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.