Super Smash Brothers, the acclaimed crossover fighting game published by Nintendo, has recently received a new installment in the series: Super Smash Brothers Ultimate. This title, unique in the franchise, contains every character that has ever existed in any of the previous incarnations; all resurrected, so to speak, for the sake of capital gain, marketing appeal, and above all, ideologically consumptive globalist propaganda. The game, unlike most fighting games (let alone games at all) is able to sell itself not only on the merits it possesses as a competitive fighting experience able to foster legitimate community through mechanical complexity and relative balance between the avatars and their individual options, but also (and more importantly) through that image which comes from the possession of an enormous number of intellectual properties and characters effectively culled from their separate universes, set to perform that most ubiquitous of actions in the world of videogames: unquestioned and spectacular violence. In this game, one can pit children against children, dogs against dogs, frogs against mice against midgets, and all this, for the sake of blissful pleasure and engagement with friends, and that with (and through) an abundance of brands. Playing Super Smash Brothers can feel at times like swimming in a pool of cocacola while using dominoes pizza boxes for floats and giant floppy jolly-ranchers for noodles, during december, at night, with the fairy-lights glowing, and a menorah lit in the window, with all your homies and bros doing jack-knives off the snickers diving-board; it can similarly feel sweet, extraordinary, over-the-top, familiar and inundating, at once. If holidays in candyland at christmas could both appeal to and the average consumer, throwing them into a diabetic fit of seizing rage and euphoria, we can as easily say that the average person — the non-gamer— is able to perhaps appreciate at a distance the appeal of the game, but not the actual value of its experience, ill-equipped as they are to properly consume it on the textual level it, granted, makes little effort to promote.

I felt at looking at William Gass' top novels of literary import a sense of loss both on his behalf and for myself. How long had he spent reading those same books over and over again, and joe recently had he touched them? A man and character such as him likely had read and read them multiple times, but i suspect that the significant moments with the books are from his young age. His best moments and most profound insights are likely from his youth, and the time of the freedom to feel. When young, I'm sure also his reading was for him; now he reads for his image. Or does he now? Perhaps those books fresh on his mind even after a lifetime of reading has given them a proper place; their ability to be remembered is their greatest asset; they are rendered again more memorable for having been inducted into yet another man's pantheon. He ennobles the titles, and they inform him.

I can imagine a young william (substituted for a young gass — gas that would have been) reading with eyes wide open the mort darthur, and feeling in the moment the splendors and tragedies of the english king. I can see him, young and free to his thinking. I see him now — his body has made him differently free. Liver spotted veiny hands on thin limbs attached to a paunch which has been sitting in silk approximations of the hairshirt; The neck bulges not with boom but sag, and any expected tightness in the image is found where the belly and ribcage join, and around the light of blue eyes upwards glancing. He has been totally freed of his youth, even before his time, to pursue the place of the reader and writer. He wears it like a sash.

The image hurts me some. Even a wise man can be a fool to his body — and this wise man no less, who among his favorites is Plato, mouthpiece to Socrates, himself a soldier and citizen foremost, and a philosopher simply for having been remembered by his pupil. Socrates spoke of the need to know the body. Gass I wonder at.

And I fear the lesson. To settle into a position can overtake you. to be overtaken because you occupy a role is to forget will; at the same time it feels as though will must guide to the place where one cannot forget ones future, and must always be aligning for the purpose yet to arrive. I have a need to know, but not so emptily as to learn while leaving my body behind. The world does not gift that man a name beyond his smallest circle.

