Dark souls: A Christmas miracle or just too hard to enjoy?

Well here it is, i’m sat feet up by the fire on a pleasant christmas day musing to myself. The festive spirit is thicker than the scent from a plate of christmas pudding set down on the coffee table. Yet something is amiss, it’s been bothering me for nearly 12 days now. I can feel it as a draft running over my hands as i type. A looming spectre that haunts these winter nights. I look to the fireplace and see it grow dim, the fire is fading… the fire, it’s fading… SHIT I NEED TO TALK ABOUT DARKSOULS…

First things first, well this is the second paragraph so i guess then this first thing is second which makes it not first in the first place but alright. Dark souls the hard to review… you could almost say.. Its the… of.. But no, we’re not going there, i mean we just did but i didn’t write the full thing out so like “she that will not be name” (Baroness Thatcher) the full terror of it’s looming withered specitle won’t abmush you on your way through town. Speaking of abmush this game has an ambush fetish. Not that all fetishes are bad, well i mean some obviously are. Furries for instance. Ha, i have just kink shamed someone, i’ve always wondered what it would feel like to be on the other end of that.

Getting sidetracked aside, the number of times something leapt out at me during play was mind boggling, Such as: the intricate level design, the care and purpose put into the visual element or solare’s hot washboard abbs, the mere mention of which opens up the possibility of a lewd innuendo and me shouting praise the sun! but this is a family friendly blog and apparently being sodomised by sun worshiping tinman is not family friendly. While we’re on the topic sodomy i ought to bring up fat man and the lion. i’ve spent long enough on that fight to develop quite a good rapport with them. They’re a recently wed couple renting a condo in anor londo and spending their days working as part of the civil administration. Fat man apparently eats people… which is unusual but hey i’m a progressive guy, and does it really do any harm? hard to know.

I could talk more about the other bosses but this isn’t a top 10 video and i can’t use the kuleshov effect to show you i know that what even means. Sounds worse than it is unlike the other bosses which sound like their going to ground me to jam to spread on their toast and the proceed to do exactly that. Jokes on them jam is sweet and i am oh so bitter.

I started playing a dexterity based character, who would want to spend all their points leveling strength to they could wield clunky impractical oversized weapon that shakes the very earth when it’s swung? So one new character later i was back on my way weilding a weapon too big too thick too heavy and too rough to be called a sword, i had some guts. Freudian pseudo-phallus in hand i began my journey into castration, patricide and incest except instead of doing any of those things it’s all symbolic. Normally symbolism annoys me, i know some very pretentious people that use it and i include myself in that group. But in Dark souls the symbol is you cleaving an armoured boar open with a sword twice the length of your body… so yeah.

You might assume that your character is a hellenistic hero of old, whose greatest flaw is their own zeal and you’d be wrong, look at you making stupid assumptions, good thing you’re not writing the review, eh. You’re a raisin man with a tiny head and a health bar that goes down easier than an object under the effect of gravity with no other kinetic force acting upon its mass. Never have i so strongly identified with an avatar. Well not since the skullgirls incident.

This game depicts social interaction in a errilly accurate light. You stand silently as the NPCs talk at length about things you don’t know, never bothering to explain any of it before shoving a question in your face and then laughing maniacally when you give an answer. Most come off as having an agenda but never do much, some won’t speak at all and others are incessant flirts that need to respect my BOUNDARIES, SOLARE. It doesn’t matter how i feel about you, it can never be. You care more about the sun than me. Unless i could become the sun? yes! MY VERY OWN SUN MuHaHaHaHaHa.

Apparently your character is a hollow, which is fantasy speak for crazy zombie person. This means you have lost most your memories and will to live. Some view this as an allegory for depression, i view it as an allegory for playing dark souls too much. Well here it is, i’m sat feet up by the fire on a pleasant christmas eve musing to myself. Instead of ending the game just starts over like you never did anything at all, almost like the festive spirit is thicker than the scent from a plate of christmas pudding set down on the coffee table. Yet something is amiss, it’s been bothering me for nearly 12 days now. I can feel it as a draft running over my hands as i type. A looming spectre that haunts these winter nights. I look to the fireplace and see it grow dim, the fire is fading… the fire, it’s fading… SHIT.

dishonored: does story telling have any part to play in modern gaming?

