing York/Zach's increasingly close relationship to the town against a conception of death as continued existence in a state of alienation. SWERY represents the Pacific Northwest as functionally Shinto and still manages to create the most effective portrait of the United States in the medium, in which the corrosive dreams of self-transcendence and absolute unity with the other can only be countered by a kind of boddhisattva of pop culture appreciation. Where Revengeance anticipated 2016 in some odd details, Deadly Premonition's a lot more on the nose thematically.
All of this is peripheral to the sheer charisma of York which is the sustaining quality of the game. While he's obviously modeled on Kyle McLaughlin, the Twin Peaks comparisons kind of understate the influence of The Hidden on this game, ironically suggesting that SWERY and Lynch were influenced by the same source.