I’m going to do something I never normally do, and not only talk about the textual themes of a work, but whether or not they were right or wrong. I don’t do that very often despite it usually being considered the basis of analysis – the kind of analysis they generally teach in schools and is, more specifically, the current popular trend in pop culture analysis. Mostly I tend to focus on subtextual morality; these are the things the characters do, and this is the morality I believe those characters hold based on patterns I observe, and this is the collation of consequences they receive.
It’s not often that I just look at the things characters say and argue the truth or falsehood of it. I’m willing to entertain the idea that I’m a paranoid cynic who refuses to trust anyone’s word; I’m equally willing to suspect that I’m pretentiously trying to invent meaning where none exists, although that’s considerably less likely at this point. But I think the main reason is that the abstractions most people play with are too generic to be useful. “Parenthood turns you into a better, more responsible person” is true for some people, burns out others, and warps the rest into monstrous narcissists.
But the ideas Metal Gear Solid 2: Guns of the Patriots plays with are very specific and, to my eye, still worth considering in 2025. In fact, people have been saying how prescient the game has been for two decades! Needless to say, SPOILERS for the game will follow, because I’m about to explore the big twists. That is to say, the big twist at the end of the game is that your character, Raiden, has been manipulated by artificial intelligence as part of a program to control information and manipulate people digitally. If you haven’t played the game nor have any interest in playing it, I recommend the following videos from the climax, which I believe can be understood out of context.
The first video is delivered by the villains, and thus needs to be taken with a grain of salt. In particular, I think the game wants us to reject the notion that there is no ‘self’ – not just because Snake, the hero of the game (though not its lead character) rejects that entirely, but because it’s barely true in the context of JD’s argument. Despite having no self, I have created a self? I think the more accurate way of looking at it is that Raiden has embraced what the game believes to be the worst version of a person – someone who embraced a convenient narrative, even as it was filled with holes. If Raiden doesn’t have a self, it’s because he chose not to have one.
The game is not arguing that people do not inherently have a self; it’s arguing that people who reject the self are the ones that people, organisations, and cultures like JD can take advantage of. The other ideas advanced by JD in this speech are almost uncanny in their prescience with current-day internet issues; in particular, people breaking off into little communities, sustaining otherwise unsustainable ideas, is very similar to the modern complaint about the internet creating bubbles.
They even manage to convey exactly why this happens: there are so many ideas and truths floating around the world now that one can get lost in a deluge of useless data. I disagree – and I’ll go into why later – but I’m sympathetic to the complaint that human beings simply weren’t designed to receive so much information, and particularly so much information about other people. I am as susceptible to and frustrated by doomscrolling as everyone else, and my particular complaint is that I keep looking up what some idiot in Denver thinks, even though I know it’s ‘junk data’ that serves me no apparent purpose.
In this kind of world, no wonder people retreat to ‘gated communities’, where they’re safely reassured that other people – ‘normal people’ – think like them, where there are no threatening ideas or people with bad, scary feelings, and sometimes they retreat even further into labels and self-images they seize from other people and use as armour. No wonder people grab onto one moral truth and then toss it aside the moment it becomes inconvenient1. I’m using mocking language, but I do this.
I’ve been stressing the word ‘villain’ here, and that’s because I don’t think they present a positive moral example, nor are they intended to. One conclusion people often make from observing what I and MGS2 are observing is to side with JD — if not to try and control the flow of information to others, or even simply to oneself, but to high-handedly judge everyone else for being so stupid as to fall for it. JD has a clear-eyed, smug, superior hatred of Raiden in that speech, and it’s not even the victim of the attitudes it’s decrying.
These are understandable reactions; right now, there are concentration camps in the US partly because millions of Raidens thought people with blue hair were a good enemy to throw themselves against. So many things from the last decade, from masses trying to ignore a plague away to a collapsing economy and housing market to the rise of fascism have given people a desperate, life-or-death need to figure out how to control people. At the same time, it’s also a pressing need to work out how to do this without costing you your sanity or, worse, your soul. Most people seem to either give up and ignore it, or are burned up entirely, neither of which seem attractive propositions to me.
Luckily, Snake presents a third option, one that matches most comfortably enlightened people I’ve known: root your identity less in what you take from the world and more about what you put into it. By this, I don’t just mean what you materially take from the world; most of the craziest, least dangerous assholes I’ve known seem to spend so much time whining about the fact that they live in this kind of world and not another.