I hit a dry spell, not a sexual dry spell of course i still bed upwards of twenty of the finest sexual specimens the multiverse has ever yielded but a writing dry spell and oh boy have i been pent up. I stare at my keyboard with a lustful male gaze that’d make a prostate exam taking place centre stage at prison of your choosing feel like a smile from stranger in the street. I awake in the middle of the night to find outlines and character development sheets staining my bed, my so called nocturnal emissions have become so problematic i’ve taken to attaching a bell to my pens to wake myself before the deed can be done. What does that have to do with dishonored you might ask? I could answer that i’ve been desperate to talk about it, but it’s not true, i picked it as a topic five minutes ago and even now i’m not sure what i’m going to say about it. So without further ado, further ado.

Dishonored starts with blah blah blah boat hide and sneak stab stab magic prison bang. Unlike the game it only took my one sentence to set that up rather than a brutally slow walking simulator demo. I could use this as an aside to talk about walking simulators, i might. I’m considering it… nah, but i reserve the right to come back to it to fluff my word count if i so choose. The game is fun, i think. When i first played it i was a nervous shut in who never left his room… now i’m… oh shit. Moving on.

The game is set in a steampunk alternate victorian city but instead of being that trash brass steampunk that pillocks on the internet seem to be into it’s retro half life 2. Where the peoples faces are about as haunting as the looming fear of spring heel jack leaping from the london cobbles into your hackney cab brandishing a knife and loot box, ha ha topical joke about loot boxes in the games industry at the moment, no one has made on one those in a while. Haha self commentary meta joke i haven't made one of those in while, haha endless loop of meta self reference that wasn’t funny to begin with, i’ve gone cross eyed.  

Speaking of spring heel jack, you play as some dude with no voice and apparently a backstory, go figure. Also you has super powers. Gods, good and evil and a plague blah blah plot. The details aren't important you can stop time maybe if you level it up. Thought if you could stop time stopping to take in the details of something seems a lot more practical. You can only do so for 2 seconds but in that time you can still lineup enough projectiles from the repeating crossbow to kill four dudes and still leave time for a long monologue about destroying their bloodline or a yare yare daze. Ironically enough i spent a lot of time using the ability…

There’s also a basic teleport ability but your character doesn’t whisper “no hard feeling kid” when he jumps behind someone, i don’t know if this is a bug or an issue with my audio card but i’ve been on the forums, i’ve tried verifying my game cache and reinstalling the game but no luck. If anyone knows about how to fix it please let me know, this is very important to me. It feels like a major part of the experience is missing for me

The game also has moral choice elements, but all games made five years ago had those. It kind of effects the game in the sense that more bodies = more rats. The rats don’t keep talking about gathering for whiskey and cigars however and the fact the guards never bother to invite me is very hurtful. So much so that it almost justifies knocking them unconscious before dragging them up the a third story window ledge and letting them fall to their death, which according to the game isn’t an immoral act…

Complaint number whatever: where are my horse drawn carriages? The whole appeal of history is exploring the question, what if horses were still useful? In dishonored they use two story tall mechanical prosthetic legs instead… i didn’t find a single horse anywhere. Human history is the struggle to find new and more innovative uses for horses. Horses pulled down the berlin wall, they manned the ships at the bay of pigs, they broke the siege at stalingrad and i’m pretty sure a serbian horse shot franz ferdinand, not a huge fan of their stuff but some people got quite angry about it, guy has a nice tash. Without horses we may as well be at a village fête. Ms phyllis’ jam preserve may not allow me stop time, teleport or do the staby staby but it certainly spreads well on granary.

Gamers are stupid, graphics are stupid and horses are alright: i discuss mount and blade: Napoleonic wars

Gunpowder is to warfare what sliced bread is to analogies, the best thing since sliced bread. I could talk about the obvious comparison with the bow, its impact on european warfare and army sizes or it’s roll in the formation of democracies but i know my audience is too stupid to engage with that sort of thing and i feel unreserved contempt for them because of it. As we all know people who review games have an Arbitrary. Scaling. Hierarchical. Intelligence. Total. (ASHIT) rating of somewhere between Sherlock Holmes and Dr House MD. but as an ardent populist and liar afraid to show my unequaled contempt, i don’t give ASHIT. Why? Gunpowder… and now we’ve come full circle let war commence.

It’s been proven in studies carried out by an unnamed and somewhat fictional professor residing in my loose caffeine fueled machinations that the best game to ever be made is: mount and blade: warband: napoleonic wars, An expansion for the second best game ever made whose title somewhat eludes me(and no not PONG). This game, the first one (no not pong, i mean the first i referred to, yes i know there are sherlock holmes games but i meant in this paragraph) where was i?

