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not morally egregious per se but rather a depressing culmination of two centuries worth of design trickery and (d)evolving cultural/social tastes and otherwise exists as insipid casinocore autoplaying bullshit that leaves you feeling the same way as you did moments after blasting rope to that fucked up mmm ice cream so tasty thing you found in the middle of a reddit doomscroll. this game should come with a contractual agreement binding its devotees to never speak prejudicially about mobile games or musou or vampire survivors or people whose lives have been ruined by industrialised gambling practices. you seen that casinos have RFID wristbands now that let you re-ante by just waving your hand across the slots? goes great with the simulated day/night lighting and complementary alcoholic energy drinks. endless hours of fun! fuck the review man let's talk the end of the world in the comments below

trans girl guro game is on its face a very attractive premise to me (ignoring the "puzzle platformer" part) so it's sad this is mostly just mediocre. the most important thing to understand is that this is basically ineffectual as both trans art and gore art. the game isn't interested in interrogating body horror, gore, dismemberment etc in relation to transfemininity, instead letting all the violence amount to a fairly asinine metaphor for 'the pain of living' and so on, in turn reducing the possible interest of the gore to its power purely as an image, of which there are many more interesting examples across various mediums. there isn't a trace of the erotic-dysphoric mutilation of films like splatter naked blood or in my skin which are as works by and about cis people much more "meaningfully trans" than the missing. the game isn't problematic, it's ultimately toothless -- not willing to meet violence, desire and self-image at their intersection where it ought to. it's objectifying not for any of its violence but for its lack of interest in transfemininity as subjectivity rather than an identity category. i'm not going to accept the idea that art about trans women is too heavily defined by suicide and misery, at least until my life isn't either (i'm the center of the universe after all), but that's the thing: this is barely a text about trans suicide, and it's not a text about dysphoria at all. all it has is a puerile message of self-acceptance (the 'your demons are of your own making!' thing just doesn't work in this context). as i understand it swery's work has a a very spotted history with these subjects but after this (and given i can't stand twin peaks pastiche) i'm not in a hurry to find out for myself.

In life, we rarely get a chance to follow an art from its genesis to its conclusion. At the arse-end of history, we're often doomed to look at such things retrospectively - surrealism, rock & roll, postmodernism, the New York School of Poets, wild west movies, whatever - and wonder what it was like to evolve and ultimately ascend to atrophia in tandem with a creative movement.

Titanfall 2 is, therefore, a rare privilege. A game that has, with the retrospective power of its seven-year existence, definitively marked the end of an era that was carved out by Call of Duty thirteen years prior. Halo, Modern Warfare, Bioshock, Borderlands, Wolfenstein, the lot - I feel like it's fair to say that Titanfall 2 encompasses its own movement, the nature of its existence, and all the reasons it could not continue - where do you go beyond time? If you'll forgive the incredibly fucking pretentious analogy, Titanfall 2 is not unlike Let It Be, the final Beatles album that put the cap on a half-century of rock. (You could probably extrapolate this complete nonsense further and suggest that the corporate self-awareness of popstars popping up in Warzone and Fortnite mirrors the ironic MTV garage grunge of Kurt Cobain, but hey! - that would probably sustain an equally stupid Backloggd essay of its own.)

What makes Titanfall 2 rarer still is that it’s an ending to a now-lost artform that began with the same creator years prior. Infinity Ward may have respawned, but they were, at this conclusive point in time, the same unit of creation from 2003. Impressionism was started by guys like Claude Monet, but was drawn (painted?) to a close by Van Gogh, a conscious will that passed down a century, their art thankfully/tragically unaccelerated by lack of commercial interest. They say an artwork is never finished, but fortunately for us the future is far more financial than we originally projected - artistic movements can now be efficiently condensed into a decade of fiscal quarters. We can watch an artform rise and fall upon the plateau in the time it takes to finish a high school diploma, and that's neither a good thing nor a bad thing; just a thing that happens now. Let it be.

Sure, other militaristic first-person dual-weapon wall-running action shooters with automatic health recovery have come after Titanfall 2, but they're essentially invalid imitations, impressionist postcards that we pick up in the lobby of the Van Gogh Museum. They're the consequences of something that's gone for good. Never to return, for better and for worse.

