My memory condition is not as open and shut as I made it out to be, however. Yes, 2014 is the cutoff date for what I remember for the most part. However, it’s more accurate to say that the memories before that time are like sun-bleached photos. Their backgrounds are destroyed; only certain subjects remain; I can only assume the context. Some are more destroyed than others and it is difficult to find out which is which until I examine them. Whenever I tell stories about the past, I’m left in a position where it seems like I’m being disingenuous about my condition. I can remember certain details, but it’s like telling a story about a dead world. I have a memory of visiting our grandparents’ house at some point, but everything outside the door has been scrubbed from existence. I don’t know what I looked like, what age I was. I don’t know that girl, I just know a body visited a room with wood-lacquered walls and crosses on every surface.

I tell you all of this to explain the strange way the following anecdote is conveyed. This is a story about video stores. This shall be both exposition and education; a story, and a demonstration of what memory is like for me.

At a certain point in ████, in ████, I visited a humble chain of video stores, once known as Blockbuster. I was visiting with my friend, ████, and their family. A faint smell of cheap theater popcorn lingered amid aisles of plastic cases. This friend, excited at their acquisition of a PlayStation 2, was eager to acquire a game with which to test out their new purchase. █ █████ ██ ███ ███████ █████ █████ ███ ███████ ████ ████ █ █████ █████████. I was ██, and from what I can surmise from context clues, easily impressed.

From other stories I’ve been told about myself, I know I was sheltered, almost entirely reliant on my uncles for any sense of taste. They, being teenage boys, were more than willing to corrupt the mind of an impressionable girl by making her listen to metal, play violent video games, and say swears at people knowing it would create amusing consequences—for them at least. █ █████ ████████ ███ █████ ██████ ████ ██ █████ █ █████ ████████ █████ ██████ █ █████ ████ ██ ████ █████ ████████ ███ ██ █████ ██ ███ █████ ██████ ████.

Being told by a █████ █████ that I could pick out any game I wanted was something akin to being given a blank check for an uncountable sum of money. I wandered down the aisles with ████ and saw a case. Upon the box was a black and red cover; a sword-wielding anime man sitting in a pose of indescribable despondence/ennui. Overtop, in stylish, curving handwriting were the words Devil May Cry. Some previously unexpressed sense of aesthetic called out to me; I absolutely needed to know what happened inside that svelte, black-jacketed case.

“Oh,” said ████’s mother, “are you sure?” She eyed the incredibly prominent mature rating on the box.

“█ ████ ███████ ███████ ██████ ████,” I said.

It seemed she accepted this as an answer as we left the store with our newfound acquisition. We went out into ████ ████ ████ ███ ███████ ███ ████ ████████ █ █████ ████ █████ ██ ████ ██████████ █ █████ ████ ███ ███ ██ █████ ██████ █████ █ █████ ████████ ███ ██ ████ ████████ ██ ████ █ █████ ████████ ████ █ ████ █ ████ ██████ ███ ██████████ █████ █ ████ ████ █ ██ ███████ █████ ██ ██ █████ █ █████ ████████ ████ ██ ███████ ███████ █████ █████ ████ ███████ █████ ██ ████ █████ ██████. Even so, I have loved the franchise ever since.

If trying to read all that gives you a headache, imagine the headache that still pounds in my head trying to remember it and we can call it even.

Resurrecting My Dead Self

Staring back at the person I never was, I am jealous. Without realizing it, I’ve escaped the purity of that feeling: of finding something, resonating, and simply choosing to be curious, damn the consequences. Crumbling memory makes it even harder to get back into this state. I have a somewhat unique experience of being “born” an adult.

Adulthood means an essentially unlimited ability to pursue the things I like. My aesthetic sense is more developed than ever, but I still struggle to choose art based on what I like. I mistrust my ability to identify what is and isn’t worth my time. I tend to try to “hear things out” even when it is apparent my time is being deliberately wasted. The opinions of others often convince me into or out of things, further confusing my ability to self-select.

I talked previously about the oppressive burden of enduring other people’s thoughts. You open social media; you are told something you like is overrated. A fond recollection of a childhood favorite film revisited tells you it was never good; 45% on Rotten Tomatoes. Media piracy websites will feature prominent reviews, and star ratings aggregated from places like Metacritic—what the fuck is that about?

With free time being more limited than ever, there is an impulse to min-max. There have been moments where I have spent longer stretches researching a good time than actually having one. The Trails franchise, for instance, was one I put off for years because I operated from an oppressive point of view: I believed I could get something better, more polished, more refined, elsewhere, where a “mostly positive” was not enough.

It gets even worse when you must consider the politics of the things involved. I cannot begin to count the number of times I have been ecstatic for a new game release only to realize several of its prominent developers are scum of the earth. For my own sanity, I have avoided things seemingly developed in a lab for me, because the lead dev espoused a hateful ideology. Research becomes necessary and it is much harder to simply consider “the fun of the game” when such actors are publicly available and their words are a matter of record. Our purchases become signals to others about what we value, what we endorse, and so we endlessly submit ourselves to a panopticon of our own making.

Art has always been political. I’m not trying to assert there was some ideologically pure time where a person could just consume art without thought. Often, we imagine such a period, but it is just that: the product of imagination. Most people simply just had a time where they were sheltered from the political ramifications of the things they engaged with. I think we have a responsibility to others and ourselves to find beautiful things without giving up on what we believe in. There is a balance to be struck between cold logic and idealistic passions.

With all this in mind, I engaged in a thought experiment. I would attempt to revisit the mindset of this long dead person. I would play a selection of PlayStation 2 games, chosen entirely from the information I could glean from the box. I gave myself permission to drop whatever I felt like, and permission to be repulsed by what I found inside: The aesthetic need not be defended if the contents were vile.

I permitted no review scores, no research, and no gameplay footage. All I had, in some cases, was faint recollections of what others might have said or interest which came from a contextless fancy in the things associated with the game (soundtracks, keyart, ect.).

My Beautiful, Blue-Bottomed Disks

Bloodrayne

I’ll admit to being a bit on a mid-2000s vampire kick for this one to have fruited into anything. Bloodrayne’s box art was less enticing to me than █ ████████ █████ ██ █ ██████████ ██████ ██ ████ ███████████ ██████ █████████. Whatever effect of intelligence I may have completely crumbles in the face of a hot lady surrounded by dead bodies—I’ll admit to that being a me problem.

I have fond memories of ██ ███████ ██████ ██ ████ and being a passing vampire enjoyer, having an excuse to play a game predominantly about one seemed like a good enough time to me. Bloodrayne surprised me then, by being one of the games I played for the longest. A big part of that was the presentation; I am a sucker for any game which allows me to blast my way through a gothy, gravitas-filled world.

I was also quite taken with the gore in this game, as concerning as that sentiment might be for any psychologists present. Gore in Bloodrayne is fascinating because unlike many other games in the murdering genre, it lends itself a sense of permanency. Dismembered limbs, bloodstains, and corpses lay strewn about like the boomer shooters of old. By comparison, with the interest in increased visual fidelity and the need to regain system resources as quickly as possible, bodies in modern games often dematerialize as if the world’s most efficient black-bag service is following you around. I have played modern AAA shooters where the bullet holes disappear before the magazine is half empty, and here is Bloodrayne leaving corpses strewn around lobbies until I kindly choose to get on with the plot.

Compared to some others on this selection, I will likely play Bloodrayne to completion. The gameplay required little adjustment for someone spoiled on polished, modern control schemes. There was an even split in the game’s attention between showing me Rayne being cool and showing me her ass but, anthropologically speaking, it could have been much worse given the era it was produced. That said, I’m willing to do anything for a goth lady.

Evergrace

Of the games I chose, Evergrace was the one with the most prior baggage attached. Evergrace’s soundtrack by Kota Hoshino has ensured my productivity in writing about as much as having a keyboard. █ ████ ██████ ███ ████████ ██ ████ █ ██████ ██ ████ ██████ █ █████ ██ ███ ████ ██████ ███ ████ █████ █ █████ ████████ ████ ████████ █ ██████ ████ █████ I had not seen a second of the game, however, and the boxart itself had always intrigued me; it seemed, if not actually, spiritually in conversation with my beloved Devil May Cry. A white-haired anime swordsman sitting upon a rock and staring at an unseen point, carrying some emotional burden. What can I say, I have a type.

Considering FromSoftware’s current position as the Dark Souls factory, Evergrace was surreal. The control scheme was completely different from the one which has gradually crystallized into a soft necessity in action RPGs for nearly two decades. The ambience was consistently surreal and dreamlike in a way I haven’t experienced outside of indie games. And of course, it was great to finally hear my beloved soundtrack in its rightful place. That title screen experience was immaculate.

The gameplay is more interesting to talk about than to play, unfortunately. There is a combinatorial smattering of durability management, ability selection, and enemies being weak to certain types of damage which all persist even into later games, but it is far more crude here. I am not the most patient person in the world, but the cumbersome slowness which pervades every system, from combat to just getting around the place, is more aggravating than pensive. It reminds me of ██ ███████ ██ ██ █████████ █ █████ ████████ ████ █ ████ ███████ █████ ██ ██ █████ █████ ████ ████ ██ ████ ███ ██████ ██ ███████ ██ ██ █ ████ █ ████ Threads of Fate or Dewprism in Japan █████ ██████ ████ ██ █████ ██ █████████████ ███ ████ ██ █████ █ ████████ █████ ████ ██ █████████ █████ ███ ██ ██████ ██ ██████ ██ ██████.

