Why Arn't more games musicals?

Yes, yes, i missed my last deadline, 2018 round up pushed back to next time, meh. That happens when you live a high octane life like mine, somewhere in between racing classic cars down in the south of France and picking up a cheese and onion slice at Gregg's it must have slipped my mind. Taking time out from a busy schedule can make all the difference when developing a video game, a few years ago the assassin's creed series did so much to my total nonchalance as i’ve not played any of their games since or before black flag.

Wow that actually neatly set up what i could talk about today, shame i spoiled it by pointing that out, but hey can i really blame me? Let's spend the next paragraph discussing the issue with needlessly verbose prose. This is getting a bit much.

Ass creed, haha, ass. Assassin creed, haha, double ass! Creed is 2015 sports drama and successor to the much beloved rocky franchise. In which, the son of rocky’s rival is taught to be a real good phili boxer by ya boy rocky. Brawling is a very limited element in black flag, the game is much more focused on pirate songs, and why not?

Immersion is all about the construction of a version of reality that streamlines the experience. Fortunately an entire genre of film is devoted to going this via music, the aptly named musical has been a staple of film ever since les miserables was released in 2012 but some ‘historians’ claim it was even earlier as live music has been used an accompaniment to film before the use of synchronised recorded audio but this was before Hugh jackman started acting so can it be really be called a musical? This review is starting to show a few red flags, huehuehue.

Okay it’s three hours later and i got tied up trying to help a canal boat but ultimately skipped out because of more pressing matters, this. I suppose given that many a fierce pirate has died running a ground this can at least be written of a somewhat related tangential spurt. My point is that assassins creed: black flag isn’t just a Ac game with some boat stuff tacked on, it’s also the first game which is a explicitly a musical! There are plenty of games with good soundtracks integrated into the story, transistor i’m looking at you, yes yes take a bow.

But there is no music in the cut-scenes and the assassin parts of the game, so how can it be considered a musical. This is quite true but the cut-scones aren't the game, they’re bits that break up the game, like raisins, and secondly the assassins (still giggling about that btw) is entirely boring and tedious and i don’t like it and it’s repetitive and i’ve even done this very same joke before but better when it was fresher and it’s completely unchanged from previous versions so why?

So with two thirds of the game discarded as tripe, tripe of the blandest most congealed sort, that leaves the extended adventures of a pirate and his crew plundering, looting and otherwise rumming it up in the Caribbean. Yes, you play as a pirate in the Caribbean but it’s about as fun as the first film and not the sequels but we don’t get zombie skeleton pirates and why not? I’m serious, copyright infringement aside i hold that the game could be made better by leaning in and going full camp with it’s premise.

The ever shifting sea lanes means enemy brigs can creep on up you mid battle and change the tide, (GET IT? ) in a heartbeat. So too will pirate hunters give a slow burn of anxiety as they chase you across the map drawing ever closer forcing you to ask: “do you fear death jack sparrow.” Shoot the ship, board the ship, loot the ship, be in bed by 8pm. A pirate's life for me.

Back to the previous point. This being: the game is a musical. Whenever you’re not in combat your crew is belting out hearty sea shanties, the use of diegetic music is rare in video games and rarer still is it’s fluid integration into setting. I know it seems a petty point to praise a game on and that the music isn’t even linked to stages in the story like that one time they did it in read dead and i felt all sad and stuff, but credit where it is due.

Also taking the idea of camping it up, turning this into assassins creed: treasure island (the Muppet version) would have made this an immediate 10/10. This does beg several questions such as why am i praising a game for what i envision it could have been? Would long john silver get his own musical number? YES! And why i am asking so many questions today. Well to tell you the truth, i’m not sure, maybe it’s just habit?

I give this game a ‘shiver my timbers’ out a ‘leave her johnny leave her’

Dead games and pop classics: the struggle for life in the face of modernity.

I just deleted the first paragraph of this review.

Life for rent, released in 2003, was the second album by singer songwriter and mythical queen of Carthage: Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O'Malley Armstrong; performs under the stage name Dido, thank goodness. Unlike fable 3 the album can still be bought by in digital format and is still a classic of the 2000’s. With songs like ‘thank you’ and ‘white flag’ becoming the soundtrack for wine drunk mothers everywhere, and as a result to their children as well.

When i downloaded life for rent i was pleased to see i was not required to connect to an online store that no longer existed as a poorly thought out form of DRM. nor did i have to seek out a website, through the forums, to get a patch that essentially cracked the album by dido: life for rent, that i bought years ago and legally own, (well not really the digital media provider owns it but whatever.)

I recently decided, after years of objecting to it, that i sort of liked Life for rent and that it’s peak tracks do have a certain resonance, especially when wine drunk. The same cannot be said for fable 3, a dead game that killed it's studio and had it’s support collapse years ago and really wasn’t that good to begin with but that at the time i thought was fun.

In fable the third, you start a revolution to take the throne from your brother. Only a revolution implies a change in the state of governance. This, strictly speaking, is a military backed coup by a series counter-industrialist aristocrats, justified by the supposition of the protagonists status as an ubermensch. In life for rent the primary change of power is the codification of one’s inner vulnerability into a thing of artistic beauty by the singer. Not only i am allowed to feel my vulnerabilities but knowing that the shared experience can be a source of strength.

The simplistic gameplay nonetheless feels clumsy and unpolished with connectivity between the elements mismatched at least. Basic at best. Enemies often stand next to explosive barrels, positioned to make the encounter as trivial as possible highlighting their status as things to be crushed under the ubermensch boot and undermining my ability to empathise. Far from trivial life for rent feels like a sense of craft, care and pathos was put into each track, well produced with excellent interplay of vocal and instrumental performances the album maintains a tonal consistency without becoming samey.

The Hobbes, no silly not Thomas Hobbes, although i am here to talk about the monopolisation of force; namely by the protagonist. A short ways into the game you encounter a group of cave dwelling sentients called the hobbes: essentially fat goblins, the character accompanying you levels repeated foul racist accusations deriding their intellect, despite their having a full established civilisation with social stratification, tactics and the integrated use of magic. This reads as some genuinely shocking colonialist bollocks, or it would that was the intent; instead the subjugation and marginalisation of sapient species is played for jokes. Fantasy has stumbled into racially charged elements in the past, like the orcs in middle earth being described as similar the the Mongolian peoples but the ability to overlook it again with the hind sights takes a certain kind of contextual blindness.

If you want clarity of vision and a realisation of its subject matter, look no further than 'Life for rent' by dido. Topics around the everyday struggle for life and love make each track as relatable as it is breathtaking. The struggle to get by is highlighted by the exemplar of the insecurity renting property brings to the tenants life and the extension of that that relationship to other facets. A social commentary that is meaningful and subtle that would undermine in elegance many current pop tracks aiming to do likewise.

On the subject of rent, fable 3 tasks one, once on the throne with ruling and making decisions to decide between arbitrary good and evils to raise the funds to fight and external evil. The solution however is to buy all the property in the country and collect the rents to pay for the coming war. The image of the all powerful external enemy has often been used to justify fascist doctrine in the past, so it’s no surprise to see it here. But seeing the supposed heroic thing is the economic subjection by a seizure of others own security, makes me wonder if perhaps the developers would have been better of listening to life for rent by dido during the design stage.

In the song ‘here with me’ dido puts forward an understanding of the personal costs of love and the reconciliation of self with one's desired partner. ‘Life for rent’ muses on the transitory ephemeral elements of life in modernity. Fable three tries to justify that seizure and subjection of foreign peoples in its second act, in a section that comes close, well more like closer, to understanding the troubles of colonialism but then just defaults to praising you for #bigdecisions. The near-parody epitome of moral decision making.

A degree of self awareness would have gone so far to improving this work especially with it’s comedic edge. A total contrast the the pleasant, but not over overbearing thoughtfulness we see in the must listen hit album: life for rent by Dido. both deal in the life in the industrialised world, guess which i prefer?

The game doesn’t have horses even, wtf is with that? The DLC on G2a costs more than the game did when it was on sale, that’s limited availability for you.

Skyrim: Down and destitute from riften to solitude - the tale of poverty in a fantasy world.

He sleeps soundly; snoring, farting and occasionally murmuring. I tip toe past, my sight set on his wardrobe, yes finally it will all be mine. Charcoal, a cooking pot, also some fresh leeks. I leave with my disappointment, and fresh leeks out into the night, i am the theft of Morthal. More like undeveloped peasant town, hahaha, i can’t even afford to rent here.

I’ve served four stints at the Jarls pleasure, and i’m not talking about his short sword. I have no items, because each and every one of them was stolen, by me. I have no children because i have no home, and i have no home because i am pretty poor at my profession… i am the worst theft in all of skyrim. In a land of endless captive cold, where dragons rule the skies and great civil wars rage, i the main character missed the memo. After the requisite carriage ride and tutorial, which i decided my character was drunk for and so largely believes was a illusion made by Sanguine, the daedric prince of debauchery, during my stupor the quest began.

From there he decided it was too dangerous for him to bare arms and drink ever again. He must give one up. So now he’s a pacifist in a land of sword crazy burly men, and women. Untalent at magecraft the most he can muster is a bright light that gives him away in the dead of night during his lurking. Though he is admittedly otherwise a very talented lurker. His herblore too is rather lacking, gone are the days of cheese sandwich alchemy. This leaves him with one avenue for work. Breaking into people's home and scrounging their shit.

He is very cunning often waiting until people are sound asleep before barging in like a bull in a china shop, and pretending he got lost on his way home. Once he stumbled upon a plot by a powerful vampire to take over the town, only to be chased away by her love crazed thrall as my inebriated thief couldn’t bring himself to fight back, in case the magic sky dragon ever comes back.

