It’s a special guest episode this week as John and Lorelai are joined by Xyros, a variety VTuber and the leader of the Xybatsu. John’s been playing Deltarune Chapter 5 and a little more Marathon while Lorelai’s gotten deeper into The Adventures of Elliot: The Millenium Tales and Fuck’s Quest II between sessions of Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time. Our special guest Xyros has been playing Alien Isolation, Tormented Souls 2, Romancing SaGa 2, and Mina the Hollower. In the news, they go over all the potential studio closures coming from Microsoft, some EVO shenanigans, and Team Ninja clearly not understanding why Dead Or Alive 6 didn’t work and making everyone even angrier with the release of Dead or Alive 6: Last Round.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, John, Lorelai, and Xyros. You can also find Xyros on his TikTok, Twitch, and Youtube channels.

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 Video Production by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 96: Boning Up with Xyros appeared first on Gamesline.

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 another duo show this week with John and Lorelai sitting down to mostly talk about Fuck’s Quest 2. John’s also been playing Final Fantasy VII Remake on his Switch 2 and Project Digimon. Lorelai’s been playing The Adventures of Elliot: The Millenium Tales and Beatdown City Survivors. The duo also discusses all the terrible studio moves XBOX is making.

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

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 95: Deep in the Taint appeared first on Gamesline.

Fuck’s Quest II is a game where you play as Fuck. He is the character you play as. He has decided to break the curse put on the land, and to do so he must gather two Bible Crystals and defeat a variety of ugly monsters. Everything about this game is irony poisoned; the characters are MS Paint-esque abominations, and their dialogue is comprised mostly of swears and insults. Hiding under this layer of complete stupidity is a solidly designed game, calling to mind 2D Zelda with sword and bomb-based combat and a few dungeons to explore, each unlocking new abilities for Fuck to use. 

Unfortunately, a lot of why I liked this game is the jokes, and just listing a bunch of jokes in a review is lame and helps nobody. I will still tell you a few to try to convince you. You can get a free health refill in dungeons by pissing “forever” into a huge hole in the ground, or on a guy you hate’s gravestone later in the game. “Sex Food” makes you move faster for 20 seconds, which is apparently analogous to how long Fuck lasts in bed. The hub town is called “Cleanville”, which I keep thinking about every few hours, and I laugh every time. 

To me, the humor lies in how batshit the world is in its consistency. Everyone is unflinchingly cruel in language to each other, but they will also help and be helped at the drop of a hat. Fuck will tell someone to go die in a hole and then immediately take on a lifethreatening quest to find an item for them. The absurdity is key, but so is the weird sense of heroism throughout. There’s no reason for Fuck to be doing any of this, he sucks ass and girls don’t like him. But he does it because everyone else sucks ass and that’s just how it is. As someone who often tells people I would die for at a moment’s notice to shut the fuck up (jokingly!!!) at least once a day, you can see why I gel with this.

I initially wanted to say “if you can look past these things, there’s a well put-together game here”, but no. You need to think this brainrot is hilarious or don’t bother. I can only recommend this to people who love YouTube Poop and similar things. This is a consistently rewarding game for people who know what a Dinner Blaster is. I’m kinda surprised it’s not in this game, to be frank. There are so many little nooks and crannies to dig into, item interactions to discover, and dumb jokes to set up by slamming your stupid abilities together; it’s very impressive that something so dumb is also so smart. 

There’s a variety of puzzle and skill based challenges in the world, and I enjoy how ridiculous some of the answers can be. One event involves the creator of the game, covered in bed sores, asking you to help fix a bug as the environment around him disintegrates. You have to chase an actual physical bug using Sex Food to speed up, and once you do it clears up the horrible pixelation layered over the room the dev is in. He then gives you a boat-pothole removing tool, which lets you help a rich guy get his boat out of a pothole, which you then jump into while screaming. It’s a bit difficult to do a few of the quests, but none of them feel impossible, unless the joke is that you’re not supposed to be doing this or you just have to come back with a new item.

These side quests and extra items you can get are completely optional. It’s possible to mainline the game and blow through it fairly quickly, but once you scratch the surface and use different items in different places, the world expands exponentially. I would say this is a “you get what you put into it” kind of game, where you’ll be rewarded with new jokes and abilities by sticking your head somewhere you passed by before. Sometimes you end up getting a health upgrade and nothing else, sure, but other times you’ll stumble into a “lockpicking” minigame that is an impossible Snake-like that constantly shows you how much time you’ve wasted on attempting it. I did not finish it in my playthrough. You may call me weak if necessary.

