Having to be in a world with other people really is a horrifying thing. Sometimes things get so bad I wonder why we even bother trying to communicate with each other. It seems inevitable that we mess something up, say too much or too little, hurt people in ways we could never fathom. No amount of verbal or non-verbal communication could capture the ideas we truly believe in, it could never convey the nuances of our thoughts and perceptions, the principles we carry that guide our every decision. Wouldn't it be better if we all knew exactly what was going on in each other's minds? It sounds like a horrifying idea, but would it really cause more trouble than we already create? A network of people constantly connected, every detail of your life being taken in by anyone willing to join that network. Then you would see every version of yourself that exists in different people's minds. Wouldn't that be a relief? Or maybe it would drive you mad. Either way, why not give it a shot?

This game came out 2 months after the final episode of Serial Experiments Lain. Fans went into this expecting answers and got more than they would ever want to know.

this one is a pretty interesting story about a “hero” – i.e, a military that joined the army believing that he would be a hero but is actually just helping a multi billionaire company/imperialist state in their dirty path – slowing realizing how shitty his job is and how much he is more of a “tool” and a “product” rather than, actually, a hero. the game has this theme of “honor” and what that really means and i like how it never really prestiges shinra for anything, even with the romanticism in SOLDIER and all, is more of an individual discourse. the genesis plotline (and kind of the main plotline lol) is interesting too¹ and questions a lot about the usefulness of SOLDIER, their purpouse as individual and if they aren’t just monsters used as weapons for a company to do their jobs. even zack not being as modified as angeal, genesis or even sephiroth, he’s still just a shinra’s dog, you know? pretty funny how genesis is just an edgy gay that reads too much poetry! love the 2000s aesthetics on it, the flip-phones, the FMVs, how beautiful the boys are! like. seriously. final fantasy vii may be the final fantasy with the most beautiful boys in any of them. anyway. i dislike how the missions work! to be more exactly, i hate the level design on it, is just flat and boring and what really makes you want to do the missions is getting new items to fusion or to just have a better build and because of how good the combat is. not excellent, though! fire trivializes a lot of fights and some encounters that could be excellent are just you spamming fire and running and sometimes hitting the enemy while he’s just there still attacking you and not really reacting to any of your attacks. but you know, psp game etc etc. the ending of this game pays for pretty much all of its sins, i cried like a bitch. also reno’s in it and he’s handsome. and zack is a cute too. good game!

¹just an edit to say that is not flawless tho! genesis is a big "?" since, while it does brings some cool questions and is a narrative trigger for sephiroth's downfall, it's existence throught the game as well as the whole g project, s-cells etc. plot feels like a big nothing in the main picture (The Final Fantasy VII Compilation, I Mean). still, genesis as a character is pretty fun to watch!

Hylics like you and I will hang a basket over a shopkeeper’s head, ransack his life’s work from under his nose without consequence, laugh at how ridiculous this is and heap it upon the list of Skyrim’s alleged shortcomings. Game developers will look at the same situation, hang it up on their wall and adhere to it as a design philosophy.

Developers have commented on this sort of contrast between their own perspective and that of players before; most famously, designer of Civilization III and IV Soren Johnson coined the old adage of “given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of a game.” This is no less true of The Elder Scrolls than any other RPG, but in its case, a different sort of contrast also exists in what’re generally considered the best quests. Ask anyone what their favourite part of Skyrim is and you’ll likely hear Ill Met By Moonlight brought up, or often The Mind of Madness, or any number of the ones which incidentally lead them to discover Blackreach for the first time. In a game packed with so many spectacular highlights, who in their right mind would find themselves longing for what most of us would write off as fetch quests, rote tedium amounting to nothing more than having to collect a certain amount of a certain item? The answer’s none other than Todd Howard.

He’s completely right about this. It’s been almost ten years since I’d last played Skyrim, and I still vividly remember the relief I felt in finally coming across a random, unnamed Bosmer bandit whose blood sample was the last one I needed to complete one of the main quests. As Todd describes, I beat the quest in a time, place and manner which were all purely unique to me, which – despite the apparent mundanity of collecting different races’ blood samples – is more than enough to have firmly embedded it in my brain as much as any Daedric artefact hunt or murder mystery or mediation of a truce between two sides of a civil war.

What this speaks to is the greatest strength of Skyrim and Bethesda’s catalogue in general: experiential value. Radiant AI’s long been the butt of jokes, largely thanks to Skyrim’s big brother in particular, but the fact that it enables these games to effectively react to themselves and create genuinely dynamic situations no two people will come across is probably taken for granted. To make an open world feel alive and lived-in’s an elusive undertaking, but even so much as attempting a system like this puts Skyrim several steps ahead of near enough everything else outside of its own series. As invariable as it is that your Dragonborn will eventually become a stealth archer (in part because of how much character building’s been watered down compared to its predecessors), unique, organic experiences and roleplaying opportunities still abound thanks to it.