His life here was going nowhere, so i got bored and decided that he had decided to go off on a adventure, lacking the fiscal and social commitments to do otherwise. He was not missed… by a stray arrow, which stuck him in the… thigh (close one)
After passing by a guard swimming through the air i decided it was time for a drink. So stopped by the local tavern, a quick conversation with the barkeep later i learn i still had no money and that i wasn’t supposed to just start necking whatever wasn’t nailed down. This earned my first stay in the Whiterun dungeon which unlike the Morthal jail, wasn’t too cold for rats… yay?

I was out in no time, if by no time you mean 4-5 months with good behaviour. Pretty ingenious way to avoid the guards on the front gate if you asked him. Looking for work the local companions guild told be i could join if i could hold a sword. After explaining my misgivings in a calm and careful manner they told me quite precisely to get bent. Taking their advice to heart i hit up the cloud district, which people assured me i’d not get to very often, and managed to find a neat set of fine clothes along with my second stint in dungeon, this time i’d snuck in my copy of the lusty argonian maid; however my character was illiterate, at least it saved using the rats as toilet paper.
Deciding to move on i first sold my only possession, or tried to, turns out my shit smeared copy of a book describing the sexual escapades of a lizard were not in high demand in the ultra conservative, fundamentalist talos loving north men.

Onwards to winterhold, here i was with my own folk, or as the locals had taken to calling them, the dam grey skins. That’s right i’m a dark elf, what of it? I mean really, how can you be so bigoted as to get hung up my race, it’s not like i’m a orc or something. Onwards to the nearest tavern. There i met a orc wanting to punch my lights out, for some reason he didn’t understand i was calling him a pig faced mountain fucker ironically. What is it with north folk and having no sense of humour. So between my pugilistic hesitations and his berserk rage my nose was beaten to resemble my groin which itself was beaten into a bloody pulpy mess… not even the boredom of prison had done so much damage to my genitals. Jokes on him i stole his sweetroll, which is how i earned my first fine in winterhold, which upon being unable to pay became my first stint in the winterhold jail which was both cold and had rats.

After the stumps healed i didn’t stick around, the weather in winterhold was far too racist so i headed south towards the rift and it’s town… riften, home of the thieves guild. I see what they did there. Here i found my calling, the one place i could truly belong: An orphanage! a young boy in winterhold had told me to go there and murder the lady who owned the place and to be fair to the boy he was very polite when asking, so i felt obligated to foster good behaviour, through not foster him specially on the count of being a vagrant vagabond drunkard who was one step away from become a full flown skooma addict.

I had cross by moral code and could never again claim to be a pacifist, which was perfect timing because i was soon recruited by the dark brotherhood, they were so impressed with my kill stealing that i was press ganged into service, their hidden layer was a marvel of treasures and trained killers. Naturally i was caught with sticky fingers and was promptly kicked out until i could pay a fine, which for me meant forever. Skooma is not cheap!

What was cheap were the cloths i was able to strip from a murdered woman on my way into markarth, a town so retro-steampunk-dwarven i was forced to leave, or i nearly did, it turns out there had been a spate of murders and secrets conspiracies going around, a concerned party needed a talented lurker to break into hold and retrieve clues. Honestly i was the best work i’d had in years and nothing quite compares to #monetised-lurking. Unfortunately, my contact was found out an i was thrown into a prison, and not the fun kind, but one where you have to do real work, a mine!

I’ve long since been a hand a breaking out of almost any prison but seeing as the guard just drag one back and i get fed i’ve never really felt the need to spurn my penal sentences, unless it involved the jarls short sword. It was about 20 minutes and a brief montage before i was ready for my great escape. Unfortunately i was shived while wiping my ass on a rat and so ended the ballad of skyrim's worst thief.

Game has horses but i could never afford one and stealing one earned me a stint in prison. 

The PUBG: The ultimatum

From here until the new year it’s all a down hill slide. Nothing good was ever achieved on the cusp of winter. Today is no exception! Splat splat splosh goes the third shower of the morning as i sit in an unlit hovel overlooking the spectacle through a thin veil. One last surge and then it finally lets up. for a moment, thoughts clear i take my mark.

Pace, action, tension and excitement. No room for holding back i need to capture the zeitgeist of human experience and to do so now i must ride at the very forefront of games journalism. To pause on a beat, reflect on circumstance or offer insight would be an insult to just how very hip and happening this post will be. There is no context when you're riding the crest of a wave, there is only you the board and shore line racing towards you. Before we beach ourselves on the metaphor i think it wise to now state, that i, like so many other people with misleading T-shirts, do not surf.

Pugb, pubg, pgbu: player unknown’s battlegrounds. So just battlegrounds then, i guess we say dante’s inferno. Well i do, you say not that pretentious trash literary allusion again bvgroti to which i swiftly and reproachfully announce: i can’t. For this text, has no text, no context and no explicit imperative. What's an explicit imperative? GO FUCK YOURSELF! Although the games been hinting i should do that for a while.

Simply the game does all and tells all through it’s mechanics. Is this a good thing? Well it was certainly interesting the first time i saw a red splodge appear on the map and i decided to go check it out only to find myself promptly saturated in mortar fire. That is to say, i doubt they could have got much more in before it wouldn’t be a cadava anymore, maybe some kind of new experimental smoothie. This would be amusing if true, heck it might be anyway but it’s not my place to judge (but just so we’re clear it ought to have garnered at least a wry smile)

I learn the game the same way most did, through a sequential percolation of information as the pubg wave broke up on shore of the gaming masses. From Twitch, the Youtubes, and other platforms that exist did the videos come. All things to all men. A call to do the thing. We lobbied up and got to it, not as pioneers but as colonists and like colonists, boy did we starve… and leave behind a problematic legacy which mires foreign policy even today. (such a brave thing for me to say)

The soft touch i use for my PC gaming, that is to say all my gaming. Isn’t exactly at the cutting edge. I don’t want to be too mean to the poor dear because she has been a sturdy and reliable thing for many years and i’m fairly convinced she can tell when i’m talking shit about her and will punish me accordingly. My point here, if there is one, is it takes me an awful long time to load into the game.

In earlier builds this meant laying in a ditch for five minutes while the game world loads out an ethereal playdough, but since then with a constant barrage of updates making the game more or less optimised the effects have varied. Ranging from everything working just fine, to the repeatedly crashing upon launch. My favourite of these effects is the ability to phase through solid walls in game. Client side collision detection and the games tendency to take a while fully rendering an asset from the playdough realm allows me to pass through the blobs of shapelessness that will resolve into the building proper a few seconds later. It acts of a counterbalance of the initial frame rates being in the region of somewhere between 5 and -5. This more often than not, gets me killed, as uncle Ben says: Delicious rice ready in 10 minutes, also if you’ve got power you’ll prolly f’ it up so just say home and watch netflix or sumin. One such instance was me ploughing a car half way into a house, only for the house to then render around the vehicle causing it, and me to become a new flavour of smoothie.

Mutation: it is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to evolve from a single-celled organism into the dominant species on the planet. This process is slow, and normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia, some programmer fucks up and we leap forward. What could be more cutting edge than the ability to pass through physical objects. Imagine if you didn’t notice the door in front of you as you walked, so you simply passed through it. What possibilities would that create, a cornucopia of experience at the fingertips being snuffed out by a click of a shotgun as the mic spamming child in the next room spots my reality bending glitch and tastes the coming of his chicken dinner.

Maybe the reason we don’t have super powered people today is because humans show an instinctive desire to snuff out anything they can’t understand. This is doubtful speculation and probably a waste of time to spend much thought considering, but what can i say. While waiting for the game to load i’ve had time to reflect on inane musings that mean little and just fill the gaps. Speaking of gaps, this brings up a fairly unique question, as i report my experience of the game, i figure due to my hardware it’s fairly unrelatable to the average player, so then what purpose does a review serve if i talk about aspects they’ll never engage with and events that were entirely fictitious… again probably best i don’t spend too long on this one in case the answer undermines my authority.

Though at the core, my experience is much the same. Waiting in a broom closet with three teammates waiting for some poor unfortunate to walk in and discover our smoothie selection via shotgun to the mouth. Only to then walk outside to get picked off by a sniper, blown up by grenades, drowned in a river and get caught trying to revive your good for nothing friends while the ever shrinking blue ring bares down squeezing mic spamming gun toting psychopaths into a tight enclosed space and offering them virtual points to slay one another.
It’s like a prisoner's dilemma where the prisoners are all utterly ape shit.


Why do they bother to add vehicles and not bother with horse? 5/10
OH SHIT! I forgot to mention the miniskirts, actually the less said the better.

Halloween special: Amnesia unmasked? you'll never believe?

In the lead up to to the winter months a litany of new titles are released for the gaming masses to purchase with annual titles like: that one you’re sick to death of but which promises to be different this year, to that one you never got into and don’t really see the appeal of. There might even be something new in the mix, though i’d not count on that possibility too strongly. This season of releases ought to be worth covering in depth with a series of systematic and well informed analyses that tell you nothing you didn’t already know and feed into whatever opinion you already had. Unfortunately for those in “THAT” camp, there is a bigger and far more important date that falls soon… the eve of all saints day!

Grease is the word, another set of words is the systematic use of non disclosure agreements to silence witnesses in cases of sexual and racial harassment but that’s neither here nor there what is here is a discussion of the merits of a game i’ve barely played and not for many years. Amnesia, a game i’ve not played for many years: amnesia, game i’ve… amnesia. Wasn’t that amusing, almost as amusing as a legal system allowing individuals to use their wealth and connections to hide behaviour that is unacceptable in modern society.

