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.

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Another week, another Gamesline Podcast! This week, John’s been playing Resident Evil 4 and 7 along with Pikmin 4 Fierce mode. Nikolas has started Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and is digging into The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. In the news, Harada has joined SNK for some reason and SEGA has cancelled their mobile Super Game.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, John, 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 90: Upside-Down Pikmin appeared first on Gamesline.

It goes by quick: the story of an imperfect yet happy family turned into a placid examination of an estranged and resentful relationship that forms between mother and daughter after the passing of their husband and father. The daughter – Adora – is tasked by her aunt to find an old key in her childhood home. During her search, she uncovers old memories by cleaning and restoring certain small objects in the house – like a record player and a typewriter – that each house their own unique anecdote.  

She catches glimpses of her mother’s old accolades as a writer, a pursuit she seemingly dropped out of nowhere despite some modest success. After her father’s death, Adora takes up making music, a hobby that reminds her of her father, and makes for her mother a cassette tape with music that reflects her desire to connect and comfort her. But her mother, predictably overworked in her drive to repress her own feelings of grief, throws it in the trash and admonishes Adora for being so reckless with her future, in wasting her time with a pointless hobby. Understandably, their relationship worsens, and when Adora goes off to her adult life, she refuses to call her until she’s proven her wrong. Her mother dies before they ever reconcile with each other, and her regret is obviously sour.  

I love to engage in anticipatory regret. One of my more pressing regrets is that when my parents eventually pass on, it’ll be a righteously unsatisfactory ending to a deeply dysfunctional familial situation. There’s no reconciling, because the situation only persists thanks to my casual lifelong performance as anyone except the kinds of people they deeply fear (gay, leftist, etc) and they allow themselves the peace of sweet ignorance. It’s alienating and weird. I think of it as a thin veil – we are opposed in virtually every way that matters, but they are all I have, so I know at some point I’m going to be like Adora, wishing for different circumstances, a better end to a path that only goes in one direction.

My own memory is pretty spotty, specifically in terms of my own childhood and periods of my life that occurred farther than ten years in the past. Letting a memory attach to something physical is a pretty powerful tool to keep an internal narrative going, especially as a person who never took up writing in a diary. I’ve been dragging around things for over a decade now, from apartment to apartment, simply because it holds the potential to help me remember something I at some point wanted to remember. Occasionally, during the few times per year I wander around the house I grew up in, I’ll pick up some old toy or stuffed animal given to me in a brief moment of harmony in an otherwise turbulent childhood and feel the fog of war lift from some part of my mind. Cleaning off the objects in Undusted feels similarly peaceful, brushing out the crud in the corners and wiping off grime; and finding little pockets of dirt in old gadgets opens the moment of reminiscence to breathe and reach its natural conclusion. 

The end of Adora’s story is the realization that she and her mother were suffering similarly but separately, needlessly for the fact that they could have met each other on equal grounds if they took the time and space to acknowledge their grief. Both had unspoken needs and tragedies through which they filtered their interactions with each other, which led to redundant animosity and miscommunication. Every time they had a moment to reconcile, they stalled.  

It’s a very personal story, and the depth and detail remind me yet again how a certain experience can be elevated by the player rather than the reader or watcher. Cleaning, thinking, coming to terms with each step of the story. Taking the time in its fullness, along for the ride with the author. Part of my bitterness is seeing a familial relationship that could be mended so easily in comparison to my own, but Adora’s story is familiar in its inevitability – there is no ending reflective of an entire life, all the rights and wrongs, things said and unsaid, perfectly preserved in a final moment of satisfaction. Mend what you can, brace for what you can’t.    

I won’t sit here and insist that every relationship is able to be mended—some are destined to be weird and fraught until the very end— but that regret may still remain. Someday I’ll be in a similar position to Adora: sifting through stuff in the garage, boxes of unorganized ephemera (and probably like a hundred bibles), cleaning off the dust and picking apart both the good and the bad memories, waffling between contrition and acceptance. 