Oh yes, napoleonic wars. It great, i mean really nothing quite compares with defending helms deep from the onslaught of the prussian army. This isn’t just a simple free for all like most shooters, well it is but everyone pretends it’s not and that makes all the difference. People form squads, lead by idiots that charge straight into a river, dampening your powder just in time for the austrian cavalry to encircle you…  it’s pretty accurate stuff. The use of tactics is minimal, your gun fires once every twenty seconds and a player called angela merkel is likely to snipe you with a mortar nearly a mile back from the actual fighting. Which i’m told isn’t a metaphor for germany’s economic influence.

So why do i like this game? On paper this shouldn’t be nearly as good as it comes to be in practice. The answer is simple, spirituality. This game is a vehicle for the transcendence of the limited bounds of consciousness, as you hear the drums pound articulating the mighty roar of russian muskets and the rich smell of sulfur on the wind. Your mind is distorted and enhanced taken to a place a serenity and balance, a lot like iowaska including the effect of shitting yourself as a lancer shovels his lance into your still beating heart. Dying and being reborn in a constant cycle of ego death as the chat spews toxic insults that’d make 4chan blush. It’s heavenly!

It's not all blood and carnage, i’ve spend time playing the piano while the french storm the farmhouse i’m taking shelter in. i’ve written letters home to mother in quiet contemplation of my own death, stiff upper lip and breechers pulled tort. Few games offer experiences so tangible with graphics so dated. OH SHIT, i mentioned graphics. Alright time to have it out: graphics are bad and you should feel bad for liking them. This a black and white issue, go do technicolor in your own time. There’s no middle ground or message about focusing on gameplay first, or admitting spectacle might have some place in the medium, anything that isn’t eye scratching low poly is literally strangling the games industry and the cause behind the zika virus.

Lets total up the good things about this game to give an objective score so metacritic… meta? Metta get ready! Urghh… i think i just did a minisick and still tastes like last nights field rations. I swear the general is mixing in horsemeat. Speaking of which the game has horses, which you might have guessed from my mention of cavalry but never discount the possibility the games industry will try to pass off two halves of a coconut as a horse. I’ve heard lots about how they can be mean and am surprised they don’t try it more often. The game has guns, albeit ones with the accuracy of a daily mail article but none of the reach. Can you fire a gun on a horse? Yes but it’s about as a effective as a water pistol and their line infantry will only miss so many times. So i’ll give it The weight of human suffering in the name of nationalism/ 10.

If you choose to play this game, be warned merkel awaits, she hasn’t won re-election so many times from her political guile alone… some say she’s unkillable, others say her leadership has positioned her as the de facto leader of the EU, i could keep reading the wiki… but the bugles just sounded and it’s time to charge… time for me to become another casualty of progress… i should have stuck to pong... and not giving ASHIT

Half-life 2: a cultural touch stone or something that could be improved with loot boxes?

Quick question: who would you rather play as? a time travelling cyborg cop with amnesia whose wife has been murdered and he must seek vengeance. Or play as some dude with a hat, not even a particularly good one. Game devs face decisions like this everyday or they would if the corporate overlords would let them. Ever since the original board game clue was invented people has struggled with weaving compelling narratives into their games without someone yelling ‘ludo-narrative dissonance’ at them. The only dissonance here is my having to google what the words means, which i clearly haven’t done. Is that meant to be the dissonance? I actually don’t know.

A Popular choice is the silent protagonist. People always remember characters like James (SH2) and the other ones with fond feelings and pyramid head am i right? Yes. Rhetorical devices aside i think it’s time i tackle half life 2. Back before you were born valve made games. History lessons aside, the game has you play a Gordon Freeman a dude who has made some questionable choices in his back story and must face them by going to the town of silent hill. Allusions to earlier jokes aside.

Yeah i’m struggling with this one, i mean what do i say. Reviewing is really hard. How can i talk about a game that i haven’t played since july of 2012. If i logged on now would Gordon have started a family with Barney? Do they allow for gay marriage in the half life world? Would not allowing it be enough to stop mr freeman and mr freeman from entering into loving matrimony also is that what the G in G-man stands for?  I have so many questions and it’s not even installed, okay that's a lie but i’m still not going to play it. You see for as long as i don’t, the possibilities are infinite and no reality can ever match the unspoiled potential of infinite possibilities, which is why i am pro-abortion.

Me and father grigori never saw eye to eye. Until i flung a saw at his eye then he dropped some ammo but completely gave up on giving me spiritual advice. Kleiner and i used to go down the local strip club and spread around the fake dollar bills he cooked up in the lab. It was such a sweet and simple time, you too probably have fun memories that’d form the ideal basis for a thirty minute sitcom format and after all isn’t that what half life was really about?