Though I did not personally enjoy what the game was going for, the sense of aesthetic was wonderful. The sights and sounds on display really inspired me, and it was intriguing seeing the chrysalis of a beloved game studio before they become what would define them.

Shadow Hearts

I love Legend of Dragoon; it’s an imperfect game, but one I know was acquired in a similar fashion to the earlier anecdote. A small girl saw a game with a word similar to ‘dragon’ in the title and ███████ ██ ███ ████████ █ ██████ ████ █████. ██ ███ ███████████ ██ ██ ██ ███████ █ █████ █████████ ██ ██████ █████ ██████████ ██ ██████ ███. Shadow Hearts has been often recommended to me because of said appreciation. its timing-based combat being a major point of similarity. I never went out of my way to seek it out and as time passed it was always in a “someday” category.

Now fully immersed in this experiment and only burdened with hearsay, I decided to give it a try. Immediately the box art presents an interesting aesthetic and it always makes me laugh to see a damsel in distress psychically menaced by the world’s most normal looking man.

Shadow Hearts, in the first hour or so, disappointed me. It wasn’t the gameplay or aesthetics which bothered me, it was the writing. I don’t know how many games would exist in this category, but Shadow Hearts earns a shiny “homophobic caricature in the first hour” sticker. This was the year 2001 we’re talking about; there have certainly been bigger label bad influences to take umbrage with, but that on top of the protagonist’s flippant desire to sexually assault the woman he’s travelling with made me immediately feel the need for a shower.

All that considered, my sense of aesthetic did not let me down. There is an interesting world here, there are interesting points raised. The negative first impression did not diminish my desire to see the story further, simply because of the strength of the game’s mechanics and the interest I had in the setting. The promise of a dark world is still here, even if it is a little greasier than I would like.

Dark Cloud 2

Dark Cloud 2 was interesting because I was not intrigued by its cover but by the back of the box. The in-game screenshots displayed an art style I now see frequently replicated in the modern day. Cel shading is now common, but I still felt compelled by what the game was showing me. Within moments, it captivated me with its first areas. I ██████ ███ █████ ████ ████ █ ███ ████████ █ █████ ████ ███ █ ████ █████ ███ █ ████ ██ ████ ██ █████ ██ ████ ██ █████ ██████ █ █████ ███████ ███ ███ ██ ██ ███ ████████ ███.

I’ve always been a sucker for an RPG town. Show me a space which allows me to linger and feel a sense of time and place, and I will love it no matter how mediocre your game is. The first town of Dark Cloud 2 being a combination clown zoo and steampunk menagerie was so interesting that I felt compelled to continue playing just to see what else the game had in store.

The absolute breadth of the voice acting talent on display here was incredible. Paul Eiding, Michael Bell, Cam Clarke, Mark Hamill, and Scott Menville all made these fun and strange characters come to life. It was so stacked a cast I felt compelled part way through my first play session to double-check what I was hearing; a moment of offense at the fact that none of these professionals are apparently credited in the game.

The first forays into the gameplay loop of Dark Cloud 2 show an interesting gamut of interlocking systems so diverse that it made my head spin. You have dungeon crawling, weapon growth management, invention photography, mech building, world building; each tightly clustered within the first 2 hours. It was so much variety that I genuinely forgot for a few moments the first dungeon they put me in was a sewer.

Dungeon crawling has never been my first choice for a core gameplay loop. I first learned to hate dungeons when █ █████ ████████ ██ █████ ██ ████ ████ ██ ████. It takes a lot of convincing for a big dungeon central premise to hook me. Dark Cloud 2, in the time I played, couched the need to enter the dungeon in human necessity. The protagonist needs to leave the city and can only do it through a sewer. This is naturally because of the evil clowns extorting the local politicians—just like real life.

I’m not certain if I will play to the end, but I am more than curious enough to see where the story is going. Dungeon crawling will always be a less-than-ideal conduit for my personal investment but I’m willing to see it out, which is more than I can say for some other games in the genre.

Living Dead Girl

After finishing my little experiment, I had a long period of reflection.

I thought about the girl I once shared this body with and wondered if I did her justice. Passion is something I have in large quantities, but it’s often the part of myself I trust the least. Learning to trust my sense of aesthetics was freeing, in a way. I didn’t need to burden myself with the many details I would often find floating around my mind. Length, whether I would engage with the microsystems of the game, if I can justify whatever price the game is presently going for, what my clique of friends have come to believe.

In a world where games have become synonymous with the commercialism that constructs them, it’s easy to submit to the desire to research. It’s easier than ever to find several thousand games with which to indulge in; we can’t just settle on “middling.” At least, so we tell ourselves. If one spends a dozen hours finding the exact, optimal game you are desiring at the moment, you won’t have wasted any time! Except all the time you spent researching instead of doing. I don’t mean to imply a person can’t enjoy researching games for fun, but I, myself, have felt the dissatisfaction of trying to find something ideal, and ending up not doing anything with my time.

All the same, a sense of emptiness pervades me from doing this. The story at the beginning was not just a somber anecdote; I showed you what memory is like for me, but it was also an attempt to convey something I feel I’ve lost. As time has inevitably gotten away from me, I think often about the experiences other people have and feel jealous. Intellectualization has rarely been helpful for me to express the parts of myself I hold dear; yet, trying to get in touch with parts suppressed—or in truth never existed much to begin with—still requires conscious effort.

Nostalgia and I have never gotten along. When people talk about the experience of loving something, potentially for what they feel are childish, or stupid reasons, I feel pangs of envy. I have said I am immune to the cloying, choking fingers of the past because my history is so foreshortened; I think today, I realize it isn’t true. The nostalgic recollections of others compelled me to behave in this way in a desperate attempt to capture something I cannot hold.

No matter how hard I try, I can never be this backspaced person. I am her living dead recollections reincarnated as an echo. She deserves peace and she deserves it from me.

This experience has not been without value. I can appreciate the newly built trust in my sense of aesthetic, even if my reason for seeking it is unattainable. Research will not be completely abandoned, but I will permit myself more forays into the unknown. This kind of thing needs to exist on a spectrum: intellectualization and passion.

Opening myself up to novel experiences has always been worthwhile. It hasn’t always shown me some hidden version of gaming perfectly tailored for me, but it has given me more tools to hone my critical faculty. More so, I also think giving myself a lens to find things aesthetically appealing while also being bad gives me the most important thing an artist can have—spite. The times I’ve seen something beautiful, only to see it not executed in an appealing way, gives me an infinite amount of energy to construct something from its pieces.

Give yourself permission to love something imperfect. Find the things which speak to you, and if they don’t exist, you can make them. At any point, you can become the person you most need yourself to be. Video games might be a silly hobby meant for people who enjoy the tactility of virtual experiences interfacing with mortal flesh, but I think such things are best enjoyed when you’re the one holding the controller. Give yourself permission to love something only you can love.

✶✶✶

It has been one year since I joined Gamesline. Even when it has made me curse or miss out on sleep as I try to stick to my self-imposed deadlines, I wouldn’t trade it. I’m glad I got to be here.

Thank you for reading.

The post The Video Store in My Mind appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s a full house again this week as John, Lily, Crystal, and Nikolas sit down to talk about the Nintendo Direct and the games they’ve been playing. John’s been playing Resident Evil 4 Remake, Marathon, Boltgun, and the Parasite Mutant demo. Lily’s been stuck in PS2 purgatory with Bloodrayne, Shadow Hearts, Mercenaries, Dark Cloud 2, and Evergrace. She’s also been playing Alabaster Dawn‘s early access version and Sekitori. Crystal is in Final Fantasy hell with Final Fantasy XII and watching Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children while Nikolas dug into Etrian Odyssey.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, John, Lily, Crystal, and Nikolas

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 94: Rayman’s Giant Hog appeared first on Gamesline.

There hasn’t been much innovation in the format of these tactile interactions in quite some time. The Wii came out twenty years ago and what innovations have been made in the realm of VR haven’t quite filled living rooms in the same way the white monolith did. The Steam Controller managed to attract my attention because, regardless of how small, it has attempted to recapture a feeling of innovation.

I am pretty particular about controllers and interfaces at the end of the day. I love a well-lubricated machine honed down into something hyperspecific and intended for one use. I’m a freak who predominantly writes with fountain pens, types on mechanical keyboards, and uses a DAP—a digital audio player—to contain my music. I love a mechanical switch.

This comes, without going into too much detail, from a chronic condition which heavily limits the amount of sensation coming from my hands and arms. Touch screens and non-tactile inputs are my enemy. So, yes, me ruining your Discord call with mechanical clicking noises is due to a very sensitive medical condition. This, in addition to my chronic baby hands disease, means I care a lot about the ergonomics of my interfacing technology.

Such interfacing has been structurally homogenized over the years as games have less and less incentive to be truly exclusive to one platform. Nintendo, Sony, and the other one have found a shape that works and stuck with it; you don’t truly get a ball controller to play Half-Life 2 and Portal with that vibrates and throws all your shit off your desk anymore.