I’m not trying to make a point here but i keep forgetting that, guess i have a nasty case of… forgetfulness, and also using a framework to protect the personal lives of public figures from journalistic overreach as a means to side step potential legal action. Amnesia is a very tense game, long periods of wandering solving le puzzles about are woven seamlessly with the encroachment of vicious and terrifying monsters that abuse and prey on the silenced and defenceless protagonist… using non disclosure agreements.

The environment warps and twists in unsettling and bizarre ways, often concealing the lurking terrors at a distance in patches of dark. This is placed against and limited ability to illuminate ones surrounding, that game itself is trying to keep you in the dark as a way to make it’s monsters more threatening, which adds to the horror of the experience. I honestly can’t think of any parallels i could draw, even subtextually; so i’ll move on.

I’d never use my powerful peerage as a objective writer of moral rights, a wrighter if you will, to preach to my audience, there’s only about ten of you anyway. I stick to my topics and with laser focus never straying a hair's width away from the raw, crinkle cut, mixed metaphorical truth! That being said i do wish to share my current suggestions for improving the law of this land, in a totally objective and factually way, this isn’t an opinion and if you think otherwise you’re probably quite thick: it should be illegal to die whilst ‘staying alive, by the beegees,’ is playing in the same room, doing so should carry a life sentence.

Instead of byzantine legal protections the wealthy should be forced to build giant mecha suits and go battle over the cities in a glorious display of steel on steel, rampaging around as walking skyscrapers. Turning back the tide of gentrification using their electrified chain swords and flamethrowers. A bare bones darwinistic law of the jungle will emerge where only those with the grit to use their untamed steel behemoths will be able to prosper in battles of untold spectacle and carnage. The hot bellowing fumes of machines drinking city worth's of fuel every second, impacts that’ll drown out those fucking lawnmowers and ground shaking beneath our feet as though being shelled by artillery fire will become a fact of life. All the while everyone else can go on drinking tea and nibbling on scones without having to worry about cases of sexual misconduct. It’ll all be that simple, problem solved!

In summary: amnesia , not a game for the faint hearted.
In summary: amnesia , not a game for the faint hearted.
In summary: amnesia , not a game for the faint hearted.
In summary: amnesia , not a game for the faint hearted.
In summary: amnesia , not a game for the faint hearted.

Cakes and videogames: a tenuous connection poorly thought out to meet an deadline?

When attempting humour on method is to play out the absurdity of taking an extreme position for comic effect. You may want an example to help illustrate my point but i assure you none is necessary, you see the idea is fucking awful! There’s nothing absurd about believing extreme things because thing i saw once on an anonymous comment thread said something about as obscene; I was only looking up the recipe for a cake.

“Bad comics often attempt to dissect the very nature of comedy as their opening gambit. Not only is this an bold but also abstract introduction to a set that is unwilling to anchor itself in an established norm. The true weight of thing becomes felt in the second stroke which leaves the comic with no obvious springboard to move off from and no norm to bring the audience back to.” - anon on the cake comments.
Why this was written on a baking forum is beyond me.

Cake is an opulent food. Marie Antoinette is purported to have remarked upon the revolting french peasantry “let them eat cake,” unfortunately for her their cheat day wasn’t until next Sunday. Following the strands of unjust aristocrats, confectioneries and opulence leads us to mario 64, where the titular character luigi is invited over for “cake,” while many have speculated on the true meaning of this, one hacker who broke into the game files found a .TXT file that clearly explained that “cake” was a euphemism for the systematic exploitation of the lower classes by the wealthy. This was then posted, not to a Nintendo forum but to a Cake forum which explains why it isn’t more widely known.

The video game equivalent of the cubism movement: minecraft, also has Cake as one of it’s items. It being one of the more complex items to craft in game as a symbol of it’s opulence. The player needs: wheat, sugar, eggs, neuroatypical tendencies and milk. No prizes for guess where i picked up that little tidbit.

Later on we’ll discuss the Cake in Portal but first i’d like to mention the function of cake in modern society. You see i didn’t find the recipe for my cake on the baking forums at all but on an mmorpg. You see outside the framework provided, that being the game, much of the ingredients lack any worth. Which is fine it’s a game after all, but it is one that keeps people engaging in menial activity for a reward contingent on their continued investment in a system which would leave them better off, in a monetary and temporal sense, were they to question and then abandon that structure. They are the filling in the cake.

Subtext is open to interpretation, like the layers of jam between two sandwiches of sponge there are many acceptable ways to go about it, there are also some which are clearly mad, nutella for instance. To give an equivalent with subtext, the use of cake as a metaphor or euphemism bakes in a certain assumptions that obfuscate the meaning like a layer marzipan.

In this Cake case for instant it would fall apart when i removed the bottom because the nutella is made equivalent to marzipan as part of the madness, which is demonstratively false because while it is possible to have too much marzipan, any amount of nutella is about as necessary as denying trying to sprinkle social criticism and progressive sentiments in your ramble about cake and then giving up because your having much more fun talking about marzipan. i guess you can’t have your Cake and eat it.

This is quite the challenging dichotomy regarding cake, on the one hand i seem to like the cake because i am emotionally invested in its existence, on the other hand i am hungry and want a larger slice. I guess i can echo the words of Marie Antoinette when i say “let them eat “cake”,”

Pokemon, i choose you! for our topic of discussion.

As a child i seemed extremely shy, my unwillingness to make eye contact with the other kids, teachers or even the milkmen lead people to make certain assumptions about me as a person; furthermore, because using that word makes me sound clever. I was terrified of entering wheat fields, hedgerow or any other kind of tall grass. My insistence that “i didn’t want to get my trousers mucky,” swayed few that heard it, for as many know: children exist primarily to get their trousers and anything else in their vicinity as mucky as possible, this includes their parents relationship, NOT MARRIAGE. We’re not here to force backwards institutions onto people who’d rather smoke pot.

Turns out those worries were misplaced but not entirely without merit. You see i had little pocket money, and no pokemon to speak off. If a stranger had challenged me to a battle i’d not only have to hand over the pittance of a stipend my eight year old self was afforded, but also in my mind i'd likely be stung several times by the person’s killer bee, psychic duck or brother who is a bit on the slow side. i was bound by the way i chose to see the world, fortunately i grew out of it but i wondered what life might be like if i hadn't. So why the life story then? Are we reviewing your entire life today or just a another fragment of experience? Well it’s not like i can review things that have yet to happen, as much as i’ve tried at time; moreover, because write that is me smart. Video games!

We’re talking pokemon, rather i’m typing about them, but if i pretend this is some kind of dialectic you’ll feel your input of staring at some words for a few minutes somehow reaffirmed your supposed intrinsic quality. Enough meaningless distraction filled with false affirmation, we need to talk about a children's video game!

It’s hard to imagine a person reading this without a vague overview of what pokemon is, that’s because i have a limited capacity to envision anything, and assume my experience of culture is uniform with everyone else's. Primarily the source of my distress that not everyone instantly realises that any reference to a bakery is automatically a joke about the great fire of London, which started in a… that’s right! A pokemon centre, you DUNCE!

As a cultural force the influence of pokemon is undeniable, well i mean one could. This was typified in the video where a bunch of pikachu fash march down the street in japan advocating for the establishment of camps to detain and control the squirtles. Citing them as wartortles in waiting and as being bad hombres. Amazing how one can use a magical animal fights to seamlessly bridge era’s in right wing political discourse.

This brings me neatly to my central point, in episode 14 of the animated series, which first aired in japan in 1997. Ash, the protagonist, seeks his third gym badge by facing off against a military veteran turned pokemon trainer named surge. Surge’s primary pokemon is a raichu, the evolution of a pikachu which ash uses as his primary means of ass pulling his way through situations. Ash loses first time around but then after deciding his electric rat was faster for some reason and choosing not to evolve the rat, they then ass pull through the rest of the episode.

Episode 14 sticks with me, not for the contrast and foil provided by surge. Nor the emotionally weight of a discussion around how evolution can change one’s bond with their fighting rats but that maybe surge is ash's dad? Maybe because his pokemon is bigger version of ash’s that means he’s the dad tho? We don’t know who that dad is so it’s possible? Who knows, who can say. Maybe surge got ash’s mum pregnant during the occupation of kanto after the second pokemon war and that with their economy in ruins the only way to get by was by selling convenience items to the occupying troops, not least of all themselves…

Pokemon therefor typifies the aftermath of any great conflict, as the people attempt to leave the past behind and move forward with a renewed sense of positivity. Ash ought never to know his mother is slowly succumbing to last stages of sexually transmitted infections that she acquired around the time of his conception. She can no longer care for him and needs a full time pokemon helper to get by as her mind and body deteriorates. Hence him being sent into the world alone, save for his pet rat. Ash lacks the capacity to process this, so he buries himself in an endless series of distractions as he wanders the world, a vagrant pulled apart from his mother and meeting his father without recognising it. His is the tragedy of man kept forever a child by his own inability to move beyond his stagnated perception, a child with no grounded force to tether him to reality.

I like the way the animals change at certain levels it helps to give one something to aim towards when grinding and gives one a real sense in progression to help flesh out the otherwise standard Rpg experience. The games stick to a rigid formula but one that has served them well, they are a reliably enjoyable if a not samey experience.

My favorite pokemon is the duck because it is silly.

Deus ex: a deep dive into the ghost drive of the human soul.

Once upon a time there was a far greater journalist than myself, shocker i’m sure. They wrote with an unbridled passion and a free beating heart. The stroke of their pen could make or break a game’s release, and for one ascendant moment i found my own work nestled in the bosom of their greatness. The sophiticated gamer, the literal grandfather of video games journalism has, like the buddha, left this mortal coil behind to explore new frontiers of consciousness, a place they called “IRL”

Once upon a time, upon a time, i reviewed deus ex human revolution. I’m not one to repeat myself, but i am one not to repeat myself, myself; however the words i spoke then were those of a child and as a child i thought only as a child, a child. So it think it’s a good time, that being a time where once upon a time is a time constraint that alludes to a time now past; saving time on specific details, i’ll only have mentioned once upon.