Snake’s argument is yes, your feelings are who you are and a helpful guide to decide which things you’ll continue sharing with the world. He argues that there is an internal self from which one can draw meaningful action to share with the world; not simply reacting, nor recreating old favourites (both of which leave you at the whims of others), but sharing yourself with others and watching that have an effect on the world.
I’m a creative, so that’s the work I keep drawing on; essays like this have been my center of gravity for the world, in which I take things — not just movies and shows and books and games, but experiences and observations — and weave them together into something new (I’ve expanded further, even into things I never had much interest in, because I see things I can use but not in essays). Snake is a soldier, and his violence and technique is what he puts into the world, serving greater purposes like destroying Metal Gears.
When people say that human beings were not meant to have all this information, I think they’re unintentionally revealing their own weaknesses, or rather perceived weaknesses — human beings are endurance predators, where our strength above all else is a resilience that shocks our prey. A sufficiently organised mind is capable of processing any amount of information. This is what Metal Gear Solid 2 teaches us, and it’s a useful thing to hold onto in these trying times.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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A bunch of games I played and how they make me feel.
Yeah, I'll take a fucked up concept with everything on it, please.
Department of
Conversation
I feel like I needed this today. Will spend some time thinking about what I share with the world. (Also, having just watched Crawl, I feel like its “apex predator” mantra gets beaten into the ground by “endurance predator,” which is much more illuminating and encouraging.)
<3
Like all good philosophy, it's rooted not in judgement, but in achievable action; I can't decide to be the best predator, but I can choose to keep getting back up.
What did we watch?
Black Bag — David Koepp’s script twists and turns nicely and Steven Soderbergh’s camera follows, but his cinematographer Peter Andrews absolutely shits the bed here. The darker scenes are muddy and when they are lit — as in the extended fancy dinner that kicks off the movie — it’s by halo-riffic lamps that blur the murk, it looks like you’re squinting through smog and it makes the fluorescent-lit office scenes a relief. Baffling, baffling shit, somehow this Andrews fellow found something more soporific than Netflix sheen, and it’s a shame it cloaks the fun spy shenanigans and a crime to do this to Cate Blanchett looking as fab as she does here.
The Day The Earth Blew Up — because this is a movie Daffy and Porky are required to have emotional growth, and I was resigned to a lesson learned at the end. But no! Wackiness is given free reign! This is a lot of fun, the boys (and manic nerd Petunia) have to stop an alien invasion and if this sometimes feels like a dozen mini-toons crammed together it is still Looney Tunes, there is a factory and “Powerhouse” gets played, people who love the form are working here. Although the funniest musical cue in ages comes completely out of left field and is incomprehensible to the youths (my nephews and the other kids in the theater), the adults were howling though. Take the kids, have some laughs.
Pray For Death — in under the wire and on under Lauren’s recommendation! The protagonist is Sho Kosugi, a retired ninja who yadda yadda dead wife vengeance, but the hero here is James Booth, a contemporary of Michael Caine and a constantly jobbing British actor who wrote this ninja revenge flick and plays the main villain, he looks like an evil Cockney Richard Kind and goes buck wild by the end, he fucking rules. Does he pray for death? You have until midnight tonight on Tubi to find out!
Babylon 5 — Space Jehovah’s Witnesses! No, sorry, this one sucks ass. Dumb philosophical conflict that requires the main character to be even dumber (as opposed to arrogant, which is fine) in order for the “twist” ending to happen. Pop sci-fi and religious debate, like women and seamen, do not mix — the only good part of the episode is the various ambassadors politely telling the nerd platypus people to fuck off for various political reasons, that is the wheelhouse to aim for.
Wooo, Pray for Death! “Evil Cockney Richard Kind” is spot-on, and the escalating over-the-top violence he brings to the table here is terrific–and what a hero for also writing this bonkers script that has the courage to set a fight in the world’s creepiest mannequin storage facility that just happens to also have a functioning sawmill above it.
I laughed so hard at the sawmill reveal. This warehouse has levels! And apparently Booth wrote several more ninja-related flicks! He seems like a pretty cool guy.