Did they ever explain the thing about the antlions or were we just meant to not really give a dam. I mean the models were cool and all but it just this one underling thing that stops the series from feeling complete to me, it's a glaring hole now that i think about it. There's so much that hinges on it and it’s just left unanswered. It's a huge cliff hanger that is begging for something to tie it neatly up. WHATS UP WITH THE ANTLIONS VALVE? WHY WON’T YOU TELL US, WHAT ARE YOU HIDING BEHIND THAT STORE FRONT?

The essence of dread...a fear factor modern titles lack: The elder scrolls: oblivion.

The elder scrolls: roman numerals: oblivion.

Ermmm, right so i have a headache, not an excuse or anything but i felt like we needed an icebreaker and well we’re into it now so let's not lose momentum. Last week My coworker suggested people should have to disclose their hiv status on their jobs applications. I don’t have HIV, to my knowledge but i do own a copy of the elder scrolls for oblivion. Which is a bit of a misnomer as we act in game against the interest of the demons, sorry i mean Daedra, that live there. King four arms and spiky thinks the place we live is his place to live and we don't want that for the aforementioned reason of us living there already. Wasn’t that a neat synopsis, i wish all media was so easy to describe... I think we can all agree poetry is bad.

Right onto the meat and potatoes, i was running low on supplies in my home, near the northern town of bruma and we had guests coming that night, the air was crisp and scented with the gentle fragrance of pine. It was winter and cold one at that, no staying out longer than needed. I was waiting for the game to town to load in when i caught sight of my own reflection and realised i have yet to succumb to the vampiric disease inflicted on me by a homeless man two nights prior. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem but i’m disliked by the local clergy for my stance on talos worship and they haven’t discovered that tuberculosis is a thing yet. The game tells me i have begun to crave blood but really i'm in the mood for chinese.

This is a fantasy world however, so there is no china, until player numbers start to dip and we need to make some mad bank with kung fu pandas. So like i said, meat and potatoes. The trouble and strife asked i pick up some herbs and alchemical supplies because she has back pain, probably from the odd way she sleeps. that sort of thing is legal here if you have a doctor's prescription. Shock horror the shop’s closed. So i pop into the local mages guild, bunch of litteriate wanker. In the future they’ll be things that read for you and all you’ll need to know is how to cut wood and standardised assembly jobs or so i’ve come to believe

This is dragging on a bit but there was an invisible dude, and when i bumped into him i thought it was demon come to steal my kneecaps. so i punched him square in the taint and now the guards on my tail. Great opportunity to talk about the combat mechanics… i however spend all day jumping so i leapt onto a rooftop and waited till they got bored and went for supper. I returned home with supplies in tow and the missus asked if i’d apologised to the  priest yet, i said “she’d still not apologised for insulting stendarr by worshiping a man beside him and i would withhold by apology until such a time as she found herself in possession of a lick of sense” in truth i’d not seen her but the wife's lips curled into a wicked sharp smile as she saw the pride flash across my face. I blushed, caught in an act that she revelled in. perfectly plain to the untrained eye but she took such delight it felt perverse. It was.

So then we got down to it, the meat and potatoes. Things got steamy, we almost opened a window but didn’t want to let in the cold, soon we have a rich broth ready our supper. We laid the table and waited for our guest to arrive. Lovely couple, bit naive. We talked about all sorts, bandits, the grey fox and a new grand champion in the capital and my wife’s recent recovery for an illness, her skin was paler. We said it was the bad weather. They said the stew tasted odd, lacked salt and garlic. Supplies are short we said. The husband started to make his excuses and  My wife glared at him and his wife rose to her feet in an outrage, i did so likewise, locked the door drew my blade and settled down to the main course as the fangs descended from my wifes lips  … dear reader it’s far too cold to be homeless up in bruma and the priestess is a devout worshiper of stendarr… no one came looking for them you know, best you mind who you go to dine with, remember they’ll be dining with you too…..MUHAHAHA.

Is there any more to politics than shouting what we think repeatedly? Fallout new Vegas might have an answer

Preppers are a phenomena of people getting ready for the end of the world and collapse of society or at least a natural disaster. While i wouldn’t recommend befriending any such fellow i couldn’t hurt to know where the proverbial squirrel keep their nuts, just in case they get caught short on the can when the bombs drop.it must be said they have  entirely the wrong end of the stick. The apocalypse isn’t about survival in of itself but the philosophical, social and psychological underpinnings that accompany it. We won’t be worried about concerns such as if we have enough beans to last the week, we’ll be spending our time contemplating if our traditional morality has any place in this brave new world in between bouts of smashing jill from next doors skull in with a baseball bat to make the nightmares go away.