The post Facing a Bitter Mirror in Undusted: Letters from the Past appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s a biohazard this week as John and Rose tackle the most difficult challenges of Leon S. Kennedy’s career! John is playing Resident Evil 4 (2005) on Professional difficulty, while Rose platinum’d Resident Evil 9 with less than infinite equipment durability! Plus, they discuss Pragmata, Marathon, Vampire Crawlers, and Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo! In the news, there’s a new Star Fox remake, a Switch prince increase, one-of-a-kind Mindseye DLC, and unionization amongst the developers at Double Fine and Magic the Gathering: Arena!

After that, there’s plenty of listener questions this week, including: What did John enjoy most about his vacation? What games do John and Rose play to lull themselves to sleep? What is the most edible physical video game? What do they want to pulverize with a blender? And what video game feels like eating a stale Dorito?

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, Rose at fatamorgana.bsky.social and John at john.gamesline.net!

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 89: Finite Knife Durability appeared first on Gamesline.

I am not angry about this, even though I’d rather things be different; art can thrive in any condition. I think there have been good revivals that play to the past, and reboots that interpret characters and stories through a modern lens. However, the ones that don’t work are the ones that don’t bother to reinterpret, purely playing the hits instead.

When I played Pokémon Pokopia a few months ago, I knew there would be callbacks to Red and Blue’s Kanto. Folks online had looked at the maps of each area and lined them up with cities in Generation One’s landmass, and the story in-game quickly told me that this was a Kanto, nay, a Pokémon world ravaged by some form of climate catastrophe that left the land bereft of both humans and Pokémon. When the player character, a Ditto that just so happens to be freed from its Poké Ball, begins to rebuild the land, Pokémon return and begin to emulate human society in a hope that people will also come back. 

The Pokémon are interacting with the world in a way that emulates the past, yes, but they are also bringing things forward. You aren’t tasked with re-creating the cities as they were before the disaster (you can if you want, but there’s no real guidelines). Instead, the Pokémon are inspired by what they remember from their lives with humans and want to show how capable they are by their own means. They want humans to feel comfortable if and when they return, but the Pokémon have their own needs, and request amendments to the cities to fit their likes and dislikes. The Pokémon are characters in themselves, and many of them act very differently to how people have always imagined them. There’s a reason the valley girl/gyaru Bulbasaur and Southern-drawling Kyogre stand out so much. It’s novel! 

If a remake of a game retreads the same roads with little deviation, it is not for those of us actively interacting with the media. It’s there only to court those searching for a cheap hit of nostalgia. Pokopia posits that building on top of a foundation while introducing new things for new inhabitants will still appeal to those returning.

There was a moment about a week into my playthrough where, even though I was already immensely enjoying the game, Pokopia became something special. I had created a good amount of homes in the Withered Wasteland, the starting area where Fuchsia City once stood. I got my little town of Pokémon to around environment level six or seven (shh), which means the residents were on the path to absolute contentment. For the whole game, a unique set of tracks played for each area, mostly original save for the Pokémon Center healing jingle as a common motif. 

Suddenly, without drawing attention to it, the music shifted to a new remix of the Fuschia City theme. It took me a moment to realize what had happened, and as soon as I did, I broke into a fit of sobbing. I don’t exaggerate here, I didn’t just tear up a bit, I started bawling. The use of an old piece of music, of setting this game in that first Pokémon world, was artistically resonant and moving. It wasn’t the song itself, even though it is a nice melody and I had memories of it playing in past playthroughs of Kanto titles, but it was more about what was being conveyed in that moment. No longer was this a Withered Wasteland, unfit for people or Pokémon. Ditto had brought life back to this area. This was Fuschia again, but in a new form. Sure, I may be a bit weak to Pokémon as a concept, it has always been a special interest of mine, but this was a use of expectation, subtlety, and the medium of video games that still impresses me. I was initially confused as to why Pokopia was the only big Pokémon release during the series’ 30th anniversary, but it’s not a mystery to me any more. 