Both frontrunners for all sorts of industry awards last year were also dark fantasy action-adventure games with RPG elements and emphasis on exploration. There’s absolutely nothing in either of them remotely as cool as being able to ride a dragon and have it fight another dragon in the sky in a battle that can end up seamlessly spanning an entire province, which you can also explore nearly every inch of and interact with nearly any object in on foot (on 7th gen hardware, no less). This is the same game that lets me eke out a quiet life as a married woodcutter with a hoard of cheese wheels of dubious origin in my cellar, or Tamriel’s most indirect serial killer who instigates fights throughout the province by leaving valuables in the street, or an opportunistic necromancer who employs nearby corpses to solve all combat encounters for me, or an Altmeri master thief who stalks and then knicks the belongings of any and all Bosmer I run into because the Thalmor aren’t extreme enough for his taste, or essentially anything else I can imagine. At every turn, on every playthrough, is the stuff you’d see on the cover of a classic fantasy adventure book, something I’d wager only one other game released since Skyrim can lay claim to.

It’s for these reasons that I’ve not given Skyrim a numerical score. Until this revisit I had it logged as a 3/5, which in my view is “just alright,” but there’s two problems with calling Skyrim just alright. For one, games which actually are only just alright don’t have even a fraction of the longevity Skyrim’s demonstrated in so many different metrics, and two, what standard are we comparing it to to arrive at the idea that it isn’t much more than that? There’s no other game that does what Skyrim does, exactly like Skyrim does, but better. You don’t have to love it to recognise that; as of the time of writing, Skyrim isn’t even my second favourite TES, but not even its own predecessors fit the bill since all of them are so starkly different both from it and from each other.

You can easily point to better alternatives for specific, individual aspects of Skyrim. Dragon’s Dogma puts its combat to shame and even features an NPC relationship system more in line with Oblivion’s. Its quests would be more rewarding if it were designed like an immersive sim so that attempted solutions like this would actually work. Its dialogue system’s arguably even more limited than Fallout 4’s, without the excuse of being burdened by a voiced protagonist. The lack of a climbing system like Daggerfall’s or Breath of the Wild’s feels more and more conspicuous every time you bump into invisible walls on slight inclines. The aforementioned simplified character building means that the days of leaping across Vvardenfell or Cyrodiil in a single jump are sadly long past us. It goes on, and on, and on.

Skyrim’s so evergreen despite plenty more issues than just these because there’s no holistic package that compares. There’s being bloated, and then there’s offering such a wealth of varied gameplay opportunities each delivered to a (in the grand scheme of things) relatively high standard that you learn to tolerate its many dozens of cracks. Your favourite game, and mine, probably doesn’t have worldbuilding this well-considered, feature any areas that compare to Sovngarde musically or visually, let you live out the idyllic mammoth farmer lifestyle we all secretly pine for, and/or suplex talking cats. This picture looks like a joke at first glance, but you’ll eventually come to realise how true it is.

~ GetRelationshipRank <ProudLittleSeal> 0 I work for Belethor, at the general goods store.

Forget about the whole narrative of "Death Stranding is unique because no other developer would make a game about just walking across open world and doing deliveries." Anyone who thinks like that don't know a single thing about video games (also somehow doesn't know games like Euro Truck exists). The achievement of this game has nothing to do with how "novel" it is with its core theme or some bullshit.

Death Stranding is great because gameplay mechanics supporting the idea of doing deliveries are thoroughly and meticulously systematized and game-ified that their feedback loops are incredibly addicting, while also buttressing the core conceptual themes of connection, being alone and altruism. Kojima and his team made sure that fetch quests are fun not just because of the instant gratification of achieving grades at the end and people giving you likes, but because of your own planning before making the delivery and making sure you are going through your routes while in full understanding of your current resources. Once you begin to see the larger picture and build network of roads and ziplines, the game now becomes something else, testing you to be as efficient as possible, and rewarding you for being smart.

Kojima has always loved systemic gameplay, but he always understood how to balance it out to make sure it's manageable, localized and most importantly, exploitable. Death Stranding is no exception. The game's focus is in the systemic exploration, but unlike other emergent open world games and "immersive sims," Death Stranding is not about emergent experiences; it's about constantly dangling the carrot of "you can be even more efficient here." And it's damn good at amplifying that gameplay loop. But instead of the pursuit of efficiency diminishing the humanity of the narrative and the world, it makes it stronger because you are creating these "strands" tighter and tighter.

I imagine that anybody who follows me is long past the moment of “oh Mass Effect is actually extremely fucking wack, politically” so I’m not going to spend a lot of time here on how deeply evil this game is except shoutouts to Wrex you deserve better, anti-shoutouts to Garrus I know you’re everyone’s boyfriend but you’re one of the most evil people of all time, rest in piss Ashley, awful awful woman.