So, this new contender, back again from Valve’s prior experiment in 2015, is having another hack at it. How’d they do?

Others Have Prevented me from Calling It the Puck

Just about everything with the Steam controller at first blush was pleasant, down to opening its minimalistic packaging. A single cardboard box contained within another cardboard box and a pull tab was all that kept me from my new plastic son. Its contents: a cable, a manual, and the charger/dongle (my partner requires me to type chongle at least once in this review, you are welcome, it is now your turn to make dinner.)

Holding it in my hands, I could appreciate the subtle intricacies of its curves, weight, and shape. A single twirl of both of its joysticks told me all I needed to know: this controller feels pretty good. It lacked its predecessor’s airy weightlessness and disconcertion that it could be twisted in half by a sufficiently determined newborn. This impression held water after the immediate four hour breaking-in period, subsequent, equal length breaking-in periods, and a Twitch stream; anything to procrastinate from actually writing about it.

After a brief updating period for both the controller and the chongle (two dinners, keep up), I finally got to the software side of things. The sheer number of windows, menus, submenus, could kill the elderly; but I think this is a good thing. In the case of electronics with so much modularity, having the ability to actually get in deep and play with everything really makes the controller what it is—a tool to create a futzer’s paradise.

Playing through Blood, a classic boomer shooter, was eye opening. Seeing the detail with which the community offered control solutions for a game never intended to handle this way was amazing. Input layers for maps, rotating sub menus designed to sort through the myriad weapon choices of a classic FPS, and quick-save and quick-load were all bound with enough intuitiveness to easily grasp in less than a level or two.

With so many optional buttons—some not even apparent if you count the grip sensor as an input—you can make a controller the weight of a plush toy into a helicopter cockpit. It isn’t technically praise owed to the Steam controller in particular, as you can utilize the various bits of customizability inherent to Steam itself on any controller, but the way it integrates and interacts with such modability immediately makes you feel like you can tailor the play experience to whatever you want.

The tiny innovation the controller has, in the form of the twin touchpads, makes for an immediate interest point. The haptic purr of the pads feels pleasant and, once the sensitivity is properly dialed, shockingly accurate. From a person who could pen several strongly worded letters to the creator of the laptop trackpad, I am just as shocked to be saying it. Both on stream and on my own, navigating around games typically associated with mouse and keyboard control never stopped feeling strangely novel. I am probably never going to be a professional 4X or RTS player on them, but it made the games feel immediately more comfortable and approachable.

Ultimately, the ergonomics of simply holding the controller are pleasant. My particular issues aside, I didn’t ever feel fatigued or like the controller was anything other than lovely to use. A small detail I felt pleasantly about was the detailed haptic vibrations; once tuned correctly, I could feel them appropriately, something I often feel left out on with games, as silly as it sounds. The amount of times I’ve put down a controller during an important scene, only to scare the absolute piss out of myself upon realizing it was vibrating the whole time, is too many to name. It’s a minute detail for most, but it’s nice to be included.

Overall the controller is great, and offers new ways to engage with games I previously thought I had “solved.”

Where I feel the problems start are things entirely independent of the controller. Namely, Steam itself. Without the connection to Steam, the controller is basically useless. Steam Support suggests adding any non-Steam game to Steam as a means to ameliorate this problem.

Now, it may seem petty, stupid, insipid, etc, to mention that a controller called the Steam controller requires Steam to function, but the fact that it is practically a brick while not working through their frontend sticks in my craw. The PC game space is cross-pollinated by many game front ends and avenues for playing games. The limitation of these means, even if rectified with a minute of effort, feels wrong. I’m sure if the controller has any actual staying power, someone, someday, will mod in general use; for now however, it makes me uncomfortable.

My biggest problem with the Steam controller admittedly comes from a personal place—the actual price. At $100, it is far from the most inexpensive controller on the market. $100, to me, is a large amount of money; that’s nearly 50 asset-flip hentai games! That’s too many hentai games for anyone to own.

Economics, Plastic Baubles, and Joy

Once again, I risk being a little foolish, standing on a soap box to say something that has bothered me since acquiring this lump of plastic and circuitry. When the Steam controller’s price was made public, my immediate gut reaction was that it was simply too much to spend on something like this, on me. There are so many other things $100 could go to. My personal guilt complexes about receiving any amount of money aside, there are reasons I bring this up.

I generally avoid talking about pricing or any kind of economic value in my reviews. I don’t like games being reduced from the art I see them as to something I need to justify; the same way I need to justify a fourth gas station energy drink run in a single week. A controller is not necessarily immune, despite the different kind of art that goes into crafting it. I am sometimes struck with awe: any given object on my desk is the product of thousands of people’s efforts to deliver me a piece of plastic that I am annoyed by owning.

I am not a particularly insightful voice here. I cannot tell you why the Steam controller is $100. I am not a R&D specialist, logistics specialist, or even single-celled businessmen determining what the ideal bottom line for a product is. What amounts to a “fair” amount of compensation for such a product is not something I feel comfortable stating. I do not know how many sleepless nights and arguments went into making this controller.

I don’t imagine that pricing is congruent with quality, in truth. Many many material factors construct a reality where basically everyone I know has experienced some kind of stick drift or catastrophic failure of an integral piece of technology; I can only tell you that they happen, and no price point has ever seemed to stop it from happening.

I can spend $20, $100, $300 on a desk chair and I will still find myself collapsed on the ground wondering why my chair decided the middle of Marathon’s Cryo Archive was a good time to explode into Ikea shrapnel(småbitar, if you prefer). The price of what constitutes a good, well-made product always seems to be approaching a vanishing horizon.

“Oh, $300 isn’t what a desk chair costs; at minimum you need to spend around $1500, get like a Herman Miller or something.” It seems like hyperbole, but it’s a repeated sentiment with a changing price point and a changing noun depending on the particular hobby or need; yet it always seems to be far more expensive than one would prefer to pay. Ultimately, it is a willingness to pay the price point which determines what the price point shall be. I am one of the rubes who will.

But then, here I am, too, on the opposite side of the spectrum. My old controller, the GameSir Tegenaria Lite, casts gloomy stares upon my new acquisition. It is grey, sturdy, and cost me $12. It has comfortable sticks, chunky triggers, and reminds me of my beloved Playstation 1. I plug it into my computer, and it controls games. I love it.

For the low price of $12, you can have 80 percent of the Steam controller’s features. If you are so inclined, you can do the exact same amount of fiddling and futzing in Steam’s menus and create an elaborate chain of controller commands, making a twelve to fifteen button controller the equivalent to a Steel Battalion command console.

The adage “you get what you pay for” feels less true in matters such as this. I have had $600 pieces of tech explode upon coming free of their packaging; a $5 nameless knock-off bauble has lasted me nearly a decade. I am unsure if a $100 controller is worth it, no matter how nice, attractive, and scream-filled it is.

The key thrust of my argument here is not that the Steam controller is somehow a moral problem, an economic problem, or even a problem most people should even care about; my consideration is personal. How much controller do you actually need? Is any new gadgetry enough to fill a hole of materialistic deficiency? Did I get exactly $100 worth of joy out of this new piece of plastic obscuring yet more surface area on my desk? I think your answers will determine if the controller is right for you.

So, in the attempt to reassert this is a review and not yet another anti-capitalistic spiel: is the Steam controller worth your money? It depends on your needs and use cases, as many things are!

Will it change the face of gaming as we know it and take us to a new golden age of controller interfaces yet unheard? Probably not, but that gyro is pretty neat.

Should I buy it from a scalper for $200 not including shipping and handling? You should absolutely never do this, for this controller or any item.

Should I buy approximately 50 hentai games on Steam? Sister, you are the master of your own destiny.

The post Holding Hands with Plastic — Steam Controller Review appeared first on Gamesline.

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The post Lily Tests the Steam Controller! appeared first on Gamesline.

Yup, it’s a Girls Night. Lorelai and Lily team up to tackle the pod this week with to talk People of Note, Dawntrail, Marathon, Nioh 2, Knights of the Old Republic, and Final Fantasy XIV Fanfest speculation. On account of it didn’t happen yet when this was recorded. But it did happen now that it was posted. Let’s have smun with it.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, Lorelai at judgementscythe.bsky.social, and Lilith at gallowlessdatura.bsky.social.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Scott B

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 88: Marsupalami Hoobaventure appeared first on Gamesline.

Out of the many FPS released in the past decade, Cruelty Squad is the game which had the most impact on me. It’s made me ponder my own writing, my relationship with the genre, and my personal relationship with aesthetics and what they say about the art you make. It is also just a rollicking good time. Naturally, this is high praise coming from someone such as myself who spends a lot of time being drafted into first person shooter engagements at the behest of numerous people. I could wax poetic but, in this instance, I think I will simply show you.

This is what an early run of Cruelty Squad—a 2021 first-person shooter and organ commerce simulator made by Consumer Softproducts—might look like.

And here is what a late game playthrough of the same level looks like.

Understandably, your first reaction to those two clips will likely be “what the fuck?”, but I assure you I will endeavor to unravel the tangled ball of nonsense I just plopped in front of you. Cruelty Squad is one of my favorite games, dominating my thoughts and resonating with my own anxieties and pessimism surrounding the world I occupy.

