brutal doom for the video essay generation well, color me impressed. this is actually cool!

it seems like every other day i find a new indie game or analog horror video in my youtube feed using hackneyed "subversions of expectation" or file manipulation or arg elements for spooks. imscared was cool, but imscared came out 12 years ago. so when i heard about myhouse.wad, i brushed it off. it wasn't until last night that i bit the bullet, and let me tell you: i should have done it sooner.

the house of leaves inspiration is blatant enough as to call it an adaptation. there's no point in dissecting it, but i'd like to use it to explain why my house doesn't suffer from the pitfalls you might expect. remember how house of leaves has a bunch of hidden shit inside of it that redditors have been talking to death for years? well, you don't need it to enjoy the book. it's an addendum for people who wanna go crazy over that kind of stuff. my house is the same way with its metahorror. the creepypasta elements are contained in the downloadable journal rather than the game itself. the "deeply emotional" (read: tactless and generic internet psychological horror) themes fans don't shut up about are contained in secret content that you won't find unless you're looking for it. in that case, why should you play the wad?

cuz it's a damn good time! if you liked lost in vivo's combat-heavy take on otherworld from silent hill, you'll like my house. the maps are super pretty and fun to explore. there are cool new enemies too! if nothing else, play it to see a modern action horror doom map with strong atmosphere. it only took me 30 minutes and i'd recommend it even if you already know the "twists".

as much as i still want to mock the fandom and compare it to brutal doom, i do hope this inspires people to take full advantage of gzdoom's special features. maybe someone will make a map that uses similar technical tricks to make something in a genre other than horror. as it stands, i super enjoyed my time in my house and i recommend it to all the skeptics. this one's different.

SOLD

Obviously not really poker, despite the theme. Strange things happen with the cards in your hands, the poker terminology rapidly descends into insular gibberish, and probability is controlled - but tantalizingly never fully in your control, one always feels the freedom found from giving oneself over. Maximum difficulty runs have a sub-50% winrate, as far as I know.
It's not actually replicating the flow of a poker game. It's about endlessly seeking less so wins and losses, but simply spending more time in The Zone before you're kicked out; of ditching the flashy presentation and exciting music and narrative overtures of its competitition and being a smooth ride to get you into The Zone, of gradually ramping up stimulation to change your baseline level of what's satisfying, of abandoning your agency and accepting that the house always wins and that we will die and it's better to spend your time on the way there insensate and comfortable.
It's not poker, it's a slot machine.

I will be upfront here and admit that my initial impression of Magic Pengel was underwhelming. The first couple of hours felt extremely plodding, thanks to the opening glut of story cutscenes with awkward voice acting, the lack of part variety to attach to your Doodles (your drawable monsters for battle), and the initial grind for more colors necessary to both draw and further develop your Doodles. This initial grind can be a nightmare because a lot of the fightable villagers will easily outclass you in terms of sheer stats and stall you out by using Charge every other turn to heal off more damage than you can inflict, so you’ll end up wasting your arena time if you happen to challenge a super tough villager since there’s also no way to forfeit a match. It also doesn’t help that there’s a half minute loading screen every time you need to move to a new area in the overworld, so you’ll end up sitting through over a minute of loading screens moving between the two main arenas alone since there’s no fast travel and you’ll have to pass through the market every time. Not a great start for a seemingly great premise!

Get past this initial roadblock by winning a few arena matches and gaining enough resources to thoroughly flesh out your Doodles with better stats, however, and the game starts to find its footing. Combat is almost entirely turn-based rock-paper-scissors (magic trumps attack, attack trumps block, block trumps magic) with some degree of mind games. This fortunately does get a bit more complex later on; landing magic spells can inflict status effects such as paralysis and sleep upon foes, as well as temporarily lock or punish types of attacks depending on the spell used. This essentially adds another layer to the mind games, aside from the aforementioned Charge for healing/powering-up the next attack/resetting neutral; thus, combat isn't just mindlessly following the advantage triangle specified above. In addition, the colors and parts used (i.e. adding limbs, wings, a held weapon, etc) drastically change both your stat and skill distribution (explained in more detail here and here ), and since your drawing capabilities and max capacity are increased with each arena win, you’ll likely be redrawing your Doodles all the time anyways to keep up with the tougher fights while tinkering with new and expanded loadouts. Simultaneously, it becomes a lot easier to farm resources since your Doodles will finally have enough attack power to deal more damage than opponents can heal off with Charge, and you’ll earn significantly more of each color (a few thousand as opposed to a few hundred in the early game) upon victories. While Magic Pengel’s combat never reaches the depth of similar monster battling systems such as Pokemon, I nevertheless found it easy enough to get into the rhythm of the progression loop once I got past the opening grind, and it served as a solid podcast game that vaguely reminded me of my days laddering on Pokemon Showdown.