Deus ex is a series that has firmly entrenched itself in the cyberpunk genre just to the right of the neuromancer and next door to Ghost in the shell; although the latest entry has tried to dislodge itself from this matrix by being bad. How would i know? i’ve not played it but maybe i’ve had the memories implanted but there’s no unicorn in my dreams so maybe i’m me. Cyberpunk’s ascendancy and main /function, aside from being hard boiled with low key body horror, is posing philosophical and social questions that play on the anxieties of the modern age; or if they’re feeling lazy it can be a race relations allegory.

Deus sex falls hard onto the latter ladder and manages to hit several rungs on the way down by adding: the other guys have superpowers basket, that skewers any hope of a equality being salvaged from the deluge or am i thinking of that other cyberpunk game set in detroit but with fewer memorable lines than. “i never asked for this,”
Hard to know i’ve not played that unicorn either but my recent holiday to mars was lit.

Let’s jack-in and see if we can’t hack the source code of this technovirus. Side note: the idea that the internet would be used for jacking-in is one of those predictions that was just a stroke off being bang on the money shot. I have actually played deus ex, not as many times as i’ve watched bladerunner but more times than the aforementioned sequel that i haven’t played. Which is about as descriptive as i can get without really thinking about it for more than three seconds. According to the omniscient super intelligence, ie google: the world’s faster computer can do 33,860 trillion calculations per second meaning if i were a computer working out how many times i’ve played deus ex would be impossible because i haven’t given it sufficient data to give an exact figure but it would realise that faster… wow!

That computer is located in china and so are the best parts of the game, the time spent in neo-shanghai, or just shanghai for short, is easily the best part of the game. The whole city actually feels like a futuristic hexagonal laden metropolis; unlike detroit that feels like it’s just come to grips with the 20th century, which is still more progress that anyone could really expect it to make, meaning this is technically soft sci fi.

It would be wrong to talk about deus ex without exploring the series’ stance and commentary on conspiracy.

The game has you do the sneaky sneak with a series of cover based mechanics that is buffeted with hacking minigames gunplay when you F’ed up. Pretty standard fare at this point. You’re reading a review of a game while walking through the desert but the review has run out of things to talk about and fallen on it’s back, you try to flip the review into a Voight-Kampff joke but not everyone will get it. Why can’t you review videogames normally like everyone else?

In the future it is likely horses will become obsolete, that means unicorns too but then why do they keep showing up in my dreams; i only found out yesterday one can pay for purchases using their phones and in a near future dystopia the only way to participate in elections will be with a subscription to google vote or going to the ivote store and installing the app into a small microchip that helps dampen deviant thoughts and impulses. The every essence of humanity is dissolving under the microscopic analysis of the military-scientific complex and all we have to show for it is synthpop; maybe that is a fair trade? All this speculation; lost, like piss into garden hedge.

BVGRONTI Celebrates One year of truth seeking by reviewing read dead redemption

It’s our anniversary sweetie. Don’t tell me you forgot? Well no oral coitus for you tonight then, you’ll have to read a blog post instead. That’s right BVGRONTI is now a year old. In that time we’ve taken the establishment to task and quite literally redefined objective journalism. Up is down and those that were first are now last. I could go on like this for some time in a self congratulatory manor tooting successes of the platform; like when we managed to shut down Ea by reviewing half life 2 or that time we and bruce willis flew a rocket ship to stop a meteorite impact.

Facile fantasies aside i thought it’d talk about some video games. The best videogame! The best video game to review on the internet. A game i, surprisingly, like.

Out on the open prairies a man and his mount can do great and terrible things. Well in reality you can herd cattle and catch Pellagra but lets not let such things weigh on our consideration. Brigands and bandits, outlaws and marauders, vagabonds and blackhats, desperadoes and ermm... outlaws. The old west was a cornucopia of NPC baddies that would charge fearlessly at expert time stopping gunmen that took perfect shots from atop galloping horses. History is wonderful.

Red dead redemption captures this feeling while integrating other unrealistic elements like depictions of rural frontier lifestyles, the conflict that arose from industrialisation and games of poker. I might be a bit of a stretch to say, and you’re welcome to call me an over analysing pretentious English teacher for suggesting it but i think, and it must stress that this is just my opinion, but i think the game might be borrowing the aesthetic and style of Sergio Leone in it’s own tribute to the spaghetti western genre that shows narrative and structural understanding of both the genre it’s depicting and the real events it references, the problems and anxieties displayed therein. Nah, you’re right probably just a brain fart on my part.

The main dude, who you play as (shocker), is a family man and farmer until one day ‘the man’ (not him) shows up to remind him he used to be a bad boy outlaw able to shoot the stubble from a man’s cheek at fifty paces and twang. Oh, that and your ol’ buds be causing a ruckus down on the prairie and they need a bit of midwestern hospitality to help them get acquainted with feeling of 9mm of a lead passing through their cerebellum.

Right so why is this game good then? I hear myself ask, reminding me to deliver on promised of the premise during the firsts half of the second section of the text; which with this overly meta segway has declared begun. Horse, i mean Horses! Or as cowboy’s called them de’m Ol’horsey thangies. Rich georgian accents aside the horseplay (horse-gameplay) in red dead really takes the peach, which is another was of saying ass, but not ass as in bad but as in a donkey, therein meaning reliable and trustworthy… the horseplay takes place upon a peachy ass.

Do the gameplay and graphic still hold up after eight year? First off its ‘does the gameplay’ and second how would i know? I’ve not played it in years, i’ve just idealised it in my head from a time where the way i experience things is very different to the way i feel now, and old games carry with them a sheen of my former self i feel entirely uncritical off. That and the xbox is currently held by my brother. Oh right, i can complain about that… not my brother, the game.

A surprisingly on topic notion right? Anyway i’m kind of ruining the fact i was sticking the point by, you know, not doing that. Yeah, i’ve wanted to play the game again and been unable to do so because i can’t be bothered to borrow the old eggs bogs. A port to the PC would have allowed be to expend capital to get around having to talk to people i’m related to - the entire point of currency in the first place, but No, rockstar games ever present in their omniscience held out on me, and so i will do the same, my undying rage with be the last star left winkling in the nights sky long after all others have succumb to entropy. As the strong force breaks down and matter begins its cold journey to a perfect timeless equilibrium, my rage will live on as a spark, radiant in the cosmic emptiness… I just called; he said maybe later.

The game is far from perfect, there are no assless chaps unless you count the lack off thick boi’s in the old west. You can tie people up with a lasso but this never compels them to tell the truth, this might be due to john marson not being of amazonian descent. I have written to the studio about this but still no word, guess that makes it a theory a theory theory, thanks for…

It is worth asking a question or two, what appeal do we find in the harsh and bitter life of the old west, what compels people to live in such in inhospitable climates or better yet what pushes people to live there in the first place. Well i can’t be bothered to google it, so i guess we’ll never know for sure but what i do know it that i’d rate this game: being just a comedic device to avoid firm commitments to a scoring system i’m not interested in, out of 10.

What insights can be gleamed about Esports after thinking about it during a early afternoon shower.

Capricious energy finds its way to my fingertips this morning. The juvenile thoughts of a grandeur fuel their relentless beat. A furied exchange of ideas took place last night which has frothed the tide of my mind to a swirl of flotsam and jetsam, that is to say: just a bunch of trash bobbing about in the water. This can only mean one thing! Another blog post will soon be born.

Recently a furry won the Dragon ball fighter Z tournament. Much in keeping the lore of the series where the president of the world is a actual dog, a notion only slightly less fantastical than our reality wherein ...(insert one of the hundred jokes about him you’ve all heard before, ect ect, roll on snare drum) The current state of fighter z and the social activities of it’s winner are beyond my interest for the moment, given the game currently costs more than a tenner and isn’t about ten years old; however what is now more than ten years old and only costs one's self respect is the wonderful world of Esports.

I do not watch Esports. Real gamers, like myself, listen to Beethoven while breaking into people's homes and drinking milk. This is normally not a problem except for the victims of my 60’s esq violent crusades of random sadism. That was a lie, no not the esports bit, the truth is i’ve never read a clockwork orange, let alone taken inspiration from it commit vile acts, which is less than i can say for skullgirls.

I think we got off topic there, which was for the best perhaps, you see in my disinterest i have come to form a view on the subject. Most of the debate if centred around the question of they could as real sports of not? I couldn't care less but i’m pretty they’re both equally worthwhile of disregard. No! That's hardly a interesting perspective. Blah blah i am talking about a thing i vaguely disprove of in a critical light, gosh i should write for the guardian's opinion column. Mind you even i would struggle to stay that inane. I’ll have a shower and think this through.

Here’s a novel concept for you, being overly invested something in something is bad. I can think of a couple examples off the top my head. Religion, The show friends, politics, stock markets and that new spice girls reunion.

Now for a seemingly unplanned detour. Sports professionals often inspire their fans to play the game for themselves. This is a useful because physically moving one's body is effort and hence something to be avoided if at all possible. Hence the players would otherwise not be doing so. When it comes to esports, however, the people who follow the competitive scene almost invariably play the game already, yet the professional player still inspire them to a greater or less extent. Here comes the gut punch, this wasn’t a tangent. With no barrier, like: having to put clothes on, not be a furry, or experiencing the harsh and unforgiving climate of a spring afternoon the #inspired gamer no external means for escalation.