Lots of games have tried to bring us round to these sort of considerations but i haven’t played them. i have a keyboard and must scream, so… fallout: new vegas? A game made from a another game but with less shooting, a smaller map, more bugs… but is somehow better. Now i know that pissed some people off, good. I wrote it mostly to wind you up but i stand by it as a seeker of objective truth. I suppose i’m expected to give a run down of the plot and then pick apart why it’s different to it’s parent game...eh.

I’ve kind of got some more pressing concerns though, with most of humanity, mad, mutated or mutilated you’d expect bum bags to be back in but no, disappointing. They're quite nifty really. I mean they just sit there right where you hands are near to and have storage and ease of access for everyday utilities. It just makes sense, i’ve seen people wearing tires on their shoulders and goat skulls on their head, they have next to no practical considerations at all. Most people choose to wear dirty clothes, no seriously it’s a choice. There is detergent and clean running water in a big ass dam nearby, why don’t they wash?

Well i’ve got some idea. You see the plot in near the dam and i’ll be damned if i mention the romans, too late i suppose. Nothing’s better at creating a breeding ground for an endless series of reboots and reimaginings than a society on the brink. In fallout land Caesar's legion is the epitome of this mindset but rather than go with a all female cast they opted for shove a hundred volts of grimdark into rome's proverbial nipples, this doesn’t need to censored because i clarifying that they are male nipples. Now they kill for no real reason, brand people needlessly and use weird contortions of logic and reason to justify a conflict that does not seem necessary once we get to the third act but is the underlying hook.

On the other hand we have NCR and their ‘president’ Aaron Kimball. On the wiki, under the heading “assistance” is reads, “helps nobody” this is telling for the entire administration. Their inability pass meaningful reforms for a nation in dire need of liberty and equality while still serving their own selfish and destructive agenda is reminiscent of anyone you don’t agree politically. There is also a man called mr house but the game told me he was de facto leader of new vegas and i refuse to recognize that a figure head can accrue power by any other means that democratically, so i don’t have to think about the role economics plays in the shaping of liberal democracies and account for the actions of politicians i have subsequently had to label as maleficent… because i am smart.  

Wow, politics in a videogame. I actually found this to be a real breath of fresh air, most media tends to be strictly apolitical and objective in its focus, blah blah blah i got bored of that joke. Fallout has a survival mode. I did not use it, instead i spent my time talking to a girl called veronica, sounds abit like veruca. She has a big metal fist and likes to punch the bads, agreeable sort. I repeatedly tried to romance her because i struggle to connect with human beings. When (eventually) she took me back to her place.. for what i assumed was sex. Instead i was inducted into a remnants of the US army, i was to told to keep my sexuality to myself and given a scholarship then graduated with a major in looking fab in a suit of armor.

Highlight reel, that time i blew up a spaceship, invisible bluemen, comical photo of me attacking a merchant. Subsequent of me crouched over body with a thumbs up and smile. New vegas in the distance, screenshot of the game crashing, screenshot of downloading bugfix mods, photo of benny’s bloodied and mangled corpse being cooked by a miniature thermonuclear weapon. Subsequent photo of myself with the head of said corpse, again thumbs up. A drunken night out on the strip, sightseeing at the dam. War, war never changes.

Bonus round: Why aren't there more horses in games? I don’t know, i am really curious. Maybe they’re hard to draw.

What can GTA: sa tell us about the links between post -scarcity economics and futurisms strongest critics?

The key to designing a impactful and immediately recognisable character is the silhouette. Characters like the ones you're interested in have this quality, google it if you don’t believe me, i win either way? This would be a really good segway into talking about the game limbo, it’s restricted aesthetic and how it generates atmosphere to contribute to the core experience… so then, grand theft auto: san andreas. An entry into the series during rockstar studio’s we’re not numbering these phase.

If you’ve played a gta game it's basically the same principal but if you haven't and i’m assuming you haven't or else me saying this is superfluous you go around as crime man CJ johnson, being a gangster and committing crimes. Unlike most games it is a the superb masterstroke of videogame design and storytelling, a heart wrenching down and out struggle of trying to reconcile the american dream with the inevitable conflict of social forces greater than oneself, like “rules” again attaching plastic explosives to the elderly and not robbing banks, ideas that would leave ann rand rolling in her objectivist grave.