Another thing to highlight for folks without irony poisoning is the soundtrack. There’s a wide swath of songs that hit many random genres, but they’re all solid. I’ve had a lot of the music stuck in my head, which is especially funny since it results in Fuck’s stupid walk sprite gesticulating around in my mind’s eye. The “voice acting” also rules, in that each time you talk to anyone they say an insane voice line such as “My farts, my rules! Deal with it!” which yes, I have added that to the “stim archive”. 

Fuck’s Quest II is a very stupid game made by someone with solid game design chops. If you want to play a 2D Zelda game where you call everyone an asshole and have a fart propulsion ability, this is that. It’s very much worth checking out for many reasons, but for people with broken senses of humor like me, it’s almost essential.

The post He Can Fart To Fly Around, Too – Fuck’s Quest II Review 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.

A new week, a new episode of The Gamesline Podcast. This week John and Lorelai sit down to talk about all the stuff that was fit to talk about from the Summer Games Festival, Playstation State of Play, and more. Lorelai’s been Playing Final Fantasy 3 on her Super Nintendo to prepare for the new Kefka Ultimate in Final Fantasy XIV while John has been playing Marathon and Pikmin Squared.

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

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 93: Summer Games Madness appeared first on Gamesline.

The trailer shows a continuing focus on the “one camera” cinematographic presentation that Santa Monica Studios has been consistently proud of. Sequences seamlessly transition from gameplay, to quick time events, to minute-long cutscenes. This was one of the most talked about aspects of the 2018 game’s design, commonly referenced with the words “immersion”, “scale”, or “consistent”. This approach mostly works with the presentation of the game as a road trip-esque trek across a fantastical Scandinavia, mainly because Kratos as a character is built like a tank you literally could not stop. You don’t need to worry about time’s passage, fatigue, or moments of enforced rest when your character is the quintessential angry guy who’s going to rush his way through every conversation and situation.

It works a little less when you’re a woman who is alternating between resurrection, doing air combos on plant monsters, stumbling down hallways, and being imprisoned as she’s held down by enemies she’s going to unmake within moments.

This is not a problem unique to the one camera format of the post PS3 God of War games, and it’s not even a problem inherent to the AAA cinematic approach that Sony has made their bread and butter over the last decade and change. While Ludonarrative Dissonance is perhaps best known by its usage in discussions around characters like Uncharted’s Nathan Drake and his propensity to alternate between quippish “I’m just a little guy” routines and the slaughtering of dozens, it’s a problem continually plaguing games big and small year after year. In all the years since, this situation hasn’t improved in the slightest..

Part of this is caused by video games’ propensity towards violence. While every medium has expressions of conflict, video games—being a mechanical and heavily interactive format—are understandably dominated by replications of the most visceral form of human engagement. People have always yearned for the physical sensation of impact (take a look at any sport to understand this), and gaming functions as an extension of this. We yearn for the crunchy hit stop, and the particle effects of collision and destruction. 

The other, more simple answer, is that in any creative field, people are going to rely on shortcuts or “standard” solutions to any problem they run into. We expect all fighting games to have a move list, so it becomes inherent to the genre; visual novels should have a text log; live service games demand a battle pass, and so on. Often these conventions are desired, but just as often we run into ideas that exist simply because it’s viewed as a necessity, e.g. the deluge of open world games adding loot systems straight out of Diablo even when designed to be static, or gacha games 1:1 copying the UI of Genshin Impact half a decade out from its release. 

The most egregious of these obligatory concepts to me has always been what I colloquially refer to as “the microwave hallway problem”, after Metal Gear Solid 4’s scene where a suffering Snake pushes his way through a hallway that’s killing him with radiation, as the imagery jumps from perspective to perspective.

In Metal Gear Solid 4, this scene is about Snake, as an old man, pushing himself through absolute misery for a moment of heroism. MGS4 itself is a fairly slow game focused on stealth, so a paced and deliberate moment like this doesn’t feel too out of place, and matches the artisanal tone that director Hideo Kojima has historically gone for. It’s iconic and remembered for plenty of reasons, especially for its place in gaming at a time when the average storytelling for mainstream titles was done through a purely divorced cutscene and gameplay split.

Unfortunately, this concept has been used again and again throughout countless games in the decades since MGS4’s release, and typically without much direction beyond the surface level. 

Cyberpunk 2077 is a game ostensibly about the dying V, a struggling mercenary whose brain is being torn apart by an entire other identity forcing its way through them. Aside from the consistent interjections from a ghostly Keanu Reeves, this fact is mostly removed from the player’s standard means of engagement, in favor of the expected techno-power fantasy… except for the random moments at ends of quests (and similarly-timed event triggers), where V will suddenly double over with a pixelated and messy screen, and start to move at 0.25x speed, before immediately regaining full and complete motor function without the slightest inconvenience. 