A word of warning though: as much fun as it is sketching crude creatures with your Pengel and watching your crayon abominations destroy developer-drawn Doodles with much more effort put into sketching, that is unfortunately just about all that this game has to offer. Magic Pengel’s narrative touches upon some interesting lore and story beats concerning both the world of color and the supporting cast (such as your friend Zoe’s connection with her missing foster father, a renowned Doodler that once worked for the king), but the game never goes into too much detail with its sparse storytelling, and it ends on a bit of a cliffhanger as your friends decide to set off on another adventure. While you can sell spare colors for gold gems, there’s not much to purchase from shopkeepers; you can buy a few brushes to further adjust your line thickness, but the only other items on offer are Doodles, and there’s no point in buying those when you’ll get far more utility out of drawing your own (especially because you can’t delete any part of a Doodle drawn by an NPC). Finally, the game is a bit lacking in post-game content. The only unlocked features are a new arena where you can engage in 1 v 3 or 2 v 3 fights for higher rewards, as well as a hidden boss that can be fought if you somehow grind one million gold gems. As such, I have to concede that a lot of the Magic Pengel’s surrounding elements could have used some more time in the oven.

Ultimately, I prefer the game’s spiritual successor Graffiti Kingdom for its more succinct runtime and expanded drawing utensils. Even so, I mostly enjoyed my time with Magic Pengel (the quaint charm and artstyle admittingly a big reason why), and I’d say it’s worth checking out if you want a taste of one of more creative monster collecting/creating games out there. I think Taito had something really special on their hands with this formula, and it’s a shame we’ll never see a game in this vein from them again.

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.

For all that people have lambasted Skyrim for its fundamental flaws, myself included, it is a game that thrives in its smallest moments. After reading Proudlittleseal's lovely review, I decided to give Skyrim a long delayed replay and try to appreciate it on its own terms. I ignored the Skyrim that has aged least well; the series of overly scripted questlines in which the same five voice actors blandly talk over each other about how the Player is the only one that can save the world from Alduin /Eye of Magus/ Stephen Russell. And instead I played the Skyrim that has more in common with the scuffed fantasy paperbacks from charity shops that I used to love for their sincere and uncomplicated adventures. Helping a witch turn on her coven. Having a drinking contest in Ivarstead only to wake to the disapproving glare of a Priestess in Markarth. Investigating a conspiracy only to escape the city with a bounty over a 1000 septims. Assisting a Priest of Mara in leaving his past behind so he can travel by my side. The old hermit who led me to a cavern the size of a small nation. Skyrim thrives in this picaresque framing where every character, dungeon or encounter organically weave into a journey that becomes more than the sum of its parts. In a genre I've come to associate with bloat and busywork, its just refreshing to play a game that cuts all that out and lets me embrace the wanderlust that got me playing rpgs in the first place. Its far from perfect but I see its value now.

Random thought: I played Hollow Knight a month ago, and Cornifer and Iselda are basically Torneko and Tessie as bugs. No, I will not elaborate.

Anyways, I've previously played all of what I consider 'classic DQ' (the original versions of the first seven games), and this marks my first foray into the DS remakes. I like the game a lot, but it also solidifies my distaste for the series' combat in general. It's not so much that the game is grindy, but that it boils down to praying hard to RNGesus only to find out that he's RNSatan instead. As an example, an early-game boss can either do a normal attack for 30-40 damage, an AOE attack for around 20, or a different AOE attack for 40plus. He also sometimes gets two actions per round. And if you think about it, him doing an AOE twice at the end of a round, then following it up with the same thing at the start of the next round (which happened to me more than once) is such monumental overkill that it will wipe your party even if you're overlevelled. Random lategame mooks do this as well. Some bosses will instakill a character if they get a critical hit - which would be tolerable in a game where you have ready access to reliable methods of resurrection, but not here! This all adds up to a game which is so random that it kills almost all attempts at strategizing in favor of relying on luck, and simply doesn't come across as fun for me (or maybe it's a skill issue? So many people enjoy the combat so I might be missing something).