Compare that to the other ways the Pokémon franchise has celebrated “milestone” anniversaries. We got a game that respectfully and lovingly reflects on the past while stepping into a new territory for the franchise for the 30th. For the 25th, there was the incredibly bare-bones and outsourced Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. Okay, we also got Legends: Arceus, which made me feel similarly to how Pokopia did! For the 20th, Sun and Moon on the 3DS were excellent games and a huge step forward for character writing in the series, but this was also when Red, Blue, and Yellow were put onto 3DS Virtual Console at a higher cost than any other Game Boy game on the eShop. I’m not opposed to remakes or re-releases from a moral standpoint, but I will always prefer a new take on concepts over a retread.

The first time Game Freak brought us back to Kanto is still the best, and it’s because of limitations and remixing. In Pokémon Gold and Silver, a limited version of Kanto is explorable, with a handful of areas slimmed down and the gym leaders all at the same power level, as the player can reach any of them at any point. These limitations can be frustrating at times, and Generation Two’s slow level curve is criticized for good reason, but things such as Cinnabar Island’s volcano erupting and forcing the people of the island to a new location does far more to expand the Pokémon world than Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee ever did. It moves the world forward instead of arresting its development to avoid rustling the feathers of those only looking for safe stasis.

When I watched the 1986 film True Stories for the first time a few nights ago, I was immediately enthralled. David Byrne spends an hour and a half talking about the concept of the Texan from as many angles as he can muster, and he loves every single one of those angles. It felt like an episode of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, but with a bit more affection for its characters. Afterwards I poked around at some of the special features on the Criterion Collection Blu-ray. One that stood out to me as a frustration, a short film called No Time to Look Back, in which filmmakers Bill and Turner Ross travel to the locations where the fictional town of Virgil, Texas was set. The Ross duo drive around and recreate a few shots from the original film, quoting it along the way. At one point, one of them says something like “David Byrne hates nostalgia, but we’re allowed to do this!” Yeah, dude, you are. It’s still really boring! They speak to almost nobody from the area, and when they do it’s either basic platitudes or straight up telling them “we’re visiting because a movie we like was shot here” met with “oh that’s cool” by the locals. 

This short’s title is a quote by David Byrne’s Narrator character from the film, said while exploring a mall and commenting on how shopping centers replaced the town square. Comparing this truth to today’s truth of the dead mall and the lack of third spaces notwithstanding, this walks in tandem with how I feel about nostalgia. It is an acceptance of a world moving forward while considering and incorporating the past. It’s an understanding that the world often rhymes and echoes, but letting it fully repeat leads to stagnation. While the Narrator says there’s no time to look back, I disagree. We can look back, but we shall not move back. We must take this information with us to forge the new. 

There’s another scene in which the Narrator speaks on revisiting things that holds far more truth to me. “I really enjoyed forgetting. When I first come to a place, I notice all the little details. I notice the way the sky looks. The color of white paper. The way people walk. Doorknobs. Everything. Then I get used to the place and I don’t notice those things anymore. So only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is.“ What the Narrator posits as forgetting is experiencing something in a new light. It’s novelty, it’s finding something new in something familiar. Creative Pokémon fans prove this every time they make a ROM hack that improves on the original game or creates something completely new in that framework. That same passion is palpable in Pokopia, and it’s why Ditto’s journey means something to me, and a re-release of FireRed and LeafGreen on the eShop doesn’t. I’ve gotten very used to Kanto in that form, and Pokopia finally helped me forget what I knew.

The post I Get Used to the Place and I Don’t Notice Those Things Any More 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.

John: How does suddenly getting recognition on this project now feel?

Metin: I almost can’t express how joyful it is to witness all the emerging love for Moon Child and our other games. It’s a wonderful, surreal, wild ride, and it pretty much makes up for the repeated bad luck we experienced during our game development years. We’re much enjoying it while it lasts.

John: What previous media inspired the gameplay of Moon Child? Games for the gameplay, of course, but the look as well?

