quite nicely marries the mythology of the old west with the unreality of video game action. what transpires between cutscenes is not exactly real. the stories silas tells are not exactly real. never quite goes all the way to illustrate how mundane silas' activities may have truly been but then it's still silas telling a story so he's always a video game esque one-man army. it's a cute narrative device that most games don't take advantage of.

overall, nice music. nice pulpy, meaty shooting and violence. has a really nice writerly quality just with the narration that kept me hooked. a very singular experience overall.

utterly boring and hollow. i am fascinated with its depiction of a future London, however. compare it to something like cyberpunk's fictional night city and there is something thoroughly more interesting about a real city in a game. real places, real history. only problem with a game like Legion is its complete lack of culture and humanity. you can play as anyone, and as such you're basically no one. you can hack everyone but you can't really talk to anyone. the whole game is about systematic oppression but there's no personal stories about anyone of it. they can't call out the police. there are signs that down with "violent" cops. game is so cowardly.

in which max payne is really horny

i love how domestic and urban the arenas are in max payne 2. you fight in numerous apartment buildings, and one mansion. a hospital. a police station. a warehouse. a funhouse. a club under renovation. and a construction site. some of them are abandoned but not all. there aren't any real civilians but you always feel right in the heart of a beating city. there's no apocalypse. no supernatural element. each arena does feel like a centrepiece stage for a movie scene but simultaneously it feels like real life. its hard boiled noir aesthetic is laid thick and yet the game feels grounded to real life n ways i can't think too many shooters since have.

i also think most of the environments look rad, super nice art direction, and because they're mostly empty, they're very cacophonous. my kind of shooter.

perfectly average.

hits all the WWII movie beats. but that's all it is - movie beats. movie beats anyone who's seen a single WWII movie could pick up. has no real original soul or identity of its own.

feels really superfluous too, after black ops 3 went back to the battle of the bulge two years earlier in a weird kind of meta commentary the franchise's - and us military's roots. also feels weird to play after infinite warfare which felt like a bit of a breath of fresh air by heading into the future and into the stars so you could robots in space. and then this comes out like call of duty poked its head out for a second and decided it was too scared to evolve or change.

i don't think a WWII shooter should play like a future space warfare game either. like, in the moment, i appreciate the hollywood of it all; the explosions and solid, relatively nice camerawork, but its blend of the historical with the over-theatrical kind of leaves me queasy. watching german soldiers pour out onto your screen like the computer-programmed lemmings they are feels really hollow. game lacks heft and tact too.

i liked the part where you rescue the little girl though.

A lot of good deaths in this game. It's a game about a drug that turns people in to bros. Bro soldiers. Dudes who love killing the enemy and high fiving one another. And it's about revealing the subsequent horror of the reality both to
the player and the character. And I think it delivers that message most thoroughly by making you bare witness to these incredibly overly dramatic and yet relatively genuine feeling moments of these men as they gasp and cry and die. The big villain's final words are don't tell my mum what I did which reflects a boyish innocence hidden beneath. It's kinda corny but also a kinda rarity for me to see in a war shooter and also something I felt was genuine.

Didn't love that the game decides in its dying breath to completely undercut its anti capitalist underpinnings to paint the south american "rebel" leader as yet another sneaky opportunist instead of maybe someone who is also genuine in their desires. Seems like a "gotcha" moment for the sake of a one, a symptom of the post south park "anyone who believes in anything is a dumbass and all sides suck" mantra that was (and still is) popular to peddle to teenagers and the idiots game publishers think every gamer is.