Yet if they already play the game they still feel the need for an escalation. Some will buy a skin and call it a day while others will try harder. In so doing they will become a scourge on the gaming world. Tryhards! Sure those walking talking dick heads exist in everyday life too and are still best avoided but they also tend not to be the kind of backwards scum that plays video games then writes about it on the internet.

In games our agency is limited by incontrovertible rules, more so than in life, when it comes to the range of responses we can illicit albeit with lighter consequences. So when we try harder we run up against this hard limit which can only be overcome with skil, time or Random number generation. If that sounds frustrating you’ve been paying attention. Fortunately people online deal with frustration in a very mature and constructive manor, taking the time to talk to friends and family about what's bothering them while addressing the problems both internal and external with a considered and measured approach, hence there is no problem, none at all, so few problems in fact anyone who could in any way direct criticism towards games should be told to “krull demsurfs”

I mean this is all just probably, but apply chance to a large enough sample and you start to be able to put some power behind your predictions. I don’t know if you’ll have sex when the power cuts -actually that's not true because i’m pretty sure no one reading this has the option of coitus but you get my point...

Q: Aren’t you just using stereotypes and overly simplified psychology and a total absence of any data to draw a tenuous connection between two aspects of the culture while undermining yourself along the way.

A: couldn’t have put it better myself; but like i said, i should write for the guardian.

Q: don’t you think not bothering to explore other options is misleading, i mean to pin toxicity on such a simple mechanism is reductionist at best?

A: The readership are pretty easily manipulated and care more for a narrative than an objective presentation of facts around a certain thesis. The more i can play into one groups bias while inflaming the other more social capital i can gain.

Q: so who’s side are you on here?

A: Cloud9 Sneaky's cosplays 

Taking the Big shots to task! Reviewing the reviewers. An end to elitist smug?

Seldom is the day that i consider the appeal of the prose i spout, that day has still yet to come. I have instead formulated a brilliant cheap trick to bolster the attention it draws without improving in any way shape or form; Quite the opposite, this might make everything a lot worse. A fellow critic of the video games, recently put out a review of a horror game, called Persistence (the game is called persistence, not the critic (would it be weird if the game reviewed the critic?)). Ever since i’ve had a persistent urge to chide, mock or otherwise condescend to what is otherwise an entirely readable article, i can’t fathom why but i find it repulsive in a manor only matched by upper middle class suburbia.

The video game persistence is one i have forgone playing because that would have necessitated having heard about it before. The article states, “a trouser ruining horror” for the most part my trousers remain unruined. The exception being the time some kid left his half chewed gum on the bus seat where my derriere found itself, hence my fictitious nickname: gummybuns.

What isn’t fictitious is the zeal with which this sticky fingered Augustus gloop boasts his hardware and supposed refinement as a critic spouting such bollocks as “for my own sanity” and “shattering hours later” even going so far as to mention he was in possession of the fabled future technology “vr” i don’t believe in it, if i sellotape a screen to my face that doesn’t make it virtual reality, all it does is make me some rotund soft brained dirge believing in a future that will NEVER COME!

I didn’t mean for this to turn into a hit piece but if you wind up staggering around a tennis court in the middle of a match it’s rude to not at least try and take a swing at the ball. Speaking of court the supposed “website?” this article is hosted on doesn’t let my copy paste sections of the article, citing a DMCA protection. This might be to protect from people stealing his work but i could have always screenshotted the piece (piss) and uploaded that, leaving everyone none the wiser. ‘Me steal his work? I couldn’t have, it’s DMCA protected,’ is what i would say in court before trying to take a swing at the ball as the umpire tackles me to the ground screaming ‘are you the pervert that trashed the local music shop last year?’

2321 character deep, i refuse to press the backspace key that many times, so i have no choice but to press on. The writer clearly has a loose if not tenuous grip of the sciences, saying “delicious stem cells, Mmm” first off Mmm isn’t a word. I tried to play it once in scrabble and my opponent told me to ‘get of the tennis court there is a match in progress.’ Second is the issue of stem cells, they’re not delicious. They taste like mushrooms, a food upsupringly grown in shit. This would be a perfect opportunity to criticise the reviewers taste in games having set up the necessary elements for a witty little one liner but unlike that morlock faced reviewer i have no reason to stoop to cheap insults.

They claim the game was scary but also say things like “that encounter was pretty hilarious” clearly they know nothing about tonal consistency. You can’t put something totally out of place in a game like that or else. 22,000 children die of poverty each day, climate change is set to disproportionately affect the impoverished and without sustained efforts to slow the rate of change and help improve their means of subsistence this figure could increase.

The author rounds out his review with a brief three liner summary of what he was saying giving little thought the greater world around him as he does. He claims that “the game is not for the faint of heart” yet it is an escape from deeper more tragic truths that plague our world. This for once isn’t his fault, the games industry blah blah blah escapism, reality. Cyber space. Ready player one is bad reference you know all this already do i need to remind you?

The game reviewed didn’t have horses, nor did the review find a way to work horses into the narrative. In this at least i can outshine because my infiltration into the tennis court took place upon an equine mount.

Age of empires 2: is nostalgia poisoning the minds of yesterdays youth?

Age of empires two (aoe2) is a pit of nostalgia for many, hours spent researching heavy plough and doing the things that game otherwise has you do. Like many of you, i didn’t actually play it when i was a kid, sorry. Instead i had an imagination and an education that gave me the, using clever words synonym, I use today to acrticate my Edea’s. Incoherent gibberish aside lets jump into the review.

Age of empires, is a game like any other game. I've not really got a lot to say so i popped a quick question to a friend asking them what their childhood experiences of the game had been like in the full knowledge that they had not played it at that time either. This fellow was however an veteran of interviews: having quite recently being interviewed on a beach my a welsh man asking him about the now cancelled swansea tidal lagoon. The interview went as follows:



Halcyon indeed sweet hypothetical manchild. There is something of a victimhood at play here for the lost children. Those that never had more than terrestrial television to tide over our supple impressionable minds, the forlorn and lost who unable to grapple ourselves to our plain and uneventful pasts are forced to live in a tumultuous present, stripped of our rose tinted spectacles we wander the desert of the real baring down on all we see with incalculable cynicism from our half-formed under stimulated monkey minds.

Note that the fellows linguistic capabilities were improved when he was a version of himself who had played aoe2 as a child. Given this was the only variable at play here, it does make for rather compelling evidence that not playing aoe2 is a source of neurocognitive decline in the development of the child's mind. While the mechanic of such an causation can only be speculated upon, it wouldn’t be all too bold if i suggested that the game beams the historical and social textures of the civilisation directly onto their comparatively softer skulls, wherein lies the brains (sorry not every here played aoe2 as a child and i want us all to be on the same page)

I know some of you are very curious about the welsh man and how he plays into the discussion, well you see the welsh aren't a playable civilisation in aoe2. There is a very good explanation for that… they’re all a bunch of… misrepresented and stereotyped people who bare the eire of their anglican neighbours and by extension their former dominon’s. That fact you were anticipating a cheap jab the welsh on my part just goes to show how pervasive the attitude is, and what low expectations you hold for the man who named his chinese city Sumtingwong.

This however hits at something larger, i unfortunately can’t ignore this grand injustice lacking as i may the advanced fold in the front of my brain needed to understand the necessity of being prejudiced against oppressed peoples. A smarter fellow might be able to explain but alas i must thrash and writhe against a system built upon a assumptive mantle of my having played Aoe2.

The game is a real time strategy. Let's talk about that name for a moment. namely the aspect denoted as “real time” what does that mean? Well it references to things happening concurrently. Which to so some degree is true or rather it was true in 1999 but here in the scifi future with new marvels such as computers, the electric toothbrush or even the Loom (haha we had that one in 1999) Nostalgia is now a player on the board, not the in game board more the bored of this extended ramble about nostalgia board, that is you’re now thinking about bored board boredly in a broad but not like a sword especially one with a nord… word.

The key point here, so muddled in tangent it required a new paragraph to actually get around to it, which now is derailing itself with an aside about it’s own necessity…

Finishing a game of aoe2 can be difficult online because sometimes one person's connection ends up making lag for the rest due to the requirement of every player being connected to every other player. This is often a source of frustration for those of us that don’t pop a prepubescent boner at the sound of villagers chopping wood. A symbolic castration that inevitably turned all the super intelligent ubermensch the game spat out into multifetished perverts. Some i have spoken to have openly expressed and interest in non missionary sex, non procreative sex and extramarital sex; which, deceitfully, is nothing to do with having multiple wives.

Speaking of multiple, this games has multiple mounted units: It’s okay in my books.

Mgs5: No not that one.

Wetwork, to some it means taking a slash on your partner(s) to others it's a life a death struggle to keep the world safe from those that would seek to do ill. I write these lines, equally wet, as i sit stewing in my own sweat after a harsh mid morning jog on what might just be the muggest day in living memory. What connects these three seemingly tangential observations? Well the run was short and bit of a pisser, short i am and so is metal gear 5: ground zeroes which would be taking the piss for the asking price if i’d not got it as part of a larger bundle; That and all three are warm, wet and a bit of a teaser.

The real trick to stealth in the same as “good” writing; hmmm... perhaps something closer to “effective” would be a better term. The word “jackhammer” seemingly plucked at random for use as a non-sequitur might actually fit closer than the other two. Word choice aside i mean to be an exponent for the most effective form of infiltration known to man; in this the modern day: two thousand eighteen anno domini. As i wet my lips to put these words forward i feel the hands of the GCHQ poised to punched my name into a watchlist. My solution: making bomb threats!