I remember my first meaningful run with the Binding of Isaac — intoxicated, my friend and I, set at opposite ends of his dark basement bedroom and peering into the electric glow of our laptop monitors, were engaged in singular games of downward-delving, charting with the anxious precaution that only a marijuana high can produce, the procedurally manufactured basements of singular degeneracy and circumstance that the game yielded to us. Though we shared his basement space, and had marked out the beginnings of our moral baseness with our pipe-smoking and cheeto-chomping, the real depravity was drawn not in-game, but rather by the metaphysical distance we made between us when we, in the night, kept for ourselves different corners of his room to experience the plastic novelty of this dungeon-crawling game which we had both admitted earlier to having found mediocre for its want of aesthetic austerity. It was base in a way that was obvious; its commentary was crude, not shrewd; it drew lines too rough to say anything meaningful, and was on the whole a bit empty. But here we were, with this in mind, at the end of our long day, smoked out, and indulging that emptiness, and in the dark, enjoying it. I remember, in that playthrough,

Metal Gear Solid V is fundamentally misunderstood as as a novel piece of media and narrative — although, on a certain level, this is to be expected. The willingness people have to claim that it is a work “incomplete,” or to exclaim that it is somehow not up to the standards of the series, shows a remarkable lack of self-awareness and insight generally; not only is the concept of completeness a totally ineffectual notion in an object which has seen commercial release, the work is also a complex iteration on the themes that had been previously established in prior entries of the series — information control, the nature of identity amidst culture, the concept of allegiance in wartime all are brought up and handled without condescending the viewer; at the same time the work introduces to the these discussions the nuance that the complex role of technology has in affecting such themes, and the way in which we reassess and re-tool our technologies when conflict arises. In defense of those who hold such weak opinions, those who suggest the game is weak thematically, I’ll say that, at least, there is an element of this reading that is not inconsistent, and may in fact be fundamental to the work: these misapprehensions of the work are something of the point, and so it is not so wrong (and may ultimately be an important fact of the game’s design) that people (namely, lay-men and all literary analysts of the work that I’ve heard discuss the game) fall into the trap of remaining at this level of analysis.
A meme that sprouted about the phantom pain around release was the idea that the work was meant to elicit a different kind of phantom pain, a feeling of presence where there was actually nothing. This claim was easy to weave into much of the design of the game: the game world, two broad deserts, are by nature dry and empty. The missions
This is understood by many to be a kind of hand-waving, or a dismissal of the valid criticisms of the work in favor of the argument that MGSV is “bad on purpose.”
There’s validity to the invalidation of the point: it’s clever, but not a particularly sophisticated argument, and just saying it is the case does not do the hard work of making the case. I don’t really believe it’s correct either, but it is not for the traditional reasons.
I come back to the notion of completeness: THe game itself might not feel complete, but belies a misunderstanding of the game which kojima has been known to play.

A more sophisticated tone and presentation hid from the audience a deeper sense of humor and asininity — what many took to be supremely annoying or half-baked should have been understood instead as the real humor of the work, but was glossed over because fans take the canons of false universes too seriously. False universes, one might add, that have supplemental canonical narrative material articulated in a series of PSP card games.

The conceit of mini metro is to build train lines for various stations which pop up in approximations of major cities. The clean and uncluttered aesthetic allows the game to communicate quickly what your goal is.

The identity of the passengers is only considered in as far as passengers have a place to go. One is defined, by the specter of transit, not by face name or interrelation, but by the location for which one is bound.

I played mini metro on the way home from work, and tried to find in it some value. Failing at study and play, I placed a call to a local used bookstore to see if they might have in stock a piece of now forgotten fiction. As the line rang I felt the drawing of some symbols — it occured to me that the person on the other end might see me only as a means to an end, and as my voice along the line asked roughly the same question that was asked every day, it's possible that I might be shapeless, or shaped after a square, regardless of my esoteric taste. Objective and point being, get the request where it needs to be.
The resonance rang further as I got on a train to simply go check the shelves instead of having my query answered immediately through machine memory: Today it dawned on me, (again, as dawns fly successfully to days to nights and dawns again) that there were few reasons to pursue publishing as any kind of political endeavor — at least as any kind of sales associate. There's a kind of joke in publishing: one curates knowledge, but only insofar as that curation is positively received by your consumer base. If we are in a time where it is attention that we are cultivating and curating, it’s not a question of what is best to feed on, but what most thoroughly attracts. A junk ethos pulses through all markets; this stung me. For those trafficking for the sake of growth and gain, what changes hands is largely secondary to the growth itself.