Glad I read ed smith's essay on it in Shooter. Forever wrote it off as that game no one player whose cover was everyone's avatar in the early ps3 lifecycle days. Think it deserves a better legacy than that.

i know john milius was involved but it feels like red dawn - and subsequently michael bay's the rock for some reason - was an influence but only after it was filtered through from the references modern warfare 2 made to the material two years prior. everything about this feels like modern warfare 2 but traced over. or like modern warfare 2 gave the homefront kid its homework to copy and said but make it look like your own. homefront was like sure and then forgot.

definitely going to give this game points for trying. there are real world references to banal American institutes such as White Castle and Hooters. the game openly references hillary clinton and kim jong il (and kim jong un). i think it's neat considering how out of their way games go to make up their own in-universe parallels so it's refreshing to see a game trying to actually "be real".

not worth a lot by the end though. game is very shallow and its premise is like every american conservative's victimisation wet dream. "finally, we're being oppressed and have a reason to fight back". give me a break. maybe more interesting if it were set in canada or australia.

nice shooting though.

absolutely fine.

there's an episode of the tv show community where a character (Pierce) tries to haunt another (Troy) by trolling them with a literal Norwegian troll doll. in one scene, the show cuts from character to character making love eyes at one another, and when Troy turns his head seemingly to make love eyes, the camera pans to reveal Pierce shoving the troll doll in his face and giving him a scare just Troy fully turns his head

this game reminded me of that scene because it's practically the same scare this game uses on the player over and over and over and over again. and to the game's credit, it worked like gangbusters on me. but i am very weak to jump scares and frighten incredibly easily. the smallest, unexpected noise startles the living shit out of me. i am pranked quite often because of it. so maybe to the game's credit, it works wonders on babies like me.

i kind of wish the game took a subtler approach, perhaps taking more from its gone home influence and focusing more on exploration, and cutting the jump scares down from 500 to 5 or 10. i think it's swell that the game paralyzes me with fear at the prospect of turning the camera around.

i never played PT, so the moving geometry and constant stream of endless doors and hallways was something i thought was pretty dope, and i like the importance this game places on the act of looking (which is something that in reality would garner a reaction from another living person but often in a video game barely earns a mention (even if this game has no people in it i applaud that touch)), but maybe the scares could have been more impactful had i never been truly aware if any time i turned around or walked down a hallway/through a door i was going to be treated to a scare or not. by the end, the game had worn out it rhythm and i played it with pop music on in the background just grinding down to get to the end of the story. and the story wasn't much. it was fine. but this is where a focus on exploration could have motivated me to dig into it more instead of running full steam ahead away from any scares. i had to wikipedia most of its plot because i was too overwhelmed with scares to explore it for myself. and most of what i did glean was "abusive husband pines for dead wife" which i mean give me a break.

still pretty good overall. i am interested to play more of bloober's games, think they have real potential. i liked how walking in this game felt kind of uneven like you were really lurching from step to step.

action button dot net's bottom line for kane & lynch 2 dog days reads "a game whose only verb is kill". i think that applies for dead men as well.

was thinking about kane & lynch games in relation to Rockstar's protagonists. Rockstar typically present you with a character who is equally as psychopathic but in K&L there's no personality to these men whatsoever. no attempt at humour, nothing that undercuts just how truly awful and devoid of humanity they are.

take michael and trevor in GTA V. they are basically kane and lynch but for the mass market. trevor in particular is "edgy" he's "crazy" he's "in your face". he runs around his underwear and causes general mayhem. lynch on the other hand is just genuinely crazy, and angry all the time. the game doesn't really portray him as a clown even though he so easily could be written that way (because he has a funny mullet and glasses and says wacko things).

kane has a family, like michael, and is coded as the "professional one" but kane's family hate him, want nothing to do with him. he abandoned them. he has no witty repertoire or any personality at all. he's a stone cold criminal and murderer. and a traitor and a liar and just an all around piece of shit even if he's dressed like an money manager.

Rockstar games can't help but clutter their "gritty" and "serious" michael mann inspired crime games with wacky side characters aimed at 13 year old american boys. i appreciate that kane & lynch plays itself straight and direct. it's a closer look into the face of evil even it, too, is not quite michael mann either.

i think dead men lacks the genuine romanticism and beating heart of mann. it's not about the professionalism of crime either, in fact it's about the complete opposite - the chaotic. but i think it does skew closer to mann's work. dead men features a scene right out of Heat (in fact, it kinda has two as i'd argue the opening prison break is similar as well) just as GTA IV and V do. basically the infamous LA shootout scene. in GTA IV that's all set piece and scripted. in dead men it's pure chaos. no enemy markers. terrible weapon controls (although great, heavy sounds, the noise the M4 makes in this is great), it really does capture some of the myth of Heat even if it feels completely by accident.