I will abstain from indulging in my first instinct, which would be to prattle on about the natural beauty and rhythm of the gameplay mechanics. Instead, I will engage with what an immediate first impression would be, and the reactionary negative response therein. So, in my urge to give the best possible impression of this game which has captured my heart, I have an obligation to disabuse some notions.

Let’s talk about why Cruelty Squad looks like that.

Visions of a Puke-Choked World

Immediate responses to Cruelty Squad’s aesthetic sensibility can be described as “divisive.” The presentation of Cruelty Squad, from its menus to the first combats, feels like an audio-visual attack. Many responses to the game ultimately culminate in saying the game is good despite what it looks like, or reveling in its appearance as a sort of in-joke—a game which refuses those not capable of seeing past its surface level. I don’t particularly identify with either of these ideologies. The aesthetics are not aiming for a refined peer-reviewed art style or sound. It can be summed up in a single word: ugly. Yet, this is not the condemnation it sounds like; intention is the difference.

My enjoyment of the putridity of the presentation of Cruelty Squad feels like the manifestation of a contention within myself. I enjoy dark, frightening, abrasive things. Often, this results in interrogation from other people.

“What is there to be gained from enjoying something like this?”

“Why do you do this to yourself?”

Then, from there, it becomes assertions.

“You are lying if you say you enjoy something like this.”

“You only enjoy this for attention; it isn’t possible to enjoy something like this.”

All comes to a spoken or unspoken conclusion.

“There is something wrong with you for liking art like this.”

People who appreciate such art often spend many dozens of words publicly performing self-awareness; a ritual of showing they too are aware of the grisly, unsettling, or unsightly nature of the media they partake of. Perhaps it isn’t immediately inaccurate: as someone who dumps all her music into one gigantic “liked songs” granfalloon, shuffling from rebarbative death metal to insensate baby music for evil gay people, there are probably more than a few things wrong with me.

Despite saying that, I refuse to deliver an insult upon an art style I genuinely find compelling just to have the appearance of being “in on the joke.” Yes, admittedly, there is an enjoyable teenage-boy-showing-a-classmate-a-particularly-gross-bug factor to repulsing others with art you enjoy. Just so often though, it is isolating. Around the third time someone asked me if my mental state was okay upon streaming this game publicly, I stopped being amused and started thinking those people were incurious at best, and fucking dumb at worst.

No matter how many times I’ve written and rewritten this passage, some level of acrimoniousness creeps into my words. The college professor who lives in my mind is presently shaking their head and reminding me that insults to the audience are generally not convincing; and they’re right, I know that. I have no obligation to defend this game from other people because of the strength of my own convictions—yet I seem to over and over. Even within the words of this supposed “review” I find myself treading the same path I walked in my review of Beyond Citadel and even my more personal works. But such defensiveness feels necessary, months have passed and I still see thumbnails, articles, reviews, all asserting derangement from the art I love. Once more I feel compelled to articulate what seems obvious to me: an inability to understand art does not make it incorrect, “psychotic,” or the spontaneous generation of an intoxicated artist.

Then, I won’t pretend and I will simply say, now many paragraphs in, Cruelty Squad’s aesthetic is both hideous and flawless. Art has no obligation to show you only beautiful things, and the world of Cruelty Squad with its unchecked capitalistic transactions and violence is far from beautiful. Contending with a stock market which runs on human organs as easily as it runs on business acquisitions would not work if the world looked like Cyberpunk 2077. Cruelty Squad’s world is adorned in noisome beiges, nightmare gradients wielding the word PUNISHMENT like a sword; the mall of Cruelty Squad is just as likely to have a zombie-infested meat crypt as a Gamestop containing no games and only selling funkopops.

The music is just as dissonant and frictive as the visuals yet enjoyable enough that I’ve carried it out of the game, much to the chagrin of anyone in proximity to me and an aux cable. The tracks are noisy, unpleasant, and immaculate, from the pulse-pounding “Combat Cocktail” to the menacing yet serene “Divinity of the Office”.

In all the aesthetic presentation of Cruelty Squad there is violence. The rejections of normalcy, of representation of life turned off kilter, is a reconstruction of what is; You are then forced to see what you took for granted from a new perspective. Contained within are sights which I cannot claim to have seen anywhere else. Novelty can be powerful—I have certainly never seen a swamp-themed casino run by a screen contorting cognitohazard—but I also think there is a loudness to the way it rejects normalcy. Some aesthetics, like that of extreme horror, are loud as to be unignorable. The aesthetics of satanic metal are loud; the aesthetics of Cruelty Squad are loud; and so too are the aesthetics of violence.

Seizing the Iron with Your Own Hands

Violence is Cruelty Squad but not in the sense one would traditionally expect of a first-person shooter. Violence pervades every system, the world building, and the architecture of the story itself. The first cutscene prior to picking a mission consists of your protagonist dispassionately watching a mass shooting outside their apartment window before being headhunted into some violence of their own—a gig economy of assassination. 

The repulsiveness of the aesthetics immediately becomes apparent within the mechanics themselves. Instead of the traditional push-button reload, a staple of the FPS for decades, you are asked to hold down the right mouse button and sharply pull the mouse backward and then back up again. This realization and the subsequent clumsiness will likely result in your first death; after which the game will politely inform you that you are a flesh automaton animated by neurotransmitters. You resurrect from the inconvenience of death at a flat rate and then go at it again.

All missions follow the same structure: you have a target—wallhackingly displayed at all times—which you must murder to progress. Most of the time, they aren’t even aggressive; you can strike up a friendly chat about their world views and then discharge a firearm into their head which sounds like it was remixed by Merzbow. 

Hitman, this is not. There is no particular reward for precision, no complaints for misapplicated bullets. Nameless victims get in your way and the only real impact on gameplay is a minor annoyance, bodies blocking bullets meant for more relevant targets. Often this results in their meaty and hyperbolic explosions into viscera, bone, and organs—a monetary windfall to be sold on the stock market.

This is what I alluded to before. Violence is Cruelty Squad in ways beyond the dispensation of firearms. The business of killing is a transaction and so too is the aftermath: to kill someone is to gain the net worth of their organs, and the rest is someone else’s concern. The stock market can be opened, traded on, and manipulated in real time. One can intentionally manipulate the market by watching the targets line up with businesses in game, then flooding the stocks once they react to your murders. One mission, requiring you to kill a political figure, causes the stock market to rapidly inflate with no upper bound. Leaving the game on while this occurs nets you an essentially infinite amount of money and renders the game’s monetary progression meaningless. Wealthy players can purchase everything they want, acquire all resources, and then never need to think of money as anything other than a high score.  

This is both exploit and commentary. The paltry death-inflicted sums of $500 mean nothing when you can generate infinite wealth from someone’s spinal cord. The only real punishment from death is in the form of irritation from your handler; they turn you into some kind of flesh-eating slime beast which lowers your difficulty setting. The cheapness of resurrection, and of life, is also the canonical explanation for mission replayability: the wealthy resurrect and your duty is to cause them to suffer the repeatable inconvenience of death.

Much like the real world, the rich live sheltered lives; they build themselves in cocoons of lavish, unimaginable wealth, sheltered away from the suffering of lesser people. Death, too, is rendered meaningless in the infinite avarice of the high wealth individual.

Meat Grinder God

The story of Cruelty Squad is completely unobtrusive if you allow it to be. On a mission-to-mission basis, you are given a context-establishing text crawl. The missions themselves often provide context-building dialogue either from targets or random NPCs wandering around the location. Generally however, the plot, the reason for your actions, is intentionally obscured and distorted, whether it be through multiple layers of intentional deception or just the way people talk in this universe.

This is not an obstruction to the actual gameplay in any way. You can plunge deep into the gore of Cruelty Squad and not once pay a single thought to the why of it all. With the previously established target-seeking wallhacks you have, a person uninvested can ultimately play through the entire game gathering nothing but the essentials and still see an ending. You can speedrun death until it is as transactional as the stock market ticking away in the background. 

Cruelty Squad is a game where its mechanics tell the story. The mechanics tell you of a world where someone can endlessly resurrect, have a menagerie of firearms and organ-replacing biomods, and murder people in a way which only meaningfully affects stock prices; this is storytelling of a variety where nobody needs to explain how the world works. What lore messages there are tell you of weapons meant to cope with this reality, firearms which scramble DNA to make resurrection harder or other technologies. You live in this world and shoulder the discomfort as a person not made for it; when you see a cruise ship powered by engines made of flesh or a rich neighborhood configured in the shape of a pentagram, it is the player who must understand, not the character.  

That isn’t to say there isn’t a story to dissect. The endings in particular have intrigued me since I 100%’d the game for the first time. There are three; each ending is a response to the world at large. The first one is the most immediately obvious: you simply take the easiest path, free, liberated from context and just following orders. Walk ever forward on the leash your handler tugs, pull your triggers, and then go home. Second, is the hateful path: climb this pile of undying bodies, stand atop it, and feel pride in yourself for being one of the few who makes it. There are thousands beneath you, but this is beyond your concern: you won the game, the economy is yours. Last, you can take the hard path, doing what nobody else can. Where many others roll down this endless hill, you stand up and end it. You break the system nobody thought was breakable. Like a god, you make a new world and everyone else is forced to live in it; through divine idiocy, you bend the world to your individualistic whims.