Nothing is more effective as a source of fear and confusion than an explosion. Other than shipping anyone one on a watchlist off to guantanamo bay for a light afternoon session of listening the barbie girl while a set of cracking live jump leads become firm and fast friends with your perineum. See the risks i go to for a piece of journalistic excellence like this. PM: Floaty McMay boat wouldn’t hesitate to ignore the context surrounding my assertion if it meant she could send me hurtling over the white cliffs of dover, into a waiting CIA hydroplane, to make the immigration figures look any better for the army of closet racists that have become her new powerbase.

WHY? Why the hatred for the system BVGRONTI? (rolls of the tongue, not a work in progress) well the answer is simple really. At the beginning of the game while witnessing the treatment of the prisoners in the fictional analogue of guantanamo bay (where the game is set) we are serenaded with the song “here’s to you,” a song about anarchists being put to death for crimes many believe they didn’t commit. The people who decided the state was a bad thing and ought to be abolished were really pissy when the stated decided they were a bad thing and ought to be abolished.

A strain of martyrdom makes its way into anarchist writing, praising the complexity of the men pulled into the machine of government and those the hurl themselves in after. Like those valiant souls who's arm’s become lodged in vending machine when trying to snatch a packet of cheese and onion. I’ve not yet developed a taste for that form of political whiskey but it burns my throat all the same. So what you heard a song and now you’re foaming at the mouth? No it think it’s the bombs they put in that little girls chest. Isn’t that some hackpin metaphor for adolescence? Pretty sure it isn’t.

The main crux of my outrage is that the very method i used to distract guards throughout my time roaming the bay was turned against me in the final moments of the game. I’m pretty sure the game agrees with my initial assertion. The explosion is the great leveler; Equity of man and concrete are brought about before its shattering might. it was the tool of my elevation and hence too my collapse, just like the anarchist. Either hideo kojima is a masterful storyteller or i need to reign in my pyretic tendencies.

What about the girl that got blown up?

Good point! I rate this game: better than getting teeth lodged in your skull that make you forget how to speak russian but not really.

fallout 76 will have a battle royale mode!

Woke up this morning with a real feeling of punditry on the breeze, normally i wait till later in the week to knock out one of these bad boy’s much like my pre-bed shower game; which i will not, sigh of relief, be reviewing…this week. The smart move would have been to take my bank of cashiers checks, (my little white spurts) and sit myself down in front of the electronic entertainment expo for god knows how many hours, cranking out words with my hand while i simply sink into the cringe of it all. I know some who did, but they don’t have blogs, nor do they possess the sheer indifference to reason needed to spit one of these things out. I could ask what they thought but that might give me something to write about, ruining this paragraphs implication that all i have here is a steaming pile of wank.

After a friend send me a link to the preorder for fallout 76 power armour edition retailing for about 175 pound sterling i decided that a ounce of grandstanding is in order, nothing short of total smug can be invoked for the tidal wave of cosmic level miscreance on both his part and the part of the infamous satanic figure: todd howard, who will use the revenue from said collector’s edition to fuel his industrial scale psychic hive-mind of kidnapped children to driver us ever closer to an actual nuclear apocalypse.

Such charges ought not to go unsubstantiated. In print such words could be liable, but sueing is the last thing todd howard would do. In order to sue he’d have to prove to the judge that i was wrong and that were was no hivemind of kidnapped children locked away in the basement of bethesda studios right between fallout: new vegas 2 and the smouldering puss soaked remains of Brink (2011). All things big todd would never let see the light of day. Hence i feel we are at something of an impasse, these words alone can’t stop the apocalypse but maybe they might make BIG T lose some sleep in between re-releasing skyrims.

I’m beginning to wonder if the apocalypse would be that bad, for one thing it’s most certainly mean the end of my more powerful and popular rivals platform’s, i off course would survive unlike the ninety percent of people who would die in an actual apocalypse. I’m still too naive to consider my death a given certainty and as a result i approach nightmare scenarios like some brave new world being stripped of the shackles of conventional morality so i can made so called HARD CHOICES! But then the alternative is choosing between sweet corn brands; can anyone really blame me?

With all the meaningless speculative waffle this could be loosely compared to a kotaku article, if i had actually read any and not just heard about them through cultural osmosis. So let's get back to something more real. The friend i mentioned earlier, the one you might rightfully construed as an entirely fictitious element, undermining my proposition of returning to the real but which is in actual fact a person i know. Yeah? That one? Well he preordered the game, a preorder! Blatant blasphemy in internet circles. The dam thing was barely announced a week ago and has not been subject to the least critical appraisal, unless this counts, and already he has brought copy albeit not the ‘can’t pay rent now’ edition

So what exactly has he brought into, what is it people are buying when they pre-order. It’s really quite simple. Like a gold prospector staking their claim to some wasteland marsh my friend believes here be gold. He has purchased ownership, in an age of digital distribution where there is no scarcity, so all that’s left is ownership and even that’s watered down. A rather ironic paradigm for a fallout game in which everything is scarce and their really is no strong form of legal ownership, where preorders are replaced with not knowing where the next meal comes from. He Has brought ownership of a thing with certainty, wherein there is neither. If that doesn’t make your neck spin your joints aren't quite as flexible as my own but i’m firmly of the belief that you’re all trying.

Have i read the list of features they plan to put in the game? No! When a child draws their dream castle and puts the carmel pool right next to the man eating alligators one generally pays it little serious consideration. Until the child has achieved their masters in architecture that is. At which point i would do like to do nothing more than sit down with a brew and chat alligator logistics. You can tell a gator from a croc on the basis of whether it will see you in later or in a while. How i wish that joke was the product of my own mind, true envy lays therin.

Maybe that’s just it, this half cocked slapdash scrawl, just some cheap cash in on E3 an envy fuelled ride to gawk at those uncynical enough to put their money where their mouth is for things they unambiguously want. William hague, a tory posh boy, decided the other day that the war on drugs is a bust, maybe it’s time i too conceded that the war against nothing in particular has also failed to curb the rampant elephantiasised unwieldiness of nothing in particular. Then again the steam sale are right around the corner, maybe i might find some glimmer of salvation on that sea of green.

Bioshock the many: Apolitical storytelling at it’s finest.

There are two kinds of narrative, or there could be if one took proposition A: there are two kinds of narrative, to be true; then it logically follows that there are two kinds of narrative. What are those two kinds of narrative, well we can’t know with proposition A alone so let's introduce another element quickly before i loss your attention and through analysis we might discern what those kinds of narrative are. Bioshock: infinite is a the sequel to bioshock that strips away the tight, claustrophobic and thrilling atmosphere of the first game, Set underwater; and swaps it out for a the open sky, which admittedly is much harder to make feel claustrophobic.

The game takes place in the floating city of Columbia, seemingly idyllic with it’s wholesome christian veneer; only it turns out there all a bunch of racists, who’d of guessed. I had it in my head that when i was forcibly baptised on a arrival that things could only work out well. Mistake numero uno, that’s number one for our non spanish speaking readers, they built a city in the sky Acrophobia puts one in an awfully jumpy state, ironically enough. Just when the bathophobia fleeing from the city of rapture thought they were safe, BAM! Dunked in water quick enough to make your head spin, which we will call mistake number 2.

The list goes on until one realised it’s probably okay to start gunning these people without so much as a second thought, which is when the game hands you a gun and tells you to go nuts. Gyaliaphobia is not very common, so nuts most people tend to go. So far we’ve been talking about the interactions of an individual with society but there’s more… there are characters too. That being said just because there is a thing doesn’t mean they’re particularly worth talking about; unless that lack of interest, therein, is a point i can use to sledgehammer my misgivings, which this sentence is doing while also describing its own purpose. D E E P

Cognitive dissonance aside, the game has another more interesting aspect to itself. The so called ‘infinite’ part of the title. This isn’t some cheap attempt at sequel naming you’d see from the likes of the game industries resident puss bloated sequel behemoth. They’re instead playing the ace high of all stand alone ideas that make whatever their applied to really deep and meaningful for some reason… The mindfuck multiverse. If you can hear me sigh when i say that, it’s probably you’re end, i’m not tech savvy enough to rig that up. I’ve got a real fear of technology, which makes me, you’ve guessed it, a luddite.

As Stephen king once said hypothetically in my head, “what if all my stories were one big story, that’d be sick init.” the multiverse, in scifi terms, is time travel +1. Any story that takes place across multiple independent realities is automatically a meta deconstructionist satire and can be used to hand wave or link up just about anything: Like the reappearance of the freaky power ups from bioshock. The only downside is you’ve played the highest card in the deck and so there’s not a lot one can do in terms of escalation. 

I myself, sat here with toes curled up to shield by aching feet, have been wondering just that and as i do i create two branching realities, each their own narrative both rather Geliophobic in their own rights. It’s amusing that at the time of bioshocks: infinite's release The moral choice stuff was still quite prevalent, and that in a world of infinite branching realities the game and narrative are extremely linear, except for some backtracking in both. Apart from some meaningless coin flips, which when you think about does make it rather satirical in a sense or it would were it not played straight.

Quick fire round:

Gives the feels? it’s got some spicy notes here and there.

Do things get edgy in the dlc? what a leading question! You seem to already know.

Why did you avoid major story spoilers to shield to more interesting aspects of the narrative from scrutiny, thereby ruining your ability to answer your own initial question? no one expects me to answer it plus my tautology is invincible, it proves itself.

A Barbarous life at sea, A herald of the open oceans: fear and generalised anxiety in CIV 5

When is a door not a door, how is a raven like a writing desk, and does absolute power corrupt absolutely? Science, philosophy and general substance addled discourse has strained against the iron purview of such question since Socrates invented thinking back when the world was new, or at least comparatively newer. Civilisation five or V or 5, came out in 2010 but didn’t actually start dating until the DLC made it good, turning it from and awkward teen into a chiselled machismo with a firm yet tender grip. It is due to this game that we are now able to answer at least one of these questions: when it’s a ajar.