this game also features a club scene right out of collateral including handing kane the same melee animation as tom cruise's hitman vincent. funny this is from the developers of the hitman games yet feels more violent and meaty than any of the hitman games i've played (everything post-blood money, so not a great sample).

i've kind of rambled. this is a good game. it's oddly beautiful at times, much like dog days i think it has some really nice architecture and beautiful dusk skies and night scenes. it's not as daring or committed to an aesthetic like dog days, which in turn to me winds up feeling like a remix of everything in dead men now that i've played it, but it nevertheless has an unmistakable quality too coupled with a cold level of violence that feels unmatched today. they just don't make games like this anymroe.

i am thinking of the quote from former Marine Jimmy Massey that's sampled by Lamb of God on the title track of their 2004 album Ashes of the Wake:

"this is a new type of war, this is an eradication."


and also these quotes from the game itself:

"Cost of a single Javelin Missile: $80,000"
— Unknown
"Cost of a single Tomahawk Cruise Missile: $900,000"
— Unknown
"Cost of a single F-117A Nighthawk: $122 Million"
— Unknown
"Cost of a single F-22 Raptor: $135 Million"
— Unknown
"Cost of a single AC-130U Gunship: $190 Million"
— Unknown
"Cost of a single B-2 Bomber: $2.2 Billion"
— Unknown


even when you're killing "the bad" Russians, you're doing so in the most flat out destructive way possible.

kind of the video game equivalent of (another quote) the george orwell line "if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever".

game sort of just says "war is as inevitable as capitalist imperialism is at extinguishing it".


plays well and looks nice, i guess. very stripped for call of duty. after this they are all literally hollywood blockbusters with the a-list casts and everything. this is almost avant garde in comparison. they'd never make this game today. i kind of appreciate that. idk.

edit:

been a few days now since i finished this but i still can't figure out any real words on it.

kind of best played blind as it will reveal everything it needs to say to you in fairly blunt terms.

i loved that while it presents as horror it actually unravels into genuinely good sci-fi as it slowly demystifies itself and stays fairly grounded.

the final third when you travel into the abyss is some of the most terrifying nature ever in a game.

i love that this game presents you moral choices but doesn't really add them into the narrative. they're not "roleplaying" options but rather there to colour your experience and really make you think without game-ifying the choices. and the choices are... well all kind of the same but filled with a sincerity that makes them horrifying every time to a degree and scarred me.

it's a game that answers the question "can you tell a story about humanity without any humans in it?" the answer is yes, and maybe make it feel more human than any game with humans in it.

it's a surprisingly gentle game all things considered. no real villain. no antagonist. the monsters are scary but far and few in between and their existence is genuinely more sad than anything.

it's a game about existence that mostly feels like a collection of moments of just you existing in these various quietly nightmarish spaces. hell of an ending.

ah-hooo!

what if the 1% truly were a secret race of reverse vampires who are literally feasting on the lower class? baby, the order 1886 says just maybe they are.

and it says it with a completely straight face. no shed of irony and playfulness. and i can see how, if you're coming to a piece of fiction that clearly has so much of itself steeped in an absurd genre premise, maybe you want something more like devil may cry.

but what i appreciate about the order 1886 - beyond the fact that it might the single most expensive looking game i've ever played, like it still looks better than just about any game made since - is that it's the inverse of uncharted. almost identical gameplay and camera. maybe order 1886 is a little heavier, a little more meaty and visceral. maybe it's gunplay is a whole level above anything naughty dog have managed to pull off. but instead of taking the real word and adding in quips and the supernatural, the order shoves you in to an alternate steampunk history full of werewolves (who you knife fight) and then removes all the genre personality. it winds up feeling like a story about real people in a lived-in world where things matter as opposed to just action movie archetypes parading through a pirates of the caribbean movie set. it also has two NPCs who show their dicks.