Thank goodness; finally, after all this time, the first nonpolitical video game.

This is a breathtakingly stupid video game if allowed to be. It is exactly the blind violence aging parents of numerous generations have declared video games to be. Violence for entertainment, pointless and therefore—to many—harmless. This is a viciously cynical video game if allowed to be. A nihilistic story where the world is without death, endlessly wasting its time on banal amusements to no end. A story where nothing matters; make the number go up because skinner boxes have replaced actual value and the stock market ticker is the only thing still moving. In the world of Cruelty Squad, Death, like a transaction, is value. A deathless world is one where life becomes meaningless, an expectation, forever for the sake of forever. Thus, I can find hope in a bleak message. To restore death is to give life weight and have the finite life mean something.  

Gutter Cruiser

I have been critical of the genre of cyberpunk for a long time. Once something with teeth, a prophetic critique of the terror of untamed capital, now just empty aesthetic. Neon tubes, rain on city streets, the distant sounds of firearms popping, and corporations which rule everything. This is no longer fantasy, or even a prediction of the future—it is just reality.

I was shocked by Cruelty Squad’s ascendance of the Cyberpunk aesthetic. It made a world I would absolutely on no level want to live in, yet I must acknowledge its similarities to our own. It eschews paths which would have made for an easier story to tell, an easier pill to swallow. The mechanics are intentionally rough, the story opaque. Its aesthetics are abrasive and avoid the comprehensibility of much more “put-together” games.

I initially played Cruelty Squad at a time when the capitalistic pressures of the world were utterly suffocating me. Healthcare and its bureaucracy were grinding me to nothing while I watched people with more net worth than I can ever dream of pay to avoid the lethality of the world. The bodies piled in the streets, and I found this game, harshly cynical and putridly honest; it resonated. When I first saw the trailer, with its aggressive grinding music and despair-inducing messages, I felt something. It was not positive, nor negative, just a fragment of my soul echoing. Just then, the trailer gave a message, like it was just for me.

“Does this even make you feel something?”

I can answer now, in full honesty, that it does.

I felt the crushing despair of capitalistic grinding teeth. I felt the hollow joys of a power fantasy: perhaps if there are a thousand evil people with guns, one good person with a gun could solve some problems; the same delusion which has ruled American media for centuries. I felt a quaking shadow of a future where one can choose to accept falling down the mountainside, letting the machinations of others define your life trajectory. And I have felt Cruelty Squad.  

The post An Incision Tracing the Stock Market Curve — Cruelty Squad Review appeared first on Gamesline.

After a brief stop, the Gamesline Podcast returns as John, Lily, Lorelai, and Rose sit down to talk about what they’ve been playing. John’s been big into RetroAchievements with games like Community Pom, Hatsune Miku Bomb Squad, and Azure Dreams while also digging deep into Pokopia, Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, and the new Umamusume scenario. Lorelai’s also been in that one when she’s not playing Monster Hunter Stories 3 or Nioh 3. Rose has been digging into Vital Shell, Resident Evil 9, and Crimson Desert when she’s not Playing Marathon with Lily whose been getting up to shenanigans in the Final Fantasy XIV Occult Crescent and Trails to Azure.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, John, Rose, Lilith, and Lorelai.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited and Produced by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 85: The Tale of Kliff McDuff appeared first on Gamesline.

I often find myself in a similar rut between games. Not everything can sing to your soul; trying to find the importance in something you don’t give a shit about just makes you feel fraudulent. So I found myself in familiar trappings: games which weren’t breaking new ground but felt like I was doing something. I did my Final Fantasy dailies; I dallied with Monster Hunter; I tried out Marathon—the new one, not the original one, we live in Hell. While fun, none of it filled the void in me demanding satiation.

You can imagine me, head on desk, various drink cans piled upon my noggin, making sounds reserved for cats and bored games writers.

I found myself thinking about speed, about motion, the primal building blocks to my satisfaction. I played through all of Pseudoregalia, a free and flowing platformer. I wrote several drafts worth of thoughts on it; all of them found their way to my recycle bin. I replayed the majority of Super Mario Sunshine thinking about our long-standing relationship, a game which has followed me though all of the stages of my life. Those thoughts didn’t even exit my head; they were too abstract and sentimental to encode into something worth reading.

The groaning exiting my mouth and the grinding sensation in my brain intensified. I wanted something quick, something which could accelerate my heartbeat and make me feel alive again. I wanted competition, my primal darkness which compelled me to hunt down fellow gamers.

I scrolled through my games. Dead faces stared back at me from digital blue-grey tumulus with resounding goose egg player counts. Games, once played, interred in silicon graves; Ozymandias’ trunkless legs standing in the midst of a vast digital desert.

A dark miasma coiled around the room, pouring out of my monitor and clouding my thoughts. A nightmare more frightening than anything a mortal could imagine presented itself before me: Counter-Strike 2. It batted its eyelashes at me from my Steam library.

“You could always give it another try,” it said. “You’re probably still halfway decent.”

Beads of sweat collected on my forehead.

“Hey. Unreal Tournament 2004 is having a comeback,” said my partner from across the room.

“Oh shit, for real?”

A Shock Combo with Twenty-two Years Lead Time

Unreal Tournament 2004 in 2026 was a fascinating experience. It is both timeless and dated in a way only an arena shooter is capable of. The music pounds with an early 2000s industrial trance beat, immediately hypnotic yet non-descript. The weapons are these obtuse, strange things constructed by a gamer mind only obliquely aware of how a firearm works. Movement is sublimely clunky yet flowing; side-hops chain into momentum-boosting double jumps, which chain into exploding into meat because you fell into a spiral of cluster rockets. UT2004 is the only—non-pornographic—game in recent memory which could force me to read the sentence “Memphis was carved up by Cleopatra’s Green Shaft.”

It was a beautiful and sublime crystallization of a time I never got to experience new. CTF-Face is a map I only ever got to see as a pseudo-nostalgic drum and bass playlist on YouTube and now I got to see it in-engine; it felt like some kind of inevitable prophecy coming to its final act.

Yes, I write this with zero nostalgia of my own, playing only as a person seeing the game for the first time. That being said, I was fascinated by the differences in game design ideology between then and today. The game is feature complete, with no battlepass, and no promise of additional characters or skins in the content pipeline. All maps are either in the base game or provided by the community. New game modes are invented in real time out of a robust suite of “mutators,” modifying the standard gameplay. This game is finished, “dead” even in the eyes of some, yet we’re still playing it. This is the product of a twenty-two-year long resurrection made by a loving fanbase.

My partner and I played into the wee hours of the night, roleplaying as 800kb/s internet wielders listening to D&B while vaporizing one another into piles of cartilage. It was, in a sense, a playable museum, albeit one where a rejected Transformers design can coldly say “Die, Bitch” in a way definitely intended to sound hard to a demographic devoid of maidens. Yet, even as I raised an eyebrow at the misogyny of yesteryear, I was fascinated by the return of this “dead” game.

Back in the modern world of gaming, it’s dire out there. Games are announced, cancelled, and expunged from memory within a year of release. A community might call a game dead when comparing its player base to its contemporaries, because it doesn’t have a “content” pipeline which suits their tastes, or in some cases, simply because a YouTuber told them so. Yet, are such proclamations truthful? I still sit in a lobby with other people, twenty-two years after the release of this game, and it has the audacity to still exist. Old Unreal is easy enough to find, easy enough to download from, and off you go; people cared, and so the game is allowed to exist.

Many other games haven’t passed this test of time. My Steam library is a veritable graveyard of games which haven’t received the same love or attention. Strike Vector, Loadout, dozens more. Those games died despite all the happy memories contained within. Most people, it seems, just take it on the chin; this is simply the fate of all online games. One day, the lights go out, and the game dies.

Is this truly necessary though? We see this game make a return to a fanbase still willing to play it even if they only number in the hundreds. I believe, genuinely, that as long as there is someone to keep the lights on, someone to pass the torch along, there is no reason a game as a piece of art can’t live forever. How many apocalypses has something like Team Fortress 2 weathered? Yet the fanbase continues trucking along, for better or worse.

Ultimately, games only truly die when they are killed.

Trash Decade

In a less healthy period of my life, I played a lot of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4—Black Ops 4? Black Ops IV? Black Ops IIII? Who is responsible for this?

Anyway, I was playing a lot of Call of Duty: Black Ops 𒇹 in a state not dissimilar to how I described myself in the first segment: I was between games and desperate to satiate some dark urge inside of myself for murder and violence. Humble Bundle delivered unto me this piece of shit, which would take over my life for approximately one summer but no longer.

The game was ever so slightly more textured than the usual CoD fare. There were still killstreaks, but this foray was hero-based, and made you heal for yourself instead of sucking your thumb until the screen stops being goopy. The game was hypnotizing, dreary yet intoxicating, like the last 4 to 5 cm of a tallboy. The content, the battlepasses, even my fellow players meant very little to me; I was just here for something to jolt my brain and remind me I was alive every now and again.