Metin: We all came from a Commodore 64 and 8-bit game console background and played lots of games before starting to develop our own games, but in the case of Moon Child, our goal was improving upon what we did before, when we created our preceding Amiga platform game called Hoi, which was published in 1992 after a delay, and was surrounded by bad luck with publishers.

For Moon Child‘s look I was inspired by the magical nightly atmosphere of a 1991 Capcom arcade game called Midnight Wanderers, which was part of an arcade cabinet featuring three games, collectively called Three Wonders. Next to this, another Capcom game is among my all-time favorites: the Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins and Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts series, also featuring a nightly, spooky atmosphere in a cartoonish style.

John: How was the development process back then compared to today? Do you think it’s better or worse now?

Metin: Well, we have been ripped off by publishers three times during our game development years. Those early years of the digital revolution were like the Wild West of game development. I guess the most painful experience surrounded the development and release of Moon Child‘s predecessor Hoi…

Hoi would first be published by the US-based publisher Innerprise Software, formerly known as Discovery Software International, famous for the classic Amiga games Hybris, Battle Squadron and Sword of Sodan.

In 1991, when Hoi was about 60 percent finished, Innerprise Software asked us to send them the latest version of the game, for internal evaluation and testing purposes. About three weeks later the Hoi version we sent to Innerprise turned out to have been leaked to the Amiga hacker Fairlight, and was rapidly being copied by Amiga users around the world.

We cancelled our agreement with Innerprise and found a new publisher, also in the US: Hollyware Entertainment, formerly known as MicroIllusions, publisher of The Faery Tale Adventure and Music-X.

But following the release of Hoi, Hollyware never paid us any royalties apart from an initial $200 cheque “for the release celebration party”. As we were three young chaps in a different part of the world, we did not have the resources to legally fight the lack of proceeds from our hard work. It was a deception that would occur again after the release of our puzzle game Clockwiser by the UK publisher Rasputin Software.

Both Hoi and Clockwiser were received warmly by the international game press, which made the events with the publishers even more sour.

Subsequently, we were determined to create a new, better platform game, featuring an elf-like character, and the Hoi character as an automated sidekick. But by the time we had completed the Amiga demo version, Commodore went bankrupt, and the Amiga’s future became uncertain. As we still hadn’t earned money with our games, we got the opportunity to start a semi-independent game development division at a local multimedia company. There, we reinitiated Moon Child for Windows, finally getting paid for our work, and we took advantage of certain PC hardware capacities to double the game’s resolution. We decided to leave away the Hoi character, and focus on Moon Child.

When Moon Child had just been released in the Netherlands, bad luck struck again though, because the company had invested heavily in Philips CD-i authoring hardware and software, which turned out to become a flop. By the time Moon Child would be published internationally, the publishing department was discontinued. So Moon Child remained stuck in a Netherlands-only release.

Later, we found out that the game had been living a life of its own in the worldwide piracy circuit, and through the years I’ve been receiving e-mails every now and then from people expressing the childhood joy Moon Child delivered, which is really heart-warming.

Reading the very sympathetic response of the current game dev community to Moon Child (and Hoi), I sense a connection between what we experienced with game publishers and the current state of the game publishing world, which is increasingly enshittifying, for example with the adoption of generative “AI”.

John: Were there any specific influences for the theme song? Why did the composer take the direction they took with it?

Metin: Ramon Braumuller, our composer, started playing drums at age six and joined bands by the age of twelve. In the early 1990s, he and his brother Ruud produced House music in their small studio. They were named ‘The R.’ Ramon thinks the blend of those House music influences and the Amiga demo-scene tracker music formed the foundation for the Moon Child track. He also sang the vocals in the Moon Child Amiga demo title track, using old school gear to realize the chorus: ADAT multitrack-recording onto VHS tape, then sampled the mix into the Amiga.

John: How’d it feel working on a traditional platformer in the wake of the shift to 3D, whether you knew it was coming?