I played mini metro on the way home from work today and attempted to gain what I wanted from it, namely deep insight about it, and through that, insight about the world; but what I’d found, principally that capital systems don’t care about the organelles that move them and that the game follows in a tradition of mobile games which are obliquely reflective the world around them despite being kind of silly and flat, kept me from being able to conjure anything further of note. Instead, as I became more familiar with my commute to work and back, and more familiar with my superficial apprehensions about the symbols I was interacting with, I noticed myself slipping into the state which to many is considered “zen”, or “flow”; and it was here that I noticed that I was playing, in some ways much better, and in others, much worse. In a way, I was better at mini metro than I had been before, because my ability to think about what was happening, to really truly consider critically what was occuring on screen, was reduced, because I was the metro more. The logic stood more obvious, and I could ride easily knowing I had some fundamental understanding and — oh here’s my stop.

But my understanding, a mechanistic manner internalized, was tethered and guided by the fact that the novelty was fading. I was not considering as deeply my routes because my understanding of a certain mode of play had already been established; because of this, though I felt more attuned, I was actually playing significantly worse than I had been, and previous attempts at the third challenge on the New York Map, to create a successful metro which is able to carry 1600 passengers while only 2 lines are connected to a square station, had actually been more successful, with my first go being the closest to solving the puzzle. The trouble it seems to me here, at least one of them, anyway, is that the capital transit landian soul of the metro, of any system, is navigable at a distance, but to get up close to it is to become lost in it. The nervous feeling of inbound failure keeps the tension high, and the initial observations valid. As one shifts into a state of deeper mechanical immersion, one loses the tension, and the profundity found in the gulf between object and subject. The interim produces an object which attempts to don the subject; but until the two are one, and the master and mastery are carried out as a being complete through another, there is an uncomfortable failing, and the ability to gain ground is diminished as the object shivers from the subject, or to bring it back, as I slipped into and out of a state of semi-cognizant flow, at times primed and at others too comfortable with what I was working with, failing to realize I’d donned my object affectively, not effectively. To feel attuned to the mystery of the machine is to lose the forest for the trees; and while the mystical experience of the tree might be really profound, it’s difficult to find in the lone tree the ecological significance of the forest, the role such a forest has on the community which surounds it, and the deep value of their perfect symbiotic interrelatedness, perfect in its unviewedness. Too, it’s difficult to know from the religious experience the shared psychological or physical one. It is, it seems, or at least feels (oh typical feeling and unsurity) , the case that one cannot examine truthfully and at the same time really get down to that divine feeling of connectedness. To view is a mode, to be is a mode, and its not clear the two can be joined (although we do hear stories of the first psychic images of DNA being viewed through the hallucinogenic experiences of acid-using physicists).