Yet despite my criticisms, it was not by my own hand that I ceased playing; that decision was made for me. I was queuing one day, as per usual in my apocalyptic spiral to avoid checking what day it was. I was queuing. I was queuing for a very long time. This, I felt, was an exceptionally long time to queue, even for a game like Call of Duty: Black Ops 𐍆𐌹𐌳𐍅𐍉𐍂—this is the last time I’ll do this joke, I promise.

My frustration mounted but I kept waiting. It was only after getting up and forcing myself to live in my own thoughts for a while that I realized no game was coming. I exited the queue and stared at the loadout which had ferried me to something resembling catharsis. A phantom image of a dying horse begging to be put out of its misery popped into my mind, a decidedly not normal thing to think while staring at a firearm. I left the multiplayer menu; a jovial popup informed me it was time to purchase the new Call of Duty, to replace the old Call of Duty I was already playing. I made a throaty sound, roughly like a parent discovering a child entering the house past curfew, and exited the program. I have not opened it since.

I feel like the experience I just described is familiar to most gamers. We play multiplayer(or just online) games until we get distracted and find the doors closed, or we watch horrified as they unbuild themselves from underneath us. It is rare to decide your relationship with such a game has run its course, as there is no fixed narrative conclusion. We use it up until it is gone, or gone from us.

But it’s not solely on the consumer in such cases. Obviously the most guilty persons in the room are those who turn games into nothing but products. A game can live but must die because there is no profit motive for allowing it to stay living. A server browser might confuse your audience, after all; you have to handle the queuing for them. Sometimes 200 people isn’t enough to make a single game; you can only deliver the highest quality match. You cannot simply hand over the rights to run it off to the fans; think about your brand! It is childish to assume that these things can live forever, eventually the servers just need to come down, says a sales rep interested in selling you your dreams.

There is a learned helplessness, or at least an apathy, which emerges from such eventualities. We cope with the terror of the things we love being snatched away from us by pretending it is all inevitable—just move on to the next thing. This works ideally for the executioners of games: those who continue the commercialization of an art form into discardable toys, disposability with intent to incentivise more purchases. Live service games fill you with anxiety, a terror of losing out which manipulates your behavior to be more receptive toward choosing a single game to rule your recreation time; that is, until the game meets end of life and all of it was for naught anyway.

“Buy the new game”, a helpful prompt in the menu says underneath an end-of-life banner, flickering like a halogen bulb in a soon to be bankrupt grocery chain. “It’s all the same shit with a longer number at the end.”

Graveyard Planet

Being in the industry of games sucks right now. Discord sucks right now. Credit card companies would still really like for you to not be able to buy completely legal material. Your genuine attempts to preserve art will be met with a cease and desist orbital strike.

This is not, however, the inescapable fate of things. It is useful to call these trends unpleasant and to bring them to other’s attention. Knowing one’s material conditions are not acceptable is only the first step, however. Being able to imagine a better existence is the next step to building it, and while one pithily stating that something sucks and everything was always fucked since before you were even born might be attention grabbing, it doesn’t need to be the truth. It cultivates despair, but it should drive you to action, not simply angered capitulation; you do not have to simply accept that the things you love will be taken from you and then sold back to you in glorious, fucked up DLSS5.

Unreal Tournament 2004 still lives past its expiry date. Even the aforementioned Black Ops 4 has a modified client enabling play years past the expiration of its servers—I didn’t even know that, I discovered it while writing this essay, crazy right? Even the previously mentioned Strike Vector and Loadout have fan servers!

People have a tendency to always look for what is new, for the next new dopamine hit. I get it. The world is a really stressful place and we’re constantly looking for a feeling as big as the first time we ever loved something. A lot of my own personal attempts to find a new thing to light my heart on fire have been fruitless, but there is just as much beauty to be found in old things as new. The last essay I wrote was about how I looked backward and found something to love in things I missed, and just as often I could keep digging.

There are more games than I could ever learn and play in a single lifetime. I could play through the entire NES catalogue and find things nobody ever talks about. I could go on a quest to dig through an obscure console and find beautiful gems overlooked by people whose entire childhood was the PS2. I’m not insulting people who don’t go off the beaten path; I think there is much to value in even the more obvious places. Yet, cultivating a taste beyond what is obvious will open doors you never knew existed. Who cares if they’re dead; you, the player, are the one bringing it to life!

The old will always outnumber the new. The more you allow yourself to appreciate things outside of the immediate era, the more you can bring life to things beyond the year you live in. You don’t have to simply end your choices with the things sold or advertised to you. If MOBAs have gotten stale, try learning about where their inspirations emerged from. If you don’t enjoy the current extraction shooter trend, play the games from before they emerged. You will likely be surprised that other people still play them, or could be convinced to play them, if you’re insistent enough.

Nosgoth, a peculiar asymmetric team-based shooter entry of the Legacy of Kain series, has been resurrected; it can be played with the assistance of a modified client and a Discord server, if you’re so inclined. Anarchy Reigns, an often forgotten PlatinumGames online beat ’em up, has returned in the form of PS3 emulation, online functionality restored. All returned because people cared enough to gaze backward.

A sense of curiosity can foster a change; incuriosity often puts you at the mercy of those most invested in making a sale. Digging deep in forgotten places, in the areas which aren’t immediately appealing, can lead to great discoveries, and in turn bring vital blood back to the origins of the hobby. A little care and attention can resurrect the dead.

As long as people continue to care, a game can continue to exist. Modders will make custom clients, emulators will enable old games to live on new platforms, and even the most passionate will take server architecture into their own hands. The Concords and Highguards of the world are dispiriting, yes, but as people who care for this medium of art, it is our duty to take the things we love and carry them with us. A corporation preserving the things they make should never be the expectation, especially when they are financially disincentivized from doing so. Preservation is not impossible; we can love the things we love, provided we hold on tightly and refuse to allow them to be taken. Doing the work is hard but I think the effort is necessary.

A lone server in a game’s server browser, for those who will play can be enough. A person developing a website which enables others to remember that old things still exist can be enough. A person with a following and a curiosity in dead things can inspire others to pick through this graveyard with them.

So, won’t you go graverobbing with me?

The post Dead Games and the Necromancy of Love appeared first on Gamesline.

In this city, one hope shines through the night: The Gamesline Podcast starring John, Rose, Lilith, and Nikolas! John enters the pastoral world of Pokopia while also returning to Raccoon City in Resident Evil 9. Rose played many games, including Resident Evil 9, Nioh 3, Marathon, Slay the Spire 2, Trails Beyond the Horizon, and Mewgenics! Lily played ULTRAKILL Layer 8: Fraud, Trails to Azure, Monster Hunter Rise and numerous Next Fest demos, including Annihilated, Cicadamata, and Firestarters. Finally, Nikolas has also been playing ULTRAKILL and Mewgenics!

In the news, Nagoshi Studio is in danger of shuttering, Nintendo is suing the US government over tariffs, PlayStation isn’t going PC ports anymore, Xbox is officially making a new console, Pokemon Winds and Waves was announced, Highguard is shutting down, a new Hunter: The Reckoning game was accidentally revealed, and Cookie’s Bustle is free from spurious copyright claims.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, John, Rose, Lilith, and Nikolas.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Crystal with video production by John

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 84: Cookie is Free appeared first on Gamesline.

Recently, mainstream JRPG releases have consistently disappointed. Many of the most popular, big-budget releases are, generally speaking, fine; they’re well made but they aren’t exactly breaking new ground. Much of their material has been either co-opted by other genres or said before. That’s the biggest problem, really: it’s not the early 2000s anymore. My mind still believes this is the way longform fantasy stories are told, yet the times have changed. What people consider to be a “big game” is no longer a 70-80 hour epic of a story delivered through exposition and turn-based combat; they’re often open-world action RPGs with an emphasis on sizzle and spectacle. Even Final Fantasy has gradually evolved to meet this shifting cultural expectation.

JRPGs, when released intentionally under that label, seem to be operating under a similar misapprehension. They all seem afflicted with a self-indulgent recursion; navel-gazing games which seem to think storytelling began and ended with Chrono Trigger. Repeatedly they seem to say: remember Pokemon? Remember Final Fantasy VII? Mother 3 was pretty cool, right?To me these aren’t unplayable games from some bygone era, they are very much living and breathing because nobody allows them to fucking die. It is one thing to take inspiration from a beloved story, it is entirely another to repeatedly resell the same story while littering it with little winks to the audience which seem to say, “yeah, I know good games.”

I imagine my opinion can be potentially read as mean-spirited, but I only wish for this genre, one I have dedicated so much of my life to, to grow up and tell a story which doesn’t heavily borrow all its ideas from its predecessors. Yet, it seems more and more this is not going to be the case.

One could argue this is the nature of genre—familiar trappings which define this particular branch of gaming—but I’m not convinced. Motifs and tropes are a useful language for conveying complex ideas quickly, but something constructed entirely out of allusions to other things will be reduced down to a ghost of a story; forcing the remembrance you could be playing something with actual ideas instead.

When modern times fail me, I do what I usually do: I look back, to the things I missed the first time. John—your friendly CEO of gaming—knocked me onto this path when he gifted me The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. In his own words, this was a game Xenogears-enjoyers seemed to like. Nothing else was particularly interesting at the moment; I figured I would give it a chance.

Now, nearly 300 hours of JRPG later, I have words to say about it and, John, if you ever gift me a game that fundamentally alters the course of my life again, I will be forced to take legal action.