The game does have updated graphics and better QoL than the NES original - as expected - but I do need to complain about how they added one of my biggest pet peeves: Xenogears-style camera angles. I feel like controllable camera angles are good for immersion if you have interesting locales that are set up like actual real-world locations, but if your towns and dungeons are set up in a rigid grid and the only thing that separates them from 'traditional' JRPG towns are the fact that the doors of houses are not all facing the same direction, then all you're doing by adding a controllable camera is adding tedium to getting around!

My star rating above should spoil that there are enough things I like about the game to balance out my biggest gripes, and really it's just the fact that... well, this game is Dragon Quest, man. Like every other game in the series I've played, the NPCs are charming, the vibes are cozy, and it really nails the sense of exploration by being nonlinear enough that everyone's journey of discovering the world in Chapter 5 will be uniquely their own. The more modern hardware and more polished translation render the dramatic moments of the original - like your childhood friend's willingness to protect you, and the villain's origin story - far more effective. And as one of the not-many who adores Koichi Sugiyama (the composer, not the person), the updated orchestration does his work a lot more justice; as a purist who writes very much in a traditional classical style, the more 'accurate' instrumental samples represent a huge jump in quality over the tinny midi of the original.

One last thing I need to mention is that the Party Chat function - which adds a ton of characterization to your party (and even the guest members!) - is inexplicably dummied out of the Western release. For a game with such a colorful cast of characters this is a massive miss!

In the end, this is a great way to play one of the strongest entries of the series in a more 'modern' medium. Fittingly for a series which has been often described as 'RPG comfort food', you know exactly what you'll get - if you like the other games in the series, I'd recommend this!

After hours. I am a single line across which all other lines unfold, slick, slipping. Going so fast the strands slide through the cracks of the emulator.

2:00 am. My automobile body funnelled into video-tunnels that stretch without end to the rhythm of nu-jazz beats. A drama that plays on repeat for my Pearl Blue Soul.

Someway, somehow, R4 reminds me of a Hong Sang-soo film.

It's a senseless comparison, played-out across mediums and genres but every time I come back to these tracks it persists, blends-in along the city lights and tire marks in my rear-view mirror.

There's a tension in this philosophy of drift, the joyous longing of century's sunset, that makes me pause for thought at the end of every race. The stories are so simple, the game presented with such expert straightforwardness, as to blur the feeling itself in Camarro-yellows.

Still, where I think this iteration of Ridge Racer joins the cinema of the author is in that insistence to make flows coexist - rub emotion and expression against one another in ways most often hidden - and leave the outbursts at the edges of the screen.

The speed of Ridge Racer is the pace of life itself but for all its glamour breathlessness the moments that truly stir are those near-misses, the curves in a length of road where the vehicle goes slightly out of control and you brush past a rival. The little encounters. The seconds where the heart stops. I wish I could've held-on to your hand a horizon longer.

Type 4s and margaritas, that’s all I want for the summer.

"Loving V"

Mascara drenched-tears and gunfire. In the end I just stuck the iron in my mouth, pulled the trigger.

As V and Johnny sat on the roof of Misty's Esoterica, their voices drowned-out in the noises of Night City, Cyberpunk pulls me away at last, removes us from subjectivity by panning the camera out of this digitally-stricken body and towards a wider angle of two trajectories mercifully coming to a stop - deciding they wouldn’t play the game anymore. “Cleanest, least bloody option” she said. My first-person absorption within the computer-game was hence wholly consumed, putting V in front of me in a way that felt true to the experience of playing 2077’s broken, shimmering jank, the achievement of ending one’s life making sense of both our acts of roleplaying; mine as a holistic, experiential avenue and hers as dramatic diegesis given shape through the only language video-games seem to understand well enough, that is, the accumulation - and ultimate bubbling - of violence.

Shit felt terrible, no questions about it, something of the unfinished and unachievable kind - the right kind of wrong for once, first-person shooting in the directness of your face, forever. Suicide is exhaustion given infinite form and no language to remedy it’s omnipresence - that's no easy sentiment to tease out of me and it sure as hell ain’t a virtual one but Cyberpunk did succeed and I do not mean it as just another rejection of failed ludonarrative ventures, though this particular ending does carry with it an air of disdain for your decision to not act out the blaze of glory-seeking bravado that’s meant to close out the story. But I was exhausted. The wild circle of Cyberpunk 2077 goes both ways; cornucopia as trash and trash as cornucopia. All the narrative swings and systemic inconsistencies that fed from the ugliness of the work's dangling bits and in turn shone back some of their own light to form genuinely unique video-game sequences that deserve to be examined and contextualized on their own, beyond the meme, formed a world alright. All of it was too much. I could not play a minute longer, had - many times - threatened to pull the plug on 2020's most wildly surreal corporate art experiment and so finally I did. Hit the proverbial Blackwall in a sense. The artificial prose and passes ruling on this empire of code could not - and then would not - accommodate my presence within their simulation. Doesn't matter how towering or complex, a simple data block which we fuel with credence for the time it takes to wrestle with its fictitious circuitry remains just that in spite of itself. V and I were simply tired of sharing this body - a veritable second Silverhand I had become -, me attempting to imbue her with an essence that was never really there in the first place whilst she roared and raged to stay alive for another day or another hour, to exist inside the megalopolis of the dark future whatever the cost.