Instead I want to talk about the thing the game is actually ABOUT and what it struck me as being really about when taken in its totality. At first glance Mass Effect seems like it’s sticking pretty much beat for beat to the early Bioware formula: tutorial, three discrete levels in any order, fourth level with a context shaking twist, and a funnel level into an endgame scenario. But Mass Effect has something that none of the other Bioware games that follow this specific formula do: a shit ton of completely optional side content. And while I think you can certainly derive what I got out of this game if you ignore it, which mostly people do, because it is obviously unfinished and largely uncompelling in the way you want a story-driven RPG to be compelling, I think that engaging in every single bit of it really helped this game reveal itself to me.

Now I have to come clean up front and admit that I am simply an enormous pervert (mako enjoyer). I like how it controls, this gigantic, floaty, unwieldy thing that will swing sharply in whatever direction you indicate at even the lightest touch, that takes forever to start or stop but is always a moment’s notice away from flipping fully onto its back because you ran over a small rock, that unless a surface is literally like 90 degrees vertical you can p much scale it no probbo. But you can get good at it! There is consistency to its floatiness, there is art and skill to the propulsion you get from its jump and the ways you can manipulate your airborne angles with it if you’re positioned correctly. The Legendary Edition says they “improved” the mako but all they really did was make it heavier which may have made driving it immediately easier but ironically makes climbing mountains and getting out of harsh terrain much more difficult because you have more mass and can’t accelerate as much from a stop or a precarious angle.

And yet driving across infinite essentially identical planets brings me so much joy, one of my favorite feelings in all of video games. It’s amazing how much you can change the feel of a place by changing the dominant color scheme, or adding a second color, or putting a harsh filter over the screen, or putting a massive moon in the sky, or environmental hazards, or any combination of these things. These places don’t feel distinct but Mass Effect, contrary to popular opinion, is actually a beautiful game, one that made up for limited animations and less-than-cutting-edge graphics with an incredible command of color and filters and art design. That stuff all stands out even in its largely featureless wildernesses, where you only company will ever be one of four kinds of salvage operations, a random boss fight, or the planet’s designated side quest location, of which there are maybe seven unique maps divvied across like 30 planets?

These maps are enormous and truly empty. If they’re dotted with small scraps of stuff for you to loot it’s almost never shit you care about or even shit with a story to tell. There’s no music and no ambient dialogue from your companions and no sound of any kind other than the wind and the noise of your engine encroaching on the silence of a planet that does not care. Because this is what Mass Effect is ultimately about: that the world is big, bigger than we can understand and certainly bigger than we can master. That to think we can know it is arrogance and that to think we can tame it is suicide.

Everywhere you go in Mass Effect you find people who have overextended, who have fucked around and found out. Usually they’re long dead. Sometimes this is dramatic, like their ship went down and they were killed by a large worm monster but mostly it’s just that something went wrong with their ship and they crashed on one of the overwhelming majority of planets in even the charted galaxy where no one lives, and even with their distress beacon going they’re too far out for anyone to ever find them because they were brave enough to be out here for a reason that suddenly seems very small in the scope of the death the universe is about to hit them with. Even the little largely scientific descriptions of planets that you get when you first scan them are often filled with small stories of people who died there for whatever reason. Explorers, pirates, settlers, whatever. All kinds of planets. All kinds of reasons. Always dead.

But it’s more than just this. Mass Effect isn’t just about how Nature Is Scary and We Need To Respect it. I think it’s becoming evident that Mass Effect is about how no matter how times we’re warned about this, we just won’t learn this lesson. We refuse it, we reject it. It’s a game where literally every main plot scenario is driven by people who have Fucked Around And Found Out, re: some primordial phenomenon, usually natural. Liara investigates prothean ruins alone and messes with shit she, the known universe’s foremost prothean expert, doesn’t understand and gets caught in a deathtrap, saved entirely by happenstance. On Feros, Exogeni Corp. unearths the thorian, a singular and ancient life form so old and obtuse that it defies the classifications we’ve used for plants and animals for hundreds of years, and even when they realize that it’s dangerous, and killing people, and possibly irreversibly destroying their brains, they just let it happen for research, until things spiral further out of control. Binary Helix is doing almost the exact same shit on the Rachni, who very quickly massacre everyone at their remote research base in response to the abusive way they’ve been resurrected. Let’s not forget either that the Peak 15 research base is cut off from the outside world by the extremely hostile and untamed weather conditions of Noveria itself; part security feature for shady corporations, equal part menacing trap when something goes wrong.