This is not going to be comprehensive, and in the interest of both myself and my editors, this will contain no story recap. From this point on, when I refer to Trails, I refer to it in respect to this particular segment of the story I have experienced. This consists of the three Trails in the Sky games as well as the Crossbell duology of Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure.

Trails is a story told in arcs, and over the period of five games, I have felt myself go through something of an arc. Even though it’s not the end of the chronicle, it feels spiritually analogous to a conclusion. These were games once rendered in chunky sprites upon 3D backgrounds. Hereafter, they traded their garb for something more contemporary. This transition, especially after the time I’ve spent with it, seems like something I should honor; it is the bow I need to place on top to consider it “done” in my mind.

A World of Change

Any story can worldbuild, and many do, often with mixed results. Writers joke about the nonproductiveness of worldbuilding—you can do it forever and still have nothing to show for it. Trails however is uniquely fascinated with the construction of its own world, and it only seems to be growing.

Video game worldbuilding exists on a spectrum. Some games pay only lip service to the world; it is merely the space your avatar inhabits during play sessions. Others can have intricately laid out lore but ultimately convey it in an unusable way, telling you thousands of details with none relevant to play.

Trails’ world is relevant and, more importantly, fractal. Our knowledge of an area tends to grow broader and more abstract the further away it is. The knowledge of where you live, for instance, contains individual places, streets, people; while things further away tend to grow blurred and indistinct, reduced down to something your mind can better compartmentalize.

Zemuria, the setting of Trails, is a massive continent, but in any given game, you hear about far away places in the same way someone might tell you about the concept of something in another city. You learn the little details actually interfaced with; they aren’t forcing the entire Wikipedia article for Japan into your brain. This evokes a more natural curiosity, especially knowing those places are real, can come up, and often are the setting of future games.

Each individual Trails game tends to set its focus small, at least when compared to other JRPGs, which tend to be concerned with what occurs on the entire planet. When you exist in a particular nation, the nation’s problems balloon in both your mind, and those of the involved characters. While sometimes the fate of the continent is at stake, one often spends the most time in Trails experiencing the problems of a singular nation or even a singular city. In the first two Trails games—Trails in the Sky and Trails in the Sky SC—you are predominantly concerned with the goings-on in the small, mountain nation of Liberl. Things happen in other countries and impact your little microcosm, but the issues which unfold exclusively involve your neck of the woods. Warmongering elsewhere is frightening, but only because you know how it could impact you and the place you live. The decision to keep the scope small in this way keeps the struggles of the setting feeling real and relevant, free from abstraction.

The interposition between the broad and the hyper-specific is what makes the world so compelling. We know there is an Empire to the north filled to the brim with war hawks, but in this small village lies a single man in a store we frequent, who needs help. So you help. It is information conveyed in a human fashion. News of something horrible happening in another place is abstract and difficult to conceptualize without the presence of a person being affected by it. The individual is the emotional anchor which helps you better understand the wider reaching ramifications. This, to me, feels like an expression of the pain and anxieties of the real world. I may be forced to contend with the horrors coming out of a nation which isn’t mine, powerless, but I can help in the community I live in.

Trails’ relationship with technology further grounds players. Compared to many other JRPGs, the Trails series is much more “contemporary fantasy.” Technology and magic coexist; a dragon and a mech can be on the screen at the same time. As the series goes on and the timeline progresses, so too marches the inevitable progress of industry and technology. Many other games handwave subjects which don’t interest the writer. “The technology is magic; it works because it is magic technology—please don’t worry about it.”

Trails by comparison has a technological revolution as the series’ backbone for most of its games; it is both relevant to gameplay and plot. We see the burgeoning invention of the automobile, phones, telecommunication, and the internet. These stories lean into socio-political conflicts and the changing relationship between communities because of this technology. Though magic and technology co-exist, it mostly avoids the genre touchstone of magic traditionalism vs technology progressivism. There is conflict between progress and tradition, as in real life, but it comes across less like they are ontologically opposed concepts.

This approach to technology is a further expression of worldbuilding precisely because it is tactile. The things we can hold have a way of conveying where we exist in time; things thrown away remind us of what has passed. Time progresses as we realize a favorite film is suddenly, terrifyingly, ten years older than we remember it being; VHS or DVDs are no longer the standard way of conveying sound and video. Many games fail at such an organic conveyance of time passing. Fantasy worlds often enter technological stagnation out of aesthetic fear; the author is a little too scared of the game escaping from the medieval fantasy trappings and resultantly cripples any attempt at making a sense of time or place. Trails, it seems, has no such fears, and the world feels all the more real for it.

A grounded relationship with technology allows Trails’ world to comment on things which then feel organic and fresh. How does an adventuring guild deal with the burgeoning technology of the internet, cyber security, and hacking? How does a city and its developing roads deal with the real threat of spontaneously generated monsters? A willingness to engage with the conceit of one’s own setting allows the setting itself to be an infinite story engine.

Even the trope of the “bygone era” can be explored when you are interested in the worldbuilding ramifications of what such things present. Zemuria has a “lost era of fancy and decadence” like many RPGs, but avoids the often disquieting prelapsarian urge to return to it. We are told the ancients of the old world brought their own destruction and created a thousand-year dark age born of irresponsibility and bad decisions. Because the game does not abandon the chronology with every entry, the big truths revealed can stay true and the world continues to reckon with them.

Paragon of the Community

Worldbuilding is nice, but where many stories fail is in conveyance. They repeat the mistake of having “the wise character” dryly convey what the rules of the setting are, and completely flout any attempt at naturalistic storytelling. Video games are incredibly guilty of this. The amount of village elders who have started sentences with “as you know,” only to tell me the most asinine explanation of a magic system are too many to name. This should be a crime.

Another frequent crime of video games are side quests. Side quests typically don’t have the level of consequence to make for a substantive experience, usually ending up a utilitarian excuse to remain in the world for a little while longer, or simply a change of pace. It is material one typically considers as a passenger of the world, not an occupant of it. In a world of thousands of towers to climb in empty fields, or collectable baubles which exist to arbitrarily gate you from the actual ending, it’s easy to want to give substantial amounts of side material a pass. I am completely okay with my dead little brother going unhonored if it means I don’t have to collect 100 pigeon feathers; I am too busy stabbing the neighboring villagers in the throat with wrist-mounted cutlery to care.

Trails puts a lot of effort into ameliorating both of these game design woes. Side quests are a means by which Trails offers meaningful and substantial information about the nature of the world and its characters through naturalistic storytelling. This avoids more blatant player-oriented exposition. Paying attention to this information is often rewarded, in some cases with whole quests you would have missed if inattentive. In this way, the game rewards you for paying attention to the setting by granting you both material gifts as well as more information on the setting and events. This cycle of seeding information and seeing it meaningfully paid off invigorates world-player interfacing. You care more each and every time you are rewarded for doing so.

Even mundane dialogue can be rewarding for players who meaningfully engage with the world. Where another game might only update dialogue after meaningful story progression, Trails loves to update what characters have to say after basically any passage of time. There really is no such thing as a character revoking their personhood as soon as you finish their arc. A stranger has passed into your home village? You had better believe this is the talk of town.

Talking to NPCs might not seem like riveting gameplay in most games, but when you can watch the quiet parenthetical of other people’s lives playing out in real time, it becomes gripping. Will the girl obsessed with finally overtaking the city’s best baker come out on top? You better talk to her every single day to find out. Writers who put an absolutely monumental level of effort into making the NPCs feel like living people is an immediate difference from many other contemporary JRPGs.

The amount of dialogue becomes even more impressive when you consider the substantive interconnection between characters. NPCs exist outside of your characters and interact even when you aren’t watching them do so. Characters might comment on the location of another, which can allude to their motivations and actions to come. NPCs involved with side quests might provide additional insights which will be relevant when the game does one of its many “are you paying attention” tests during main story progression. Even outside of plot relevance, connections can come up in a way comparable to real life; a person randomly reveals that they have familiarity and a connection to a person you’ve already met several cities away.

Allow me to tell a story of this happening across two games. In Trails from Zero, you are regularly given missions by way of a computer console which more or less self-schedules your day for you if you are playing in the most strictly linear way. However, each and every day you are free to explore the lavishly expansive city of Crossbell; doing so often awards you with aforementioned hidden quests.

One such quest, “Search for the Kitten’s Owner,” sounds like both the joke and punchline for another game giving you busywork. You are tasked to find the owner of a lost cat found by two children, Ryu and Anri, who you have met previously. You talk to every child in an entire region of the city, which silently tests you to see if you remember where the people in the city tend to be.

Eventually you are acquainted with stockbroker Bond and his daughter, Sunita. Bond confidently declares that no cat lives in their household, which seems like a dead end. Eventually after some investigation, you discover Sunita has been taking care of the cat, but some anxieties have prevented her from revealing this to her father. Thus the game establishes the characters Sunita and Bond. In many games, this would end there; both characters would be resolved back into generic substrate.

Four chapters later, we are reacquainted with Sunita, potentially for the first time if you missed this quest. After interacting with a mysterious drug which has been running rampant in the city, Bond has gone missing; you know this is odd behavior for him because you met him previously and know he cares for his family. A simple but effective call for investment that doesn’t end there.