Get Out
Brilliant stuff, right out of the gate. My biggest response here is that Jordan Peele is a storyteller who neither wants nor needs subtlety; every cinematic tool he uses, whether it’s story or cinematography or performance or sound, is chosen for maximum possible impact, and Peele is no Michael Bay – he paces things out, mainly because a) he has specific things to say about white liberal racism and b) he has respect for dramatic structure. I was particularly delighted by the fact that there’s no sudden superheroism or supervillainy in the final act – it’s genuinely just a few normal people beating the shit out of each other as Chris tries to flee.
Peele’s best skill before everything else is his gift for vivid imagery, not just in terms of the paranormal stuff – like his extremely cool take on hypnotism, something my friend told me is an accurate expression of what being hypnotised is like – but in simple, ordinary visuals. My favourite part of the whole thing was the black actors’s performances as the white-controlled black characters, so carefully chosen to be as unsettling as possible, and my favourite part of the mythology was the simple use of a flash to turn off the mind control, and my favourite bit of commentary was the use of single tears, which I interpreted as a deliberate reversal of the White Tears idea. These are very simple, very memorable images used to push the story along, and it makes the movie great fun to watch.
I practically cheered when I saw Stephen Root in the opening credits, and he didn’t disappoint, delivering yet another performance I’d never seen from him before.
Root absolutely got my ass here. And if Peele is dealing in upended tropes, Root might be his version of One Of The Good Ones.
Flow – alright, I’m finally caught up on the latest high-profile cat movie. And here’s what I have to say: Why does this cat not have whiskers? Whiskers are one of the best and most important parts of the cat and I found their absence genuinely distracting. Otherwise, this is really good! It did make me think of indie video games quite a bit, the kind where you’re playing the beautiful adventure for a couple of hours and then it ends and goes “aha, this was of course a metaphor for grief / trauma!” – but this doesn’t spell out a message beyond “what if a Capybara could drive a boat?” and I appreciate that.
Live Music – local band Stuart Pearce launched their album and possibly said farewell to a chunk of their lineup although that’s mostly rumours at the moment. Their sound is basically 60% The Fall, 40% Guided by Voices and while I’m not a huge fan of either of those bands, they do it well and with a ton of energy.
High Potential, “The Sauna at the End of the Stairs” – reopening an old case is a fun way to change up the formula, made for a solidly enjoyable episode although I wish the family at the centre of it had been a little more interesting. Keith David turning up at the end was fun.
Guided by Falling?
Falling for Voices?
Wooooo live music! Woo (apparently?) incoherently wordy vocalists!
Wooooo live music!!
I enjoyed Flow a lot and never noticed the lack of whiskers, huh. And I agree that the movie is better for not spelling out a message, but I did get a message anyway. Fortunately it’s rooted in the feline perspective and the cat is always moving so it stop to preach to the audience, but it’s there if one cares to look into it.
Oh yeah there’s plenty there if you want it.
The Game
Really love this, and it had been a couple years. Sharp and engaging–this actually tapped back into my Shield-viewing feelings, where I felt like each scene was giving me something interesting and attention-grabbing–and often funny. (“I’m extremely fragile right now” is my forever highlight.) One of Douglas’s best performances, and I think he’s really key to why it works: as cool-toned as his Nicholas Van Orton tries to be, we always know what’s driving him, and that makes it easy to follow along and enter into his escalating (and mostly justified) paranoia. Penn and Douglas also do a great job becoming convincing as brothers in a very small amount of shared screentime. I still maintain, however, that this is a terrible birthday present.
Night Moves
Needed to watch this after reading John Anderson and John Bruni’s retrospective last week, and of course that piece–with its fascinating analytical focus on the updating and deterioration of the cinematic private eye and the shifting mores of ’70s masculinity as a whole–also got me thinking about how the film uses the movies in-text. Arlene could have appeared alongside Sam Spade, but she’s also another washed-up cinematic dream, a one-time celluloid fantasy reduced to stumbling drunkenly around a pool; the stunt that kills Delly is, as Joey puts it, a “Keystone Cops” sequence, on-screen comedy replayed as bloody and (at first) seemingly pointless tragedy. It’s even interesting to note how Harry’s reduced to watching Joey at the end through the glass bottom of the boat, any sense of justice or closure playing out “on screen,” untouchable and distant from him. Bleak and fantastic, and that last image of Harry’s boat going in circles is absolutely haunting.