Metin: I clearly remember that formed a growing dilemma for us back in the 1990s, when Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake were accelerating the attention of gamers to 3D gaming. I started practicing 3D creation in 3D Studio MAX (as 3ds Max was still called in the 1990s), but our coder, Reinier van Vliet, was hesitant to make the switch from 2D to 3D coding, and I don’t blame him. It’s literally an extra dimension you need to handle. Back in the 1990s there were no prefabricated 3D engines you could adopt.

In the course of the 1990s, after the Moon Child release had [been] stranded in the Netherlands, we decided to shift towards multimedia development: CD-ROM games and applications for companies and brands.

John: Which of the memes has been your favorite, and did having something you made find an audience in such a different way 30 years later take you off guard?

Metin: I love just about every piece of Moon Child themed expression I see on Bluesky, but I think I like the whimsical animated parodies made by Bluesky user LVL?KEN / @ricesnot.bsky.social the most.

(Note from John: Ricesnot/Icesnort is a great YTP creator/vidsmith and I’d recommend all of his work. He’s also part of a dev team called Gravy Crew Games that recently released a game called Rules and Rodents.)

Witnessing our games getting so much love and warm responses is a genuine emotional experience after we spent around ten years creating games without a real breakthrough that would have allowed us to keep creating games. After reading the positive reviews of our games in the game magazines of the early 1990s, our frustration grew when we turned out to deal with yet another unreliable publisher.

John: Was Moon Child going to evolve beyond the game if it took off? Do you have ideas for the character, or was it a design first? How has the fan response changed him as a character for you, if at all?

Metin: We always liked to fantasize about people wearing suits of our characters at games conventions, haha. And of course we would have liked to get rich with merchandise and big commercial deals, such as “Moon Child: The Movie” haha. But in the end, the sheer fun we had creating games together, inspiring each other and reading positive reviews in our favorite game magazines at the time was priceless and lasts a lifetime.

And the fan response is just wonderful. Moon Child has suddenly become the iconic character I wished he would become back in the 1990s. I created the first version of Moon Child back in 1991, when we had just experienced the setback from the first publisher, Innerprise. Later I streamlined his appearance to match the speed of Moon Child‘s scrolling. Never would I have thought that he would be elevated to fame more than 30 years later. Life can be full of surprises.

John: If Moon Child was voiced, who would you like to play him?

Metin: Oof, tough question… Sylvester Stallone, haha? Maybe Jim Carrey? In the days we made games, game characters didn’t talk yet, haha.

John: You released the source code and a level editor. Why was that your response to this sudden popularity? What do you want to see done with this now public?

Metin: When the second Hoi game publisher turned out to be unreliable, we decided to release Hoi to the Amiga users for free in 1993, released as a remix version with some minor improvements. It felt good to do that. Money isn’t everything, and we loved the idea that many Amiga users would get to know the game we had been developing for more than a year.

When Moon Child went viral on Bluesky, we wanted to do something similar: to return the appreciation of the gaming community by releasing the source files and assets, so anyone can have fun with the game, make ports, mods, etcetera. We can’t wait to see what people will create with Moon Child.

John: What is Moon Child’s perfect Sunday?

Metin: Chilling in his natural environment, sitting next to his pal Hoi, while chuckling at the funny Moon Child memes on the internet.

John: What is the team doing these days? Anything you want to share?

Metin: Around 2000, I returned to freelancing and became a magazine illustrator, newspaper cartoonist and toy modeler. I’ve also worked as a Technical Artist for the Blender Foundation for a while, which is based in Amsterdam, not very far from my hometown.

Reinier returned to game development for a number of years in the early 2000s, shifting to mobile games. We made one more game together for a company he worked at in the early 2000s, a China-themed game called Yin Hung for the Nokia N-Gage. After that, Reinier moved on to creating apps for banks, and these days he’s guiding other coders in the same field.

Ramon plays the drums in a popular Dutch party band, and creates soundtracks for high-profile Minecraft content creators on YouTube.

The three of us are still friends, frequently messaging each other, and going out for dinner every once in a while.

If you wish to play Moon Child for yourself, the game is available to be played in-browser here, or downloaded from Archive.org.

The post The Second Life of Moon Child – A Conversation with Metin Seven 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.