Already one question ahead of the rest of society i decided to double down on my perversion and enlisted the help of two fellow masters of the arts to aid me in my quest to uncover the true nature of man. In order to protect their identities and properly set up my Freudian understanding i have elected to call them Id and superego respectively, or rather disrespectively but certainly not unrespectively. Multiplayer is the realm in which realpolitik takes place; no man is an island but we certainly were, because we all spawned on islands.

The aptly named ID, (shout out to whoever came up with that (it was me!)) began at once to expand in a feverish frenzy. they sought out war and destruction as though they were a invasive goat left behind by sailors, however alone on their island the id had to content itself with seeking out god, or more specifically Sikhism's god.

The super ego however was steadfast in it's self control and discipline, promising to never raise arms unless provoked. There was a single caveat to this. The soul exception: a grudge they harboured against the nuclear warlord Mahatma Gandhi. Fate was not kind and their island was not empty. The power struggle began at once, two nations mud wrestling to keep their heads above the water on some desolate sandbank in the middle of the vast uncaring ocean, at least they had crabs.

Let me as an aside to the this tangent talk about the game for a minute, okay thirty seconds but this pretext doesn’t count, okay it does. One plays as the leaders of civilisations advancing through history and trying to prosper by whatever means available to them, if that sounds vague it’s because you only gave me thirty seconds so who’s to blame really? You! It’s definitely YOU! For imposing these ridiculous pressured on a journalist of my stature, i can’t even reach the top shelf without my tippy toes.

If they are id and superego, that makes me the Ego, shout out to…

I was playing as the Chinese and knowing a thing or two about china and it’s ocean going expeditions i figured i could do fairly well for myself so long as i avoided England. The plan was simple, spawn in a really convenient position on the map and use the shallow water ways to hop between islands and set up trade with the city states. Soon i had a merchant navy so full of seamen it make the emperor proud, he frolicked gaily. While that joke might strike some as crass and probably too easy, even for me, i am forced to remark that the racial stereotypes that informed my city names were far, far more crass indeed. You could probably guess them without giving it a moment's thought, i know i didn’t.

Yes those stereotypes couldn’t hope to justify the first joke and that’s the point really. The power rushed to my head like a surge of adrenaline or an another thing that works as a suitable, succinct simile. War! Religion, and institutional racism and homophobia! All had taken root on three separate islands independently. Once calm headed rational fellows, and myself, had been taken in my the spreadsheets, forced to sink or swim. we thought 'To hell with the little guy,' and sought out the quickest means to vilify them.

What happened next will add to my word count but i must note i haven't the foresight to know what my next session will bring but i shan't let its hindsight scrub my words thus far. Can humanity be redeemed, i wait with baited breath.

Part 2

The ego, myself. Produced a navy the likes of which the world had never seen. Bloody rampage followed. It began with espionage, the Iroquois stole, china denounced, war followed. In what seemed like the blink of an eye four cities were annexed. Next the id’s Celts rolled in like wailing Valkyries catching Ghandi unprepared allowing the super-ego and id to create their own Warsaw pact. Next was England, it’s religious zealotry out striped even the id’s as it ejaculated white hot religious fervor straight into the faces of other nations. Doubly concerning, they had declared war on the superego for reasons unknown.

Peace came with the price of blood, England was conquered by the trio but in her dying breaths the queen Elizabeth revealed the she’d been receiving funds from the Celts, so too had the Iroquois. The id had engineered wars to override the good sense of its contemporaries, it craven desire for gratification made manifest in the burning rubble of two lost empires.

What came next was the long silence. The tripartite psyche, now the only ones left, festered their animosity unable to find an external other for their Hegelian ascent to self-hood. Friendly exchanges became paranoid probings of the enemies intent. The high seas were filled with ships ferrying coin and a plague of fear that threatened to sink the islands into another brutal war. an incident of general land grabbing (literal!) brought tensions to boil in the far east, a now staving city bereft of aid became a sour joke to its calloused governors.  

Things came to a head when a set of deadly propositions were dropped into world governments lap: China tried to ban people copying their technology and failed, then the Celts banned crab. Finally japan proposed china be embargoed, so China’s fleet set sail and for a time it seemed war was about to surface again… 

Though the game isn’t yet over history waits for no one. So i must publish this story without an ending, at least for the time being. I’m sure you’ll all wait with baited breath for a follow up but in summary: war makes a mockery of all, power demands one renounce or become enslaved to teleology, and a writing desk and raven both have legs. This game has horses so i rate it civ 5/5.

The league of legends conspiracy: unmasked, disrobed and now totally nude.

I was, wasting time on / using, reddit when a message popped up in my inbox saying that i ought to review a new specific game or rather that i ought to apply to review a game that this person was associated with. While i haven’t bothered to reply for fear their refusal will shatter the bracket of glowing golden ego i am now cloaked in, i have however elected to share this detail with my adoring fans to keep them sure in the knowledge that i am too lazy to ‘sell out’ or ‘take my work seriously’ furthermore unto the quagmire.

League of legends is a powerful opioid drug manufactured by in a snowstorm by an as yet unnamed demigod for it’s nefarious scheme of destroying the world. Now if that sounds just a little unhinged to you then well done, you took that literally; you fucking idiot. That being said it’s time for me to don my tinfoil hat as i unravel the conspiracy of league of legends.

That sounded like a decent thing to say but i know next to nothing about conspiracies, which makes me remarkably well informed for a conspiracy theorist, but hey that’s just a set up for an reference, an internet reference. The game is a moba standing Massive oba (oba meaning ruler in the Yoruba language spoken in west africa) this initially didn’t seem to make a lot of sense until the game took a despotic turn eating up by free time and subjecting me to an endless tirade of debasing and humiliating experiences or as they are called in game: matches.

Each match lasts about as long as an episode of the X files but unlike the X files the truth isn’t out there all there is ‘out there’ is four angry teens out to talk shit about you... and the enemy team is there too. Talking about individual encounters or events that transpired during my playtime is much like trying to recall the events of a drunken night out. Ultimately i can’t decide if i had fun or not. So assume i did, maybe, i mean i‘m kind of sore and for some reason there's a bruise on my left cheek so… good times?

Much like a cult the game introduces strange and unhinged behaviours into the minds of it’s players. Sadism, antagonism, loathing and tantrums or SALT for short. Players on the losing team often exhibit symptoms of saltiness, seeing as they are collectively at a disadvantage though that won’t stop the instalocking AP jungle fizz from feeding because you didn’t give them half of all your minions and a kill every two minutes. It’s perfectly possible to win the game and feel nothing but puerile hatred for oneself and one’s team, this is called competitive mode in game. There’s also the possibility you’ll start spending a lot of money without gaining any tangible benefit, a fate i cleverly avoided by being broke.

Each game is structured like a story by laughably racist hp lovecraft. Each story starts normally enough with a long and boring tirade about geology and then bam! Madness, horrors beyond your own awareness and a light smattering of pseudo scientific racism and racial stereotypes. I’m pretty sure that latter elements are just dota trolls working to destabilise the game in a vile conspiracy to undermine the values the community... or i would be sure of that if it wasn’t half the darn player base demanding i provide them with oral satisfaction on the basis because they didn’t bother to ward the river.

After that all bets are off and the game progresses to the team fight stage. This is supposed to be part where the players engage in a bout of jolly cooperation. The reality is a cornucopia of decadent egotism that’d make even most vain regime on the planet blush with their comparatively meek sensibility. Tilted and salty individual attempt to interact with fellow teammates, this is about a friendly as starved chimps engaging in bare knuckle boxing. It is at this point where the illuminati wins… for some reason, i’m not sure why but if i keep reillterialing the point emphatically it will only serve to make my rational argument more solvent.

As of march there are 134 playable champions in the game, so we’ll say over 120 because that’s a nicer number and to be honest no one plays Skarner anyway. Apparently Mordekaiser is now the least played dude, i guess he is no longer neuero uno brazil. Mind you i’m not sure he ever was. Anyway, is that too many champions? Who knows? Pundits probably.

The game has lore but it’s about as meaningful as changing your profile picture on facebook to show solidarity with the current humanitarian disaster or star wars movie, i can’t remember if have heard this joke elsewhere but if i openly admit to the possibility of stealing it then it’s okay right? To say any more would be giving it more credit than it’s due, even this is a bit much. Anything more i ought to say? Probably but I’m not wildly interested in spending my sunday morning remembering when i could be watching the swallows in garden. Oh, Aram is a thing… it’s at least slightly less tryhard.

Over 120 champions and only one is a horse (half horse), now this is a conspiracy. I therefor rate this game. 0.5/about 120.

Bayonetta vs the bible: what can teach us more about perversion?

Normally there’s a process to all this, some kind of brainstorm occurs. Yet all i have to work with today is a light drizzle. Call that a peak behind the curtain if you will. I however will call it what it is, a stalling tactic while i try to think up some crumb or otherwise underwhelming morsel to moan about… how about bayonetta? I mean i haven’t actually finished it but that hasn’t stopped be from forming judgements about my own life to this point.

The thing is there is some baggage about the portrayal of women from last time, and this game is probably the one to use as a case study in video games (bear with me here). There are some very articulate people that make a lot of points explaining the complexities of women’s portals that are often insightful to the native view, there is also a lot of inarticulate shouting that is somehow less coherent than I. Note how i haven’t ascribed these characteristics to any side of the debate and yet you're still decided my rough position and whom i would label with descriptors.