That’s right the entire story reads as reimaging of atlas shrugged much as what ulysses is to the odyssey. Rand's influence is everywhere here from that controversial thing she said about that one thing and then all the others too. Wow you never realised when it’s been staring you in the face the entire time. Cj is the protagonist, the protagonist in atlas shrugged is a protagonist. This isn’t rocket science people. Let me give you an example:

The day started out better than most, weather looks good, pollution minimal. The neighbor's dog was silent for a change, thankfully. I had a filling breakfast, this time skipping the bacon during which time i got a call from an old aquience hoping to meet up, a delightful prospect. I took my car down to see my friends, a real slow ride, and was pleased to note a lack of criminal activity that normally pervades the locality.

Once with my friends we played a game of basketball and found myself instrumental in my team's success. Then we retired to a friends house to play games, i won several and gained from it a small wager…then i decided to do the train mission… all i had to do was follow. The. damn. Train. I’ve had nightmares about that day ever since, feeling like a horse with no name. My therapist says i can’t keep blaming myself but those words are tears drops lost in the ocean. How can anyone let me get myself into that situation? I tried i really did but every time a relive it the outcomes the same.

This feel hits at the heart of our comparison here. Rand asserts in a quote i found on google “the man who lets his leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap” far be it from me to expose my nocturnal habits at the local scrap heap to the readership of this journal but R/dragonsfuckingcars has had a perverse effect on the maturation of my psyche. The only thing for it was to embrace this harsh but succulent philosophy... i was running down the dream.

So i went into business for myself and became a free bird, after a bout of shipping herbal remedies which are legal in the state of san andreas, if found myself able to purchase a set of garages that allowed my establish my second hand motor company. For there i invested in a RC urban start up and soon found myself engaged in all out miniature scale war with a rival firm. This is when i found myself working for the yakuza, going to flight school and robbing a casino. I was living the dream i had learnt to value myself, my own happiness was mine to achieve and i even had a jetpack and two tickets to paradise. Then it all went south.

My deadbeat brother go out of jail and wanted me to go back to my old ways, he wanted the gangs to start back up and already i could feel myself slipping back to a helpless socialist mindframe. I was no longer invincible, my ammo ran dry and i could no longer punch cars and send them floating off into the air. I had lost my cheat codes. I realised that a my fat stacks had been spawned in, so too had my muscular physique and flying taxi. I was a wreck for weeks. I hit the sauce hard, i could hardly hold the line.

I didn’t stay that way forever, maybe somebody up there likes me. My brother whom i’d scorn sponsored me through the AA. i got clean and now work a 9-5 at a downtown car dealership. I’ve starting seeing a girl from the local diner, Denise she talks even more than i do and has the cutest laugh, she’s some kind of wonderful. I’m a man of modest means, sometimes i wake up at 2am and drive round the block for an hour before i can go back to sleep, i miss the life i had, but now with her i’m finally happy…...one day we might have our white wedding.

vampires: an allegory for exploitation or just teenage disco balls?

Ah good evening my budding young socialites. Today we're going to be discussing mental illness in video games at topic i feel more than qualified to handle because i play a lot of video games. To fully grasp the topic we need a deep understanding of the human mind fortunately most of you already possess one, or if you are not ghosts might be one, but let's not get bogged down in the philosophy of personal identity because they will never have any bearing on our lives, until we invent transporters.

To catch you all up here's a quick run down of the work of sigmund freud and carl jung. You want to shag and or kill either of your parents (or parent if you conceived via Parthenogenesis. Or maybe yourself if you simply budded off from your parent like a strawberry.) and as such you need to dream in order to properly deal with your messed upness and that cocaine and goes well with trying to understand the human mind, Simple. you may as well apply to be a psychology professor at this point. If you can survive statistic. Speaking of statistics the RPG game vampire the masquerade: bloodlines. Has an average of too many syllable in it’s title which is my biggest grip against the game. A non-extant sample of any population finds ostentatious manifestations of multisyllabic compositions gratifying to peruse.

In the game you play as a vampire forced to pretend not to be one in a sort of social  Masquerade with abilities and tendencies dictated by your bloodline. Based on a dice rolling tabletop game with a similar name which everyone compares to dungeons and dragons but for brevity's sake i will avoid doing so. Far be it from me to waste my readers time and attention with useless facts when we have something much more important to discuss. The point of which ought to take centre stage in this article, that being… vampires. First lets look at the symptoms then lets talk to them to make them better.