Black Dynamite
And now for something completely different! A+ parody that, like the best parodies, has an actual plot that works on its own terms. Unbelievably quotable, but the lines I think I use the most are “But Black Dynamite! I sell drugs to the community!” and “Ha! I threw that shit before I walked in the room!” Not once have I actually thrown shit before I walked in the room, but does this stop me? No, it does not. Some of my favorite gags here are the actors playing actors–the friend I watched this with pointed out Michael Jai White doing a slight “…we doing a take two here?” in-character reaction to “the militants turn, startled!”, and I also love Salli Richardson playing Gloria’s actress as someone incredulous at the timing of some of her lines.
Beef, S1
Rewatched all of it over the weekend because I’m thinking of doing episode-by-episode reviews here and wanted to soak it all in again before I had to start taking notes. Incredible standalone season with propulsive, escalating plotting–there are some minor hiccups, but the biggest slowdown comes only when the show needs it and has earned it, and everything else is actions and consequences–and a dramatically fleshed-out cast who all get to pinball off each other.
Severance, “The We We Are,” then “Hello, Mrs. Cobel” through “Trojan’s Horse”
I’m putting this after Beef just to be mean. “The We We Are” is actually a pretty terrific season finale, and one of the best thing about it is how game-changing it feels … and then one of the absolute worst things about S2 is how much the game feels the same. Look, I’m sure someone’s argued that it’s part of the satire for there to be an ostensible leak proving a corporation is evil and for that to all be swept under the rug and make no difference, but 1) Sorry to Bother You did that way better, and 2) that sounds like how I, a notably terrible artist, would try to talk my way into a better grade in high school art class. No, I meant for it to look like that! It’s a deconstruction!
There are good individual moments in S2 so far, but nearly every choice made in terms of how the show will proceed strikes me as bafflingly terrible, even on the smallest scale (like, why not let Mark deliberately seek out Reghabi after his after-image plan fails instead of having her pop up like a scientist ex machina? Why not give him a little more agency to get us invested in his choices?). The show has also become almost entirely composed of needless longueurs. If someone has to walk down a hallway, or drive somewhere, rest assured, we will see it at length, without even much dialogue to spruce it up. Cobel’s plot for one episode is essentially driving somewhere and not getting to her destination. I’ve started heckling the screen whenever this happens, that’s how irritating it is: “This is just another hallway! You tried to fool me by setting it in a forest, but I’m still just watching people walk in silence down a predetermined path!” And that’s how way too much of the plot is handled, too: I got a mean laugh out of Reghabi saying, “Let’s not rush things,” because it felt like a cruel mission statement from the season as a whole.
The real saving grace of this season is Milchick, who has become the most dynamic character to me because I’m given enough material to understand what he wants, how he’s working for it, and why he’s having trouble getting it. (I’m also very appreciative of Tramell Tillman’s winter get-up.) In a season where too much time is devoted to characters elliptically not clarifying things, Milchick is a blissful oasis of “I actually know enough to connect here.” He also consistently takes action, which is refreshing.
Best moment of the season so far goes to Irving, though, nearly drowning Helena–and then lovingly cradling the restored Helly. Turturro’s vicious delivery of “Seth” would almost be enough to make that scene on its own, but it’s one of the few scenes lately where I can appreciate more than just an acting choice.
Has anybody showed up for a one-day assignment and knocked it out of the park as cleanly as Cedric Yarbrough in Black Dynamite. If “I sell drugs in the community!” weren’t already the mic drop, his helpful “Oh, that’s Black Dynamite” might be more memorable. Plus he’s a pimp in a cowboy hat named Chocolate Giddy-Up, I may have to watch this again already.
As some other wiseass pointed out, Yarbrough here is the antithesis to his character in Juror #2, a delightful bit of casting goofery that I really hope was intentional.
(Casting agent shows Clint a picture of Chocolate Giddy-Up) Cowboy hat? Get this man on set right away.
That final shot in Night Moves of Harry circling the drain always flashes in my head whenever I have a bout of existential futility.
Sports! – The end of the only really close NCAA men’s game in the Elite Eight, and most of the Nats upending the Phils. I will watch anything with Kevin Harlan’s play by play. Less sure about Stan Van Gundy, but he meshes well with Harlan. Phils play by play man Tom McCarthy is one of the best around. Phils color man John Kruk is not.