The easy thing to do would be to disavow the debate, or wade into it so cack handedly as to piss all sides off with my misconstruing the points being made; but, and i feel this is the true master stroke here. i could spend half my review discussing the topic but only in an entirely facile approach to the issue in what i imagine to be a fairly dry read for a punchline that is too weak to justify the investment, leading to one's ultimate dejection and isolation from the text therein as the simple accessible lexicon is swapped out for a more alien thickset vocabulary to drive the hitherto prose…

‘Live and let die’ was the title song for the eponymous james bond film of the same name, moonraker. Heavy drum motifs and a accelerated instrumentals are played off against slower more violin centred sequences, the latter corresponding to easy going optimistic past and the heavier, faster sections used as a representative of the confusing and ethically murky present. The change of one's own beliefs from live and let live, to live and let die. Paul mccartney himself having recently taken up piracy on the high seas could be a literialsation of the transformation. Do anything for long enough and you’ll have the niggling urge to address the complexity of more serious aspects of the topic even if your forat forbids you to do so. Meaning one must mature and incorporate more complex elements into the repertoire of revert to a fundematist view in a total rejection of this call.

After much soul searching i have found a truly satisfying answer: No one cares about what i have to say. My major problem when playing the game was the looming fear someone would walk in on me playing the game, and immediately judge me, an anxiety made manifest in my long and dreary paragraphs above. I sat watching a tightly clad dominatrix figure beat her way through hordes of enemies while dancing as if on a stripper pole.

The only thing is i’ve seen enough explicit, that is pornographic, material before that the titillation of the game itself is mild. The real perversion is the knowledge i’m engaging wholly unironically with questionable media and finding that complication exciting. The act of debasing my own rather perfect morality an antecedence to the possibility of further taboo acts. Recognising the problematic aspects that leak into one's sexuality as being a source of confusion; Frankly that's quite hawt.

Anyone trying to make it okay is therefor trying to kill my boner in service of their own boners, meta rhymes with better and that's what my boner is. A more self aware boner, a boner that refuses the simple basal pleasures as an end unto themselves and seeks to build upon them to reach new heights. Mine is the inevitable march of progress, a tower of babylon. Would the violence in game of thrones be better if we didn’t feel for those being slain? No of course a that’s rhetorical question, why would you answer it knowing i just did right now by writing this. Plato took the high road on this and thought that by not playing bayotta we’d ourselves not come to view women as titninjas in the first place but plato was building society from the ground up. Working with what we have it’s better to try and get off on the fact that what we’re doing, while not explicitly wrong, is questionable like watching a schlocky horror flick, or a rocky horror pic. To become a pervert and getting off on moral complexity, to live and let die, is the calling of the socially conscious gamer. 

7/10 - made my fingers sore... from button mashing.

Mount and blade: True leadership

The quality of leadership. In a recent speech given by the prime minister of the united kingdom she said the following, “When the global rules and standards that keep us safe come under threat we must take a stand and defend them,” all the while ignoring the legislative and international bodies that set those standards to begin with. Leadership so it would seem is not a clear cut thing. You either run out of things to say quickly or keep speaking long enough to see yourself referencing the dark knight.

What does this have to do with a video game review? I hear you ask. Well before the thermonuclear biological gas attack turns our fused flesh into the a hybrid eldritch abomination i figured i should get around to talking about the best game. Mount and blade: warband is a cultural zenith towering over swaths of mediocrity and filth that make up most video games. It is said that ninety percent of an medium is trash, if that is so then it is the one percent that uses an offshore hedge fund to dodge tax while bloating the price of pharmaceuticals to justify it’s ownership of resources far beyond its own need or want. bit of a mixed metaphor there.

You play as a wanderlust stricken merchant taking up arms to form your own warband and ascend to the kingship of swadia. Alternatively you could play as number of other people, with different goals working for a other nations but then again why would you? swadian cavalry will make their enemies eat shit as they temple their skulls into their equine companions leavings. They are death on the battlefield. 

The game cycles between you moving about the a wide expansive world map, and the battlefield evercetions that take place along the way. The former involves: doing business, talking to people who want you to do busy work for them so you can plough their daughters, like the raiders do to the fiefdoms that you so sorely covert. Yeah that does sound problematic but i’ll come back to that point…

Right away. The game is patriarchal, as was medieval Europe. You can play as a women and at once you’ll be sneered at, denied ownership of land and held to higher standards than your contemporaries. The game’s world is unabashedly sexist towards you, trying to push you into marriage in order to gain land or favour in court, the achievements conversely are often exclusive to a female character incentivizing play. This game is one of the first that made me truly empathise with the world's own social injustice as i knew none of this going in and learnt gradually through play that everyone only valued me based on my cooter’s potential to reinforce blood ties.

Right, i was going to talk about the battles, this isn’t some total war nonsense where you direct the battle from on high, you’re on the ground often leading the charge from horseback while shouting orders and trying not to gain a new orifice at the hands of an enemy polearm. Depending on how you level your character up these engagements can feel very different, i’ve been a charismatic stud in gleaming silver armour having to dodge for my life while my forces do all the heavy lifting. in contract, i’ve been a something akin to a soviet T-26 tank cloaked in black steel and with glowing red eyes as i coat my hands crimson, all the while a couple of peasants chip at the broken remains of those i left behind.

As you level up and gain reputation working for factions you’ll get invited to join wars and formalise your relationship a faction. This means besieging towns, forts and going to lord Harlus’ mid-campaign feasts. Half through a siege to retake the town of Dhrim our wise and noble butterlord decided his 9-5 was a grind and threw a huge ass party with everyone standing around talking about the quality of his butter. The town remains lost to those nordic hooligans.

Once you’ve realised that swadia is the best faction or alternatively succumb to a brain tumour that will tell you something different it’s time to jump onto the mount and blade subreddit and get to shitposting about what trash all the other factions are. This isn’t part of the game per se but does help me to forget the faces of those i’ve killed as their screams haunt my dreams and leave me waking, drenched in my own sweat.

So now you’re a big man in court, you’ve got a swagger and room for a bigger army. Time to INVEST. Buy productive enterprises across the land for weekly dollar payouts, get awarded fiefdoms and forts for your service and start making mad bank, who cares if those peasants are starving you need a new pair of boots and quality cobblers don’t come cheap in an agrarian economy. You can go to tournaments in the hopes of wooing fair maidens only to get knocked out in the first round when they give you wooden javelins to throw against a bunch of angry axe wielding psychopaths.

Best of all you can make friends, something rarely done irl. named NPC’s who you can level up and fill vital role in your party like a doctor or siege engineer. Jeremus is one such man, he comes to you as a simple mender of wounds but underneath his a fearless beast of the battlefield charging down walls of cavillarly with little more than a stick, he gets knocked out a lot but it’s fun to watch. When it comes to defending his fellow man on or off the battlefield jeremus is a true leader, he has good judgement, noble grace and valor outshine us all. So if you play mount and blade, ask yourself what would Jeremus do? Moverover if you are leading a developed western country faced with pressure from your allies to sip the missile strike kool aid, ask yourself twice: what would Jeremus do?

The game has lot and lots of horses, it's even in the title… 10/10 and yes the graphics do look like ass. 

Is fortnite warping the minds of children?

Fortnite battle: royale. Is a JRPG with Spanish elements thrown in for that authentic south american colonial extermination experience, play as Hernán Cortés as you single handedly; with the help of a hundred smelly Spaniards, take over a naive empire by subterfuge and the abuse of trust afforded to them. All so you can turn a neat little profit on that banana republic in the late game.

Okay, that might have been a bit much for an opener, let's try to keep this all nice and gentle. Fort night: battle royal. Is a game where the rapidly increasing alienation of the french elite lead to a people uprising in Paris, which was then presided over by a shy guy who decided the best way to deal with their expensive and fancy wigs was to take a little off the top. They also turn notre dame into a rave house which when you think about it means this game had base building elements. The feature that allows you to feed your citizens with cake is conspicuously absent.

The fortnightly trip to get a royale with cheese. Is a gamemode set in cuba where by your boss, and one time about to nuke Florida guy, Fidel Castro attempts to guard his beard from the CIA while also attempting to produce the best dairy cows in the world. Unfortunately for you Cuba's climate isn’t conducive to dairy production so you’ll have to make the cows fuck until they produce a cow that can make milk.

Battle of the winter palace: October edition is a paid DLC for the the Russian revolution adding yet another revolution to the game that takes place a few months later. This time you play as a well educated man who’s been reading this cool new fantasy book called das kapital and wants to see if he could crowdfund Minas Tirith IRL but watch out your allies are probably going to try and icepick each other after your dead so don’t, whatever you do, create an authoritarian cult of personality that your successor can exploit to give everyone else in game GU latency issues.

fort nite: battle at sea. Is a Chinese mini game where; while failing to capture a bunch of pirates lead by a former prostitute, who knows her way around an oar better than most sailors, aye; your British allies suddenly realise that you’re not very good at dealing with the boats attacking your long and extended coastline. you point out what a fine navy they have as they sail their ships up to said poorly defended coast and they agree, it is a very nice set of boats. ‘You know what else is nice’ they ask while handing you a opium pipe…

The Armenian genocide is, No, No; NO! we are not going there. This has gone far enough, you’ve proven to everyone you’re very edgy and have too much time on your hands to learn all this shit. This is very very silly. Normal programming will now resume.

Fortnite: battle royale is a colourful and exciting free to play video game to help that takes social darwinism to its second most brutal extreme. The first being the appropriation of large scale germanic industrial frameworks to facilitate the mass… Are you trying to make a point here? Fortnite is benign and popular with children, easy to lampoon for it’s prominence and low bar to entry. Do these references add anything of value to review?

No, but i’ve gone and tricked people into thinking about history with, what is essentially a shitpost. April fools.