”The most detestable habit in modern cinema is the homage. I don’t want to see another goddamn homage in anybody’s movie.” - Orson Welles, speaking at the Cinémathèque Française in 1982

Meaningless referencing is a hallmark of Grasshopper Manufacture video games. In The Silver Case, Tetsugoro Kusabi says a moment in time reminds him of the Rocky movies; Stephan Charbonie name-drops the 1994 FIFA World Cup in Flower, Sun, and Rain; one of my favourite vignettes in The 25th Ward essentially boils down to two detectives being jacked to the tits about going to Starbucks for a caramel macchiato. 


I didn’t bother fact-checking the references above for correctness - is that what those references were again? Is that what they actually referred to? I don’t remember. It was something like that, but I’m not sure - I doubt you knew if my references to these references were right, either. You just know that Suda 51 and his staff love to acknowledge things that they like inside things that they’ve created, right? That jarring feeling of hearing a sci-fi psycho killer monologue about the dollar menu at McDonalds, or watching the lyrics from your favourite moody new-wave hit crawl across the LEVEL COMPLETE screen. There’s something special about seeing and hearing a virtual world acknowledge another (real or fictional) world in material terms that we can recognise and appreciate.


References are, of course, an oft-maligned artistic technique - Orson Welles infamously condemned any artist who leaned on referential crutches. Ironically and hypocritically, the Welles filmography is stuffed with creations that he used as vessels of reference to other works of art. F for Fake - one of his best - is not much more than a series of homages to performances and works of art - both real and imagined - that Welles admired. Transformers: The Movie, his final performance, is nothing more than one big reference to a line of plastic Hasbro toys. Despite his trademark bullish blustering, even one of the all-time greats couldn’t avoid contradicting himself on the matter of referencing. Reference is an inevitable part of self-expression that even some of the best directors of adverts for frozen peas simply cannot avoid.

Cantankerous contradictions aside, I imagine most of us feel similarly to Welles about references. As the always-rolling stone of pop culture gathers more and more digital detritus, films, television shows and video games gain an ever-increasing pool of other people’s popular history to lean on - we’ve all no doubt rolled our eyes at a shameless Star Wars parody or Skyrim knee joke a few hundred times in our lives. Captain America’s infamous “I got that reference” line from Avengers has itself become a reference. 2020s culture has essentially become a referential ouroboros, with creators cyclically patting each other on the back with cameos, shoutouts and in-game tshirts.


Filling your own work with someone else’s work is often just a tedious exercise that outwardly effuses appreciation for another artist, but really just serves as a way for you to self-congratulate and show people what you and they already know. Despite the fact that all these shoutouts are essentially made unto a cultural void, there are still some references being made today that can become special to you or me. After all, we still hold some level of care for the pieces that make up each other's identities. 


Since playing Travis Strikes Again earlier this year, I’ve not been able to shake the memory of a moment that held an eerie serendipity for me. It happened during one of the game’s visual novel detours - in pursuit of a Death Ball, Travis is sent to a festival in Split, Croatia. Whoa! In 2019, the year TSA launched, I went to a festival in Split, Croatia! And then, not long after that, Travis talks about how his handler/girlfriend/wife is really into SUP (stand up paddleboard) yoga right now - my handler/girlfriend/wife is really into SUP (stand up paddleboard) yoga right now! What are the chances, eh?! Travis is just like me! Are we on the same journey? If we read Travis as an extension of Suda 51, is Mr. Goichi Suda himself on that journey with me, too?


Such is the power of a meaningless reference. Two throwaway lines with no broader meaning or significance can suddenly bring a viewer/consumer deeper into an artist/character’s world by giving them something in common - but only for the people who rolled the same numbers on the die of life and culture that the creator did. A true artist, Orson would likely argue, could create meaning through depiction of a universal human experience - one that doesn’t rely on creator and observer both owning the same DVDs or liking the same sports team.