The thing is though, this doesn’t just happen, right? None of these things are innate to the conception of personhood. Most of the people you meet in these games are not enthusiastically being evil scientists and frontiersmen, they’re normal exploited workers trying to eke out a living in a world that’s forcing them. These disasters are the logical endpoint of the hypercapitalistic world that every species has to buy into hard to participate in galactic society. Everyone’s doing it. It’s a huge focus of the game, how deep we are in the rot. The game doesn’t fully realize how bad this is; sure, corporations are often the villains but their place as the glue that runs society and holds it together, the idea that all news, all entertainment, all life is filtered through a corporate veneer even less veiled than our own real life one is taken for granted. A runoff of the game constantly trying to make you feel like your choices matter and it can see what you’re doing is that every news report you might overhear in an elevator is about corporate colonies you visit, every shop is selling weapons and armor and all gossip is about military outfits and their trevails against pirates and extrasolar robotic boogeymen. The military and the frontier and the private business are all the same thing and while this world is broadened somewhat in the sequels, in Mass Effect they’re near the ONLY thing.

This need to not only study but to replicate and synthesize and weaponize the thorian, to recreate and subjugate the rachni, to create a bred army of mindless krogan slaves. The way the human government implants children with ever improving but ever-dangerous biotic amps with devastating lifelong side effects and abandoning them with no support as soon as the next generation of hardware comes along. Even simply the constant, omnipresent need to expand, to colonize new planets and dominate their ecosystems and strip them of everything valuable and force them into a state of habitability and relative comfort for the few species who exist in the realm of citadel space. What can these things be driven by but the demands of capital? Of eternal growth? Of wealth over humanity? Constantly in this game we’re punished for being this way but never does anyone figure it out.

Then there are, of course, the reapers. The ultimate expression of nature’s unknowability. Sovereign enters this story like a sledgehammer, and taken at face value (and without a reason not to do so), his words suggest the terrifying and infinite reality of our smallness in a world that rejects our attempts to reign it into our shitty and selfish frameworks. The protheans are ancient and mysterious? Sovereign is older, and killed them, seemingly and somehow. The rachni nearly wiped out everyone in the galaxy? Sovereign is so unconcerned with the might of the galaxy’s fleets that he doesn’t even acknowledge them in the game’s climax, he just moves through ships like they’re air, destroying them almost unknowingly, and it takes the combined might of literally everyone who is physically able to show up to kill him. He’s one reaper of untold numbers. The thorian was frightening because it defied classification and because it had brainwashing pheromones? Sovereign seems to warp perception simply by its presence. He is not only an AI like the geth but a truly living machine. He sort of explains stuff to you but it doesn’t even feel like he really cares all that much. He says scary stuff but it doesn’t feel like he’s trying to scare you; he’s just like this. “You exist because we allow it. You will end because we demand it.” What does he mean by this? It doesn’t matter. Understanding Sovereign isn't important. It might be to us, we WANT to understand, but he doesn't care if we do or not. We don’t matter. We can’t impose ourselves onto Sovereign. Even when we win the fight, how many other Sovereigns are on their way? Infinite, it seems. Living on a real Earth in 2022, as it begins to die more publicly than ever, and begins to turn on humanity in ways more and more obvious to the naked eye, and we continue to harvest it anyway, Sovereign hits me harder than before.

Where this reading stumbles, of course, is that Mass Effect itself doesn’t realize what a compelling case it’s made against its heroes and its world and every leadership body that populates it. Mass Effect is not a game that is saying on purpose to Drop The Meteor, that the Earth will be better off. The game ends, no matter how heroically or cruelly, with the defiant assertion of our right to conquer, our correctness in our way of life. It doesn’t realize how damned that sounds in the wake of how vile everyone in authority we meet is, how many victims we are. That in so valiantly preserving a status quo so rotten they are only digging a deeper reactionary hole.

I don’t think these feelings will be followed up on. I don’t recall Mass Effects 2 and 3 having the kind of relationship to the natural world that this game has, and obviously their narrative and thematic throughlines emerge strongly if discordantly from one another. Andromeda is deeply concerned with explicit colonialism in a way that only exists on the edges of Mass Effect 1. But as a stand alone experience I think Mass Effect hits. It is distracted by its vile politics and military aggrandizement but by insisting on staying out in the weeds in my stupid rover or pouring over planet descriptions for like 2/3rds of my time, that stuff fades in my memory just a little bit, even just a week out from finishing the game again. Much better to cruise across the plains and over the mountains, and feel small, and find nothing on the other side.

so glad something like this can exist today. crisis core is probably one of the most expressively “edgy” mid to late 2000s games i’ve ever played - edgy in the sense that it’s filled with stylized teenage blood pumping action and nomura character designs fit for its audience - it’s so gratifying that this era of games can still remain relevant. in 2022 i’m watching a pre rendered fmv of smug long-sworded swordsman do battle on the edge of a nuclear cannon while the hardest drum n bass heavy guitar infused battle music beckons alongside. crisis core’s essence has remained untouched.
while the story is very clearly flawed in a handful of areas (specifically genesis’ handling), zack is still just such a joy to watch, despite the unfortunate decline in voice quality compared to the original. i can look past a lot of flaws because of how heartwarming the story and surprisingly great the gameplay are. every grievance i had with the original’s combat has been completely fixed to my shock. still has the bones of its psp blueprint but its a lot more fluid now and isn’t as easy to bore.