Kojak, “A Wind from Corsica” – A convict gets himself into a program to infect inmates with pneumonic plague, but only did that so he’d be in a lower security prison and could escape and get revenge on the man who framed him. But, you know, he’s got plague, and becomes a threat to the entire city. This is one half a reimagining of “Panic in the Streets” and one half soap as the convict’s wife is actually in love with his brother. The stuff with the plague wants to be chilling – and certainly a scene where the chief medical examiner tells the mayor’s aide that he and he alone will decide if NYC needs to quarantined rings very differently after 2020 – but we all know this is not going to turn into one of those 70s thrillers where NYC is quarantined. The soap stuff is so so. And here is the weirdest part: this is a remake of an episode of a cop show called “The Bold Ones” with Leslie Nielsen. (Hey, someone did try to give him a TV show!) The IMDb listing shows that aside from changing the location and leads, it’s the same script down to the names of the characters. 1970s TV, man!
Frasier, “Frasier Grinch”/”It’s Hard to Say Goodbye if You Won’t Leave” – In the former, it’s Christmas of course, and Frasier’s plans to give Frederick some educational toys go awry, but the crux of things is Frasier’s tendency to give people gifts he thinks they should have and not gifts they actually want. Which as the uncle who once bought his one year old niece an educational toy I can relate to, though frankly I think Frasier is right to want to nourish his gifted son’s gifts. This has some very funny bits, though, especially “The Cranes in Maine have your living brain.”
The latter has Frasier ready to pursue an actual relationship with Kate, only she has decided to change jobs. It’s all very sudden and makes little sense since she just got there, and as they admit, it’s a pity since the chemistry was really starting to work. Even if it’s established they would have never meshed. There is one weird thing here: Kate mentions a twin sister. I always thought that was keeping the door open to Mercedes Ruehl coming back or something. But it’s just a throwaway.
On the topic of gift-giving (and the tension between giving the gift one wants to give vs the gift the recipes will want), we recently watched the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where he buys a birthday present for his girlfriend’s son – and for once Larry nailed it! The kid told him all about how much he loved Project Runway, and was overjoyed when Larry gave him his own sewing machine!
I was unreasonably devastated when the mother wanted to take it away.
Pollock – Illuminating, in that now when I look at a Jackson Pollock abstraction I can understand it by mentally adding the classic New Yorker cartoon caption. Because Christ, what an asshole! Shows a lot of interest in Pollock’s process – I was shocked how many shots there were of Ed Harris full-on painting a Pollock, no doubt Harris studied footage of the process extremely closely – and disappointed in how little insight there was regarding the work itself. Also surprisingly literal for a film about an abstract art.
At its best, it’s a film of a bygone era about the art world in a bygone era. Critics and Life magazine choose the next direction in high art, depicted by this movie in gorgeous celluloid images courtesy DP Lisa Rinzler. By the end it feels more like a homework assignment fulfilled than a tribute to anything or anyone. It never frees itself of stodgy biopic trappings, just a couple hours with an abusive drunk and oases of relief as we watch him work. Hooray, we think when contemplating a canvas. This represents a few hours where the man wasn’t being a jerk.
Invincible, episodes 2-4
So, this has been pretty good on the whole. Intriguing on a story level, well done for the most part from a dramatic standpoint, but also pretty funny when it wants to be– including the occasional Simpsons-esque sign gag– and with its own twists and surprises. One thing this show gets well, in a Shield-ian sense– beyond any similarities in the final scenes of their respective pilots– is that the action scenes have a real sense of both weight and spatial coherence. I would have more to say, but I don’t have much time to write and I’m really tired.
Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight
Pretty uneventful! Other than Florida’s crazy comeback against Texas Tech. But this is the chalkiest bracket I can ever remember– and I’m older than the 64-team format is.
The Righteous Gemstones, “He Goeth Before You Into Galilee”
“Are you done?”
“I don’t know!”
That was pretty much the only clean dialogue I could get from the funniest scenes in the episode.