I don’t think I’m alone in seeing superficial-referential similarities between myself and Travis Touchdown. In the wake of No More Heroes 3’s launch, I read a tweet about the game that was making the rounds on KamuiNet - not only did it praise the game for allowing Travis, Shinobu and Bad Girl to age in line with the real-life release dates of the No More Heroes video games, it also suggested that it was refreshing to see a creation where older characters can let their geek-freak flags fly. It’s cool that a 40 year old man can like Chr’s Cunterttack; it’s cool to drink beers on your couch and watch moe anime; it’s cool to be a fully grown adult and still swing a toy lightsaber around; uhhh… and more of that sort of thing (I wager the tweeter would love Kevin Smith’s Clerks 2). I’d reference the tweet, but I don’t know where it is now - hopefully this allusion is enough to keep you in the loop, even if I have likely muddied the specifics once again.


So - was that tweet made with tongue planted firmly in cheek? It’s hard to say. You’d assume a fan of No More Heroes would think twice before praising a game for permitting revelry in stunted consumerism, but hey - I know of people who own replicas of Travis Touchdown’s jacket. Suda himself retweeted a dude who has the beam katana tattooed all the way down his calf. Some people love these games without thinking too hard about all of it. And that’s fine! Whether the tweet was intentionally ironic or not, though, I still think it’s a worthy observation that drives its Akira motorcycle (omg it does The Slide!! sick reference!!!) quite close to what No More Heroes 3 is hopefully trying to truthfully achieve in its own scrappy texture-popping, frame-hitching, wall-clipping little way. 


I won’t waste too much time recapping how we got to No More Heroes 3 (you’re on Backloggd, after all, and can read excellent Top Reviews for each game in the series) but it’s worth considering what each NMH game was really about. The original game in particular, as it’s NMH3’s closest relative - No More Heroes 3 is to No More Heroes 1 as The Force Awakens was to A New Hope, to make another meaningless reference. A reboot and retread of well-worn ground that revels in all the superficial signifiers we’ve come to expect from each series. Revived from the dead with an injection of Disney/Marvelous cash and creatively controlled for a whole new generation. With each re-awakening, the main characters are now older and not necessarily any wiser, reliving glory days by referencing all that Good Shit you loved so much countless decades ago. Hey… They even both have blue lightsabers! What a reference! 


Surface-level symbology and parallels aside, probably the most important thing to keep in mind about No More Heroes 1 while playing No More Heroes 3 is its pop-punk meditation on consumer identity and how it was essentially used to trap Travis in someone else’s violent cycle of gig economics (again: read those Top Reviews!). It doesn’t even matter if he’s aware of the grind he’s trapped in and why it sucks - you and Travis still have to participate in your literal or figurative lawn-mowing in order to afford your new video game t-shirts. And this was before the inescapable collective consciousness of the 2.0 and 3.0 Internets forced us all to look at and buy the same things all the time. Ultimately, the only way Travis could escape his perpetual consumer torment was to go live in the woods and play someone else’s video game (fuck!!! a reference!!) all day instead. And even then, the past he wasn’t able to kill (in the form of a reference to a prior NMH game) still found him and brought him back to the modern metropolis.


When looked at through a lens crafted in the present day, the original No More Heroes couldn't have dropped at a better time. It released the same year as the first iPhone and the '07 Global Financial Crash, and just a few months later, Iron Man hit cinemas. Can you think of three bigger social and cultural touchstones for the 2010/20s era? NMH was the final checkpoint before the end of nerd culture's Bronze Age and the beginning of its Iron (Man) Age. Not a smartphone in sight. Just NEETs living in the moe-ment.

It may just be me attributing my own meaning to a personal period of time, of course - I played the first game as an unemployed 18 year old dweeb hiding out in his parents' back room, and I'm now a 31 year old dweeb with a mortgage and a (furry) child - but it does feel like there's been a momentous paradigm shift in The Culture since 2007. When I went to university, my peers at the pub would turn up their noses when I talked about comics, video games and anime - they were fringe, outsider topics that swam in channels separate from the mainstream. Nowadays, everyone I know knows their Monkey Balls from their Dragon Balls. My own grandmother congratulated me for putting out a Doom wad, for fuck's sake! Make a Super Mario reference in 2021, and the chances are high that your own mother would probably know what you're talking about. Whether they like it or not, everyone is at least partially immersed in this grand nouveau-nerd culture that capital has kindly crafted for us to consume. It's no coincidence that Damon Riccitiello, landlord maximus and CEO of Not-EA Games, is Earth's ambassador for an extraterrestrial apocalypse.