this is for sure the definitive version of crisis core to play with the visual and mechanical upgrades alongside some new bonus content and remixed music. but… i still do think the original is worth playing, being a bit of a time capsule for that era of the ff7 compilation and height of the psp; pushing the hardware to the limits alongside attempting the ambitious endeavor of further contextualizing one of the most beloved titles in the medium. nowadays there’s a lot less risk for square to do something like this, what with basically anything ff7 selling like hotcakes today lol. anyway i had a ton of sentimental fun reminiscing the compilation days while playing this, great remaster!

Some enemies create a subconscious space to draw you into. If you suddenly feel faint, be on the alert. It's a sign your soul is under attack. Of course enemies that materialize before you are nothing but phantoms, but the suffering their attacks inflict on your body is real. You must [defeat them all to regain consciousness. ]

Lemme tell you a tale of Lucifer as a Wrangler-jeaned anime shojo with a Save Game flip-phone flipping around doing Devil May Cry (but God Certainly Will) combos that yield Christian frame advantage upon angels and demons from the Abrahamic pseudepigraphy. Exploiting movement tech to wavedash through portraits of the Archangel Gabriel built beautifully with 720p of the Lord's tears; stunlocking key figures from Aramaic and Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo scripture until they drop upgrade points: speedrunning an assault on the Kingdom of Heaven, a tower where the Authority and Metatron reign.

You can beat it in 7 hours... if you're good enough.

i've been reading a lot of hard drive mag recently so here's my god of war themed audition tape

Hindu Gods Breathe Sigh of Relief Upon Being Placed in Corner of Whiteboard Labeled "Problematic" at Santa Monica Studio God of War Sequel Brainstorming Session

FTC Charges Kratos and Unnamed Treasure Chest Lid Merchant in Alleged 2 Million Hacksilver Repair Fraud Scheme

Internet Troll Who Thought Up Zinger "God of Bore: Gag-on-cock" 3 Years Ago Disappointed to Find Game Is Actually Pretty Good

In Rare Interview, Kratos Reveals Majority of Anger Towards Norse Pantheon Was Result of Their Inability to Pronounce "Gyro" Correctly

Slimy Goblin Creature Wonders Absentmindedly If Oven Left On as Hurled Leviathan Axe Cleaves Skull in Twain

Kratos Feigns Appreciative Grunt After Unwrapping Father's Day Gift of Necktie from Atreus for Fifth Year in Row

I don't have much to say about Hypnospace Outlaw itself beyond it being one of the funniest, most heart-warming, most endearing, most sincere, most ironic, most fun depictions of the Internet ever presented.

In my review-cum-memoir on World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, I bemoaned the death of online spaces noted for their lack of thorough knowledge. It is perhaps fitting that WotLK's release came a mere five days before the launch of Jim Garvin and Ryan McGeary's 'Let Me Google That For You' website. Perhaps by divine providence too, WotLK's release coincided with the steady downward trend of Bill Dyess' then World of Warcraft database Thottbot and the first massive spike in traffic to Wowhead. The coincidence is staggering, but also points to a trend which has irreversibly altered the gaming landscape, and society at large. Much as WoW players sought user-data-verified hard statistics on their MMO of choice, tech savvy individuals' astonishment and contempt for being asked readily verifiable questions reached a tipping point in late 2008. Confirming and corroborating data on WoW would in time become something accomplished by every player. LMGTFY would in time become a site even your grandparents might send as a slight towards a query. The genuine question 'where is Mankrik's wife?' was less the object of ridicule, more a target for sarcasm and eye-rolling as the naive were directed to Wowhead. With ever increasing databases and wikis, games and media in general have become less about a sense of mystery, more one of minutiae. Players no longer revel in not knowing, they would rather examine the entirety of a game's mechanics and lore and history with a finetooth comb.

My point in bringing this up is two-fold. One: Games have genuinely not been the same since players expected to be able to understand them inside and out at whim. Two: The Internet has genuinely not been the same since users expected others to rely on a corporate search engine, largely constructed (especially now) to deliver advertising rather than substantive content, to remedy their perceived ignorance. As Embracer Group, Microsoft, Tencent, Sony, Epic, Valve, Ubisoft, EA, and other megacorporations oligopolise the gaming space, so too do Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Tencent, Joybuy, Alibaba, Twitter, Spotify, ByteDance, Baidu, Adobe, Block, and others reduce Internet diversity to a minimum. I can't act as if I knew the Internet of eld in its entirety, but a lifelong fascination with Internet obscura and history has me at least somewhat informed.