Vampires are members of the living dead, think the grateful dead but less LSD and more hanging around in graveyards. There stichic is obvious to anyone who's ever met one, they act really pretentious because they live a long time like elves but weren’t awakened by Eru Ilúvatar close to the bay of Cuiviénen in the Years of the Trees that took place in the First Age. so don’t have the OG street cred going for them. They don’t like garlic but that part of the pretentiousness angle. Aside from this the whole being undead thing reeks of a Schizotypal disorder with some NPC displaying antisocial behaviour when they don’t speak to me and reject my sexual advances, this accounts for 95% of npcs which is a statistical significant portion and thus we can say there is a significant interaction between those that don’t like garlic and are mentally ill.

So if you offer someone some thick crusty garlic bread and they turn you down, you can be fairly certain they have a disorder and need to told that, therein accounting for the talk aspect of talk therapy. Phrases like “pack it in” and “have you tried being happy” have been proven to be. It’s also really important to level up melee because it’s overpowered. over the course of the game You chose a faction to side with, fight a werewolf and deface some art (not in that order). The latter of which i found to be a cathartic experience as for the longest time have i stared at pictures of rich men on horses and felt my blood boil of with a mavelent rage building to a white hot crescendo of me vomiting on the floor and being asked by staff if i was alright. I told them i didn’t need psychoanalyzing and proceeded to ask them for their height, favorite colour and last purchased brand of surfboard. (i will finish that stats course).

The game is set in LA, so is well suited to the supernatural, being a city of angles. Running perpendicular to this is the characters which aside from being pale and mad are kind of nice except the mean ones. An acute point to make is The game makes you talk to people which really brought the fantasy aspect home for me. Not meaning to be obtuse you can spend most the game in the sewers if you want to avoid people, how considerate.

Time for some Garlic bread. Games is fun.

Skullgirls: a tool of social reform? Or the greatest threat to social order ever conceived?

Right then, i have a train to catch in half an hour so a full review is out of the question… or is it? Could i perhaps summarize my feeling for a videogame with such little time? Only a sentance ago i thought it couldn’t be questioned so maybe if i was wrong about that, my premise might be wrong making this entire paragraph a needlessly long tangential introduction that only serves to waste my already notedly scarce time, meta (therefor good). So with that in mind it think it’s about time we talk about waifu’s.

Skulls girls is a game that a handsome and musty friend of mine suggested a few years ago and then i brought it. It is a game where you fight, which is a rather unremarkable thing, games like watching fire and watching paint dry ( a classic look it up sometime haha millennials, you’ll probably go watch someone else watch paint dry and then gasp in shock as they call the paint the N word) have left the narratively limiting concept of conflict on the cutting room floor as of late, a trend which have not gone unnoticed by some developer opting to leave most the game on the cutting room floor in a hopeless and vain attempt to turn their 1930’s esq cutting rooms into the sleek plastic laden digital studios of the 1980’s, we’ve all seen ashes to ashes and we know that their hair was silly and that the 1980’s was actually REDACTED all along (numb nuts, the people literally died at the beginning so it's not a spoiler to say that it’s the afterlife)

I heard a song about steamy sex with a snowman once, frost bite aside i thought such things should be relegated to the realm of VIDEOGAMES and we’re back on topic. So like in this fighting game you play as a girl or sometimes a trumpet if you brought that, but it’s extra. Which is a complex way of getting the player to imagine what it might be like to be systemically underpaid in a historically patriarchal system that hold double stands as the norm and make you walk around the office with pointy shoes…. and have jiggly parts/ whatever those things on the trumpet are called that make to DOOOT noise are.

I’m pretty sure several people have committed ritual seppuku at the mention of a wage gap but i’m about to make you forget that with my brilliant heel turn (in pointy shoes) you see at the beginning of the last paragraph i made reference to a song by singer songwriter and all round BAE kate bush, she wrote a song about if you like could swap places with your waifu then you’d understand their troubles, wants and desires and then like your relationship would be swell, like how narcissus now has a profound understanding of the plight of the Daffodil. I’m not sure exactly how to go about this, maybe beating the snot out of a trumpet might be a good start?

Maybe empathy might take a genuine exerted effort of mutual respect from both parties to understand not just the conclusions but their motions of how they came to believe that, free of pretense. Speaking of pretense i’ve been banned from my local music shop for smashing up the trumpets while dressed in a revealing sailor outfit and high heels. The owner and me and got to chatting as i explained why i was doing what what i was doing, i felt like we we’re really connecting when turned out this was just a ploy to stall for time while the fuzz arrived, jokes on him i can’t run in these fucking heels. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have resorted to such draconian methods if i’d have been dressed as trumpet.

Game is pretty fun.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt? A critical mind’s comments on fear itself.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt? A critical mind’s comments on fear itself.