Harley Davidson And The Marlboro Man – There isn’t much beneath the charm of the two leads. But, boy, is it enough to carry this movie through. Apparently best friends irl the camaraderie Don Johnson and Mickey Rourke have for one another comes through in their performances. They have the chemistry of Newman and Redford. This is basically a modern (sci-fi?) remake of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid – the guys even jump off a high-rise into a swimming pool below. There is a lot of traditional and modern day western imagery here – Bon Jovi’s song, steel horses, train rides, and rugged individualism. There are a few terrible lines of the dudes being old cowboys whose time has come and gone in a modern world. So what to do? Save the saloon! It has a dumb philosophy of masculinity with both being dumb with women. Harley has some kind of bizarre, Christian-based spiritual quest thing, a loner always on the move. Marlboro wants some sort of stability but – dumb with women. They both have a hard time finding what they want within society and being true to themselves. Released in ‘91, there are a few things which make this SF – For some inexplicable reason it’s set in the far future of 1996!?! We know we are in a dystopian future as the camera hovers over >$3.00 gas prices. There is a Dickian street drug called Crystal Dream. Daniel Baldwin and his Matrix rejects are sort of bullet proof and Terminator-like. Baldwin’s henchman gets more time than Tom Sizemore’s big bad who is always in his hi-tech office tower talking to Japanese businessmen reflecting early 90’s economic anxiety with Japan. It’s all a sort of William Gibson “sci-fi is the realism of our time” concept. One of my favorite dumb movies.
What did we play?
Jedi: Fallen Order
Officially giving up on actually playing one game a week, a pace that is simply unsustainable for me. Instead, I’ll report my thoughts on games as I go. Despite my Star Wars – that is to say, franchise – skepticism, this managed to win me over in the tutorial sections. In terms of gameplay, it’s basically Ratchet & Clank with more realistic human movement and, of course, Jedi powers; I may be weary of the universe, but I cannot deny that waving around a lightsaber is the coolest fucking nerd thing one can do, and the game is incredibly slickly designed. It basically won me over when I picked up that it was using light to direct me around (just like my beloved Left 4 Dead), and it does everything possible to make it so that failure is my own fault.
I also enjoy the simple story it’s telling; the opening chapter gives you a cool buddy who almost immediately sacrifices his life to get you out of there, which is both openly manipulative and heartbreakingly sincere, making it perfectly in the spirit of Star Wars. I found Cameron Monaghan a bit weak as the protagonist (though if that’s him doing the motion capture for the gameplay stuff and not just the cutscenes, he manages to fill those with great personality), but he lightens up considerably when he starts talking to the cute incomprehensible robot sidekick, which is presumably related to how actors playing off the Muppets instantly see them as real people.
Atomfall – a very British take on the post-apocalyptic open-world game, this is clearly influenced by the Fallout and Stalker games even to me, somebody who hasn’t spent much time with either. But it’s set in the Lake District in the early 1960s, after an “incident” that doesn’t QUITE seem to have been a nuclear meltdown, but is definitely in that kinda zone. This is brand new and showed up on Game Pass, some friends were excited about getting into it so I thought I’d join in too but I don’t seem to have clicked with it quite as much as they have. The setting and story (so far) are compelling enough but the combat is extremely clunky and I’m not sure the rest of the gameplay has enough to make up for it, I’ll probably spend a little more time with it though.
Balatro – managed to beat the highest difficulty level on one of the decks, so that’s something. Working on the “challenge” decks next, where you’re stuck with particular conditions to work around – it’s fun finding out how to turn a strange joker combination into a benefit. But basically this is probably my background time-wasting game for the foreseeable future.
At long long last, we picked up on Strahd, with our DM letting her husband finish up the “Groundhog Day” side quest. And thank the morning lord, we are done with that. The session ran 4 1/2 hours and was non stop combat, and just felt like we were going in endless, rather mean, circles. And then a foot from the goal line, my character lost all his hit points. And I lose my crap. I do not like combat. I do not like endless side quests. And even knowing that characters can and do die in D and D, I really don’t like that mechanism. So this was just too much and I angry. My character stayed chill and I managed to not die and to help get to the end of the quest. But as much as I like these DMs and the rest of the players, I am ever less enchanted with Strahd. Doesn’t help that we haven’t leveled up in ages, and I think that is totally built into the game. Thankfully no one seems to have been put out by my acting out. The DMs were once players and know how frustrating this module is.
Assassin’s Creed: Origins – These large and repetitive games give The Ploughwoman comfort these days, so here we go again. This time we’re in Egypt! Looking forward to synching a map by scaling the Great Pyramid or assassinating a pharaoh by jumping from the Sphinx’s crumbling nose (these are almost certain to be in the game). As a side note, I find it interesting and amusing that Notre Dame was reconstructed with help from the scans Ubisoft took of the interior for making a different AC game, I hope the newly built cathedral now includes handholds along the ceiling where people can jump from on top of unsuspecting patrons below.