Maybe that’s the fear of machines that I face in saying that (and maybe a fear of acid; maybe it’s a fear of the religious experience). How could it be that seeing something keeps us from being it? To inappropriately ape another physics icon, there’s something sort of Schroedinger-esque about the claim: two aspects cannot be jointly perceived at once. To get philosophical, and through the abstractness more accurate, reflect on wittgenstein: “one must throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it”. I could match the claim to being for us, as sensory creatures: one never sees themselves directly, to oneself one is only reflected in an instant. Video perhaps changes this phenomenon somewhat, but video is just an angle of our beings captured; video is just a more temporally thorough reflection — it is not truly more accurate. It hardly grasps our local or social significance.
I spend roughly two hours every day commuting, a time which is often void of substantive thought or output, and which is endured as such because, living as I am in a capitalist regime, one must “make bread”, and must work rather tirelessly to attain gross excesses of “bread” to pay doughy landowners their lofty “bread”-tax, lest one become destitute and “bread” shriven, ambling on the streets for a meager handout of crust or pilfered loaf. Being too much a coward to strong arm my way into a bakery, or to build one, I must suffer the contemporary ennui produced by a mildly annoying and meaningless commute for the sake of performing a 9 to 5 . Yet in the pursuit of the pursuit of means I find I grind myself physically and mentally more totally than is appropriate, and begin second guessing my intuitions about what is right and appropriate for my mind and matter — but being without means I must endure until psychological hardship simply stops its chafe at the end of my arbitrarily arrested pursuit; when my coffers are stored in earnest, and can fend against my own time’s capital decay, then can I find solace from the anxious effort to make all things lean toward my financial success. Yet now, because of the need to eat, time not spent acting towards that goal feels wasted, and any prospect of “self-care” is reduced by practical reasoning to a kind of gluttonous indulgence of weakness. Until that time of bread-solvency, all I can do is hope that the wheat of my field can stand tall, and that at the end of the day there might be some healthy plot left after all the tilling.
There is then the hope of a future me not exhausted; there is also the hope that my time might be used well. I have a smart phone on my person at all times, and find myself using it constantly, and yet nearly always to atomize myself and pull my conscious thought from the world around me. It is a symbol of great avarice to behave in such a way not, and not simply because I cannot as yet actually afford to. It is prideful in its contempt for the social world: who can claim to be better than the world, truly? Why stand apart, distracted and entertained simply because the world is too difficult to bear?
As I am, I cannot bear the sight of me, acting without purpose or place. However, I know also that to give up my smartphone and its modern pleasures would deprive me also of its great utility — such is the trouble with magic rings, binding and broadening as they are. I am placing as a kind of gambit myself in the limelight (at least as much of me as can be placed without sacrificing that other half of me which is living and active in the world beyond the screen) in the hopes that I might turn my hunger for moment-to-moment meaning into action, and sate my desire.
I turn the eye upon myself, and this to show the world what this mode of living is, atomized and despairing, even despite the truly privileged and lucky world supporting and surrounding it. I am enormously fortunate, and yet overwhelmed by a world of shock and terror. I inundate myself with entertainment, and hope yet to deliver an enlivening media to you, whoever you may be.

The ritual consumption of liquors as medicine seems to have driven their production across history, and whether it be an amaro, a wine, or a whiskey that you consume, what spirits you drink today, you do so because once there was a myth that drinking such infused beverages would heal, and not hurt, our bodies. Like a cauldron's brew, the potions of a distiller induced health in the drinker, to potentially great effect.
Thus, of all the mythologies and folktales that the Witcher pulls from, there is perhaps no referenced idea more consistent through the series than that the consumption of cocktails is a persistently magical affair. If one can endure the trial of grasses, (or, as my father called it, the gin-ening) one will acquire catlike reflexes, supernatural abilities, the ability to hex and command reality with a grace and repose the greatest acrobats and confidence men could only dream of - as a Witcher then, you play an alcohol-fueled berserker bent variously on "preserving" or "destroying" the "magical forces" which sprang from the Conjunction of the Spheres, an event which brought beasts and sorcery into the world of Not-Poland, (although within the extended metaphor of the series, this event is more likely a reference to the discovery of malt and psychoactive agents than it is to, say, the collision of various mythologies upon the consciousness of a European culture). A violent arbitrator on reality, your aggressive stance towards all that is mysterious, ill or no, is taken as law, and as you descend further and further into your aggressive alcoholism, you realize the world, such as it is, is designed to fuel your ever continued consumption of magical liquors, as further knowledge begets further reason to drink, begets further strength and proceeding need to consume yet more; the need for strength begets a need to drink begets a strength to confront a more distorted world, and the cruel wheel of addiction, articulated in the game as self-justifying power creep, presents itself. In this way, the game is a success, as it uses its skinner box design around loot and acquisition to mimic the descent into consumptive madness.
Too, as a haggard lover of spirits, you are inspired to chase your ex-girlfriends, attempt to rekindle a relationship with your estranged adopted daughter, shrug off the fact of your own death, attend to your unseemly facial hair, rummage through the belongings of others for untarnished clothing, and do odd jobs for the population to afford your addiction to the stimulating effects of an ice-cold swallow. Everything only ever concerns the personal affairs of Geralt, and as such, we are taught to feel the irony of such habits as his, as the narrative focus reveals a solipsistic predilection for confronting only ones own monsters, each contract a sign, surely, of Geralt's persistent and stultifying inner life.