And that is the main thrust of what I think No More Heroes 3 is trying to drive itself toward. Despite the introspective events of Travis Strikes Again, Travis Touchdown returns to his mainline series in a relatively unscathed blaze of geeky glory. Like that tweeter I referenced earlier said, the 40 year old Travis is now definitively a child walking in the realm of adults. He even has 2.5 children and a wife - the all-time classic societal markers of adulthood - but still somehow lives alone with his punk IPAs and wrestling figures, decorating his motel room with anime witch girl posters and collecting trading cards for an 80s video game that he watches obsessively on YouTube. Not exactly society's Dad of the Year material. Is that his fault, though? And is that necessarily a bad thing? I feel like NMH3 is trying to explore these questions without being particularly confrontational or condemnational about them. Grasshopper are holding up a mirror in your peripheral vision while you play their latest game; they're showing you their painting of that guy at your job who wears his Joker t-shirt three times a week and takes his kids to Disneyland so that he and his wife can go see the Millennium Falcon. Is Travis that guy?

Travis is probably the most frequently and meticulously discussed video game character on Backloggd. If ever there was a meme to sum up the whole site, it would likely be that "OMG! THATS ME!" guy, looking at a picture of Travis Touchdown (alongside his close friends Tokio and Sumio). The type of person who likes Suda 51 games and posts on Backloggd is unlikely to clap when Captain America references Fortnite in a Marvel movie, though. They’re probably not going to laugh when Elon Musk acknowledges Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in an episode of Rick and Morty. A Neon Genesis Evangelion reference in YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG is not gonna delight them. But they’ll still play these games, watch these movies, see these shows, and then seek out a social blogging website where they can share their disdain for said references and assign an appropriate star rating - as if that absolves them of their participation in said culture. What video game t-shirt did you wear in Travis Strikes Again, by the way? And how thick is that line of the web that separates you from that guy in the Joker t-shirt? How deep does your appreciation of the culture you appreciate really go? Could you pronounce "itadakimasu" (love the lyrics on that song!) any better than Travis does, despite playing all those Japanese video games of yours?

I say we're all "participating" in this international smorgasbord of culture-lite, but I think none of us are really all that free to choose how we interact with these things or allow ourselves to be molded by them, short of renting a trailer in the forest. Our friends chat about it, our mutuals snark about it, our coworkers use it for small talk. I didn't watch Loki, but it came up a lot in my daily team meetings. I know what happened in the show, even though I didn't want to think about it. I've played Call of Duty: Warzone with my buds, despite the fact I regularly condemn the Activision war machine. You gotta do what you gotta do. I saw Spider-Man: Far From Home because it's what my friends wanted to do one day. It wasn't a big deal. It's all a common ground we can embrace each other upon. In No More Heroes 3, one of the only ways Travis can relate to a bereaved Bad Girl is by barging into her bedroom and telling her to watch F-te/St-y N-ght or whatever that was. Meaningless references emit powerful psychoframes that connect us.

Meaningless referencing is a hallmark of Grasshopper Manufacture video games, and No More Heroes 3 is the platinum-stamped standard-bearer of that hallmark. You could even argue the gameplay itself (which I didn't even talk about here, lol) is just a series of references - you boot up your beam katana to the classic NMH beat, pull off various suplexes from the annals of NJPW and WWE history, drive the Akira bike down the highway, fly around in a knock-off Full Armor Unicorn Gundam, and mow lawns because you mowed lawns in the original No More Heroes. There's very little here that's of original invention, and Orson Welles, were he alive today and gaming his big ass off, would fucking hate that. It's all goddamn homage, all the goddamn time, you goddamn fuckhead. But in some weird way, there's an artistic bravery in building a game that's entirely about other people's work and how that makes you feel. If you can have a podcast about Takashi Miike, why can't you have a video game about Takashi Miike?

No More Heroes asked the player two questions - “Is this you?” and “Does it feel good?”

No More Heroes 3 tells the player two things - “This is you!” and “Man, does it feel good!” 