On the surface, this is the visual and mechanical language we have come to expect from cinematically driven video games, many of which are often free-form and non-linear. Developers, of course, can’t plot a set course with moments of defined strength and weakness if they’re providing you a venue with which to do things in any potential order. At the same time, however, is anything truly being gained from these moments of appropriate tonal resonance amidst a sea of completely untethered gameplay? Are these moments of weakness displaying a peek into the intended narrative, or are they showcasing just how limited the language of the common game is?

Countless games follow this format. There’s Red Dead Redemption 2’s concept of tuberculosis that involves the occasional cough and hallucination in between hundred-man slaughter sprees. There are several Resident Evil games that do this, but most notably this year’s Requiem, where Leon Kennedy’s T-Virus infection temporarily makes everything slow, blurry, and blue, before restoring perfect parry and suplex potential almost instantly. Even Kingdom Hearts 3, a game I broadly love for its absurdism, isn’t immune to forcing Mickey Mouse through a slow moving facsimile of the microwave hallway.

To reiterate: what do we gain from these moments of control? Indeed, putting the player behind the wheel of an ailing character is a powerful tool of empathy and connection, but when you jump away from that almost instantly, does that empathy persist beyond a fleeting moment? Does the dissonance not showcase the cracks and limitations of what you’re trying to do with the medium, and fall back on the base expectations of what a video game is rather than what you want it to be? 

It’s easy for me to armchair game design over here from my ivory tower of gaming critique, but we don’t have to conceive of new and innovative ways to fix these problems, when they’ve been executed on in multiple games since the genre’s inception. 

The Fear and Hunger series has a constant potential for characters to lose limbs and abilities as you face down the many horrors of that world. Kenshi, or freeform sandbox games like Dwarf Fortress and Caves of Qud, are able to showcase all sorts of gameplay systems related to loss of power by changing the means of engagement in a tangible and permanent way. Action oriented titles like Sifu or Eternal Sonata are able to demonstrate the gain and degradation of stamina and means of engagement as their characters go through various stages of life. Hell, many FromSoftware games are predicated on the concept of an “unpowered” or “hollowed” form that can only be temporarily salved. Even games like Final Fantasy IV, a mainstream RPG from 1991, work with the concept of mechanical and narrative intertwining through the character of Tellah, an old man pushing himself to the brink with dwindling stats on each level up. 

Indeed, an argument posited against many of these examples in the wake of their larger budget contemporaries would be that they’re more elaborate or hardcore games for niche audiences, despite games like RimWorld selling over 4 million copies, and persisting in popularity many years down the line. Another could be that these moments of disconnect function fine as abstraction; surely the core act of playing a video game is abstraction from reality enough that we can accept these limitations (this one I’ve seen in opposition to discussions on ludonarrative dissonance consistently). 

Regardless of reasoning, I believe these limitations come not from the medium of games, but from the nightmarish production management of many modern titles, as well as the expectations of capitalism; from operating under the belief that the market is truly something that exists, and not an artifice propped up by manufactured evidence and stubborn belief. 

When we look at how games are made, especially when it comes to titles with larger budgets, the creation process reinforces this issue. That need for a common language—a blueprint that can easily be executed on—becomes a requirement when we think about how many games are being created by contract workers. 

Looking at something even midscale in budget such as last year’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, we can see that hundreds of contractors were hired temporarily to work on things like art, rendering, sound, and quality assurance. If we look at Halo Infinite’s development, we have consistent reporting that workers were limited to 18 month contracts and then placed on a 6 month cooldown before being re-hired, to suit arbitrary leadership requirements and skirt labor laws that would afford these employees more rights in their workplace.

It’s not hard to imagine the difficulties faced by these contract workers in a broad sense, especially when it comes to getting to grips with the project they’re working on, or asserting creative agency over it. They have to learn the toolsets, the project outlines, the deadlines, where the last contractor was forced to leave work unfinished… so on and so forth. In the process of all this, there’s also the unending fear that they could be laid off on a whim, so there’s not going to be much of a desire to shake the boat with more radical creative interjections. From the side of more stable employees as well, things are consistently in a state of flux from the hands working on a project having to be retrained, with pipelines consistently altered like the Ship of Theseus. 