In the middle of this mounting heap of conflicted desires lied an encounter producing atomic material. Proper character-moments and personal voids, dejected ones. Times like “Automatic Love” and times like Takemura. Enough of those will fry your brains out. Make sure I can never come back nor forget Night City. From my continuous first-person to theirs - a third vision, on top of that apartment complex, saying things but really saying nothing at all because nothing is left to be said. And they're just there. And then they're not. And in this split-second where the linearity of your decisions establishes itself - this shift where the verb “interact” becomes “witness” - you realize, or at least I did, that you felt (no, feel) a certain type of way about her. The choice - if ever there was one - had been made from the start; all I did was press the button in an honest mistake. Enough play, more flatline.

“And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space,
hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames.
Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
Please, he prayed, now–”

Now the whole bathroom’s messed up and there’s vomit in the sink. Daddy is naked. Daddy’s blown a billion dollars down the drain in search of ray-traced fields yonder only leaving third-degree burns in his wake. This is not a video-game-centric problem but Video–games are the medium. Two years later, Phantom Liberty brings me back. V is brought forward from the dead, still fucking unstable, still drawing me in and I’m thinking to myself “Now is the moment”. Brand new chain, brand new RTX. I’m back not out of Edgerunners-fever but perhaps plain naïveté, thinking that I knew a way out. I knew, at least, of the Tower, this new epilogue that would let my V live out the rest of her days in Night City free of Silverhand’s cancerous engram, a character somewhat damaged and reformed - so I cultivated a plan. If my first journey was to be defined by the game’s egregore, then my second outing would act as its negative. Let blights and blessings wash over V in equal measures, see where the world of Cyberpunk would take me this time. A descent into roleplaying. Towards-

“A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
Now–”

A nowness. The septic tank of frame generation and path-tracing galore. Lights softly lashing out. A hundred paces into the grid. Immersion has always been at the heart of the 2077 project. A nowness, by which I mean the immediacy with which the game attempts to hold your attention and force you to engage with its world through the eyes of a digital construct. No computer software captures the push-and-pull of first-person like Cyberpunk which makes the failure deeper, almost more cutting. Soft games versus hard games - with 2077 in-between, attempting a hard act without the substantive arguments, building itself around a prefabricated fantasia of the subjective camera as this sort of all-encompassing dramatic cliché of immersion where the virtual gestures performed by V’s body are set and ordained through expensive cinematography instead of gameplay - draping itself in the robes of Deus Ex even as the meat falls off the bones to reveal an intense, almost angry focus on being a shooter first and foremost. It's that kind of teleguided rhythm which dictates the juiciest chunks of Cyberpunk's action-roleplay; a game that simply feels best when the gatling sings the cries of a thousand dead punk babies. And to these we add our faerie touch - a dialogue system skimming through flavour options as heavy stakes and lush set-pieces orient our gaze throughout CDPR’s theatrical exposé.

A nowness. When V shouts at the top of her lungs, when she’s desperately crawling her way out of a sky-wide hole. A nowness is when she touches another human being’s face, when she is touched and being looked at herself - which is why scenes like our confession at Clouds or Aurore’s appearance in «You Know My Name» hit such a fever. In their paranoid arousal lies a sincere expression of the hardships that come with human interaction in our day and age of disembodiment; searching for closure in a sex club, going full-on cyberpsycho, all of us, together alone. There and now. V is not, in other words, a character who expresses herself a lot through violence at the hands of the controller. In order to stab/stealth we must suppress this desire to get closer to the world she inhabits - replace it with the utility of conflict-solving, which is not to say that this violence serves no purpose. It is the sensory-deprivation chamber, the numbness you feel after sleeping the day-off; this dream that despondency fed every time you took the elevator to the 8th floor of H10 and were met with an aesthetical fart on the telly or every time the core was laid bare, exposed by bugs and cogs - because, yeah, everything feels slow, sluggish in Night City, as if the interplay between V and her numerous points of acquisition never quite met their intended target and instead underlined the facade of the whole structure in a way that feels relevant to the text, a text, not the one Cyberpunk 2077 is writing but the one written about and around it, a game that’s more than a game, filled to the brim with dead things that pretend to be alive. Anything to feel something in this place removed - so why not a shotgun blast?