In my review of GeoGuessr, and corroborated by jobosno's review of Microsoft Flight Simulator, stressed was the importance of appreciating the non-place. So too does this apply to the Internet at large, and Hypnospace Outlaw itself if we wish. Not everything on the Internet is substantive or substantial, nor is every page on Hypnospace. We fall down rabbit holes of Wikipedia deep dives, we examine every page on Hypnospace regardless of its relevance to our duty. Duty and productivity and the confines of time and the constraints of life and gaming guide us towards Internet or Hypnospace use that is conducive to our end goals, but those detours persist as availabilities. In the real world, they dwindle as web diversity shrinks, as webhosts go offline, as swathes of the Internet go unarchives and unremember[ed/able]. In Hypnospace, their finite nature means we cannot search forever.

The Big Crunch theory postulates that at some point, the universe will cease expansion, and will recollapse unto itself as all is returned to zero. To null.

At some point, the Internet might cease expansion, and will recollapse unto itself as all is returned to zero. To null. We will not go to website, we will go to keywords. That which is unadvertisable, incompatible with commercialisation will in effect go dark. In due time fewer and fewer spaces will exist. In due time, all will be one, and one will be none.

The Big Freeze theory postulates that the universe will never cease expansion, and will drift into entropy until all is returned to absolute zero. To null.

At some point, the Internet might expand infinitely to the point of unnavigability. In a web of infinitudes, all will be irrelevant and all will be lost as data becomes unable to be quantified on any scale. In due time, one will be all, and all will be none.

The unknowability of the universe renders any theory pointless. We do not know what will happen. We cannot know what will happen.

The unknowability of the Internet renders any theory pointless. We do not know what will happen. We cannot know what will happen.

Enjoy the Internet as it is now. Enjoy the Internet as it was then. Enjoy the Internet as it will be. Forever is it in flux, forever is it a stable constant. Forever does it all drift apart, forever does it all close in. Forever shall it be known and forever shall it be unknown.

We exist in a cosmic nothing of no import.

We exist in a digital nothing of no import.

Every atom in the universe is critical to its being.

Every byte of the Internet is critical to its being.

As a historian, I live on a periphery of data boundless yet intangible. I scour for that which does not exist, may never have existed.

At the end of Hypnospace Outlaw you are tasked with archiving a wasteland.

Archive our wasteland with the Wayback Machine extension. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wayback-machine/fpnmgdkabkmnadcjpehmlllkndpkmiak https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/wayback-machine_new/

We exist at a time where unfathomable amounts of human knowledge are being erased from existence every hour of every day. This is not a deliberate book burning. This is an incidental blaze.

Save what you can.

What a beautiful thing we are a part of.

Seek the obtuse, obfuscated, and obscure.

A selection of webzones I have found and I enjoy:

https://geocities.restorativland.org/

https://web.archive.org/web/20021215085602/http://www.u-ga.com:80/jp/games/mobile.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20070902163202/http://www.cbs.com/primetime/kid_nation/

https://web.archive.org/web/20050222012115/http://everquest2.station.sony.com/pizza/

https://prairieecologist.com/2020/01/13/finally-a-practical-guide-for-roadside-wildflower-viewing/

https://web.archive.org/web/20010118210000/http://www.l0pht.com/

https://web.archive.org/web/20030207171752/http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,50875,00.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20060314162213/http://www.classicgaming.com/pac-man/Pac-Games/PacManVR/pac.htm

https://www.geo-grafia.jp/product/

http://erogereport.blog.jp/archives/cat_87375.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20060515154050/http://users.stargate.net/~glshir/PLAY.HTM

https://dreamlogos.fandom.com/wiki/Dream_Logos_Wiki

https://web.archive.org/web/20150222012855/http://quitesoulless.com/story.htm

https://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=Oi1qbcz2m2SnwUeztGYcnQ

https://web.archive.org/web/20030407094755/http://www.vernonjohns.org/snuffy1186/movies.html

http://www.poetpatriot.com/

https://web.archive.org/web/20000229230522/http://symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/y2kgame.hoax.html

https://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/camping-in-a-u-haul-they-are-cheeper-than-an-rv-and-better-than-a-tent.53919/

https://web.archive.org/web/20140803164736/http://theodor.lauppert.ws/games/

https://tss.asenheim.org/

https://jimedwardsnrx.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/pepsi_gravitational_field.pdf

https://web.archive.org/web/20130812175052/http://csbruce.com/tv/clone_high/

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now that we're a few years removed from the 'completion' of super smash bros. ultimate, a game i feel likely closes the book on a massive, overarching story of the evolution of this series under the direction of creator masahiro sakurai in an explosive final entry lavish in bombast and maximalist polish, it's interesting to look at the super smash bros. series as a complete works - five major entries all leading to bigger, bolder things, distinct in identity (even 4, more than it's given credit) and milestones of different aspects and fragments of my life. my "childhood smash game" was really two games, and i associate both with different aspects of that developmental period - melee was my personal smash title, the one i owned and poured dozens and dozens of hours into exploring and experimenting with... and brawl was the community game; my first major competitive outlet with my friends, my first exposure to a title with THIS much content under the hood, my first time being old enough to follow at least part of its release cycle... in a sense, melee and brawl formed two halves of a whole for me. i have easily 1,000+ hours between the two having played them both as long and as regularly as i did. and it's funny, thinking about how my tastes in videogames and art have evolved alongside these games - now, at the point where i value distinction, direction, and experimentation above objective quality, i see brawl in a similar forgiving and exciting light as i did at eight or nine years old - it's a wonderful, exciting experience and perhaps the team's best example of unbelievable scale with a hint of restraint.