i like uncharted a lot. but gaming is full of uncharteds. it doubles down on uncharteds every day. sony in particular would spend the following years making technically impressive and visually pretty yet soft-hearted open world checklist games that go on and on (see: spidey, horizon, days gone, tsushima). where are the punchy, poe-faced linear narrative games? where are the games that have the balls to show you some dicks every few hours, interspersed between werewolf knife-fights? there is no AAA gaming equivalent to deadwood. this ain't that either. but it's sort of close, and was definitely a step in that direction. shame it's basically the black sheep of sony's ps4 first-party lineup. gaming would be marginally better today taking notes from this.

was a bit of a letdown to play after the excellent mafia iii - a game that had a lot to say about its time and place.

in comparison, mafia is all empty calories. striking to look at (the reflections in those puddles? marone!) and just as much of a ball to play (i will never tire of shooting people in these games, they drop with a real dramatic purposefulness, and some of the set piece gunfights are a blast, especially the art museum).

but tommy angelo is a bland nothing. he's portrayed as both an empty psycho and a morally conscience gangster. i really got no sense of who he was or what he was pursuing. very much a PS2 era character. and as for his pals? annoying(ly voiced), walking cliches. his wife? as empty a character as her husband. his boss? just some guy, basically.

it's supposed to be a game about family but there are about five characters in the whole game who speak, and the whole game is just various riffs on the godfather with none of heft. the final level is called 'the death of art', and all i could think is that for a game this boring that kind of titling is a bit too on the nose.

i enjoyed the linear structure of the game. i think more open world games should be structured like this, chapter-by-chapter with an open world as a backdrop. shame the driving kind of sucked ass. but the world in the game is gorgeous. it really tickled my fancy for early 20th century life. i just wish the game had something to say about it (beyond, i don't know, that the suits and signs back then were stylish).

Lincoln Clay uses a shotgun with the same unbounded fury and artistry as Jimi Hendrix. Someone once described Jimi Hendrix's music as sounding like heavy metal falling from the sky. When you boot up Mafia III and his rendition of All Along the Watchtower immediately assults you on the title screen, you get a real reminder of provocative and overwhelming his music was/is. It's penetrative. Then you load into the game and Lincoln Clay blasts some racist Mafia goon clear across a table in the same manner of gooey operatic violence often associated in a Tarantino movie, and you're suddenly baring witness to another form of overwhelming penetrative fury, the righteous fury of Lincoln Clay's shotgun.

Nice to see a game tackle American racism so directly and confrontationally as Mafia III. It's a shame it's in such a repetitive game. And in a game that's torn on being a Mafia game with a Mafia system instead of just being a pure story about Lincoln Clay fighting the racism in his city. This should have been more of a game about New Bordeaux with characters who offered more than mobster-isms. I got side tracked on my way to the final quest objective and wound up embroiled in a surreal, horrifying quest about the racist cult of New Bordeaux that offered up some history on the city and widened the perspective of the game just a smidge beyond Lincoln's quest for revenge, and I thought what a shame this game couldn't have been more of this and less fucking up the same enforcers over and over again.

Part of me wishes this could have been a linear chapter-by-chapter game as every questline in Mafia III is leading to these unique setpiece gunfights that could legitimately be their own level, fleshed out in more detail. Part of feels like the actual missed opportunity is not giving you more time and room to explore the city map and experience racism that's there but ultimately winds up feeling more optional than a genuine part of your typical game experience. Instead of driving to a random alley 6 times to shoot up some racists, what if it was one per racket and the only way to recon the area was to explore the city and inhabit it. Early on you have to go to a segregated bar as part of a mission and get told you'll be arrested if you remain. Why was this not explored more, I don't know.

But I enjoyed the game overall for what it offered regardless. It's a bit of a curiosity in modern gaming. Maybe only Red Dead Redemption II comes close, and that still only included racism as more of an easter egg. Lincoln Clay doesn't have the privilege Arthur Morgan in only experiencing racism via some nut handing out racist pamphlets. More games need a Lincoln Clay.