A nowness without which the text of Cyberpunk would feel half-superfluous in truth. Suicide doesn’t happen without these empty pockets of play. My V needed this violence, this dishonesty, for her death to make sense of it all. But my affection only happens in the game’s jello, in this space where play's internal logic is superseded by the outbursts of tactile production riches. Sequences like the Heist or the Chimera boss-fight - one of Phantom Liberty’s many highlights -, our countless segues into the city's underbelly as societal observations games were never really well equipped to answer in the first place but which 2077 tackles with surprising softness at times and crass immaturity for large chunks of the road, punctuations in the routine of car rides and murder contracts; the lead in a detective story that’s always about touch - whether pyrotechnical or intimate - at the end of the tunnel. A nowness - an entrapment. It’s all the same to V.

“Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of palergray.
Expanding-- And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick,
the unfolding of his distance less home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity.”

Sometimes I get so tense while playing games that I forget to breathe. My fingers tense up, just enough that the tendons jerk back a little but not enough that it actually hurts in the long run, intermittently gritted teeth ease their pressure every dozens of second or so to let me swallow a little and I lean forward from the back of my chair like anyone who’s ever lost the first two rounds in a LAN. What I am describing here is not the buildup of tension that hard games tend to inflict upon the player - there’s joy (and an exchange) happening in that trade of blows, I think. No, what this situation feels like to me is a voicelessness in the matter of the video-game. The game having and very much using its voice to suppress mine as an action that does not scream of authorial intent so much as it aims to render the player mute. This is what these worlds, in their openness, do to us. They bloat and gurgle most - if any - possibility for expression to emerge within their likeness - to impart a certain elasticity of being to the fiction and its characters. For play to go in more than one direction at a time and meet these undercurrents, make them integral parts of the text. Night City is different in that it’s aesthetically crude and conscious of what the city is to us (what drives the player to seek out its spectacle) yet, as the strongest - sometimes only - voice in play by virtue of its open-ended nature, it cannot let go of two conceptions essential to its successes ; an idea of the player as a set of neurotic impulses (which we are) drawn in parallel to its own view of itself as a space that both seeks and belies simulation. Peaceful cohabitation between Cyberpunk’s slew of systems was never on the cards and so the most salient question anyone can ask of 2077 isn’t whether it answers every political point of aesthetics that’s been ascribed - rather pointlessly - to the genre but instead see a translation of play’s tropes into an actuation of its game-world through the following question: Is Night City A Walkable Paradise?

“Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America,
and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.”

In one of my favourite early passages of Neuromancer, William Gibson describes a nowness. Through richly-textured streams of consciousness we get a glimpse of protagonist Case’s emotional ecstasy on the threshold between flesh and computer, a sort of strobe-lights reel akin to the religious experience of being visited by the Internet’s composite angel. This encounter with the world as perceived and rendered from our screens is the essence of Night City’s flash drive - that moment lived in the intersection, this longing that inhabits the mind and can only be met with an image of totality; every neon reflected in its corresponding surface, every aspect of reality densely explored by the weight of writing and asset-imprinted on the cornea itself. Baudrillard’s simulacrum realized. Night City is not a walkable paradise - it is a perceivable (video-game) one.