Taking all this into account, it’s easy to understand exactly how so many games end up eerily similar, or formulaic to a fault. Sure, this applies to things like Unreal Engine 5 becoming dominant throughout the medium as workers are able to pick up that shared understanding of how something works, but it also applies to how these works end up being made. If you’re pushing through a logistical nightmare, why wouldn’t you rely on the most commonly used or easy to understand tools? Why wouldn’t you frame a scene as so many other scenes have done before because that’s what’s easiest to convey to your detached creative team? Management has to be appeased as well, so there is a pressure towards showing them something that wouldn’t feel out of place in another successful game, matching the tone of another rather than cultivating it organically through the creation process. 

This is made worse through the intersection of marketing, management, and manipulation. When we talk about the artifice of things like focus testing or evaluating what an audience might “want” (an unrealizable notion, given that the “audience” isn’t a real group of people, but rather a handy abstraction of guesswork), it’s not an exaggeration to refer to it as an “unreality”. There are lessons to be learned through experience and inquisition, but they cannot be done through the means of our current economic and creative climates, lest we continually repeat the sins of things like the hastily edited ending to the theatrical release of Blade Runner.

When we surrender to the idea that games should be more than pure idealized “fun”, or more accurately, when we give in to the notion that fun can only be defined by unlimited player control and power, we limit the ideas of what the medium of games can be. Fun can be had in planning around and experiencing things like a dismemberment in Fear and Hunger. There’s joy to be found in those moments of overcoming the challenges of a game like Demon’s Souls. Not everything is killstreaks and SSS combos; sometimes a power fantasy can come from overcoming incredible odds, situations, or indeed even the way we control a video game.

A few years ago, I had a lot of fun with the presentation of Citizen Sleeper; a sci-fi game about functioning as a being trapped within a proprietary and expensive robotic body, trying to make ends meet and solve problems inside of an old space station. The conceit of the game is great—balance the needs of your mechanical body (allegorical of chronic illness), the needs of your community, and the imposition of societal pressures working against you—but in practice, it unintentionally becomes this oddly weightless and almost dismissive work. 

Within an hour of starting the game, the idea of balancing meters, or struggling against any sort of representation of chronic illness, can be thrown out the window with relative ease. Minigames let you play the stock market and gamble for infinite money. You can get a trait to start repairing your body infinitely with very little effort or risk, eliminating any chance of experiencing the detriments of disability. You can solve the issues of every NPC you meet, and complete the main story without friction or fear. On a certain level, I admire the game’s willingness to take the conceits of an economic manager and try to instill the idea that it’s all artifice and can be changed with luck, but it’s also limiting and ineffectual as an experience. 

I don’t expect every game to be Marathon—a complex and punishing game wherein the core experience is determined by a mechanical conceit that suits the type of narrative they’re trying to tell—but we can do better than serving (and in some respects, outright conditioning) an audience that exists in our most insecure assumptions. It’s understandable to rely on what’s easy and known, but we show the most interesting parts of ourselves when we mold what’s known into something only we can.

There will always be abstraction and ludonarrative dissonance in video games. There will always be that struggle to separate what a character should be able to do within the bounds of the narrative versus what makes an engaging and interesting game to play. However, this does not mean we should accept the absurd compromise that these patchwork microwave hallways provide. The medium of games allows for collaboration between creatives and viewers in ways other art forms could only dream of, and we should be trying to cultivate that charm, instead of abruptly ending the dialogue out of convenience.

The post In Cutscenes, You Can’t Double Jump appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s a full house this week on the Gamesline Podcast. John is joined by Lorelai, Maverick and Rose to talk about the last week in gaming. John’s still obsessing about Pikmin when he’s not playing Digimon cards or Pokémon Channel. Lorelai was Final Fantasy pilled at the Final Fantasy XIV Fan Festival which got her playing Final Fantasy XI again while also digging in to Vampire Crawlers on her long road trip. Rose of course played more Marathon, Mina the Hollower, Saros, and Forbidden Solitaire while Maverick played a bunch of Hades 2.

In the news, we go over the interview Mike Fisher gave where he annihilated Yuji Naka, The Witcher 3 is getting more DLC, and a bill addressing the Stop Killing Games initiative is moving forward in California. In other news, Dark Horse Comics is unionizing after their new Embracer overlords started shutting down Things From Another World and shifting focus to Games. If you’d like to sign the petition to support the unionization effort, you can do that here.

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

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 92: Fantasy Solitaire appeared first on Gamesline.

The Gamesline Podcast is back for another week at the Pikmin factory as John and Crystal sit down to talk about the week in games. John’s still just as Pikmin 4 obsessed as he’s been while Crystal has been playing Fuser and all the extra stuff from Final Fantasy X-2 like Last Mission and X-2.5 -Will-. She also attended the digital Endix Expo. In the news, we’re getting Kowloon’s Gate in english.

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

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 91: Endix Cards 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.