Shadows are an often used mechanic in video games, your character casts a shadow, depending on your graphics settings and this forms a basis for a game where the sun's being blocks from things makes them darker behind, good, now i’ve got the heavy science out the way it’s time to take a look at two games with very different approaches to how they handle shadows. That’s right, two games in one review and it’s not just because one alone fill the words count, because i don’t have one. My review of resident evil two spinning out into a tantalizing 14,000 word while my coverage of animal cross is currently non existent… in the literal sense.  

Anyway, video games. Alan wakes is a game released sometime a few years ago by google it, it’ll take you two seconds. The game follows protagonist that writes stories; a writer, in a idyllic new england setting experiencing the terror of a vast and unknown cosmic horror, probably inspired by roald dahl then. The evil lives under the nearby lake, probably the loch ness monster. Already the game presents you with a synergistic theme of having a writer as the protagonist, writer normally aren't the protagonist. a trope subverted in many works from a very key and prominent figure of which a lot of the events and themes in the game draw inspiration from, dante’s inferno and the other ones that no one can be bothered to google for their game review.

Dante’s inferno is also a game now but it wasn’t when it was published by dante (writing man and protagonist ;) ) back in along time ago. Weirdly enough i’m not going to talk about the game because i haven’t played it and therefore can’t relate it to alan’s awake, FUN! Anyway the game has you fight shadows that possess the townsfolk at night and you shine a light to get rid of the shadows, just like in real life, and then shoot them with a gun, killing the townsfolk in an act of cold hearted murder, this part shouldn’t happen in real life and sets an unrealistic standards for ones exchanges with neighbours. Normally they just say ‘put the light away’ and ‘is that a gun’ i am truly disappointed, FUN!

Anyway the point is that what alan wake did that no one else thought of, other than being post-modern in a videogame (resident evil 2 rip off anyone) was, like a true son of liberty, take shadows and make them the baddies stopping our protagonist from getting on with his whole sale slaughter of a small town, the things we do to get rid of writer's block. I didn’t finish the game it’s been sitting on my steam for 3 years installed and one hour of play from completion, i’m not convinced the goodies will win so i’m not going to find out.

In darksouls if you hollow you don’t cast a shadow, FUN!

persona or personal only time will tell?

Video game journalism king. reviews Persona 3 FES

Persona 3 named after the titular protagonist of the series with the same name is a videogame that deals with complex themes, subject matters and topics of conversation. This forms a triadic structure to the game. An innovative way to justify the first entry in a series having the number three. A move also pulled by 2003’s acclaimed smash release threedom fighter S but to less success because no one remembers it, the fact i am not really discussing it here and that no one is anywhere at all but some people do talk about persona (the game not the character, thought i guess they might also do that) is very telling.

In the game you are a weeaboo in japan trying to be japanised. When you discover you have the powers to have a personality and that having said personality lets you fight shadows, which as a clever literary device represent darkness, maybe, i mean there are no right answers where that's why we took english gcse right but somehow the teacher didn’t recognize my talent and neither did the exam man who instead of helping me like i kept asking him to just paced up and down for two hours while i wept because my pen ran out of ink.

Persona has even more tragic story than that as you the protagonist must make friends and then get them to like you in order to make your personality the best one. Like batman do this by day by buying girls catus’s and being told that a janitor's closet is a janitor's closet then going to karaoke which is japanese for singing really good in the original kanji. You also have to answer questions in class, this gameplay element really evoked a feeling in me as i was forced to relive the trauma of answering questions while pretending not to have an erection (tuck it in your belt).

At night you can go to a school again but now it’s evil and there's blood everywhere and because it's night people get tired. This is where the shadows come in, as in they live their at night and you fight them to get more tower so you can fight them more to get more tower and sometimes they're harder. Here you use your personalities to make stronger ones by mashing them up. For example dick van dike and bane from batman would fuse to give, well i’m not really sure there not in the game not even as dlc but i’ll do a prize pool for whoever finishes this paragraph best for me.

Floors, there are lots of them and you climb them to go up through the game at night. flaws , there is no dlc, the erections in class (lost my belt), the game makes you do one day at a time and there is no time traveling. That being said there is an extra hour everyday and everyone keeps going on about how that's cool but do you age during this our and does this mean i need to adjust when i have my birthdays and will i die sooner. These issues are never addressed and i hope bug fixes will be released in time to deal with them.

Over all it is good, i like the girls when they say nice things about me, i do not like the teachers they are mean. The moral of the story is one of psychology and astrology, too sciency for a creative soul like myself but something i’m sure can be enjoyed by an audience that has been going to Wakatsu for their after school snacks. 10/10 minus the bad stuff i said (not a scientist yo)