In fact, as a white-haired everyman, Geralt is a stand in for every alcoholic who views himself a hero of his time, delusional nearly to the point of being admirable, being so lost in his own bizarre speculations as to be an example of unassailable confidence.

Crass, self-important, dark beyond measure, and a bleak portrayal of substance abuse, the witcher takes the notion that a drink here or there might be acceptable, and asks you to confront what uninhibited pleasure really looks like.

As a fan of roguelikes, roguelites, and Rogue, I find my standards for the quality of a roguelike are as follows: if the game can provide significant mechanical novelty across playthroughs such that each new run feels like a new character embarking on a new adventure with new perils to face, then I consider it a success - and the level of its success is amplified by both amount of content (which multiplies the sense of novelty), and consistency of mechanics, which allows the player both feel themselves in a world governed by consistent rules, and to create more and more successful attempts at the given goal of, say, going to hell (or, as in the current example, escaping from it). Narrative and design soundness are also useful aspects for game makers to focus on, and can elevate a title massively, but when I consider the most significant aspects of the roguelike genre, the ability to produce consistent mechanical novelty within a mechanically consistent world is paramount.

Hades, then, is concerned with the things which to me are the exact opposite of the point, and does very little to push this mechanics-focused genre forward. While the combat is punchy and fun, it's essentially just action gameplay ported from Supergiant's previous titles Bastion and Transistor - "work smarter, not harder" ostensibly being the aphorism in the office after releasing a significantly more unique game, Pyre, to much less vibrant fanfare - and while the story is lively, there is for me a feeling of disappointment after the first, the third, the fifth successful fight with Hades, which springs from the grim question not ever to be evoked by such a life-sucking medium as this: what's the point?

I'm all for well-constructed works which adhere to the mores of a given artistic movement, and to its credit, perhaps that is simply what this is (which is to say, a game consistent with the times, and guided by superficial forces which garner positive attention, such as: general polish, strong VA, a coherent aesthetic, lovely music, fascinating attention to detail, a rags-to-riches developer story, bright readable visuals, a transparent development process, a charming cast of characters and an absolutely absurd amount of dialogue lines) - but nonetheless, I find it all kind of boring.

lacking in sufficient secrets or novelty, yet polished to a mirror's sheen, Hades is a roguelike himbo with daddy issues, perceiving the multigenerational success of its forefathers, and projecting outwardly that it can be a big boy too, just as long as its prettier than pops. What himbo fails to realize, unfortunately, is that brooding daddy was actually sort of deep.

I woke up at 4 o'clock nearly every day for two and a half months to work an arduous and underpaid landscaping job to save money for a "professional trip" which stripped me of the contents of my wallet and which paved the way for an extremely destructive breakup and ultimate collapse of my personal and professional life. After those long days (but before the following dark ones), I would wind down with Hollow Knight. It felt nice to be a bug among bugs in a bugworld, and having seen in my days under the fierce summer sun the little bugs crackling beneath my fingernails and staining my khakis, I felt a bliss in the poetic echoes, which whispered: we are always under someone's boot.

Oppressive, melancholic, unapologetically derivative, and now an oppressive force of its own within the the realm of indie gaming and metroidvanias, this is what you might call an existential poem. At the very least, you might call it "alright". Beyond that, and depending upon how willingly you allow yourself to be induced into Stockholm syndrome, you might call it "actually pretty good".

If Kikiyama, Itoi, Chilledcow, and XXXbloodyrists666XXX got together to develop this game instead of OMO-CAT, they'd at least have had the chance to further their own artistic projects, and by their collaboration would have produced a network in miniature which more genuinely reflected the aesthetic fascination and world which they each independently helped create, synthesizing not in mimicry but in earnestness their disparate but hauntologically focused works which, instead, now inform this mess.
The idea that these four would successfully push anything out in under five years is ridiculous, and in genuine parity with that perceived fact, the game is at least honest in its disregard for its own fans' time and attention, for if there's anything to be said about these five creators, it's that they created works which are timeless, insofar as they have little regard for time generally.

Verbose, derivative, silly, and essentially too late to the party. Cool soundtrack though. And oh, what potential - feels like a haunting.