a friend of mine brought up the point that brawl might've had the most "complete" feeling roster of any smash game upon its conclusion and logic at the time. thinking about 2007, 2008, and seeing who made it in, i might be inclined to agree. so many major hitters fill out the roster, with all characters feeling simple and comprehensive enough to control without getting into the complex, individualist-feeling dlc add-ons of smash 4 and ultimate. it's a roster full of characters who all feel like they're in the same game. 2 third party guests - the NECESSARY addition of sonic the hedgehog and the fan-favorite solid snake just feel... right, given the culture of the time, given the aesthetics brawl borrows from.

brawl is a defiant step away from the competitive aspects of melee's accidental execution and before the more intentional attempts with smash 4 and ultimate, and whether or not that's a good thing entirely depends on your approach. it's clearly meant to be a game enjoyed and huddled around by friends and soaked in for hundreds of hours - THE smash game for playing with items on, or messing around with the minimalist but just-open-enough stage editor (i liken this to the phenomenon of exploration that came with the limited simplicity of the wii's initial mii design constraints and the check mii out channel, or later the concept behind flipnote studio/hatena), or the plethora of events and an entire 2-player story mode in subspace emissary, which i honestly think BENEFITS from having two people as in a single-player vaccum its charm dips into monotony far too quickly in my eyes. point being, brawl was every bit the smash game the wii's audience probably needed, embracing the wii's blue-ocean market approach and creating something that felt less like a competitive fighting game, less like a multiplayer one-and-done experience, but a cultural event: a massive, overarching love letter to all that the wii, nintendo's history, and now the smash bros. canon itself stood for. there's just so MUCH to soak in with brawl; the masterpieces offered many players their first taste of retro titles to be picked up on virtual consoles, a digital release calendar and trophies painted a physical history of the brawl's referential pulp canon, contest and coin shooter modes allowed a break from the typical fighting gameplay, and a flush soundtest with hundreds upon hundreds of compositions and remixes allowed brawl to feel akin to a cultural sandbox, a playset not unlike the one depicted back in smash 64's opening cutscene.

if the original intent was to have smash bros. as a series aim for a party crowd, this was the home run of the bunch - it's a party and celebration in a way that perhaps no other entry in the series did with as much dedication, depth and intricacy. smash bros. brawl might be kusoge, but if that's the case, it's the best fucking kusoge of all time. a genuine masterpiece in the realm of casual party competition in gaming. from the first smash dojo! posts to the round of custom stage, items on, 3-stock i just played today, smash bros. brawl elevated this from a fantastic duology to a cultural phenomenon on a level encompassing the medium that no one could ever hope to achieve again.

My controversial opinion about this game is that it would have been better to go all in on a heavily scripted Uncharted 10-20 hour game. There are two games here: the aforementioned and a post-Zelda style adventure / puzzle game that made up a larger chunk of God of War (2018)'s gameplay. The strange thing is I liked the adventuring in 2018. Here, it did very little for me. I don't think it's because it was more poorly designed (though its possible), but because this games high points are SO high, that when you go back down to average gameplay it feels like utter drudgery.

Sure, if you stripped out so much combat, exploring, collectibles, puzzles, you would have something much closer to a movie than a game. But they created a movie that's far more compelling than the game. There are so many exhilarating memorable moments that made this game a blast to play (or watch), while I'll be remembering very little of the exploring.

It feels strange to say, because the exploring and combat wasn't bad. It wasn't amazing, but it was good. Above average, for sure. Just compared to some of the strongest performances we've ever seen in a game, it feels...dated, trite. Like two separate aspects of the game that are both good in their own right, but when you put them together they drag the entire project down rather than complement each other.

This review seems more negative than it is. God of War Ragnarok is a great game. Everyone knows it. Still, its hard not to notice that its simultaneously the future of AAA games and just more of the same.