Those two new statements might not end with question marks, but I think they're intended to provoke you. Whether you like it or not, this is the way that it is.

Can you do anything about it?

Can Travis (that's me!) really change the future?

Is this really the end of history?

Is this really the end?

No more heroes.

The £0.79 I paid feels like the right price for this. Not in the cost = value sense - I have paid far more for games I've appreciated far less - but as a symbolic act that forms part of the Dog Days experience's larger whole. From the moment I clicked on the Steam launcher, the game started its audio-visual assault - taking over both my monitors, refusing to run in borderless or windowed mode, crashing to desktop when I tinkered with the AA settings, running my modern raytracer rig hot before I'd even seen the main menu. It was every Fuck You that Backloggd had promised me it would be, and I hadn't even clicked on "Start campaign" yet! Wow!

This may all sound like facile shithousery, but there is something kinda special about a game with Square Enix and IO Interactive title cards trying its absolute hardest to assault you through the screen. Title screens are an important part of the Gaming Experience, and the Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days title screen is no exception - hitting you with a barrage of low-kbps door-knocking sound effects, poorly-mixed raindrops and presumable Chinese swearing. Two paragraphs in and I haven't even pressed the Any key yet - that's how you know this is a game worth talking about! Yowza!

At the time this game was released, I was all over the cover-shooting scene - Gears, Ghost Recon, Uncharted, Vanquish - the whole hole-hiding lot. Gears of War 2, was, and still is, a 5/5+10/10 Certified: Awesome banger in my eyes. Landing an active reload and separating a locust's chest from its dick and balls will always feel (Marcus Fenix voice) Nice! to me, But could I have handled this game back in 2010? You've all heard of the Cool Ranch Dorito Effect, but this game is the Moldly Stale Nacho Cheese Dorito Effect - an alluring flavour so overpoweringly awful that you can barely handle the taste. But something about it just keeps bringing you back... This is Woke Up This Morning (Nightcore Remix) in video game form. Awesome!

It blows my mind that this game has splitscreen co-op. It does not blow my mind to learn that the splitscreen co-op is apparently broken in all sorts of offensive and ridiculous ways - it's so perfectly fitting in so many many ways that elude elucidation. It's now a Life Goal for me to play through this thing in splitscreen with a buddy while we're both spun out of our minds on something or other. It would whip so much fucking sack. I feel like splitscreen Dog Days would function as a drug in and of itself. Even if I wasn't blitzed, I feel like it would still give me a hangover the next day. Can you imagine two guys doing that sprinting animation at the same time while overlapping "SHT YOU CNT!!" "FCK PSS!!" audio files play at different levels over the top of each other and six other stock uzi sound effects of variable volume? It would be sick! Fuck yeah!

It always kinda bothered me when people told me No More Heroes was "belligerent by design" as part of some larger Art Game whole - it was just boring as hell! (Travis Touchdown voice) Fck off! Even if it was intentional, No More Heroes always had its sneakers halfway into its player-hostile concept. Kane & Lynch 2, by contrast, is completely unafraid of confrontation with the player on the other side of the keyboard/gamepad. Like killing people, do you, nerd? No More Heroes 2 (released the same year as Kane & Lynch 2) tried to take the antagonistic nature of the series further towards real meaningful stuff, but it looks like Little Baby Shit in comparison to Dog Days. Suda51 apologises for wounding you. IO Interactive interactively pisses in your wound - and maybe fucks it too, before crashing to desktop! This* is how you challenge your player about all their endless killing and collecting. God damn! Are you enjoying yourself?

I was gonna do a paragraph where I lamented the fact that the game lacks that final furlough of audio/visual/gameplay polish to complement the art vibe that almost takes this to 5 Star Status, but in the process of writing this I realised that the game just wouldn't land the same if you could actually hear the music or think clearly over the sound of a shotgun getting stuck in an audio loop. If I'd been able to clear the rooftop chase the first time without being wiped out by a fucked up ragdoll distracting me and causing me to run into a glitched-out cop who couldn't find cover, I wouldn't have been half as aware of the artifice of video game running-and-gunning-and-murdering. Holy shit! Am I enjoying myself? No! Five stars!!!!