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.