Also, I've gotta say, there are some pretty funny moments, but they went a little overboard on the marvel humor.

it's possible my feelings on this will change upon finishing ep3 but ultimately i'm just starting to think i'm not the target audience for this work and that's... okay. it's clear this was made in the environment of someone stuck in the tumblr-era fandom heyday and dealing with some very real shit, and in ways that still come off as uninformed and perhaps in need of some help that they hadn't received yet - i'm not really interested in a full psychoanalytical discussion of the author because that borders on parasocial in a way i don't think is just.

what i can give this game is a definite growth in artistic originality and some great new concepts for worlds to explore. ultimately though a lot of my feelings about the first game remain here. here's hoping childhood's end is the strike-out people say it is. i'm starting to wonder, though, if this just isn't a game with me landing in its target audience.

It’s important that you treat Pentiment with the same scrutiny and scepticism that you (hopefully) do with any other historical source. Most media, not just videogames, are, politely put, atrocious at dealing in good faith with the settings and themes that Pentiment tackles, to the point where it’s probably reasonable to call it one of the most authentic games ever made in this regard. The flip side of this is that it makes the things Pentiment gets wrong feel more conspicuous than they would be otherwise.

If that last part has your guard up, you can safely lower it, because Pentiment’s small handful of inaccuracies are pretty minor in that they don't affect the plot overmuch. I won’t say what they are specifically, because this is the type of game where any and all details ought to be discovered yourself, but among other things, they include at least two cultural events which are unambiguously Christian being misattributed to Alpine paganism of some description, as well as one figure who was (to my knowledge) neither pre-Christian nor worshipped as a goddess being described as a pre-Christian goddess.

There are a couple of reasons why these don’t overly strain Pentiment’s believability and for which it deserves to be given the benefit of the doubt. For starters, relative to the vast majority of media set during the early modern period and (in this case, just after the) Middle Ages, Pentiment’s immensely tactful to the point where I'm (almost but not quite) inclined to think these kinds of mistakes were intentionally included, on the part of its characters rather than its writers; that it avoids the common error of misattributing the origins of Christian saints to pagan figures further suggests this. More broadly, it’s unreasonable to expect anything to be perfect in terms of accuracy and – on exceedingly rare occasions, in exceptionally talented hands – inaccuracies can be advantageous. Excalibur’s a more visually distinctive and symbolic film for featuring armour which is about 1000 years too advanced for the 5th/6th century AD. Shadow of Rome’s a more memorable game for making you fight a ~15ft tall Germanic barbarian whose weapon of choice is a marble pillar. Likewise, in a meta sort of way, Pentiment’s central idea of historiographical truth being difficult to pinpoint is arguably strengthened by its own shortcomings in this respect. Ideally, this’ll encourage players to be more wary of any historically-themed media they engage with, including Pentiment itself.

Any such grievances are further obscured by the mostly impressive weight Pentiment lends to your decisions. I had the fortune of playing through Pentiment concurrently with my brother, and when we’d walk in on each other playing it, we’d do mutual double takes as one of us was in the middle of story events that the other didn’t even consider would be possible. Speech checks being affected by past dialogue choices encourages you to constantly, properly pay attention to and think about what you’re saying in a way I personally haven’t seen done since the isometric Fallouts or Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. Although its time limits (while appreciated) aren’t implemented as organically as Fallout 1’s, an advantage Pentiment has over even those titans is that it also autosaves after every single action you take, lending everything a degree of permanence that few other RPGs can offer. If you were feeling particularly cheeky, you could go as far as to say that Pentiment can be counted alongside the campaign of Black Ops 2 in the pantheon of games which actually are what everyone pretends New Vegas is.

I call it only mostly impressive because Pentiment’s key weakness is the linearity of its third and final act, which even if you’re being charitable can only really be called overbearing. Not to bang on the choices-don’t-matter drum too hard, because nobody can ever seem to agree what choices mattering in a game really looks like, but you’re much more likely to wish you were able to say or do something other than the options you’re given in the last act than in the preceding two. Potential twists and turns you might hope to direct this chapter’s plot towards are often snuffed out by blurted out variations of “actually, I was only pretending to want to do that” that you rarely have any control over. This isn’t to suggest that Pentiment ends on a sour note – the ending itself’s quite lovely – but from a decision making standpoint, the whole last stretch’s noticeably more limiting.

However close it comes, this is never enough to distract from Pentiment’s visual splendour. Jan van Eyck paintings and The Tragedy of Man are the only other media I can think of which incorporate so many different historical art styles into one cohesive package and so skilfully. Sebhat being drawn in the style of Ethiopian Coptic Orthodox art’s a particularly inspired touch, but in general it’s no wonder that the art director and animators are the first names to pop up on the opening credits, because it’s like a playable manuscript. Rarely do you come across a game where you can legitimately say that the visuals are a selling point in and of themselves.

There should be more games like Pentiment. It represents two things we need more of – big developers putting out more niche, experimental titles, and historical media which isn’t riddled with self-congratulatory 21st century arrogance that spits on the memory of everyone who happened to be born before an arbitrary point in time, in which characters actually believe what they say and aren’t one-dimensional caricatures of the past. Be thankful it exists, whatever its issues.