What I’m trying to get at is…we need an alternative. To get out of here. In this way 2077’s rendition of the "natural world" outside Night City is deeply moving to me; a barren, unstimulating expanse of polluted desert and dry grass that acts in contrast to everything else in Cyberpunk and makes itself vibrant whereas Wild Hunt's impressionistic canvases of aerial pine forests and ravaged country roads felt synthetic because, this time, there's no artifice. I drove there once in a haze. There was just too much light everywhere else. Blood spilled on halogen. Repetition, often empty conversations. An absent escape. So I just took Jackie’s ride and blasted past the Stateline, as fast as I could, because I wanted to remain in the game whilst simultaneously wanting out of it. Ditched my motorcycle and started walking, breathing a little in the shadow of wind turbines as the scenery unfolded before me. I think that’s due to this want - at least on my side - for the game world to work. Something’s leaking through the grapevine. We come back to open-worlds not because of their quality but because we believe they might one day attain the true colour of reflection and surpass their fragile status as simulated environments - hence the rise of A.I. and infinite terrain generation pushing a hollow artistic envelope. In this case a pedestrian motion invites a sort of contemplative boredom that is vital to traversal. Why else, for example, would CD Projekt RED insist on adding a fully functional metro system to Night City, years after the fact? A nowness. I value games where walking doesn’t feel redundant. I value this stride towards play outside of ravenous incentives supposed to inform the wider context of the story the game's trying to tell instead of distracting me, as something that smells like games but only binds us to physical limitations insofar as they evoke something within us. This is the heart of Cyberpunk 2077 - the thing it’s reaching for. A game trying to use the framework in order to bypass it. Unlimited budget in the service of capital’s immersive production of a nowness within which players could nest themselves. What V embodies then in my eyes is this effort to push past “the new and improved meaning vacuums, where the only thing that mattered, and the only thing that players could rely on and relate to, were their own individual experiences” created by the contemporary sandboxed open-world. Why would we wanna leave? And isn’t that wish for immersion worth examining in itself? Despite what it does to a human heart?

Night City is not strong enough to hold down the fort. But in instances like the one(s) I’ve just described it’s stumbling, perhaps half-knowingly, into player-engineered but space-emergent resonances, and the people at CDPR - for all their evident lack of swagger - know that too. This time V didn’t kill herself. She just stayed there in the heat of perpetual summer, jumping over rock geometries, listening to SAMURAI on the radio for a while, before riding back into the heart of the city one last time. I quit the game and got down to writing. There's so much more to life than this. But it’s also all there is. We're in it for the love of the game, for the slices of life - roleplaying for the briefest of moments, calling a dead friend's phone number, sharing a room with Judy for the night knowing full well the moment will pass, too. Pulling the trigger or, even, leaving Night City altogether. Whether V lives or dies and by which hands she chooses to do so matter equally because this fate is hers and hers alone, in that final pull-back of the curtains where we become mere observers of a story which - both by design and happenstance - never really belonged to us in the first place. It's impossible not to hold some regrets in departing from a perspective we willingly populated with our own thoughts and choices for so many hours yet becoming relevant to us at the exact moment agency stops being a factor. V walks - just not in the same city as us. Like this image of Reed at the end of Phantom Liberty drifting-off into the desert, towards the uncaring sun of empire. "Sand's fucking hot", V says. Burning at the proper temperature it will shrivel into new matter, becoming glass before scattering again like the ashen shards of a bygone mirror. We're always left to pick up the pieces, thinking that this time things will be different, and they never are, but we keep trying. A nowness is a phenomenon forever incomplete - affixed to the interactivity of the present, incapable of seeing beyond its own immersion. But it's also a possibility for change; this hope that, maybe one day, through the experience of others - with others - we could better understand ourselves. Walk alongside the rest of Night City. Touch the same soil as V.

A nowness–

"And somewhere he was laughing,
in a white-painted loft,
distant fingers caressing the deck,
tears of release streaking his face."

–Neuromancer, Chapter 3, William Gibson, 1984

One of my favorite units in any RTS are the AoE2 Teutonic Knights, which like many things in this have been historically modified for the sake of gameplay.

The real Teutonic Knights were a bunch of catholic dudes on horseback, while in this game they fight on foot and walk very slowly towards their opponents with their swords at their sides and beat the shit out of cavalry, trebuchets, and entire castles with nothing but that same sword. They're little tin can armor fellas in capes with stats equivalent to Mammoth Tanks from Command & Conquer, except they'd probably solo Kirov Airships too if you gave them jetpacks. Hell, could you imagine what would happen if you gave them a skateboard or a set of rollerblades? It's nightmarish imagining such a scenario, every archer would piss their pants at the sight of these guys sliding at them downhill with their swords pointed towards them.

Simplicity is sometimes the most endearing thing.

This had to have been my dad's favorite game ever at least on the ol' piece of shit Gateway PC. He was always a sucker for medieval warfare, and honestly I ain't exactly straying from the same path of interests he had, at least in this instance. It was an all too common occurrence to constantly hear the "under attack" alert ring out through the apartment. It was only slightly less funnier than the Empire Earth alert that was some pompous bastard bellowing "WE'RE UNDER ATTACK" even when an unthreatening bronze age slinger was bouncing stones off a space age chicken walker.

Between playing this, Balatro, and Picross I can't help but feel like I'm slowly turning into a hodgepodge of both my dad and my grandma. ;-;