Anyway, there’s a couple changes to the mechanics, namely you now have a hawk friend that you can deploy and search for your next target from above with your super hawk vision. This would be a nice occasional addition, but it seems to be something that we’ll return to over and over. There’s also crafting again and as you all know, the line between playing a game and signing up for virtual work is crafting. The saving grace of this system is that you get the parts by hunting animals along the Nile. I don’t care about upgrading to the latest breastplate or ankle sheaths or whatever, but I am amused by running like a lunatic after a gazelle or assassinating a hippo. These games, we are promised by the opening titles, are made by a diverse team with different religious and cultural backgrounds. But they’re universally a bunch of weirdos who like to come up with scenarios where you have to jump on top of people from great heights, One World, my friends.
Mega Man X3(Mega Man X Legacy Collection) on Nintendo Switch
Barely started this, doing the opening stage and one airport level up to the boss, who wrecked me. It’s got a good sense of spectacle and looks great but it’s already giving me a sense of diminishing returns. This is already the second airport stage in the X series and the one in X1 was much better, so I hope it’s not a harbinger of things to come. And I did get to use Zero for a while in the intro stage and it was quite cool but too brief, and it seems I have to unlock him on the main game. Feels cumbersome but I’m making this my next game playthrough anyway.
Donkey Kong Country Returns HD (Demo) on Nintendo Switch
Played the first level, which is just as fun as I remembered. I beat the whole game back on Wii, it really is an excellent game. This version looks better but feels oddly stiff to control compared to Wii. It’s not a big deal since I beat this game already and if I want to play a DKC on Switch there’s also the sequel, Tropical Freeze, which I haven’t played and I hear it’s outstanding.
Wave Race 64 – Nintendo 64 on Nintendo Switch Online
I’ve had this game on original hardware for a long time and always admired it but had hardly played it so I decided to give it a serious run over the weekend. I finished the Normal circuit and made some good progress on the Hard circuit but couldn’t beat it over several attempts. I don’t mind much though, since it’s a lot of fun even if I lose, thanks to the terrific water wave physics and brilliant visuals, both of which were top of the line for N64 and hold up really well. It really is a one of a kind game (Well, one of a kind except for the GameCube sequel that didn’t impress me the one time I played it.) (Also, do jet ski races actually exist? I always assumed they did thanks to this game but now that I think of it I’ve never seen them in real life, and certainly not in the way shown in the game.)
Nine Sols, per a friend’s recommendation.
One thing that stands out is how much this game is mechanically inspired by Hollow Knight, though that itself is probably inspired by other games. One major difference is an emphasis on parrying in combat… and that combat is hard as hell. Past the first stage or so it is extremely easy to get wiped out by any random battle if you don’t have parrying down. Which I do not. After my first day’s play session I copied my save file and ended up playing in “Story Mode,” which also lets you adjust the difficulty through the damage sliders. It is far more forgiving this way. (Part of me started off yesterday feeling that I had gotten the parrying down much better after a good night of sleep, and was wondering if I should’ve stuck with the higher difficulty… and then I realized how much I was getting hit in some of these fights, and that I was probably better off sticking with Story Mode.)
And with that in mind, the exploration and story and such has been pretty fun. I feel like it’s surprisingly open-world for how early in the game I am, which might just be another way of saying there are a few different ways I can go now. I was avoiding a couple of bosses when I was playing in Standard Mode, but now I could probably beat them comfortably. Anyway, I might play a little more tonight before I can’t for a while.
Year of the Month update!
This April, we’ll be looking at 1999, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
TBD: James Williams: 10 Things I Hate About You
TBD: Ruck Cohlchez – Summerteeth/The Soft Bulletin/Utopia Parkway
TBD: Lauren James – Storm of the Century
Apr. 7th: J. “Rodders” Rodriguez: The Scooby Doo Project
Apr. 8th: Bridgett Taylor: …One More Time
Apr. 18th: Cameron Ward: The Mummy
Apr. 28th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Sixth Sense
Here’s how we’re wrapping up Silent Era Month:
Mar. 31st: John Anderson: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
And here’s the open call for May! Our year will be 1962, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
I like that idiot in Denver too.
Hey, remember me? I’d be down with writing about ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ ‘A Wrinkle in Time,’ and ‘The Guns of August.’ …’62 is a solid year. Plus I have a month off between jobs, so I need projects to do!