In the very next game, Trails to Azure, we once again find Sunita and Bond, living in a different home after the events of the prior game. In predictable cat fashion, their cat, Marie, is missing again. A newly introduced character and complication, Shirley, tags along to assist you, further entwining the old and the new. Over the course of this quest, you interface with a group of trashy corporate boys, from a country thus far only alluded to, who underscore the current issue of nationwide unrest occurring in the main plot; Shirley herself implies the political conflict of a different nation, which is colliding here in Crossbell.

Doing this quest reminds you of several other key actors who had been dormant since the last game, the Arc en Ciel theater troupe. We again see them intermesh with the new character of Shirley and the complications her presence implies. An actor of the theater troupe, who has a shadowy identity of their own, sotto voce implies familiarity with this new character; it remains a secret to the protagonists.

All of this intermeshing because of a cat who happens to get lost twice.

This intermingling avoids the divide between mundane individuals and “guy with white hair, tragic backstory, and limit break.” When everyone has a name and a place in the world, you see people as the complex individuals they are rather than the roles they occupy or services they provide. It feels like its own kind of social commentary: everyone has the capacity to be interesting if you take the time to know them.

None of this material is mandatory but it is meaningful; when the characters feel like people and the quests influence and change dialogue, you feel a greater desire to engage with the world. It makes even the main story content feel more substantial. Your role in the world is easy to fit into because your agency is actually respected. The story doesn’t need to make you the most important person in the world to make you care. When a game’s world constantly flatters you, it is easy to disassociate from anything not fluttering its eyelashes and telling you what a special fucking guy you are. Trails makes you care about aspects of the world in a human way: you are part of the world, you know the people in it and the ways your actions meaningfully affect them. It is because it is small and ultimately mundane, that I cared.

One Mundane Day in a Sea of Exciting Ones

Mundane can be an upsetting word to have associated with your work. The highest of high fantasy hate the idea of being mundane.

“No, our world is super fucking weird dude, instead of phones we got… the crystals, which work like phone.”

This to me is an insulting attempt to generate novelty, which ultimately makes a story for no one. Or worse, you accept nothing but trappings of the preaccepted idea of what fantasy is allowed to be; It is completely and utterly pedestrian.

Trails is mundane in the way a warm Sunday morning with a cup of coffee on the porch is mundane; the way having a loving but ordinary breakfast with your partner is mundane.

Trails is a franchise obsessed with the mundanity of ordinary life. Trails in the Sky is almost entirely what would be an introductory chapter of a different game which goes on for approximately forty hours. Even its explosive “story-starting” plot points are restrained in comparison. The contemporaneous entries of Final Fantasy released adjacent to Trails’ first chapter start on an apocalyptic destruction of a city and the political murder of a monarch; Trails, by comparison, begins with you starting your first day of work.

Sure, there is an empire to the north but there’s no explosive war happening right now. Sure, there is a legendary dragon which dwells in these lands but for the most part he’s just chilling. There is political unrest and civilians being let down by the systems meant to serve them, but that shit is just the news. Things stay this way until the signs which allude to upheaval become a full on earthquake.

Mundanity is so often defined by its antithesis; when horrible things happen, you can’t help but reflect on how life was normal just hours before. Things going sideways in the Trails series are juxtaposed with hours of people living their best, if ordinary, lives. When the worst comes to pass, the people you have come to care about are the ones to suffer; and often, you know the names and identities of those responsible.

Pain too can be mundane. Trails uses this mundanity to talk about things other games intentionally avoid. While it doesn’t always get things right, and sometimes stumbles, its willingness to talk about things like the realities of warfare, up to material as intense as CSA, is a type of painful mundanity. Things like war, or rape, or abuse are just edgy melodrama in many games; they talk about dark themes but in a way which wears darkness as a fashion accessory, rather than something it is interested in meaningfully engaging.

Fantasy worlds are frightened by the idea of such normal pains. “This fantasy world doesn’t have to deal with sex trafficking or systematic racism unless it’s inflicted on an orc or cat girl.” Trails’ willingness to talk about such subjects comes across as mature simply because it is willing to talk about them at all.

Antagonistic factions are often just as human in their mundanity. Violence breaks out as conflicts between people, not because demons spawned outside of town the second things got a little too peaceful; the presence of random monsters is treated the way real life treats wild animals–they aren’t evil, just inconvenient when they interfere with humanity. Even when an antagonist’s actions are unforgivable, it often comes from a specific rhetoric or political position which defines them. It isn’t always the deepest thing in the world, but at the very least it gets over the all too common bar of ontological evil. A villain who over the course of the plot chooses to abuse children does so for a simple reason: they do not care about the outcomes of their actions on others, and it suits their needs to do so, not because it is a fundamental aspect of their identity.

Even then, Trails avoids making singular villains responsible for all the world’s ills; instead, much conflict is born from factional interplay. For example, the machinations of a series of mercenaries committing violence for money is headed by an important leader, but said faction represents a way of life which abuts with other factions, not a single man in control of all wrongdoing in the world. These factions make sense to the people who occupy them and, in much the same way as real life, they foster a community which lives to self-perpetuate given it continues to meet their needs; or, failing that, because the world continues to deprive them of what they actually need.

Of course, it isn’t just the antagonists who organize. The first game is defined by the induction of our two protagonists into the Bracer Guild, a group engaged in community outreach across the continent; it solves problems with the flexibility and compassion of individuals, defusing conflict governments cannot. In the Crossbell arc, the Special Support Section is formed from a similar ethos, quite literally mirroring the behaviors of the Bracer guild.

This is what I see as the core of Trails—community. It links all my prior points together and becomes what I value most. The NPCs, the world building, the side content. You watch as a world becomes a series of interlocking networks, irremovable without digging up another part of the world. The protagonists are guardians of the community, defending it from disruptions and outside malfeasant actors. To abide by this community, you must be a part of it, both in and out of character. You do the side quests because ultimately your immersion demands it; you are someone in the role of helping others. You pay attention to the details of the world because you are meaningfully affected by them as a member of the community. You talk to the NPC because they are the roots in your network.

Even from within the plot, the mundane connection of community becomes Trails. The Bracer guild, the Special Support Section, and even the villainous factions are forms of community. They rise from need, and whether adaptive or maladaptive, they suit the needs of the people who join them; they serve and are of service.

A Thousand Hours More

Trails is defined by its most delightful mundanity; it is the palate cleanser I didn’t even know I needed. Games which feature a protagonist’s home burning as the anguished hero stoically stares into the flames are a dime a dozen; a game that can make me care if a random guy in town decided to stay in medical school or not, is really something special.

Both the pain of disenfranchisement and the joy of bonds define Trails. It feels relevant and timely, even now. In our time where the affliction of loneliness seems worse than it has ever been, despite constant connection, it’s important to remember the bonds shared together. It is a series interested in and intrigued by the little people, the ones who might not solve the big problems but day after day, week after week show up to attend to the small ones.

I can’t pretend Trails does everything right. There are patches of insensitivity, many friends of mine have alerted me to a precipitous drop in quality to come, and in some senses the slowness can be too slow. All that said however, it’s a franchise which has—thus far—managed to make me feel something in a genre I love, when many other games have not. This of course can be tied up in a lot of things; I could simply be experiencing a shift in prioritization, for instance, but I would be loath to say it is anything as simple as just being fresh.

Craft is a thing I endlessly appreciate. When a game is made by a person having a good time, intentionally seeking to express something, it can be an enjoyable experience even when there are bumps in the road. I also love games meticulously ground down and polished over thousands of iterations. Something simple can be beautiful when worked down to its most unadulterated pure concept.

The Trails games ultimately feel like neither of these things, a perfect middle point of design maximalism. The jaggedness of encounter balance is frequently alarming, exploding you with ice-wielding sewer toucans without warning. There are times where the gameplay feels like a tertiary concern when compared to the lavish treatment of the writing. Yet, I can only find myself compelled.

There have been very few games with this much emphasis placed on writing, characters, and immersion, combined with this particular sense of aesthetic; it hits my buttons in a way that makes me feel like I was always the target audience. On more than one occasion I have said that this game feels like a portal into someone else’s nostalgia for this genre. It is a glimpse back in time, back when this genre had novel ideas and wasn’t simply a series of outstanding examples endlessly copycatted until I almost wished they never existed at all.

Despite the implied cynicism, I will continue to play Trails; I will continue to play JRPGs even as I find myself growing more and more estranged from the kind of things fellow fans seem to want and appreciate. In the end, I just love a world that feels like I could ask a question about the setting and somewhere—provided I had the know-how and the desire to dig—find an answer.

Many games are simply impressions of worlds. The electrical lines don’t actually connect to anything, the streams, topologically speaking, run uphill, and the people would starve to death because technically there isn’t enough farmland to support this population size. Those things are fine too, and even Trails isn’t immune to such oddities—it is, after all, incredibly difficult to make a world. Yet I love its detail, I love its characters, and I love a game that makes me feel guilty for not finishing side quests; not because of some lingering remnant of completionism, but because I felt like someone actually needed my help.

Ultimately, a world is a living thing, as long as we believe in it, it lives. I believe in the world of Trails. I’m excited to see what it lives to do.

The post The Trails Franchise and My Growing Love of the Mundane appeared first on Gamesline.